The Child Finder

by Rene Denfeld

  Each time he visited he brought the lantern, and even as the lantern lit the walls—covered over time with hieroglyphs of imagination—he saw nothing amiss in it. He examined the carved walls with his lantern and smiled, as if she had made a gift for him.

  Maybe he cannot read, she thought. This thought gave her pleasure. Maybe she knew something he did not.

  He still never spoke, and didn’t seem to hear her when she talked. She realized that in this world there was no spoken language. Everything was silent.

  She looked forward to the times Mr. B came, bearing the lantern. When she was with him, everything was okay.

  Mr. B brought her food in a foil container that had a vague echo to her, something someone once called a TV dinner. Mr. B reused them. She could tell because there was often the same dried rind of gravy in the ridges.

  The food in the tray was not what she was used to: it was snow food. There was a greasy stew of some kind, with a pungent, musky taste. The chunks of soft meat tasted like the inside of the earth. She could feel her veins filling with nutrients as she ate, as if she were one of the trees outside, drinking in the milk of the melted snow.

  After she ate she slept, deep in the piles of fur. That is when she dreamed—of snow and ice and reaching fingers.

  One morning she had woken up and Mr. B was beside her on the bed shelf. He jumped up as if caught. She was enjoying his warmth, his comfort. She had dreamed of a woman called Mom, curling up with a girl on a couch during a long, sleepy afternoon, the television drowsily blaring another episode of Tom and Jerry.

  Mr. B stood in the dark. Under the scratchy blanket she was naked. She didn’t remember taking her clothes off. She wanted to find a way to ask Mr. B what had happened. But she was afraid of making him mad. So she hid her face and pretended to be sleeping.

  After a while he left. He pulled up the ladder after him. She heard the lock on the trapdoor. He had left the bent foil tray on the ground next to her. She licked it clean, and then flipped it over. In the dim light she could see the letters stamped underneath: hungry-man dinner.

  She traced the letters, and then pressed them against her cheek.

  In this time of great awakening, the snow girl learned much about herself, and the world. She learned the world was a lonely place, because when you cried no one came. She learned the world was an uncertain place, because one moment you were one person and the next you landed on your head all goofy and woke up in a dream. She learned the world was a wild place, full of imagination, because that was the only possible explanation for what had happened.

  She had thought she was someone else, but now she realized she was wrong. That girl was as real as the smoke on the mountains that turns out to be rain, as the cry of the animal that sounds like a child but is not. That girl would never survive here.

  But if she was not that child, who was she?

  She was something new—something rolled from the snow.

  In the dark she hugged herself. Snow girl, she said to herself. I am snow girl.

  There is no census here, Ranger Dave had said, but Naomi suspected otherwise.

  There was always a census—whether written in the scratchy pad of a farm boss checking off the field hands, or recorded in the head of an old woman who can recite the complete genealogy of every single resident going back three generations.

  The key was finding it.

  After rising, Naomi did a set of push-ups in her room. She was diligent about keeping in shape, following the training she had in self-defense classes. The hiking was good, but keeping her upper body strong and capable was important. Warm with glow, she grabbed a muffin off the counter of the diner and headed out.

  The office for land management was in the hamlet of Stubbed Toe Creek, at the bottom of the mountain range road the Culvers had taken several years before. The hamlet looked like a long-ago village, the homes with steep roofs so the snow would slip off. An icy river tumbled nearby over green rocks.

  Naomi parked on the main street near a bakery, where the group of mountain climbers she had seen at the motel were gathered, laughing and drinking coffee from steaming cups. The heady smell of doughnuts sailed out the window. A sign advertised homemade fudge.

  Farther down the street a butcher shop with windows covered in white paper had prices for wild game processing—add extra fat for a fee—as well as homemade elk jerky. The locals going into the butcher shop looked much different than the climbers outside the bakery—hoary old men in oilcloth coats and their ageless sons carrying rifles as easily as their own hands. In front of the butcher shop was a dented truck with an elk lying casually in the back, a ribbon of blood running down the gate.

  “I’d like to look at your homestead claims,” Naomi told the clerk in the small office inside a large drafty town hall that also contained a tiny library and an interesting-looking historical museum. The clerk was a middle-aged woman with bouffant hair, wearing a lime green top and pants that lit up the somber room. She was the kind of helper Naomi had often met over the years: the town historian, gossip, and librarian all rolled into one. Naomi, naturally friendly, had learned to appreciate these helpers, and show her gratitude.

  There were over forty claims. Naomi spread them over a long table. The claims went back a century: faded papers ornate with cursive script and flowery language. To All Who Are Present, Greetings. Some of them were so old that President Theodore Roosevelt had signed them. Others were more recent, up until a few decades past.

  The claims were written in a language Naomi didn’t understand. One hundred and sixty acres at the northwest quarter of section two in township three south of range five east of the Willamette meridian . . .

  She rubbed her forehead. She would figure it out.

  “Confusing, isn’t it?” The clerk smiled from the counter.

  She came over, showing Naomi how to locate the claims on her map. Her warm stomach pressed lightly against Naomi’s arm: it was soothing.

  “Most these claims were for a hundred sixty acres,” the woman explained. “No one needed that much for a cabin, but that was how the land came. The government was thinking of farming, even though it’s pretty clear this ain’t farming country.”

  The clerk picked up a claim: Desmond Strikes. She located the area quickly enough, using her stubby pencil to draw the claim on the map. It was on the road below where Madison went missing. “Now, this one is easy. This is the Strikes claim. It’s still got a store on it. His grandson runs it now.”

  Naomi didn’t say anything, only smiled encouragingly.

  The clerk picked up another one. “Now this one was for what we call the Devil’s District, ’cause of all the wolverines used to be up there, before they got hunted out.” She showed Naomi where on the map the claim lay, in the higher reaches.

  Naomi thought of the glacial forests: beautiful but inhospitable.

  “But why take a claim here?”

  The clerk smiled back. “You got to remember, Oregon was built on timber and trapping. It was fur traders and trappers that created the Oregon Trail. When the Homestead Act came along, some thought, Hey, my own piece of land to live off. They weren’t thinking how hard it would be.”

  “How many stayed?”

  “Well . . . the fur trade has lasted longer here than most places. We still got some trappers around. You’ll see them—look like mountain men all right.” She gave a merry laugh. “Used to be the land was valuable because of the trees on it. Then the government put a stop to that, so no one much wanted it anymore. Some came for gold, only to be shown for fools. But nowadays you got to inherit the claim. Otherwise it’s all government land.”

  Naomi had a sudden image: a little girl, her leg caught in a trap, mewling in pain, lost in a forest.

  “You sound like you know a lot.”

  “My grandfather was a trapper. He had a cabin way up on Mink River. We used to snowshoe in when I was a kid.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Lord, don’t know—
it’s been years. Probably in ruins.”

  “Is there any way to know if someone has been camping on one of these claims?”

  The clerk laughed a bit, her belly shaking in the lime green top. “They’d be welcome to it.”

  By the time they were done marking her map it was after lunch, and the clerk looked tired. Naomi felt she owed the lady coffee. She brought back a hot mocha from the bakery down the street, along with a small box of wrapped fudge. The clerk accepted the fudge like her grandmother had made it, and in this hamlet, she might have.

  Naomi held the sheaf of claims out to her. “Do you have a way to make copies?”

  “Of course,” the woman said. “Got a copier in the back.” She paused a moment, and asked deferentially: “You a historian?”

  “Of a sort.” Naomi smiled.

  Naomi stepped outside to a clear sky. The high mountains, all white, beckoned above her.

  She drove back up the mountains, wanting to use the last hours of the day to search.

  Naomi was beginning to enjoy her time in the forest, despite the sadness of her call. She could see tiny red-throated birds on the snow. She could hear the loud whapping sound of an owl in the dark trees. Overhead hawks circled, moving so slowly they seemed part of the sky. Several times she had seen eagles, their throats as white as the snow below them.

  The forest was alive.

  Bear hair on a tree. A sky like an upside-down gold pan raining sleet that left stars in her hair. A musky smell from afar: a skunk traveling fast—she could see his black-striped, humping form. Towards the end of the day, before the sky or her watch told her night was coming, the sound of wolves awakened the dusk.

  Jerome would like this, she found herself thinking, with her eyes on a dazzling set of cedar trees set like signposts in the wild.

  Jerome always saw the beauty in everything, even her.

  It was too sad of a thought for Naomi, and she began to run, a bit, in the snow, feeling like a foolish child, and then a crying one. She lay down and made a snow angel, and when she arose she saw the crescent of her bottom, the sweep of her hips, and she was reminded she was a woman after all.

  “I brought your file back,” Naomi told Ranger Dave, standing in the door of the station. Behind her the falling sun turned the white-capped trees into visions of gold. The snow reflected the sky above, the clouds rushing like tatters of heaven.

  The ranger looked up from the desk in surprise. She could see the loneliness in his face. He covered it quickly, smiling to see her.

  She stepped forward, and he rose, taking the file. Behind him the posters moved lightly under the heater fan, reminding her why she was here.

  “Is it ever warm up here?” she asked.

  “We have a brief summer,” he said. “But no—it never really gets warm here.”

  “How would Madison have stayed warm?”

  He frowned at her, and in that moment she could see he was not like Jerome, who would have been eager to discuss this question. It was the way most people were—they kept walls around their thoughts.

  “Well . . . alone in the woods? In December? There is no way to stay warm unless you have a tent, a sleeping bag, and supplies. You walk and walk and walk, and the moment you slow down, well . . . it’s like that Jack London story about the fire. At first it starts with your extremities, your feet and hands. If you know better and have a shovel, you can stop and dig a cave. I’ve had to do that before, out searching for lost people when a blizzard hits. But I have a zero-degree sleeping bag. Fire. Food to eat.”

  “What if you found a cabin?”

  “You mean the old homesteads?” He looked amused. “They’re still out there. I’ve run across a few, out searching or just exploring. Most are abandoned, though we still got some old-timers hanging on. I guess if you happened to run across an empty one it might be shelter. But you’d still be lost.” He sounded dubious. “You’d have to hope you were found before you starved to death.”

  “So being found is the way to stay warm.”

  “It’s pretty much the only way up here,” he said. “If you are lost.”

  “And alone,” Naomi said.

  Ranger Dave looked at her, framed in the golden light. Her shoulders were strong, her legs graceful. Only those eyes told more. She was like a watchful animal.

  With a flash of insight he asked: “Have you ever been lost?”

  “Oh yes,” she answered, and he was surprised to see that wide smile.

  He expected her to say she had gotten lost once trying to find a child, and she would tell a story of a time she had taken a wrong turn. But part of him knew the question ran deeper, which is why he had asked.

  “Once upon a time,” she said, “before I can remember.”

  Over dinner that night in the diner—meatloaf and peas, followed by the homemade rhubarb cream pie—Naomi studied her map. The place Madison went missing was no longer a lonely circle. It was surrounded by constellations. The closest claim was the Strikes one, with the store. The next closest was a man named Robert Claymore, who had gotten a claim circling the side of a mountain to the south of where Madison was lost. Even higher was the Devil’s District claim the clerk had noted, in the most inhospitable parts of the wilderness, claimed by a man named Walter Hallsetter fifty years before. She noted the claims were all platted off the main roads. That made sense—it was probably why they built the roads, for these settlers. Or the logging companies.

  The world was now taking shape—the ball of yarn had strings to follow. She would start with the Strikes claim.

  The migrants had driven her for an entire day. In late afternoon they pulled in front of a small brick office and took her inside, where a tall man in an olive green uniform stood up out of his chair in surprise. The man tried to get the migrants to stay, but they shook their heads and backed out of his office when he picked up the phone.

  The sheriff made some calls and put Naomi in his truck. He had been so kind, so gentle, but Naomi was having none of that. She pulled herself into the side of the passenger door like she wanted to crawl out the keyhole.

  He had taken her to a farmhouse on a hill, framed by falling sun. She had stood in the clean, too-bright living room. A kindly-looking grandmother figure—a woman—came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a faded dish towel. Behind the kitchen door peeped a black-haired boy.

  “What is her name?” Mrs. Cottle had asked the sheriff.

  “I don’t know,” the sheriff admitted.

  “What’s your name, honey?”

  “Naomi,” she had whispered.

  “Where did you come from?” Mrs. Cottle had asked.

  “I don’t know,” Naomi had whispered.

  Mrs. Cottle had looked at her with a well of sympathy that extended beyond any borders. “What were you running from, then?” she had asked.

  “Monsters,” was all that Naomi could remember.

  And to this day, outside the hints in her dreams, it was all she could remember still.

  4

  One day the trapdoor opened. Mr. B came down. He lifted snow girl by her arm, roughly. She was pushed up the ladder. The light hurt her eyes.

  She was standing inside a cabin. The cabin was made of what looked like Lincoln Logs, but these were rougher. You could see the bark on them. The space between the logs was filled with dried mud. The underside of the roof was made of heavy beams, the wood dark with time and smoke.

  The cabin smelled strongly of sweat and fur and the pure, clean smell of snow. The windows were covered with nailed blankets—the nails holding the blankets were old and rusted, as if they had been there long before she was created.

  Mr. B used his hands on her shoulders to make her sit at the wood table. There was a bench.

  It was then the snow girl discovered what Mr. B did. He found animals. He cut them open over a large sink. The blood ran down. It was pretty and bright red. Mr. B slipped the skins off the animals. He put the skins in one place and cut up the meat of the animals
into a pot over the black woodstove. Mr. B stopped every now and then to whet his long silver knife against a stone. It made a soothing sound.

  The girl got up and walked over to him. He frowned. She touched a wet pelt, asking permission with her eyes. He nodded. She stroked the soft fur. Mr. B smiled.

  Later they ate stew. Outside the snow hissed against the windows, covered with cloth, but inside? All felt safe and warm.

  Mr. B had a bed. It was on the floor, in the corner of the one-room cabin, behind a frayed curtain. The bed looked big, and cozy. It was right next to the trapdoor. The ladder he used to climb below was leaning against the wall. Hanging on a hook was the big tarnished key he used on the lock. The lock on the trapdoor latch looked old and bent. Snow girl wondered how strong it was.

  When it came time to return to the cave, the girl decided she would be a good girl and follow Mr. B. He wouldn’t have to push and shove her. But she was scared of the night twigs, of the darkness and hurt and fear that existed even while she was asleep. She didn’t want to go to the cave, where she spent her days carving letters she was afraid she would forget in the walls. She was scared in the cave, and missed people she was afraid she had made up.

  She had wanted to stay in the cabin. She would do anything to stay where there was warmth and light—and Mr. B.

  She knew he couldn’t understand her, so there was no reason to talk. The snow girl had a special language. She put her hand on his chest. He froze to see it there, and then smiled.

  You were born of the snow, her mind told her. Born of the beauty.

  Outside a spring snow whipped and purred. The trees raised their very arms to feel it. The sun was very, very far away: a lemon drop that could not warm a thing.

  In his bed, the girl and the man were entwined. She felt loved. There was no need for darkness. She could be awake. At night she slept against him and it was bliss, it was remembrance, it was touch.

  The next morning, when she was returned to the cellar, she lay down in the shape that was MOM and cried.