was the rule of the mess hall. So despite the clattering of tinware and shuffling of boots, despite the sighs and audible yawns, their presence at chowtime only made the dumbness of her days more oppressive.
The quiet might have been tolerable were it not for the close quarters. When word had come to the camp foreman that he would have two women in his charge — he'd been alerted only days before the crew of sawyers and teamsters had reported at the end of October— he'd had to fashion their accommodations quickly. Trond Erlandson had worked the northwoods for years and could remember the camboose shanties of the seventies. Therefore, he saw no reason the men should need separate bunkhouses and mess halls. He likewise could not come to peace with the idea of two women toiling under his watch. Unless they were selling hospital tickets or accompanied by their proprietor husbands, women were to be unseen. That was his belief. As such, he put little effort into their billet, ordering the bull cook and two others to extend the root cellar behind the kitchen.
In a single rainy afternoon they dug a den not seven feet deep. They fortified the dirt walls with pine planks and built a roof of the same. They tarred the seams of the roof and hung a curtain between the cellar and their hovel. Against opposite walls they built bunks with no more thought than they gave the woodbox, which they stashed beside the potbelly stove. Above each bunk candle sconces were hung without the least consideration for where the paraffin might drip. A pewter pitcher and basin were set atop the stove, a barrel opposite the woodbox on the floor, and a pail without a handle intended to suffice as chamber pot was tucked behind the curtain. As dusk settled the rain gave way to drizzle and each of the three men carried a bale of hay from the stable to the new burrow. Having spread half of the hay on the floor, they padded the bunks with what remained. Finally, they stood back and considered their work. One of the jacks said, "I'd not unbutton my britches to make water here, but it'll do."
The first days in camp the quarters actually appealed to Thea, contrary as they were to the ship's berths where she'd spent so much of her recent time. At least here the squalor did not pitch and roll, was not rank with the smell of vomit, had not, in those first few days anyway, been infested with rodents and lice. Though it was true she could not stretch her arms fully above her head, though her bunk was barely wider than her thin hips, though it was true that when the autumn winds came howling through at night they sawed through her eiderdown as if it were no more than mosquito netting, she still possessed a sense of relief for having found a place to rest.
It was a mere ten sleepy steps from her bunk to the stove in the kitchen. She could retrace half of those steps to fetch stores from the cellar. And unless she was setting tables or making a trip to the privy she did not much move beyond that scant domain. By the time of the first snowfalls, she had begun to feel caged.
Each day after Thanksgiving the hours of daylight shriveled until it seemed there was hardly any purpose to the sun rising at all. And with each short day a definite restlessness settled into her. The jacks returned for lunch and for dinner with frosted coats, their faces hoary as ash, wraithlike. As their coats melted in the mess hall's heat, they appeared to be vaporizing. Where once she had needed all her powers of concentration to perform her tasks, she now found herself with time to daydream. While plating their slices of pie she would puzzle over their evanescence as though it were a religious rite. Day after day they entered and took their seats and began their disappearance. It saddened her and scared her some, but mostly it simply mystified her.
She spent all her spare thoughts on the men, and what she discovered— for the first time in her life — was simple desire, as if their warming, their steaming, their appetite, the way they smelled, all of it fed this new thing in her. Each night, after the camp had settled, after she had finished her own duties and lay in bed exhausted, she would recall the subtlest moments: the way a man would rub the cold out of his hands, for example, or the way he would blow on his stew, any of a hundred such mundane habits. In her revisiting them, the moments became profound, delicious, and she would often find herself caressing the bottom of her belly or tracing her fingers up and down her neck, feeling for her quickening pulse.
With the New Year came the cold. Colder even than the bitterest days in Hammerfest. The first week of January Thea hardly slept for the whining from the horse barn. The accordion music from the bunk house that had been a Saturday night staple since her arrival ceased. And if such a thing were possible, the men found new measures of silence as they filed into the mess for their meals. In a vacant gesture the foreman began making rounds during breakfast, glad-handing the men as they sulked over their porridge and coffee, reminding them of their fortitude and stoutheartedness. Of course they left each morning into the frigid darkness, but the purpose in their step was visibly reduced.
The second week of January was colder still. Twice the temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero overnight, and on those mornings following, the murmurs in the mess hall began. Any speech at all was rebellion, but even the hardened bull cook seemed reluctant to enforce the rule of silence. From his stool at the head of the table, he looked thoughtful, judicial, even, as he contemplated the new boundaries of his order. The taciturn resignation in the men had given way to anger. They griped about the cold, about frostbite, about the snapped saw blades and shattering ax handles. The teamsters lamented the horses' agony and their own. In all of this the bull cook and foreman indulged the men.
Thea was not so alarmed by the cold, partly because most of her day was spent near the comfort of the ovens and stoves and scullery fires but also because of her arctic childhood. So despite the turn to peevishness in the jacks, and despite the fact that she understood almost none of what they said, she actually welcomed the sound of their voices.
It was during the third week of January that something completely unexpected happened to Thea. After supper on Sunday, after most of the men had filed out of the mess and trudged back to their bunkhouse, one of the jacks stopped by the kitchen to address Thea. He was an old man, his lips cracked to the point of bleeding. He said his name was Rolf and that he had been asked by the bull cook to speak with her. He spoke in Norwegian, and the sound of her mother tongue after months of its absence almost made her cry. The old man must have sensed as much because he paused and smiled and patted the back of her hand. He then told her what he had to say was important. He reiterated that he was speaking on behalf of the bull cook, who was speaking on behalf of the foreman. Thea composed herself and sat down.
Rolf said that there had been reports from the jacks and teamsters of wolf sign. He said there were many wolves in the woods, and that in all his years of working in the forests, he'd never seen one himself. Given the horrendous cold, the wolves were perhaps getting desperate, and that was why they were encroaching on the camp. Were, in any case, coming nearer and nearer. He told her about the tracks on the river, about the scant moose and caribou, and that she was not to use the latrine without being accompanied by the old lady. The bull cook thought it best for the women to move as a pair until further notice. And then the old man nodded and left.
VI.
(March 1910)
In mid-March, along the river's frozen waters, two thirteen-year-old boys shattered the glaze on a knee-deep and moon-shaped snow. They wore snowshoes they'd made of bent ash and moose gut. Their hats were beaver fur, trapped and skinned and finally sewn while they sat around the fire in the wigwam.
Odd and Danny Riverfish. They wore bowie knives on their belts and carried shotguns over their shoulders and they dragged a toboggan behind them. They were on their way to Danny's traplines on Thistle Creek and in the beaver ponds above. Their play at being men was grave and full of purpose and hardly premature anymore.
" Maybe there'll be some otter or marten, too," Danny said.
"Otter's good to eat. Pelts will fetch a fair price at the trading post. Maybe at Hosea's," Odd said, trying the woodsman's banter he was just learning that winter.
" Loony Hosea."
Odd smiled. "Yeah."
Danny smiled back.
"How's