Although I knew which branches caught the most squirrels and which holes yielded the most rabbits, I followed my usual route in order to check them all. It took me first down to the river, but no animal tracks showed in the soft meringues heaped over the bank. I trudged into the trees. They stirred their sleepy heads to see who was coming, then settled back. I had expected the ground under them to be clear of snow, but even here I had to wade through it. The wind had blown it in drifts against one side of each trunk, making the forest flash black and white. Deer and birds had been there before me, and I even saw tracks that might have been wolf, but I didn’t find any squirrels or rabbits—dead or alive. Every trap was either covered in snow or empty. I imagined the animals tucked up asleep in their beds for the winter, and wondered what we would do if they didn’t come out again until spring. In my head, I counted the number of animals still hanging from our rafters, and worried about my father’s scribbled sums. Perhaps I could eat more slowly so we would have enough food to see us through.
Each empty trap made me think about how angry my father would be when I returned without any food. I heard him shouting and saw him throw a billycan across the room. I ducked but it clipped the side of my head, bouncing off and clattering on the floor. I went back to the traps that were buried in the snow and uncovered them in case there was a creature I had missed. The forest was more handsome than I had ever seen it, but all I could think about was returning empty-handed. Many of the snowdrifts came up to my knees, and my feet became wet and numb; I was cold and trembling, but still I walked. I hummed the last bars of La Campanella and played the notes within my mittens, but it didn’t take my mind off the panic that was building inside me.
When I neared the place where the wintereyes sprouted from the rocky soil, I remembered a noose I had tied to my favourite tree, higher up the mountain, in the summer. It had never caught anything, but now I wondered whether the acorns that we had forgotten to gather because we were too busy with the piano might have attracted a squirrel into my trap. In desperation, I continued up through the trees.
The wintereye, crouched in the rocks, had been kept squat and crooked by the wind which raced up the mountain. Its roots clasped the stone with giant claws, and below the branches the snow was patchy, the flakes scattered by the wind. From a way off, I could see that the noose was not there—perhaps it had rotted or been nibbled by an animal. But as I drew closer, under the wintereye, I saw footprints. Feet, in man-sized boots, had shuffled around under the tree and walked off across the rocks. They had made the same kind of movements my father had when we played outside die Hütte, as if this person too had hopped around. I stepped into one footprint, from heel to toe—it was the same size as my father’s. For an illogical moment I wondered if he had been there before me, but we had only one pair of boots, and I was wearing them. A breeze came up through the trees, sprinkling snow, and when the wind reached the wintereye I stood beneath; the tree shuddered and in a whisper, I said, “Reuben!”
I ducked low against the trunk, scanning the rocky outcrops above me. There was no movement, no shadows unaccounted for. I looked at the footprints I crouched amongst and wondered if I could have remembered incorrectly. Perhaps I had been there already to check the trap; maybe the prints were mine. In my head I re-ran the route I had taken—from the river up through the pines, zigzagging between them, out the other side to the wintereyes and here. I was sure I hadn’t made them. When my thumping heart had steadied, I hurried back to die Hütte, jumping and turning at every whump of falling snow. Each creak of my father’s boots through the drifts made me look around, suspicious that the man who had carved his name in die Hütte was following me.
I smelled the smoke from our stove before I saw the cabin, and I ran, bent over, across the open ground, as if a sniper might have been raising his gun to take aim. My father’s tracks in the clearing were already turning to slush, and the snowman we had made had shrunk as the day had warmed. In front of the door, lying on the snow, was a squirrel. A dead squirrel. I couldn’t see any blood on it. I looked at the roof and wondered if it had been up there and had lost its footing, falling conveniently onto our doorstep. But the snow on the edge of the shingles was dripping and it was impossible to tell. I glanced around. The feeling of being watched made me nervous, but the relief of returning with even a single animal was enormous. I picked up the squirrel by the tail and went inside. My father, who was sharpening tools, glanced over his shoulder.
“I was starting to wonder if I should send out a search party, but there were no volunteers. Only one?” he said, looking at the squirrel. “They’re probably all keeping warm in their dreys, sensible creatures.”
Our room was cosy, safe. I stood by the stove, warming through, feeling the bite of blood flowing again through my veins. My father carried the squirrel outside to gut and skin it. And I wondered whether Reuben was watching him too.
15
Although I loved the snow, every morning I hoped it had melted, so my father’s mood would lighten, but each time I woke I could tell from the muffled sound that more snow had fallen. My father and I re-counted our stored food and he reworked his calculations, his writing becoming smaller, filling in all the gaps on the map, so that undersized numbers even floated down the river.
“One thousand calories a day,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Or eight hundred? There’s no fat on a squirrel. How many calories in a squirrel? Two hundred? Two hundred if we’re lucky. Four squirrels a day each, for how long?” He threw down the pen and put his head in his hands. “How can I work out how much food we need if we don’t know what the date is?”
I stopped humming, my fingers still, on the keys.
My father looked up at me, his face white and drawn. “It’s not enough,” he said. Until that winter I had always thought my father had a solution for everything, that he had all the answers, but I learned soon enough that I was wrong.
We began rationing the food we had stored. Every day, packed into my father’s boots, I trudged through the snow to check the traps, but many days I came back with my rucksack empty. I never lost the feeling of being watched, but I didn’t see any more footprints except ours. When I stayed indoors, my father wore the boots down to the river to fish, standing with the falling snow coating his head and shoulders, until he said he could no longer see to cast. I wasn’t sure which was worse: tramping through the cold and finding nothing, or sitting by the fire with all the food surrounding me and not being allowed to eat any of it.
Within a week or two, any remaining summer plumpness had gone. My father’s face became gaunt and his ribs showed through his skin when he lifted up his shirt to wash his armpits in front of the stove. All I thought about was food and music. If my father had the boots and I was indoors, I used La Campanella to measure the time from one meal to the next. I calculated that playing the piece sixty times from start to finish would take me through from breakfast to lunch. I ate my food in morsels, sipping at our thin stews—a few scraps of meat floating in grey water—licking the spoon clean between each mouthful. We had smoked the squirrels without removing their bones, simply crushing them with the hammer, and so at mealtimes the room was full of the sound of crunching bones as we ate everything in front of us.