bends, wrinkling in lines that shrink and expand. Constant, constant. Constantly changing. Always the river, yet never the same. Slowly, the waters claim her, and her thoughts dissolve into the current. Gone is Bullhead, mother of three. Gone daughter, sister, clan member, widow. There is just the swift water as it twirls and glides, moves in smooth sheets that carry her downstream.
The sky lightens for a brief moment, illuminating Grey Rabbit’s hands and the patches of lichen, squash-orange and green, and then the light is gone and the rock face goes dull. Grey Rabbit looks to the sky as the long yellow crack in the cloud mantle passes, moving swiftly toward the big water. She must finish her work and get back to Little Cedar. She’d left him lying quietly by the fire, whispering to the cattail warrior in his hand.
Deep into the night she sits with him, willing herself to keep a close watch. But each night sleep overtakes her, and another child appears. The last was a girl, crying in her cradleboard. She disappeared into the woods, carried off by a creature made of ice.
Food. They need food. They had talked of moving on, in hopes of finding the animals in another place. Soon they will have to. Grey Rabbit rubs snow across her scraped knuckles, then wipes clean the long edge of her bone.
Bullhead makes her way toward the rasping sound. Her time at the river has soothed and calmed her, allowing her to see more clearly, to notice the wind-carved snow behind tree trunks, and the soft pink patterns in the bark of the red pines. “Ah, good.” She spots a dark vole in the snow, its feet curled and frozen, its head half eaten. She turns the rodent over in her hand, and drops it into the fish basket.
Her son’s wife looks small standing before the rock wall that rises from the forest. She has scraped a good amount of lichen already. She works hard every day, focused as a hawk, yet she stays as distant as one, too. Something troubles the girl. Something more than Little Cedar. Bullhead ducks below a snow-laden bough. She has tried sharing a number of stories about hunger, of times when she’d worried over her own children, but none of them have nudged Grey Rabbit to speak. She can only trust that the girl will confide if she needs.
“Don’t be so lazy.” Bullhead sets her basket on the ground. “Get those, up there.” She pouches her lips toward a high spot on the rock. “Those are the good ones. Those taste like beaver tail.”
Grey Rabbit smiles at the joke, though her smile fades when she sees what is in the fish basket.
Bullhead takes a scraping bone from Grey Rabbit’s bag and chooses a spot of her own to work. It’s an ancient rock with a solemn spirit, home to moss and lichen, and two small cedars growing out of a high crack. She places an offering at the base of the rock.
The two work in silence, tending their own thoughts, while their scraping falls into a shared rhythm.
Herring on a stick, slowly crisping near the fire. A line of herring, one more succulent than the next.
Little Cedar crying in his cradleboard, disappearing into the woods.
A bird’s call breaks the silence. It echoes off the high rock wall. Bullhead and Grey Rabbit stop scraping, and turn to meet each other’s eyes. Again, the bird calls, and they look to the trees, smiling at each other with growing delight. They search the bare limbs and the green pines for the one that cawed, black crow—whose return marks the coming of spring.
1902
Gunnar straps on his skis, then hoists his pack. The warmer days are turning the snow wet and heavy, so the more distance he can cover before the sun rises, the better. He’s no stranger to the hour before night gives way to day, as he’s up and rowing to his nets as soon as the sky holds enough light to navigate. Sure, it’s not exactly the same in the woods. Woods cling to darkness longer than water.
He winds the scarf Berit knit around his face, straps his poles on his wrists, and shoves off. For a time he can follow the cuts of the logging sleighs, its snow-covered width discernable in the dark. The grade is downhill so he uses his edges, slowing to avoid scraps of bark that are large enough to throw him over.
It’s likely John got the rabbits to his Mrs. He can feel her on the other end of his journey, and he’d love to let loose and ski at full steam. But he has to keep from working up too much of a sweat. If the temperature drops suddenly it will freeze on him.
The woods are quiet except for the swish of his skis and the wool-to-wool of his pant legs. The lake isn’t visible, but its icy smell is in the air. He can feel it below like a sleeping animal, breathing its dark watery breath. It was quite a story that John had told him. A giant, twenty miles long and turned to stone, lying face up in the lake. He couldn’t quite follow the whole tale, or tell whether this Nana’b’oozoo was a man or a god. Maybe he was some type of Indian troll. Humanlike. Shape-shifting. In Aunt Dorte’s stories back home, trolls often turned to stone. John could have made the yarn up to distract him after his own grim tale, but that didn’t seem to be the case. He’d told it like it was true. It would be something to see, this Nana’b’oozoo, a sleeping giant in the lake.
The sleigh cut looks like a grey floor, laid along the bottom of a dark cave. No sign yet of the dawn. Gunnar loosens his scarf, already warming as he poles up an incline. It was good of John to hear out his story, not that he feels much better for the telling, not that it changes what he’d done. He reaches the top of the hill and takes the slope down, gliding past the indiscernible woods, keeping to the grey trail, as that day, indelibly set in his mind, unfolds before him in the darkness.
It was a fresh pine morning with rippling dark breakers, the lake still billowing from a two-day northwester, and he was worried about his catch. The northwesterly wind was still blowing strong enough to keep him from getting back to land. It finally let up late-morning, and so he launched his skiff into the lake. He rowed straight-lined away from shore, practically feeling Berit’s thick silence as she watched him through the windowpane. They’d fought. Sure. Well, not exactly. A small quip the night before and no words exchanged come morning. It was a pattern that had grown too familiar. Too many things had grown in place of the children.
The first stiffness left his shoulders as he worked the oars, his course taking him over familiar lake bottom—the basalt table that continues off his cove, with its high spot that he has to skirt, and the group of mammoth boulders, then the scattered few that are visible only when the lake lies flat, at five fathoms, still visible at seven, before the bottom drops away.
The air was crystal and sharp, smelling of pine pitch and rot, and the seagulls were crying loops in the air, following in hope of easy food. He positioned himself first by pine and stone face, then by the shapes of the familiar ridges. As he rowed, the land transformed itself as always from a stagnant footing, solid with home and wife, to an abstraction of shape and texture, a tool for navigation, and a goal that meant safety if the weather were to turn. He was hoping there’d been no damage to his gang, though the herring should be fine if he could get them in soon.
At the top of a swell, he spotted the red cloth fastened to his uphauler, then down he went into a trough, where there was nothing to see but water and sky. The swells were too big to bring her in standing, so he waited for the lake to lift him again, adjusted his course, and rowed on.
The gulls settled on the dark blue water, paddling back and forth, watching him work his ropes. “You best forget about it,” he addressed the flock. “I’ll not be tossing any storm herring today.” One more day of weather and the fish would have been ruined, gone so soft that bones would poke through their flesh when he went to pick them from the nets. Sure he gets tense when he can’t get out; he hadn’t meant to speak to her so curtly.
He started in at one end of his gang, hauling a section of net to the surface, lifting it across his boat, the cold water running from the ropes. One by one he freed herring from the mesh and dropped them into the bottom of the skiff. They were fine. The catch was fine. Too much time he could spend worrying.
When the section of net was cleared of fish, he pulled himself along below it, bringing a new section up and over, then watching the cleared one fall back to the lake, corks up, leads untangled.