Part 3
Frost had turned his ruff white, and his eyes caught the faint light from the hall and held it. Between his forefeet, on the boards, lay a snowshoe hare.
Ruth didn’t move. Neither did he. The wind screamed around the corner of the house and flattened his fur, and he stood in it as though it were nothing, looking at her as he had at the bog. Then he stepped back, once, twice, and the white swallowed him. She never saw him turn.
She stood in the doorway until the cold made her eyes water. The hare lay where he’d left it, white on white except for a dark smear at its throat. When she bent and picked it up by the hind legs, it was still warm.
Ruth got the door shut with her hip and her shoulder and her whole weight, and threw the bolt, and then sat down on the hall floor with the hare across her knees. She was crying, which surprised her. She sat there until her legs began to cramp, one hand resting on the cooling fur.
Animals didn’t do this. She knew it as surely as she knew how a broken femur looked on a film. Wolves didn’t settle accounts. Yet the hare lay in her lap with its body heat going out of it, as real as anything she’d ever held.
She got up. She split kindling from the wood box with Arne’s hatchet, built the fire up past what she’d been rationing, and set the big pot on the stove full of snow from the bucket by the back door. While the snow melted, she skinned and dressed the hare at the kitchen table by flashlight. It took her three times as long as it would have when she was sixty, and twice she had to stop and put her head down on her arms.
An hour later the kitchen smelled like the farmhouse she grew up in. She salted the broth and drank a mug of it so hot it scalded her lip, and then another. The pounding behind her eyes began to loosen. She ate the meat off a foreleg with her fingers, standing at the stove, and thought it was very likely the best thing she had ever eaten.
She slept warm that night for the first time since the power went out.
The storm didn’t break the next day, but the house was different. The pot of broth sat on the back of the stove. She’d let herself use the wood, figuring she’d eat better and move better and could haul more when the wind dropped. Around four in the afternoon, when the white outside the windows began to go blue, she found herself in the hall, waiting, and felt ridiculous for it.
The scrape came anyway.
This time she opened the door slowly. A ruffed grouse lay on the porch, its neck bent at an angle she didn’t look at too closely, and he was already backing off the steps into the blowing snow. Lean pickings, she thought; even he couldn’t find much in this.
“Thank you,” Ruth said into the storm.
The wind took the words away before they reached the bottom step. She didn’t know if he heard her. It didn’t seem to matter much whether he did. She’d needed to say it, as she still sometimes said goodnight to Arne.
On the third morning the wind dropped to nothing. Ruth woke to a silence so complete it rang. The sun came up in a sky scraped clean, and the world outside the windows had been rebuilt in snow: drifts to the porch rail, the pickup a white loaf, the spruce bowed down under their loads.
She put on Arne’s old barn boots and went out to look at the woodpile and the roof. On the north side of the house, where the brick chimney ran up the outside wall, she stopped.
In the lee of the chimney the snow had been packed down into a long, shallow bowl, the shape of a body curled nose to tail. A little frost of shed hair clung to the edges. Leading away from it toward the bog, straight as a seam, ran a line of tracks. Ruth crouched over the nearest hind print. Three toes.
He’d slept there. Every night of the storm, as far as she could tell, he’d lain against the only warm brick in nine miles of bog.
She was still crouched there when she heard the engine.
It came out of the south, a high snarl that grew into a roar, and a snow machine came down the buried road throwing a rooster tail of powder. The driver stood up on the running boards when he saw the house. Even at that distance, even with his face mostly covered, Ruth knew how her son stood.
Dale hit the drift at the end of the yard and went in to his waist when he jumped off. “Mom!” He floundered up to her, pulling his face mask down. His face was gray. “Are you okay? I couldn’t get you for three days. I flew out on the first plane they’d let me on, I borrowed Mike’s sled in Bemidji—”
“I’m fine,” she said, and found that it was true. “Come in before you freeze.”
Inside, he stood in the kitchen with his gloves still on, looking at the stove, at the pot, at the bucket by the back door where grouse feathers had blown up against the side. “Where’d all this come from?”
“Neighbors,” Ruth said. “They brought a few things by.”
Dale nodded slowly. He’d been raised out here; he knew which neighbors were left and what shape they were in, and she watched him start to do the arithmetic. Before he could finish it, a second engine came up the road. Ruth went to the window. Walt Kessler’s old snow machine pulled in alongside Dale’s.
Walt didn’t knock. He came into the mudroom stamping and talking. “Thought sure I’d find you froze stiff, Ruth. Glad I’m wrong.” He looked at Dale and nodded. Then he looked back at Ruth, and his face wasn’t cheerful anymore. “Something you ought to know. That three-toed male’s alive. He’s been all over your yard.”
“Well,” Ruth said.
“Not all over,” Walt said. “Right up against your house. North side, by the chimney. He’s been bedding down there, Ruth. Sleeping against your wall like a dog on a porch.”
Dale had bent to pick a gray feather off the floor. He straightened slowly with it still in his fingers. “Mom,” he said. “What is he talking about?”
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