Winterbound

by Margery Williams Bianco

  “They were drafty yesterday,” Mrs. Ellis told her. “That wind seemed to come in everywhere!”

  “It’s the old sash. I’ll get Neal to look at them.” She went over and held her hand against the window sills, here and there. “Feel that? I tell you what you do. You get strips of newspaper and fill in all those cracks, poke it right down; that’ll make a difference. There’s plenty of little tricks to make a place comfortable, only you’ve got to know them. If you live in the country long you soon learn!”

  Next to Edna, of whom they saw little these days, the Rowes were rapidly becoming the mainstay of the Ellis family. Besides fixing the windows and planning the doors—details which hadn’t mattered so much in warm weather but were important now—it was Neal who helped them bank the house with leaves and earth on the north side and nail over the woodshed cracks; Neal who cut and hauled their cord wood for them and sawed it up, not with the gas engine which, like many of the Rowe possessions, had permanently broken down—“giv’ up the ghost,” as its owner cheerfully remarked—but by means of the faithful truck harnessed to an improvised saw table, till there rose in the side yard a mountain of stove wood which the Ellises innocently imagined would more than last them all winter. It was Mary who advised in all household emergencies and who came miraculously to the rescue—dropping everything to dash bareheaded across the road the time their stovepipe caught fire, which it inevitably did before long, they having supposed that all one needed to do with a stovepipe was to set it up and leave it there.

  Martin and Caroline made no bones about preferring the Rowe household to their own. Jimmie was just a year older than Martin, while Shirley and Caroline could almost share birthdays. To see the two little girls together one might easily have taken pink-cheeked Caroline for the country child, for she was far sturdier in build, Shirley being slight and fair, with a pointed elfish face, upturned faintly freckled nose, and gray dark-lashed eyes that looked too big for the rest of her features. While she and Caroline sewed, played dolls, and kept house, Martin and Jimmie were deep in their own plans and occupations. They spent evenings poring over the mailorder catalogues and knew by heart every item in the saddlery, gun, and hunting pages, their chief interests at this moment.

  The two were well matched. Jimmie owned a .22 rifle and could be trusted with it, since he took hunting seriously and would have scorned to shoot at a small bird or a squirrel; he had a born instinct for woodcraft and knew the name, habits, and ways of every bird and beast around, while Martin, though he had never handled a gun in his life, had more than the average boy’s knowledge of natural history, and moreover owned a father who knew all about prehistoric animals and dinosaurs’ eggs and was at this very moment away on a scientific expedition in Central America—enough in itself to invest him with an aura of magic and importance to Jimmie, who had never seen a museum or zoo in his life, had access to few books, and had long ago exhausted all that the school library could offer on the subject nearest to his heart. When the two boys were not outdoors together or confabulating in their special corner of the Rowe kitchen they were usually shut up in Martin’s room at home, deep in his model engine or his microscope, possessions which had taken on new interest since this friendship began; while all Martin’s books in turn found their way across the road in exchange for copies of cowboy stories and other periodical Western literature.

  The Rowe kitchen had a special attraction for the younger Ellises. There were other rooms in the house, including all upstairs and the parlor with its old furniture, braided rugs on the oak floor, and a case of stuffed humming birds on the mantelshelf, but compared with the kitchen they might as well have been non-existent. It was in the kitchen that family life centered. It was a long low room (the Rowes, being country people, had preferred to keep the largest room in the house for its original use) with the stove at one end, flanked by a piled wood-box on one side and an old comfortable sofa on the other, set back in a sort of alcove and wide enough for the little girls to play house there of an afternoon and for three-year-old Tommy to take his midday nap on in cold weather, tucked under a patchwork quilt. Behind the stove the old chimney-breast bulged out, making a wide shelf on which the boys liked to sit dangling their legs and watch whatever was cooking on the stove top. An old pine dresser and a chest stood along one side of the room; on the other, Mary’s house plants occupied one sunny window and her sewing machine another. At the far end a row of outdoor coats hung from pegs, with a jumble of rubbers and boots below them, and Neal’s rifle and an old shotgun leaned in the corner next to the back door. Either Sam, the old black-and-tan foxhound, or Dolly, half hound, half pointer, usually lay stretched under the table in the middle of the floor, safe there from being trodden on or stumbled over, while Jimmie’s Ranger, a brown-and-white nondescript and the best woodchuck dog in the neighborhood, shared with three cats the warmer refuge under the stove.

  Here, when schoolwork was finished, Martin liked to spend his evenings, discussing plans with Jimmie in the sofa corner, reading at the table under the kerosene lamp, or, if Neal was in a talkative mood, listening to the hunting tales he would tell them as he lounged in the big wooden rocker, pausing now and then to reach out to the wood-box for a fresh stick to put on the stove, while Mary Rowe, who never seemed to sit down except at meals and not always then, moved on errands of her own about the room or just stood, to join in the talk.

  Garry, too, like the Rowes’ kitchen, for it was a room she felt thoroughly at home in, and Mary shared her own eagerness about gardening and flowers—especially wild flowers, and would drop whatever she was doing at any moment to look something up in the botany book or to exchange descriptions of plants she had seen or knew, and whereabouts they were to be found. She and Neal between them had at their fingertips, too, the history of every old house, abandoned or occupied, for miles around, of the people who had lived in them and of certain queer things that had happened there, stories just as exciting to Garry as hunting tales were to Martin.

  Martin was there one evening—Caroline too, for the next day was a Saturday—when Neal, who had been working late, came in, bringing a draft of cold air with him from the opened door.

  “Going to snow before morning,” he said, hanging up his leather jacket and coming over to the stove. “You can smell it coming, on the air.”

  “About time,” said Mary. “We’ve had one or two flurries but no real snow yet. Generally it comes earlier than this. Want some supper, Neal? It’s right in the oven here.”

  “I had some over to George’s. They were just sitting down to it before I left. But I could do with a slice of that apple pie, if you’ve got any left, and a cup of coffee. And I guess the boys could, too—hey, Martin? Jimmie I don’t have to ask, nor yet Caroline there; she looks like she could eat pie any hour of the day. I guess they don’t feed you right, over home. Kind of wasting away, you are!”

  Caroline, never quite sure whether Neal was making fun of her or not, said she guessed she wasn’t hungry, thank you, and sat up a little stiffly on the sofa. But the big coffeepot on the stove was full, there was just pie enough to go round, and Caroline relented when she saw it and shared a plate with Shirley, each drinking in turn from the white cup that held more hot milk than coffee.

  The last of the pie had just vanished when Neal, who was rolling a cigarette, turned suddenly, the half-filled paper between his fingers, and old Sam, who had been asleep under the table, lifted his head.

  “Hear that?”

  From somewhere outside the house there sounded a strangled scream, followed by a horrible blood-curdling wail that made Caroline turn white, while even Jimmie jumped in his chair and Martin’s mouth hung open.

  Neal looked from one to the other, smiling.

  “I bet that scared the life out of you, huh? Just take a look at Shirley!”

  If anything could have made Shirley’s eyes any bigger it was the sound she had just heard as she sat there transfixed.

  “Cheer up, Shirley, it’s noth
ing but an ole gray fox hollerin’!”

  Martin drew breath.

  “It . . . didn’t sound like a fox. It sounded like . . . like someone being killed! I thought foxes barked.”

  “They do. Red foxes bark. But the gray foxes, they just holler like that sometimes.” Neal crossed the floor softly and threw open the back door. “Keep the dogs back, Jimmie, and give me the flashlight. He must have been right back of the house here somewheres.”

  The boys pressed close beside him in the doorway as the flashlight played here and there on the dark yard, the dim sides of barn and outhouses. The cold fresh air drove past them into the kitchen where the two little girls sat on the sofa, listening.

  “Did you shut the chickens up all right, Jimmie?”

  “Sure, Dad. Guess he came down nosin’ around the garbage dump.”

  Shirley was peering anxiously under the stove, where the three cats still slept undisturbed.

  “Gray foxes get cats,” she said in a scared whisper.

  “They eat them?” Caroline looked horrified, as well she might.

  Shirley nodded. “If they catch ’em outside they do, sometimes. We had a cat last year and a fox got it. The cat ran. Dad says if a cat sits still a fox won’t touch it, only if it runs.”

  Caroline sat puzzling this.

  “I hate foxes,” said Shirley.

  Neal had closed the door again.

  “Wouldn’t the dogs chase him?” Martin asked.

  “Sure! And then we’d have them hollerin’ up and down the hill all night, keeping you all awake. I’ll put them out on the chain before we go to bed. If they git off by themselves, huntin’, this time of year, they’ll be gone for days.”

  “Isn’t that the kind you hunt?”

  “I get one once in a while. But their skin isn’t worth much. Not like a good red fox.”

  “I remember one fall,” Jimmie said, “there were a lot of them used to hang round in the hollow back there, and one time I went out to the spring after dark and I was coming back with the flashlight and there was a gray fox tracked me all the way back to the house. He kept a-hollerin’, and I’d turn the flashlight on him and he’d run, and then he’d keep a-comin’ again, and I got so mad I threw the flashlight right at him and I had to run home in the dark.”

  “Did you say ‘mad,’ Jim,” inquired his father, winking at Martin, “or did you say ‘scared’?”

  “I said mad. I wasn’t scared. I knew it was just a gray fox, all right, but any time I hear one of them darn things holler it makes me jump, and it would anyone else, too!”

  “How big is a gray fox?” Caroline wanted to know.

  “Not as big as you are, Sis!” and Caroline looked relieved. “They’re about so long—” Neal spread his hands apart. “They’re heavier built than a red fox, and sort of low in the body; a red fox is most all fur.”

  “Is there anything bigger than foxes?”

  “There’s wild cats. There was a lot of ’em round where I lived once. And there used to be a thing they called bobcats; some folks call it a link.”

  Martin nodded. “I’ve seen lynxes, in the zoo. They’ve got tufted ears.”

  “That was up among the big ledges, the place they call the Cat Rocks still, though I guess there’s nothing much but snakes there now, up over west of here. I don’t suppose there’s been one of those things seen in years,” Neal said.

  “There used to be bears,” Jimmie said. “Dad saw a bear once.”

  “I was always sure it was a bear, but when I told them at home no one believed me. You know how it is; if Jimmie were to come home one day and tell me he’d seen a tiger I’d just say, ‘Yeah?’ and think no more about it. Though they should have had more sense, for in my grandfather’s day there used to be bears, back round the swamp there. I was going to school across lots by the short cut—just about Shirley’s size, I was—and all at once I seen it standing up there in a berry patch, and I turned right around quick and came home. ‘I ain’t goin’ to school today,’ I says, but when I told them all I got was a licking. But I went back and found its tracks next day, right along the brook where the ground was soft. Just like a naked foot print. It was a bear, all right. I can see it now, standing there. Of course if it was Jimmie, now, he’d have walked right up to it and made sure!”

  “I would not! Not without I had a gun with me.”

  “A gun wouldn’t do you any good,” said Martin. “Father knew a man who met a bear right on a narrow ledge of rock and he didn’t have any weapon—he was coming back from fishing—so he just waved his arms and yelled and the bear ran away. He said he was glad he didn’t have a gun, ’cause he might have fired it, and then the bear would have gone for him. It was up near Canada. They had mountain lions there, too; panthers. I guess there wouldn’t be any panthers round here?”

  “I wouldn’t like to say there was. But there was a queer thing happened when I was a boy,” Neal said. “I’ve often wondered about it. It was when we were living up in that house I showed you, the time we drove over to the cider mill. The big swamp’s right in back and it used to be pretty wild up in there those days; not much cleared land around. I’d gone over to my aunt’s one day, and I had my brother with me; he was just a bit younger than Jimmie is now. It was getting on dusk and we was coming back by the old corduroy road, not hurryin’ any, and all at once I heard something hollering up the hill back of the swamp, a kind of a long howl: ooh—ooh—ooh!

  “I says: ‘Hear that owl, Nate?’ And Nate he looked over his shoulder, sort of quick, and then he looked up at me, but he didn’t say nothing, so I says: ‘Getting latish; we’d better walk a bit faster!’ I knew mighty well that wasn’t no owl we heard, and it wasn’t a wildcat, either, for I’d heard them screeching at night, and I knew what they sounded like. This was bigger and deeper, and it didn’t sound like nothing I’d ever heard before; it was a kind of a hunting cry, if you know what I mean.

  “I didn’t want to say nothing, for I didn’t want to get Nate scared, so we just kept right on going, walking as fast as we could, and all the time I could feel him pressin’ up close to me, and then bye-an’-bye we heard it again, a lot nearer this time: Ooh—oo—ooh!

  “Then Nate looked at me, an’ I looked at him, and I says: ‘Nate, suppose we run?’ And he grabbed my hand and we started to beat it, quick as we could, and as we ran I heard the holler again, and this time I could tell by the sound it was there on the corduroy road right back of us. It was dark by then in under the trees and I never run so fast in all my life, just dragging the kid along with me, and pretty soon we were near the end of the road. Our own house was quite a ways off still and there was another long piece of woods to pass before we come to it, but there was another house nearer and I figured if we could make that and the folks were up still, we’d go in there and wait for a while before we went on home. So I says: ‘Nate, if you can keep it up till we get to Johnson’s we’ll go in there, and if they’re asleep we’ll wake ’em up.’

  “Well, when we got as far as the house there I felt pretty safe. All the folks were in bed—they kept pretty early hours as a rule—and the lights were all out. We crept up close under the front stoop and I said: ‘Nate, I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll just wait here and listen till we hear it holler again, and then we’ll know for sure which way it’s headin’, and if it’s headin’ this way we’ll bang on the door till the folks come down and let us in.’ For I hated to wake everyone up if we didn’t have to, and I knew anyway we could get into the barn or somewheres at a pinch. So we waited, and we listened, and bye-an’-bye sure enough we did hear it. But it wasn’t coming our way any more; either something had scared it or it was tracking something else, for it had turned off and was traveling down the valley. But my knees were still shaking, and so were Nate’s, and we hung round that house quite a bit before we dared start on for home.”

  “Did you ever find out what it was?” Martin asked.

  “No, I never did. But I know that about that time
, or maybe a year or so later, there was two or three people had tales of seeing some big light-colored thing in the woods, different times, and all more or less around the same place. One was a peddler driving home at night, and he saw it, but it made off before he had a chance to see what it was. No one ever did know. But that swamp there joins right up with the woods in back and there’s miles and miles of country out that way used to be pretty wild, and still is. And I’ve figured since that if some big animal ever did get down there from the forests up north it might live around there for years on what it could hunt, deer and things, without a soul ever setting eyes on it except by chance. I could show you places within fifteen miles of right here where we’re sitting that’s as wild as anything you find up north.”

  “You’re going to have all these kids good and scared first thing you know,” Mary put in. “That was years ago. If you heard anything howling these days it wouldn’t be anything worse than a fox, like we heard tonight.”

  “Well, the land around here hasn’t been farmed, not like it used to be, for quite a while now. People come here and buy up the big places and just keep them the way they are, for summer places or hunting and fishing clubs. The land’s lapsing back to forest in lots of places, and first thing you know the wild things start coming back too.”

  It was later than usual when Martin and Caroline got their coats and said goodnight. Listening to Neal’s story they had forgotten the clock, and Shirley was already half asleep in the sofa corner.

  “Want me to walk across the road with you?” Neal asked as they stood in the doorway.

  Had it been any other evening Martin might have said yes, but tonight pride prevented him. He wouldn’t even take the flashlight Jimmie offered. It was his boast, especially before Caroline, that he never minded the dark.

  “Well, I’ll leave the door open awhile, so you can see your way down the path,” Neal said.

  Home was, if not exactly across the road, only a hundred yards up the road and then along the little pathway from the bars to the house. By daytime it was only a step, but at night even familiar distances have a curious and uncomfortable way of lengthening themselves out. When Martin and Caroline once left that comforting lane of yellow light flung from the Rowes’ doorway they seemed to step at once into unfathomable blackness. Martin had a queer light feeling in his feet. Even the ground felt strange; the road rose up to meet one unexpectedly and then fell away, and the bushes and rocks all seemed to be in the wrong places. Nor did it help matters that Caroline had a tendency to clutch and stumble against him.