Chapter 8 The Turn of the Sky

The winter arrived on a night in the second week of November and it arrived as a change in the sound of the world. Haldis lay in the bunk and listened to the spruce behind the cabin, and the spruce, which had been talking to the wind for a month, had stopped. There was no wind. There was a silence so complete that she could hear her own heart and the small hiss of the stove, and she understood the silence for what it was, because Ragnhild had described it to her once on a winter flight, the way the country went still just before the bottom fell out of the thermometer, a hush like an audience before a performance. In the morning the thermometer she had nailed to the doorpost, a cheap one from the aircraft's kit, read forty-one below zero. She knew the number was Celsius and the number did not matter and the number mattered entirely, because at forty below the difference between the two scales disappears and the number is the same in both directions and the cold stops belonging to any reasonable human system of measurement and simply becomes a fact of the ground. She got dressed inside her sleeping bag and put her boots on in the bag and then stood up into the cold, and the air in the cabin, which the stove had warmed to something not far from freezing, took her breath and gave it back to her as ice, and she felt the hair in her nostrils freeze solid with the first breath she drew. The rules of the cold were absolute and she had known them since she was nineteen and she had never had to obey all of them at once before. No bare skin against metal, because the metal would take the skin with it. No deep breaths of raw air while moving hard, because the air would reach her lungs at forty below and freeze the wet linings of them and lay her out on the trail. Nothing wet near her body, because wet at forty below was an amputation waiting to be scheduled. And no stopping, ever, in the open, because a body that stopped at this temperature began almost at once to die of the thing it was, which was a stove that had stopped being fed. She spent that week and the next making the cabin into something that could keep her. She chinked the logs a third time with a paste of moss and mud and ashes and this time she warmed the mud over the stove first, and the repair held. She hung the tarp across the doorway as a second door so that the heat had two things to get through instead of one, and she learned to pass through both without letting either gap open for more than a breath. She built a woodpile under the eave, three rows deep and shoulder high, all standing dead spruce, dry on the stump, because green wood in a stove was a lie a woman told herself one time. And she learned the saw. The folding saw was two feet long and the wood was hard and frozen, and she learned that frozen wood is easier to saw than warm wood if the saw is sharp and the teeth do not clog, and she learned to file the teeth with the file from the tool roll, every third day, sitting by the stove with the saw across her knee and the light of the open stove door on the steel, drawing the file across each tooth in turn, one, two, three. Twenty strokes and the tooth had an edge. A hundred and forty teeth and a quarter of an hour and the saw would cut a spruce pole in eleven seconds instead of forty. She timed it once, for fun, in the way a pilot times things, and she kept the number because numbers were company. The water problem changed shape with the cold. The creek froze too thick to break with her heel and she had to keep a hole open, which meant keeping the ice in the hole broken every day, and ice in a hole at forty below grows an inch a night, and a hole that grows an inch a night is a hole that closes within the week if a person forgets it even once. So she cut a ring of ice and kept the ring, and she laid a piece of the tarp over the hole and weighted the tarp with rocks and spruce boughs, and every morning she broke the night's new ice and dipped the pot, and every evening she did the same, and the hole stayed open the whole winter, which she would later understand as one of the small precise victories of her life. The days gave her five hours of usable light and then took even that away, and the sun, when it came, came low and stayed low and laid its light along the snow like something spilled and never quite cleaned up. She walked the trail to the bar once a week now, because the trail through the deep snow was a full day's work each way and a day of walking at forty below cost her more calories than she could afford more often than that. At the bar she kept the arrow cleared of new snow and she rebuilt the shelter when the wind took it down, and she stood in the middle of her great pale signal and looked at the sky the way a woman looks at a letter that has not arrived. The plane came on a Thursday. She was on the bar when she heard it, a sound so faint and so far up that at first she thought it was the wind in her ears, and then it resolved into the drone of a high-flying aircraft, a turbine, passing over the valley at altitude, gone before it came, the way they always went. She tore off the corner of the tarp she had carried for this and she ran out onto the open snow and waved it, and she struck the signal mirror at the sky even though there was no sun, and she screamed, and the plane kept going, a needle of noise in the enormous white, and was gone. She stood in the snow with the scrap of tarp in her hand and her breath going up in a column, and she told herself the truth, which was that a plane at that altitude crossing that valley was nobody looking for her, because nobody was looking for her here, because they were looking in the pass, and the pass was four ridges east. That night, going up the trail from the bar, she had the feeling for the first time, and she had it in the neck, that small cold prickle that is older than language and does not ask permission. She stopped. She listened. The trail behind her was a line of her own holes in the snow and the spruce stood around her as they had stood for a hundred years, and nothing moved and nothing was there. She went on up to the cabin and barred the door with the pole, which she had never done before, and she sat by the stove with the knife on the bench beside her for a long time, and she did not write that night in the log, because she could not have said what she would have written. Nothing happened, she would have written. That was the whole problem with it. Nothing had happened, and she had felt watched in a valley where she knew for a fact she was the only person for eighty kilometers in any direction, and there was no good way to put that in a log without sounding like a woman who had started to come apart. In the morning she went out to check the line and the world had a fresh inch of snow on it, and on that clean white page, three meters from the door of the cabin, was a single set of tracks coming up out of the spruce and stopping. ---