第10章 Four Days of White

The blizzard came in off the Wahtuk on the last day of November and it came with a wind that sounded like a train in a tunnel and it did not leave for four days. She had known it in her knees and her back before it arrived, the way Ragnhild used to say she knew weather with her hip, and she had spent the day before it doing nothing but preparing, which was the mark of a person who had learned. She filled the woodpile to the eave and cut two days' extra and stacked it inside the door. She filled every container in the cabin with water and set them behind the stove. She moved the meat from the cache into the cabin, the whole dwindling pile of it, because four days of wind would let a bear of a wolverine onto a cache platform as easy as a staircase. She tied down the tarp at the bar and she abandoned the bar for the duration without regret. Then the wind hit and the world closed. She had never been inside weather like it. The cabin became a boat in a gale. The wind came at the south wall and pushed, and the logs took the push and the whole structure complained, and the snow came through the chinking in thin white jets that she fought all day and rebuilt the chinking twice and gave up and let the snow come, banking it carefully against the wall so that the drift became insulation. The stove would not draw. She learned over those four days to feed it slowly and to leave the draft wide and to let it burn hot and short, and she learned to sit close enough that the cold on her back and the heat on her front lived at the same time in the same body, a line of weather drawn down the middle of her. The light went, and the light did not come back. She slept and woke and could not tell which, and the days and the nights came to the cabin the same flat grey, and she stopped trying to count them and let the wind do the counting, which it did in its monotone, hour after hour, four days of wind and no voice in it but her own. She talked to herself because there was no one else and because the sound of her own voice was the only evidence that the thing that was her was still present. She said the names of the parts of the aircraft. She said the names of the streets in Lossett. She recited, out loud, the whole of a poem she had learned in school and had not known she still carried, and got most of it right, and was pleased with herself in a way that would have embarrassed her if anyone had heard. On the second day she understood that she had a decision and the decision was wood. The woodpile was going faster than she had calculated, because the wind was pulling heat out of the cabin through every log, and she did the arithmetic in the flat grey light and found that at this burn rate the pile was three days and the storm was four. She cut the burn. She let the stove go out in the middle of the day and she put on everything she owned, both pairs of socks and her long underwear and her jacket and the sleeping bag worn as a coat, and she sat with her hands inside her armpits and her hood up and she did not burn wood between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon, and the cold came into the cabin and sat down with her, and it was the longest six hours she had ever spent, and it was the first time in her life that she had ever chosen to be colder than she had to be in order to live longer. On the third day the cache told her it had been visited. She went out on the lee side of the cabin with a line tied to the door and found that the meat cache, which she had emptied, had been opened anyway, the lid ajar and the snow drifted in, and that the drift showed no tracks at all, because the wind had erased the page and started a new one. There was something at the bottom of the cache, at the corner, pressed into the wood: a small grey feather, barred black and grey, the feather of a ptarmigan in its winter dress. She stood with it in her hand and the wind trying to take it and she thought about it. A ptarmigan had found its way onto a platform a man's reach above the snow. Or a ptarmigan had been put there. And a ptarmigan was meat, and meat left in an empty cache by something that could get onto a cache was a thing that would mean two different things depending on who had done it, and she did not know who had done it, and the wind gave her no help, and after a while she put the feather in her pocket and went back inside. The storm broke on the fourth night. She woke to a silence so deep it seemed to have sound in it, a ringing quiet, and she knew before she opened the door that the wind was gone. In the morning the world had been remade. The drifts were over her head against the north wall and only a low lip at the door, and the spruce came out of a smooth white ground like they had been planted in a lake, and the sky was the cleanest blue she had seen since October and the sun came up over the Wahtuk and threw the shadows of the trees across the snow all the way to the cabin wall, blue over blue. She dug out. It took her half the morning to find the woodpile, and most of the afternoon to cut enough wood to replace the four days, and by evening she had a fire again and a full stomach of ptarmigan and hare that cost her the last of the lard and was worth it, and she sat in front of the open stove door with the heat on her face and did the sums. She had been in the valley six weeks. She had lost weight she could see. The meat in the cabin would last perhaps ten days if she was clever and five if she was not. The snares were still set. The lake was a walk away and full of fish she could not yet reach. And somewhere in all that clean new snow around her cabin, on that blue morning and every blue morning after, there would be a page newly written, and she would go out to read it, the way she would read the mail, one day at a time, and she would not know until she got there who had sent it. ---