It was what they did most evenings here in Cat Arm, their winter isolate till the ice broke, and their father, finished with his yearly logging, took them back up the bay to their home in the Basin. Thus it was with the same comfort as yesterday that she scrabbled out the door that evening, dragging a piece of canvas up over the hill behind her mother, and sliding back down with Missy, her mother and father taking the lead, their shrieks echoing through the crisp night air, and the snow stinging the red of their cheeks. She didn’t know it then, supping back on a strip of fried onion and kicking his leg underneath the table, that winter, as she knew it, would never come again. You too, Clair, and never mind your father’s foolishness."Ĭlair grinned as her father forked a piece of meat and pork scrunchions into his mouth and chomped down hard, his eyes widening with innocence as he turned them upon her. You’re smaller than the fairies tickling your dreams. "There, you’ve got her going agin," admonished Sare. "The banshees will take you," Missy warned, "and you won’t even know it because it’s winter and there’s no bluebells to ring that they’re coming." "Sure, no wonder she’s always prattling about fairies when all she hears is her father and sister telling lies."
I cuts up your meat." She fussed as Missy knelt upon the bench besides her, her face haloed with curls.
"Landsakes, you’re going to drive her foolish, the both of you," said Sare over Missy’s rising protests, the lamplight colouring their faces like apricots as she sat at the table with them. "Pass me the meat, Sare, I haves a bite of winter," said Job, long and gangly, his oversized features sombre as he pulled into the table besides them. "Yup squashberries, partridgeberries, raspberries-all chomped together-like eating summer," said Clair. "No it don’t-do it, Mommy?" protested Missy. That evening, at supper, Clair turned to her sister, Missy, a good six years younger than she, and said, "Mmm, tastes like berries." "Wait, Clair wait right there," her mother called out and, snatching a frying pan off the stove, met her at the door. "Don’t drop it," he cautioned as she lifted the flesh, still trembling in her hands, and ran to the cabin door, trailing a bloodied path behind her. Laying the knife to one side, he slid his hands inside the warmth of the carcass and pulled out the liver, pulsating purple in the afternoon sun, and threw it quivering upon a rock. Crouching beside him Clair watched as her father, Job, pricked the tip of his knife through the hide of a young caribou, then drew it slow and easy across its belly, the hide singing back, and the blood spilling warm over his hands, staining scarlet onto the snow.
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