Chapter 13 Under the Ice

She went through on the eleventh of January, at the mouth of the inlet creek, on a patch of ice that looked exactly like every other patch of ice on that lake and was not. It had been a good morning. She had caught seven whitefish and the sun had come up over the burn on the far ridge and laid a long gold road across the snow, and she had begun to believe she was going to walk out of the valley on her own feet. She had been thinking about the creek, which ran into the lake on the north shore and carried warmer water under the ice, water that moved, water that did not freeze the way standing water froze. She had known all of that. She had known it the way she knew the circuit breakers in an aircraft, as a fact that lived in her head and not in her hands, and she had walked out onto the inlet mouth to look down through the ice at the dark shape of the moving water, and the ice had flexed under her like a drum and then it was not ice at all. The cold of it took her breath the way a hand takes a wrist. She had been raised in this country and she had been in cold water exactly twice before in her life and both times had been summer, and none of that mattered. The water came over the top of her boots and up her legs and closed over her chest, and the weight of her clothes, which she had never once thought of as weight, pulled her down to her chin, and for a full second she did nothing, because her body had gone somewhere else and left her there. Then she was at the edge with both arms flat on the ice, the way she had been taught by a man at a lake in a different life, spread flat to spread the load, and she kicked, and the ice under her hands broke, and she got her chin onto the new edge and it broke again, and she understood that this was the whole conversation and that it would end one of two ways and that it would end quickly. She stopped fighting it and did the thing the man at the lake had told her, which she had never believed until now. She went still. She let her legs rise behind her until she was level, floating in the hole like a stick, and then she began to work herself forward onto the ice an inch at a time with her forearms, no kick, no panic, no weight on any one place, and the ice held and held and held, and then she was out, sliding on her belly like a seal, away from the hole, and she kept sliding until the ice felt like a floor again, and then she stood up, and there was not one dry thread on her body. The cold that came onto her then was not like the cold of the valley. It was the cold of a body being killed, and she knew it because she had heard it described and had never believed the description, and it was a cold that came from inside out and asked for nothing and gave nothing. The water in her lungs, the water in her clothes, the water she was standing in at forty degrees below zero, all of it began at once to take her heat, and she stood on the ice in the gold light of the morning and understood with a clarity that had no fear left in it that she had perhaps ten minutes. She left the satchel where it was, at the inlet, because the satchel was thirty pounds of tool that would kill her to carry, and she started for the shore, and she did not run, because running would wet her from the inside. She walked. She walked the way a woman walks who has decided to walk, and it was two hundred meters to the shore, and she counted them, one, two, three, and between some of the numbers she lost the thread and had to start again. The shore was spruce. She got into the spruce and she found a standing dead tree and broke the lower branches, the dry ones, the ones that snap, and she cleared the snow off a patch of ground with her boot and she laid a floor of green boughs broken from the living trees, because a fire built on snow sinks through it before it burns and a fire built on a green bed will live. Her fingers did not work. She took the small kit out of her jacket, and the ferro rod was wet, and the lighter was wet, and she shaved a curl of birch bark from a dead stump with a knife she could barely hold and she dropped the knife in the snow and found it and dropped it again, and she built a little house of shavings on the boughs, and she struck the rod with the back of the knife and nothing came, and she struck it again and the sparks went into the wet bark and died. She struck it eleven times before a spark caught, and afterward she would be able to say the number exactly, because she had learned to count the things that mattered. The spark caught in the shavings and she bent over it and breathed, small breaths, and a flame stood up in her little house, and she fed it and fed it, and the green bed smoked and the fire grew, and she looked for a moment at her hands, and the fingers of her left hand were white and hard, like candles, and the fingers of her right hand were red and terrible and hurt like a held scream. She got out of her clothes. That took longer than the fire. She peeled the jacket from her arms and the wool from her back and she wrung the water out of each thing and laid it on the green boughs between the fire and the snow, and she stood in the smoke and the steam and the yellow light of the fire with not one stitch on her body at forty degrees below zero, and it was the fire that saved her and it was the fire that was killing her, because the fire warmed her front and the valley took her back, and she had to turn, and turn, and turn, like meat, and she turned and she let the heat into the frozen white fingers without touching them to the flame, because frozen flesh next to flame is cooked flesh and there is no road back from that. By the time her clothes had thawed enough to put on they had begun to scorch at the edges, and she put them on damp and steaming and the fire was a circle of warmth a foot wide and a world that was cold in every direction out to forever, and she sat in the circle with her knees up and her hands inside her jacket and did not die. She made it back to the cabin after dark, walking the trail she had made the year before and could not see, and she spent the night shivering so hard that her back seized and she had to crawl to the stove to feed it, and the toes of her right foot and two fingers of her left hand swelled up until they would not bend and burned the next day and the day after with a pain that had a color to it, red and white at once, the pain of flesh coming back from the dead. The skin blistered and peeled away in yellow sheets over the following week and took the nails with it and left behind a numbness that she would still have a year later, a small permanent subtraction from the total of what her hands could feel, and the tips of two toes that never quite came back to their old color. She lost the satchel at the inlet and had to go back for it three days later when the cold broke, and she found it where she had left it, on the ice at the mouth of the creek, and beside it, drawn in the snow with a stick, a single line pointing away from the open water and toward the shore. She stood over the line in the snow for a while. Then she went home with her heavy satchel on her shoulder, slow, on the two toes that still worked, and she got out the log and she wrote down the date and everything that had happened to her, all of it, in order, in a plain hand, because she had begun to write not only for herself but for a reader, and she did not know why she had begun to do that and she had learned not to argue with the instinct. She ended the entry with a line she looked at for a long time. The lake teaches you the one thing and then it lets you go. I have been let go twice now. ---