that depends how you define everyone.” Nora puts two more glasses on the brushes. She had a feeling this was going to happen again. “Where’s my Bun? Does she like her purple rabbit?”
“Nikki loves everything that comes from you, Mom.”
“Put her on.”
“She’s away on a playdate. I already told her the weekend is cancelled. You could come here. I’m not the only one with a car.”
Nora stops scrubbing. “I work Saturday night,” she says in a measured tone. “I always work on Saturday night.” She places the glasses on the rack and takes on another pair of dirties. Again, there’s nothing but silence on the line. Nora keeps her eyes on the brushes as she works.
“Look, I’m busy,” she says finally. “I really can’t talk now.”
“I can hear you washing glasses. You can’t be that busy.”
Nora looks blankly around the bar, catches Rose giving her a sympathetic look. The water sloshes in the stainless steel sink. There’s the sound of quarters being pumped into the cigarette machine, then the rod being pulled and the metallic thwack back, followed by a soft thud.
1622
Grey Rabbit struggles to get to the surface, where patches of light undulate and swaths of color twirl in icy clouds. The pressure in her chest is a frozen boulder. She works her arms to push herself upward, kicking her legs with all her strength, but it’s slow, slow, the water’s thick as wind and she has to fight to move through it. Her chest feels like it will burst apart. She is nearly there. She kicks and flails, at last propelling herself up and free.
But no, there is no relief. And there, above her, the taunting surface, twirling and swaying clear and ice blue, and then a child splashes in. The girl’s face wavers, growing huge and then small. Her eyes closed, her mouth a blue pucker. Grey Rabbit beats at the water like a frantic bird, trying to rise up and reach the child with her arms, but there is pressure against them, something holding her down, no, pulling, now lifting her upward, nearer and nearer to the sloshing light. Her face breaks the surface, and she gasps for air, mouths the dry brown emptiness around her. The child. She sees the tawny brown roof of her wigwam, then Bullhead’s broad back, turning away.
She’s no longer underwater; her spirit is in her body. The sky through the smoke hole is purple. Her stomach tightens. Food. They need food. Bullhead is making a soft clicking noise with her mouth. “There’s fresh snow,” she says. “The tracking will be good. Night Cloud will take Standing Bird along.” She stirs the fire and disappears out the door flap.
The girl’s round face, her lips a blue pucker. The image propels Grey Rabbit upright. Across the fire, her sons lay curled and sleeping. From outside come the sounds of Bullhead laying wood. Her words were neither reproachful nor angry, though Grey Rabbit sensed something between them meant for her. She drops her head as shame moves through her, quick as fire in dry grass. She should have been up and tending to her work, but instead she has let all the weight fall on Bullhead.
At the log on the slope above their camp, Grey Rabbit loosens her clothing and squats, her sleep-warmed skin meeting the cold air. The smell of wood smoke lifts through the trees. Around her, the pines hold dots of snow in their bark, and everything is purple and newly rounded—the wigwam like an overturned bowl, the spruce boughs splayed like thick dark hands. Below, mist rises from Gichigami, veiled and shifting, growing thicker with the light. Soon the water will be entirely hidden, transformed into a vast land of cloud.
Grey Rabbit pushes snow over the hole her urine carved, feels the new sharpness of her hip bones and a slight dizziness as she stands.
Slowly she descends, apart, watching, her sons sitting near the fire, Night Cloud returning from the direction of the river. His path leaves a dark line in the snow.
Night Cloud looks up to see his wife moving gingerly down the slope. Thinning. And quiet as a winter tree. He must make a sizable kill. He had placed another offering at the river cave. He finds tracks, scat, and bedding places, but the animals will not show themselves.
He raises a hand in greeting as she nears. Her moods, too, are a growing concern. But then she has good reason to be dissatisfied with him. “New snow.” He musters a hopeful tone as they meet. She nods and only half smiles. “The day feels good,” he says cheerfully.
“You made another offering?”
Night Cloud places a reassuring hand on her shoulder and tries to hold her eyes with his own, but her gaze slips away from him. She gestures toward Little Cedar, who sits near the fire, poking sluggishly at the snow with a stick.
“In the last new snow, he romped like an otter,” she says. “He’s not old enough to fast.”
“He is often slow to wake.”
“Yes, but still. . . .”
“He’s strong,” says Night Cloud, pushing aside her words, as they approach the boys at the fire. “It’s a good depth for tracking.” He nods at them, and sweeps his arm over the snow.
“How soon will we leave? I brought the pull-sled.” Standing Bird assumes a tall posture, hoping that his father will notice the things he’s already gathered for the hunt, and the skillful way he’s begun to pack.
“Be patient. We will start soon enough. Come, Little Cedar,” Night Cloud beckons to his youngest. “I’ll fashion a target for you in the woods. You can practice with your bow while I am gone.”
Standing Bird turns away, hands on his hips, as Little Cedar hops off his stump, poking him in the back with his stick as he passes.
The early morning veil has lifted, leaving the afternoon sharply defined. The white plains of snow, the clear sky, the big water ruffled like the wing of a dark blue bird.
Grey Rabbit sits sewing a rabbit-fur hat, though her mind has wandered back to the morning, to the pride she’d felt watching Standing Bird pack the pull-sled. Part man, he is, but still part boy. Part mink the way he changes color to match his father. “Listen well,” she’d warned as they set out. “Stay within hearing distance of your father.” And though disquiet had lodged like a burr in her skin, she’d made an effort to join the joking and the rain of banter as Night Cloud and Standing Bird walked north into the hills. They left behind the long tracks of their snowshoes, now grey vines in the bright white snow.
Grey Rabbit turns the hat over in her hands and runs her fingers through the soft white fur. It will be warm and cover Standing Bird’s ears well. She glances at Bullhead across the fire, at work on the seam of a birch-bark container. Little Cedar is in the near woods aiming his small bow at the piece of hide his father had fastened to a tree trunk. He misses his mark, puts his hands on his hips, then plods through the snow to retrieve his arrow.
“Do you think they will find game?” Grey Rabbit breaks the silence. Bullhead doesn’t reply. The unanswerable question is left echoing in her mind as she pets the soft fur and stares up at the ridge.
Bullhead watches Grey Rabbit worry the hat’s fur, her eyes on the ridge, but her eyes unseeing. The girl has always been one to wander far, but this is not a time to indulge. Bullhead runs a length of a fiber between her fingers and tests its strength before working it through the hole in the birch bark. More than once, she has awakened to find Grey Rabbit gone, or hovering over the boys as they sleep. And then, come morning, the girl won’t wake. Bullhead takes a deep breath, trying to quell her irritation. Something’s not right. She mulls over their circumstances, but there seems little to interpret. The cold has not been unrelenting. The snow has not grown too deep to hunt. Could it be that the spirits are unhappy with her son? If they are, they all have much to fear. For its power, she had given him her nugget of pink copper, tied in a piece of soft skin. She’d slipped it into his hand as he left.
Out beyond the frozen shallows, the light plays on the deep blue water like tossed handfuls of tiny suns. Bullhead works her fiber slowly along the