Chapter 15 The Long Dark

February in that country is the bottom of the year, and it came in with a cold that stopped the world. It was the air that changed first. On the second of February the temperature fell through forty and kept falling, through forty-five, past fifty, and stayed there, and the valley became a place that had been put in a freezer and forgotten. The smoke from the stove did not rise; it fell, and pooled in the clearing, and crept along the snow like something crawling, so that in the mornings the cabin sat in a grey fog of its own breath and the fog hung at the door and refused to leave. Sound did not carry the way it used to; it cracked off the trees and came back wrong. When she spoke to herself, the words fell down flat and hit the ground and stayed near, and that was worse than silence, and after the first two days she stopped speaking. She had four days of wood in the pile. She cut a fifth and a sixth, and by the fourth day of the cold her hands, even in the mitten, began to lose the fine work, and the saw began to bind in the frozen wood, and the flame of the fire in the stove, which was her whole life and the only thing in the world she loved at that moment, began to be the only thing she watched. So she stopped cutting. She sat in the cabin and she fed the stove exactly what the stove needed and no more, and to feed it no more was a skill she had learned and hated, and to feed it exactly enough was a thing she could do only while awake, and so she stopped sleeping in any long stretch and began sleeping and waking in the counts of the wood. On the fifth day the cold found the center of her and did not let go of it. She would remember that day as a single grey room with the stove in it. She was not sad, which surprised her. She was not afraid. She sat on the bench with the sleeping bag over her legs and the log open in front of her and the pencil in her hand and she did not write anything, and she watched the frost grow on the inside of the door in feathers and ferns, and she thought about all the things that had brought her here, and none of the thoughts had edges, and all of the thoughts were calm, and the calm was the thing that should have frightened her, and she was too far in to be frightened by it. The cabin was warm, in the way a cabin at twenty degrees below freezing is warm, and her body had stopped telling her the difference between warm and cold. That was the bad sign. She knew it was the bad sign. She wrote the bad sign in the log, and her hand made a line and then a word and then a wandering mark, and she looked at the mark and put the pencil down. She lay down in the bunk in her clothes with the bag over her and she slept, and in the sleep there was a radio, and on the radio Ove Thoresen's voice was saying her name in the slow patient way he had, Haldis, Haldis, and there was the smell of the office, of coffee and avgas and dog, and Dagmar was on the other side of the room on the phone with her collar up, and it was warm, and none of it was real, and she knew it was not real and she stayed anyway, and she did not want to be called back. She was called back by her feet. Not by anything grand. Her feet had begun to hurt, a deep and specific ache in the toes she had frozen at the lake, and the pain was so ordinary and so much her own that she came up through the sleep toward it like a fish toward a hole in the ice, and when she opened her eyes the cabin was dark and the stove was out and the cold was standing over her with its hand out. She lay there and looked at the cold and understood that she had a choice and that the two branches of it were to lie still and go on with the dream, or to get up and cut wood in the dark at fifty degrees below zero and feed the stove, and that the difference between the branches was not death, because the death in the first branch was quiet and near and perhaps an hour away and the death in the second branch was the same death at the same distance, and there was no branch that had no death in it. So it was not hope that got her out of the bunk. She would say so, later, when she could say it at all. It was the fact that both doors led to the same place and one of them had work in it, and she had been a working woman her whole life and she would not die on the wrong side of a lazy choice if she could help it, and she got up. She cut wood that night by the light of the open stove door and her hands did not work well and she did it anyway, slowly, a quarter of the saw's length at a time, and she kept the cut ends and the sawdust in the kindling box because sawdust was fuel too, and she fed the stove and got it back, and she sat in front of it for a long time with her palms on the iron, and somewhere in the night her body began to shiver, and the shivering was the second thing that saved her, because shivering is a body deciding to live whether or not the mind has agreed. The cold broke on the ninth day. She woke to a sun, the first sun in more than a week, and a temperature ten degrees up and rising, and to a sound in the clearing, the sound of a saw. She went to the door and opened it, and there was no one there, and the woodpile was two days longer than it had been, and on the step, on the flat stone by the door, there was a ptarmigan, plucked and cleaned and frozen, and the saw that had made the sound was her own saw, and it hung where it always hung, and there was no print in the snow and there never was. She stood in the doorway of her cabin in the first sun of February and looked at the fresh green cut ends of the spruce in the new row and at the plucked bird on the stone and at the white and smoking world going on and on to the ridge, and she said the only thing there was to say, and she said it out loud, to the clearing, to the ridge, to the valley, to whoever was or was not there. "All right," she said. "I will stay." ---