The Snow Child (9 page)

Wherever the work stopped, the wilderness was there, older, fiercer, stronger than any man could ever hope to be. The spindly black spruce were so dense in places you couldn’t squeeze an arm between them, and every living thing seemed barbed and hostile—devil’s club thorns that left festering wounds, stinging nettles that raised welts, and at times swarms of mosquitoes so thick he had to fight panic. In the spring when he first began felling trees and turning over the soil, mosquitoes rose from the disturbed earth in clouds. He wore a head net; it was hard to see, but without it he couldn’t have endured. When he wiped the horse’s flank with his hand, his palm came away bloody with engorged insects.

That was one blessing—it was too cold for mosquitoes now. Gone, too, was the lushness of summer, the thick green of cottonwood boughs, the broad leaves of cow parsnip, the flare of fireweed. Bare of foliage, the snowy benches and ravines rose to the mountains like a weather-bleached backbone. Jack watched through the naked trees and saw no sign of life. No moose, no squirrels, not a single songbird. A mangy raven passed overhead, but it flew steadily on as if seeking richer grounds.

When Jack told his brothers he was moving to Alaska, they envied him. God’s country, they’d said. The land of milk and honey. Moose, caribou, and bears—game so thick you won’t know what to shoot first. And the streams so full of salmon, you can walk across their backs to the other side.

What a different truth he found. Alaska gave up nothing easily. It was lean and wild and indifferent to a man’s struggle, and he had seen it in the eyes of that red fox.

Jack came to a log and made a halfhearted attempt to brush the snow away before sitting on it. He laid the rifle across his knees, took off his wool hat, and ran his fingers through his hair. For some time he sat bent over, his elbows on the rifle, head in his hands. Doubt crouched over his shoulder, ready to take him by the throat, whispering in his ear, You are an old man. An old, old man.

If he were to fall dead in these woods, nothing would rush to his aid. The north wind would blow down from the glacier, the ground would stay frozen, and a red fox like the one he had looked in the eye might be the first to sniff at his dead body and take a nibble here and there. The ravens and magpies would come to tear away at his frozen flesh, maybe a pack of wolves would eventually find its way to his carcass, and soon he’d be nothing but a strewn pile of bones. His only hope would be Mabel, but then he thought of her struggling under his dead weight. He stood and shouldered his rifle.

He had only cried a few times in his adult life—when his mother died, and when he and Mabel lost that little baby. He wouldn’t let himself now. He put one foot in front of the other and walked without seeing or feeling.

It was the quiet that pulled him out of his gloom. A quiet full of presence. He brought his head up.

It was the child. She was before him, just a few yards away. She stood atop the snow, arms at her sides, the hint of a smile at her pale lips. White fur trimmed her coat and leather boots. Her face was framed by the velvety brown of a sable hat, and she wore Mabel’s red scarf and mittens. The child was dusted in crystals of ice, as if she had just walked through a snowstorm or spent a brilliantly cold night outdoors.

Jack would have spoken to her, but her eyes—the broken blue of river ice, glacial crevasses, moonlight—held him. She blinked, her blond lashes glittering with frost, and darted away.

“Wait!” he called out. He stumbled after her. “Wait! Don’t be afraid!”

He was clumsy, tripping over his own boots and kicking up snow. She sprinted ahead, but stopped often to look back at him.

“Please,” he called again. “Wait!”

A sound came to Jack’s ears like wind stirring dried leaves or snow blowing across ice, or maybe a whisper from far away.
Shhhhh.

He did not call out again. He ducked beneath tree branches and waded through the snow as the girl led him farther and farther into the forest. He had to watch his feet to keep from tripping, but each time he looked up, she was waiting.

And then she wasn’t. He stopped, squinted, and scanned the snow for her tracks. He saw no sign. Once again he became aware of the quiet, the strange calm of the forest.

From behind him came a high, chirpy whistle like a chickadee’s call, and he turned, expecting to see a bird, or maybe the child. Instead, a bull moose stood not fifty yards away. It raised its head slowly, as if the massive, many-pointed antlers were a ponderous burden. Snow sprinkled its long nose and brown hackles. It swayed its antlers slowly side to side. Never had Jack seen such a magnificent animal. On lanky legs, it must have stood more than seven feet at the withers, and its neck was as stout as a tree trunk.

In his wonder, Jack nearly overlooked the obvious—this was his quarry. He had hunted only a few times as a boy, mostly rabbits and pheasants, although he had a vague memory of deer hunting with his cousins one cold, wet morning. This was different, though. This wasn’t sport or boyhood adventure. This was livelihood, and yet he was so ill prepared. He couldn’t remember much of that deer hunt, but he knew he had never taken a shot.

He expected the animal to spook as he chambered a cartridge in the rifle, but it was only mildly interested and went back to eating the tips of willow branches.

Jack rested his cheek against the wooden stock and tried to steady his grip. His exhalations rose as steam in the cold air and clouded his vision, so he held his breath, aimed for the moose’s heart, and pulled the trigger. He never heard the explosion or registered the rifle’s recoil. There was only the moment of impact, the animal staggering as if a great weight had come crashing down upon it, and then its fall.

He lowered the rifle to his side and took a few steps toward the moose. It kicked its legs and twisted its neck at a miserable angle. He chambered another round. The moose flailed in the snow, and for a second Jack looked into its rolling, wild eyes. He raised the rifle and shot a bullet into the animal’s skull. It did not move again.

Jack’s knees were unsteady as he leaned his rifle against a tree and went to the dead moose. He put his hands on its still-warm side and at last understood its size. Its antlers could have held Jack like a cradle, and his arms could not have circled its barrel chest. It had to weigh more than a thousand pounds, and that meant hundreds of pounds of good, fresh meat.

He’d done it. They had food for the winter. He would not go to the mine. He wanted to jump up and whoop and holler. He wanted to kiss Mabel hard on the lips. He wanted someone like George to smack him on the back and tell him well done.

He wanted to celebrate, but he was alone. The woods had a solemn air, and beneath the thrill in his own chest, there was something else. It wasn’t guilt or regret. It was trickier. He grabbed the base of each antler to reposition the head. It was heavy, but by leaning into the antlers he was able to jostle the head and neck around. Then he took his knife out of his pack and sharpened it on a steel, all the while considering the feeling in his gut. At last he knew—it was the sense of a debt owed.

He’d taken a life, a significant life judging by the animal laid out before him. He was obliged to take care of the meat and bring it home in gratitude.

But it was something about the child, too. Without her, he never would have seen the moose. She led him here and alerted him when, like a clod, he had passed by the animal. She moved through the forest with the grace of a wild creature. She knew the snow, and it carried her gently. She knew the spruce trees, how to slip among their limbs, and she knew the animals, the fox and ermine, the moose and songbirds. She knew this land by heart.

As Jack knelt in the bloody snow, he wondered if that was how a man held up his end of the bargain, by learning and taking into his heart this strange wilderness—guarded and naked, violent and meek, tremulous in its greatness.

The work was beyond Jack’s strength and experience. He had carved up chickens and a few sides of beef, but this wasn’t the same. This was a colossal, fully intact wild animal sprawled in its own blood in the middle of the woods. His shot had been good, through the front shoulders and lungs. He needed to open the gut to let the viscera and heat escape before the meat spoiled, but it would be no easy task. The moose’s legs, each weighing more than a hundred pounds, were cumbersome and in the way. He tried to lodge his shoulder beneath a hind leg to expose the belly, but it was too unwieldy. He took a section of rope from his pack and wrapped it around the moose’s hind ankle. Using all his strength, he pulled it up and away, and then tied the rope to a tree behind the moose. This exposed the abdomen, though Jack feared that if the rope gave way, the leg could deliver quite a blow to the back of his head.

He sharpened his knife again, only because he wasn’t sure how to begin. Daylight was wasting, so he plunged his knife into the belly, remembered he didn’t want to puncture the gut sack and contaminate the meat, and pulled his knife back out slightly before cutting from stem to stern.

He was up to his elbows in blood and bowels when he heard something approaching through the forest. He thought it might be the child, but then he recalled how silently she traveled. A horse nickered. Jack stood, stretched his back, and wiped his knife on his pants.

It was Garrett Benson, walking a horse through the trees.

“Hello there,” Jack called to him.

“I heard shots. You got one down?”

“Yep.”

“A bull?”

Jack nodded.

The boy tied the horse to a nearby tree. As he neared, his eyes widened.

“Holy Moses! That’s one big moose.” Garrett went to the antlers, tried to stretch his arms from one side to the other and failed. “Ho-ly Moses,” he said again, more softly.

“Is he big?”

“Hell yeah.” A boy trying out a man’s language. “Hell yeah!”

“I didn’t know. This is the first bull I’ve seen up close.”

Garrett took off his glove and held out his hand. “Congratulations! He’s a dandy!”

Jack wiped some of the blood onto his pant legs and took the boy’s hand.

“Thanks, Garrett. I appreciate that. I have to say, I wasn’t expecting this.”

“No kidding. I mean, he’s a jim-dandy!”

This was an aspect of Garrett he hadn’t seen. The sulky smirk was gone, and his boyish face beamed.

“I was riding the river, looking for places to put out traps, when I heard your rifle,” Garrett said. “Bam. Bam. Two shots. That’s always a good sign. I figured you had something down. But boy howdy, I sure didn’t think it would be something like this.”

“He seemed good-sized to me,” Jack said.

The boy was quiet, reverent as he ran a hand down the antler bone.

“It’s bigger than any I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Sure bigger than anything I’ve ever shot.”

His opinion of Garrett improved. Not many thirteen-year-old boys could win a wrestling match with envy.

“Guess I’ve got my work cut out for me,” Jack said.

“It’s a lot. But with two of us, it’ll go all right.”

“Don’t feel you’re under any obligation to lend a hand.”

The boy took a knife from a sheath at his belt. “I’d like to.”