The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey Read Free Book Online Page B

arms went to where it had stood. In its place was a small, broken heap of snow. The mittens and scarf were gone.
    He pushed at the snow with the toe of his boot.
    An animal. Maybe a moose had stumbled through. But the scarf and mittens? A raven or a whiskey jack, maybe. Wild birds had been known to snatch things. As he turned away, he caught sight of the tracks. Moonlight fell in the hollows. The prints ran through the snow, away from the cabin and into the trees. He bent over them. The silvery blue light was weak, so at first he didn’t trust his eyes. Coyote, or maybe lynx. Something other than this. He bent closer and touched the track with the tips of his bare fingers. Human footprints. Small. The size of a child’s.
    Jack shivered. His skin prickled with goose bumps, and his bare toes ached cold inside his boots. He left the tracks and the pile of snow, stacked the wood in the crook of his arm, and went inside, quickly closing the door behind him. As he shoved each piece of wood into the stove, he wondered if the racket would wake Mabel. Just his eyes playing tricks. It would come to sense in the morning. He stayed beside the woodstove until the fire roared again, and then he closed the damper.
    He eased himself beneath the quilt and against Mabel’s warm body, and she moaned softly in her sleep but did not wake. Jack lay beside her, his eyes wide and his brain spinning until finally he drifted into a kind of sleep that wasn’t much different than wakefulness, a mystifying, restless sleep where dreams fell and melted like snowflakes, where children ran soft-footed through the trees, and scarves flapped between black raven beaks.

     
    When Jack woke again it was late morning, the sun was up, and Mabel was in the kitchen. His body was tired and stiff, as if he had never slept at all but instead spent the night splitting wood or bucking hay bales. He dressed and in socked feet made his way to the table. He smelled fresh coffee and hot pancakes.
    “I think it worked, Jack.”
    “What?”
    “The sourdough starter Esther gave me. Here, try them.”
    Mabel set a plate of pancakes on the table.
    “Did you sleep all right?” she asked. “You look positively worn out.” With a hand on his shoulder, she reached over him to pour coffee from the blue enamel pot into his cup. He picked up the cup, held it warm between his hands.
    “I don’t know. I guess not.”
    “It’s so cold out, isn’t it? But beautiful. All that white snow. It’s so bright.”
    “You’ve been outside?”
    “No. Not since I dashed to the outhouse in the middle of the night.”
    He got up from the table.
    “Aren’t you going to eat breakfast?” she asked.
    “Just going to get some wood. Nearly let the fire go out.”
    He put on his coat this time, and some gloves, before opening the door. The snow reflected sunlight so brilliantly he squinted. He walked to the woodpile, then turned back to the cabin and saw the snow child, or what was left of it. Still just a shapeless pile of snow. No scarf. No mittens. Just as it had been last night, but now exposed as truth in the light of day. And the footprints still ran through the snow, across the yard and into the trees. Then he saw the dead snowshoe hare beside the doorstep. He stepped past without pausing. Inside, he let the wood fall to the floor beside the stove in a clamor, then stared without seeing.
    “Have you noticed anything?” he finally said.
    “You mean the cold snap?”
    “No. I mean anything out of the ordinary.”
    “Like what?”
    “I thought I heard something last night. Probably nothing.”

     
    After breakfast Jack left to feed the animals. On the way to the barn, he scooped up the dead hare and held it close to his side, so Mabel wouldn’t notice out the window. Once in the barn, he looked at it closely. He could see where it had been strangled, most likely with a thin snare that cut into its white coat and soft underfur. It was frozen stiff. Later, after he had taken