IN DEEP WINTER, TEMPLE STREAM IS A RIBBON OF ROCK-STUDDED ice, liquid only in the deepest parts of its deepest pools, where fish hold and frogs burrow. The beavers have retreated to their lodges, never hibernating. They swim daily under the ice in deep pools of their own creation, eat the bark from stashes of poplar branches, groom one another mewling happily. The fast water behind their dams has closed as slowly as a wound, leaving black ice as textured as scar tissue. There’s a gurgling to be heard, no more than that, but it’s a welcome sign of life, the stream running cold-thickened through frost pipes and ice tunnels. The rest of the free water is underground as always, flowing through the stream’s own accretions of sand and gravel, and through layers of porous rock: the stream never stops. The changing ice makes so much noise that it’s possible to surprise the most cautious animals—minks, coyotes, foxes—even watch them at their work for long minutes before scent or some subtler emanation makes them jump.
After a thaw, perhaps a rain, free water overflows the ice in a metastream with its own topography and an icy bed. When the cold returns, the overpools freeze smooth, trapping bubbles and encasing and preserving old footprints and ski trails like dinosaur tracks in lava. Riffles freeze at dozens of incremental levels as the flow diminishes, leaving multistory ice ceilings of varying thicknesses made of the most delicate geometries—triangles, rhomboids, wands of hoarfrost attached to diaphanous rays of lace by means of crystalline spiderwebs. Your boot falls two inches, breaking through six floors or so with an echoing crunch, no splash at the bottom. You stand there thankful at having not fallen further, then break through the thicker floor below that with a shout and fall six inches more to the old ice. You hesitate—it’s like walking on stained glass—the sound is vandal-loud in the streambed silence.
After a snowfall, all goes dark for the beavers. Now they must swim in their pools and canals by scent—and in fact, February is their mating time, when lifelong couples leave the communal warmth of the family lodge for a connubial swim and embrace, coitus under ice and on the move. Above, the streamscape for humans is soft and beautiful as a woodcut, inviting but not always safe for walking or skiing: the snow insulates the ice below, and the warmth of whatever water is flowing beneath that is enough to carve the ceiling away completely in certain spots, leaving only a crust of snow over the current, a trapdoor for bad acts to fall through.
WHEN JULIET AND THE DOGS AND I ARRIVED IN COLUMBUS, the yard in our rented house was still green. In fact, late December looked like autumn. The evenings lasted longer too, because we were so far west in the same time zone, and considerably south. It was as if we’d gone back in a time machine to October. I missed the ice.
In Schiller Park, walking the dogs on retractable leashes like garrotes, I spotted a familiar face, a fellow walking his chocolate Lab, said hello as our dogs sniffed at each other and started in with the usual raucous play. And the man—tall, groomed, strong jaw, big grin, booming voice—said hello back, as if he knew me, too.
“I love these uncivilized dogs!” he boomed.
“They do better off-leash,” I boomed back.
“Country dogs! Am I right? They just don’t translate to town, do they!”
No, they did not.
Very familiar person. Looking for clues, I noted that he was dressed as I was in a mere down vest, while the dog-walking crowd all around us wore heavy parkas and mittens and hats as if the day were cold.
“You’re not from here!” he boomed.
And just like that, I placed him: Kyle Karlinski, the K-man, the weather anchor on a prominent Maine channel. “You’re not either,” I said. I started to laugh at the double disjunction of having my favorite Maine weatherman in front of me, and Kyle started to laugh too, a kind of happy thunder. People around us smiled uncertainly, enjoying the good cheer. I told Kyle I was from Farmington, and he roared louder: that’s where he’d gone to college!
We talked that morning, and many subsequent mornings, dogs being creatures of habit. I learned that he’d moved “upmarket” to an extremely high-paying job at one of the big Columbus stations. He wouldn’t say if he was happy or unhappy with the move, had no interest in my complaints about my own change. From our conversations, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you one thing about the man. It was as if, short of the big brown dog, he had no personal life at all. What Kyle Karlinski talked, no matter what subject I broached, was weather. I learned, in fact, to ask him weather questions solely, and we became weather friends over our daily meetings with dogs, plastic bags of poop in hand, a mild winter coming down around us. We both missed ‘Winter-winter, so winter was our weather subject, day in, day out.
From Kyle I learned that snow, like rain, is conceived when adequate water vapor in the atmosphere is cooled enough to condense and form clouds, that snow is born when enough ice particles clump together around a handy piece of dust or ash or sea salt—“The atmosphere is crawling with stuff like that!”—to make flakes heavy enough to fall.
During a mild storm, Kyle told me that Johannes Kepler thought the six-sided snowflake was proof of the existence of God, and suddenly he spread his arms and thrust his head back, a kind of prayer like a kid eating snowflakes. On the eleven o’clock news that night, he did the same, but the flakes were just digital. He was great on the small screen, sunny and cheerful, full of stories (often about his time in Maine), stories that always ended with his viewer knowing another small thing about the weather.
One cold day, he made me guess how many snowflakes would fill a shovel. By way of a useless clue, he let me in on the fact that each crystal of snow is made up of something on the order of a hundred million water molecules.
I can’t remember my guess. Just that he scoffed: too low.
“A million flakes of snow,” he said, “will blanket an area about ten inches by twenty to a depth of twelve inches.” Roughly a snow-shovel scoop, in other words. “A million flakes, a hundred million-million molecules: you get to big figures quickly, clearing the walks!” He repeated the same information on the that night, same phrasing exactly.
To impress him I memorized the names of the seven basic types of falling snow as identified by the International Snow Classification, which I found in one of the science libraries at OSU. I waited for a snowfall during dog hour and recited while the stuff fell on our shoulders: star, plate, needle, column, column with a cap at each end, spatial dentrite, and irregular crystal. Karlinski pulled himself up to his full height, looked down on me, let me know there was a more detailed classification scheme developed by Japanese scientists, which included eighty shapes, all with names, including the seven above in various permutations, and—he knew them all—cups, sheaths, pyramids, bullets, scrolls, ferns, branches, scales, lumps, cones, and skeletons, along with scores of malformations and combinations, which he recited too. “The colder the temperature, the lighter the flake.”
That night on the eleven o’clock news, the subject was the seven types of falling snow.
And there were more snow words, “As many in English as in Inuit,” said Kyle, looking at me as into a camera, one word a day: graupel is ice crystals coated with rime and looking like dusty grains of rice. Firn is packed snow, also called névé. Firnspiegel, or firn mirror, is that thin sheet of ice that forms over old snow in certain conditions. Old snow is snow that has been on the ground more than a couple of hours, the flakes starting to meld and metamorphose into different, evolved crystalline forms. Snowpack is the accumulated snow of a given winter. Sastrugi are ridges of drifted snow, as in a field (the singular is sastruga). Frazil is ice crystals formed in turbulent water, as in the sea. Depth hoar is ice that forms under the snowpack, metamorphosed from snowflakes into unstable cups that build a fragile crystalline cavern.
I knew depth hoar: stalwart Wally had suddenly disappeared one afternoon years past during a long ski adventure on the other side of the stream—I had to help him out of what looked to be a nicely decorated igloo basement.
Kyle Karlinski substituted his own dog, old Brownie, and told the exact story on the eleven o’clock news that night, with a special sly smile that I imagined was just for me.
I COLLECT HARD WINTERS. THE ULTIMATE TO DATE HAS TO have been our second on Temple Stream. The daily high temperature was zero degrees for weeks on end, night temperatures as low as thirty below, no wind chill factored in. I’d always been a downhill skier, but that was the winter I finally got comfortable with cross-country skis, since the snow was perfection and I could simply whistle up the dogs, step out the barn door, and go. Still, one morning in February I got the idea to ski the millpond—ice you could depend on.
I dressed at home, Labonville snowmobile bib over blue jeans over laundry-pink long johns, three layers of shirts and sweaters, hat with earflaps, down vest, silken socks under woolen socks inside oversized ski shoes under gaiters, heavy mittens, neck-up, and finally a little rucksack to put clothes in a piece at a time as I heated up while skiing. I also brought field guides and safety items like matches, space blanket, and rope (now I’d bring a cell phone). I added a dry T-shirt and a pair of socks to change into at the end of the run so as not to get the chills driving home or lying hurt. The temperature, announced in red on the window thermometer off the porch, was eleven degrees below zero. No wind, thankfully.
. . . Wallace and Desmond sit up straight in the truck and watch the road, swaying in perfect synchronization around every curve as the pavement follows the stream on the way to the milldam. If I put my arm around Wally he leans into me, lays his head on my chest. Desi gazes steadfastly out the window. They are young, Desmond just turned three, Wally not even one, and I am young too, only forty, all muscle and beer belly and ambition, reading glasses still in the future.
At Walton’s Mill Park, I ram the truck into a snowbank, climb out slowly, bid the dogs wait, survey the ice below the dam, a crystal palace, kingly curtains of ice, stately columns of ice, a preternatural pipe organ, all in ruins. I say, “Okay, boys,” and the dogs leap out, investigate every hump and knob of snow, piss amply on a pair of spectral snowmen—the ghosts of millers, no doubt—while I retrieve my skis from the back of the truck, get them attached to my boots in a rush of bare fingers, painful.
We’re off. But not far. The problem is getting on the ice above the dam without going through the ice above the dam, which at this temperature would likely be fatal. But the ice looks strong and thick until very close to the lip, where a black curtain of pond urges out from under, spills over. The dogs bound down through cattails and frozen wands of marsh grass to solid pond. I follow their intuition, and we’re off. The dogs skitter ahead. I lean into my poles, pushing hard. There’s been an overflow, then a freeze, then a light dusting of snow, and the ice is smooth as glass. Wally falls with his hind end, but his front end keeps going. The back end finds its feet again, pushes the front end along. Then his front end falls so his ear is on the ice, speeding. He looks like a theater animal—two people are inside. Desi tippy-tips along on his dependable claws, never falling. My skis threaten to fly out from under me—it’s all I can do to make headway straight, pushing with my poles.
Up on the banks of the millpond there are houses to notice—just a few, with columns of smoke moving straight into the sky. I leap past them, my skis squealing now on a layer of drifted snow. My breath freezes my neck-up to my mustache and face. Back to the left, when I look, there’s a sudden view of Titcomb Hill, a dozen skiers discernible as black dots weaving down the face of the little mountain. I can’t look long, such is my speed. Good-bye lift lines, lift tickets, lift talk. My trail today is called leeway. It’s an emotional double diamond: DANGER—YOU WILL BE ALONE.
Up ahead to the left there’s a great hayfield covered a couple of yards deep with unblemished, grass-caught snowdrifts, bright in the sun. The air I gaze through is full of glinting crystals, magical. There’s the sound of a chain saw somewhere far ahead. And the call of a raven, still at work in the depths of winter. This is a classic impenetrable red-winged blackbird bog, frozen to silence. I think of the breezes in the reeds in summer, the hundred raucous birds dive-bombing my canoe.
I could ski that bog. Winter means easy access to all the secret places. But the stream-shaped pond ahead is a racetrack and I lean into it, pumping legs and arms, picking up speed, flying to a bend, keeping control, making the sweeping turn skating till I’m out of sight of the houses, out of sight of the world, down under high banks and thick alder cover. Warming, I pull my mask off, tuck it into the top of my skier’s bib.
There’s a split in the stream-pond ahead, what looks like an island, though it could just be blocks of ice stacked. I pick the left fork and go. Up on the high bank there’s a summer shanty encased in drifts, only the wind chimes free, steel tubes hanging silent in the stillness over a great stack of firewood. Through an occluded window I get a glimpse of gingham curtains. I want to go in, build a fire, bake bread, grill millpond perch, read Middlemamarch again, read it by candlelight. Well, if ever I did go through the ice, this would be the place to race to, save my life with matches.
Hand-lettered sign on tree:
The dogs can’t read—they’re all over the porch. Wally stands to look in the window, whining. Visiting? Are we visiting? Visiting? Whom?
No, we’re moving on. Shortly, the pond seems to end—I’m among blown cattails and tumbled reeds. I plow over snow humps and lovely, weird drift patterns, sastrugi and firn. The dogs dolphin-leap through deeper and deeper snow. The wind has packed the stuff hard enough that I can stay on top of it—mostly. Where the bog grass has bent down under the snow there are voids; I lose my balance when a ski sinks and tumble backward into one of them, sit there as in an icy armchair, enjoying the sun. I’ve got to take my skis off to escape. When I finally stand on them again I realize how warm I’ve gotten—ten degrees below zero after a mile of all-engines-full and a struggle to stand feels like summah. I pull down the suspenders of my bib, take off my vest and sweater and stuff them in my rucksack. I even roll my neck-up down off my chin, roll up the sleeves of the top flannel shirt. It’s no day to show skin, however warm I get. My hat stays on, flaps down. There’s ice in my eyelashes; my mustache is a winter milldam; the fringe of hair I can’t keep under my cap is an ice penumbra at the edges of my vision.
I ski. The dog-dolphins leap through the drifts in bursts of snow. They’re panting, well-heated too, bite snow for moisture. Deep in the bog there’s a high mound. I ski over to have a look, am mystified by a slight cloud of steam rising as from a street vent in New York, but rising here from a denuded latticework of rimy sticks. Then I know: this is a buried beaver lodge. The steaming is the heat and breath and drying fur of the family of beavers hunkering within. The whole is covered with coyote prints; more than one has been here looking for a warm meal in tough conditions, has dug down through the snow and torn at the structure—but clearly they haven’t gotten far: think of the strength of the frozen mud holding this whole mess together! My own failed coyotes sniff frantically, mark the site with parsimonious squirts of yellow. I listen at the vent and hear mewling, can’t get enough of the sound. The breath of the vent is faintly urinous.
Too cold to linger.
Somewhere up ahead there’s the deep roar of a big diesel engine laboring. It seems in the wrong direction to be on the road; there’s only woods that way. I remember the chain-saw whine—must be loggers. Always in the silence an engine.
The deep bog is hard and then harder going—it’s all grass humped down by the snow, no more windblown patches of clear ice. So I turn back, follow my tracks the way I came, back to the narrow pond. Past the endrifted camp I take a left onto the fork not taken, and zoom, I’m back on clear pond again, which gradually narrows further and takes more and more the shape of our familiar stream. The dogs dance ahead.
I slide to a stop at a place where the snow has been blown off the ice. Inertia countered by no friction keeps me sliding till I bump the bog edge, where I find a set of animal tracks poking along the margins in the drifted snow, then find that thin layer disturbed in such a way as to suggest the animals had also been sliding. The footprints are round, and come in a consistent pattern, one-two-three, round-round-oblate. I throw off my mittens, pull off my rucksack, dig in there for the tracking guide. Flipping pages with stiff hands, I find the exact set: these are the prints of a mink patrolling the edge of the bog for voles and looking among the reeds for any sign of access to a muskrat house, muskrat being their favorite food. The slide marks have been made by mink at play. I stick a finger in one of the footprints—you can tell fresh tracks by how hard they are. These are old.
I’m glad the dogs have gone on far ahead. They ruin animal tracks and have been known to ruin animals as well. Now I notice the clear, familiar trail of a fox, neat steps at walking speed. And the squat-and-leap trail of a squirrel. Then a meandering line of indistinct round tracks: domestic cat. The fox tracks continue along the pond edge in my direction, then detour up the bank and into the rushes just where multiple hare prints have made a well-trampled highway. I ski slowly, push myself along with poles, searching for more prints, feeling the cold. That diesel engine working up ahead is louder and louder. Somehow, I’m not annoyed—all the exercise I’m getting, perhaps. And maybe some hint of the compassion I’m trying to learn in life: the poor guy has to work in this cold while I play at exercise.
Around the last bend of the pond I’m surprised to see high-voltage lines crossing, bare steel strands on tall double poles, high-voltage lines I’ve somehow never noticed up where they cross Temple Road. And I’m coming under a familiar dwelling, the Asahel Paine homestead, a Cape Cod house that always has a semitrailer parked out front, the house itself wrapped entirely in plastic this winter, giving a kind of energy-crunch Christo effect. By the stream there’s the top of a folding chaise lounge showing through the snow and a worn beach towel hung on a cedar trunk, nicely frosted—somebody’s summer swimming hole.
It’s a tough old house with a couple of venerable trees in the dooryard. I rest a moment, looking at it from the rear, a view its owners probably don’t expect to offer. I start to think of the shabby backside of my own house, but am interrupted by a hellacious diesel roar ahead, followed by such an enormous report—like a cannon fired—that the dogs scoot back to me. Desi cowers and shakes. Even Wally finds my shadow, steps on the backs of my skis as I hurry forward.
Suddenly the empty hills echo a shout: “Merde!”
My head fills with moving pictures: A logger’s been crushed. I’m yanking the starter cord on the guy’s chain saw, cutting a broken body free from tangled branches. First aid—I know what to do, don’t I?—and then what? Does he have a radio? Do I cover him and ski up to the Paine homestead for help?
I’m skiing among the large rocks of the stream above the pond—a long riffle in summer, now all ice chocks and wind ridges and surely weakened ice. The dogs follow in my tracks. I have to wave my pole back to remind Wally to stay off the butts of my skis. I climb up onto the bank, ski up into the huge trees there, make my way around two blind bends in the stream.
It’s an accident all right: an enormous orange skidder is cocked sideways, two tires of near my height still on the steep bank, two tires down in the stream, broken through the thick ice at the edge of a pool. The tires are encased in huge chains, hand-size links threading great rings of steel. And unmistakably, standing out on the ice assessing the problem, hands on hips, an enormous figure, a skidder of a man in outsized insulated coveralls, hunting cap, ear protectors: Earl Pomeroy.
Still in rescue mode, I ski down the bank and onto the ice. Too much speed! I skim right behind my man, keep going, ten feet, twenty, till I hit the opposite bank. Earl Pomeroy gets the dogs first; they yelp and jump in the air as they skid around him barking, whining, leaping once more as I come into his vision.
“Goddamn dogs!” he cries as I slide up to him.
‘You okay?”
“Goddamn skiers, too! Sneaking up on a man!” Quickly his anger at the skidder gets aimed in my direction.
Preemptively I say, “Earl Pomeroy.”
He looks hard under the bill of my hat. “Oh, it’s you,” he growls. “Say a prayer to the Virgin, and what does She send? The Professor!”
“You’re stuck?”
“Stuck? Stuck? No, Herr Doktor, I am not stuck. I am not anything. The skidder is what’s in trouble, and the trouble has nothing to do with being stuck.”
We look at the leviathan a long minute. I can’t think what to say. Earl Pomeroy is embarrassed, and embarrassment tends toward attack. As the only available victim for such an assault, I slide back a discreet few feet on my skis. We keep staring at the machine. It’s huge, mostly tires and engine, with a black seat up top inside a low steel cage. Rammed into the cage and safely broken off are several fragments of branches big enough to kill someone—the cage seems a sensible idea. At the front of the machine, a grader bar for smoothing twitch roads, moving rocks, pushing logs. At the rear, an enormous eye of steel into which the hook of a heavy tow-chain has been inserted. The chain is tied around what Earl would call a log, but which is the entire trunk of an old white pine, shorn of all encumbering branches, a thick bole of about forty inches diameter, the whole near fifty feet long. The snow behind this concatenation of tree and machine is scraped to earth. Earl, it seems, has been trying to get the skidder aimed back up the hill and onto the rudimentary road he’s made. In the woods well above us, I spot his truck, a splash of orange and black like some monstrous oriole. It looks to me as if Earl has driven his skidder too close to the edge, and that the bank—frozen sand, for the most part—has simply given way. There won’t be much water underneath at this temperature—but I hear a distinct trickle down there. The machine has fallen into a void. Its angle is extreme, one degree from rolling. The tremendous old white pine chained behind has perhaps acted as a lucky brake.
Earl has settled down some. He mutters, “Not stuck, gorry!” and puts a thick hand to his chin. “Precariously balanced, that’s the term! I been a-driving this bank all week—but it crumbled on me here.” Great puffs of steam come with his every breath. His beard is made of frost—his mustache is icicles, like mine.
More troubled silence. The dogs grow bored. Desi picks a refined forepaw up off the ice—too cold for standing around. Wally lays himself down, goes to work pulling ice chunks out from between his furry toes.
Earl says, “It’s just tilted s’hard I’m afraid to pull it out. But, hell, you shoulda seen me climbing out of that cage! Another nudge, it could go over.” He gives it another long look. “Or, on the other hand, it could just wheel straight out. What I need is another skiddah. You don’t have a skiddah, do you?”
No, I do not have a skidder.
More thought and Earl says, “Hell, yes, I’m thinking I could drive it straight out. I’m eighty-five percent on that.”
Long pause. I say, “That leaves a kind of tough fifteen percent, don’t you think?”
“Yessuh—that’s the fifteen that puts you in the flowers. Dead as a can of corned beef!”
I say, “Now, listen. I could ski out and call someone for you.”
“Oh, hell, no, Professor. Between my education and your muscle, we can do this.”
I laugh. Bad manners, apparently. Earl stares me down. We go back to appraising the skiddah. My feet are aching with cold and I feel the first chill as the sweat from my pond run sublimates through my clothing, which is too light for standing around.
“Alors. The problem be that if I try to drive out and the machine goes, my cockpit gets crushed, and you’d have a hell of a time extracting my remains for the funeral. But I don’t actually think it’s going to go over. Still. What we need to do is ... I could stand on the box there.” Earl points to a gray patch of nonskid paint on the steel bodywork beside the cockpit. “I could reach in and set it going forward. Couldn’t steer it quite, but just ease it yup-so onto the ice and drive it right out.”
I point at the front of the skidder. “Isn’t that a winch there?”
“A wench, yes, it is—but that’s not gonna work. It’s but one hundred feet of cable and there’s no suitable anchor that direction, see, not till that hophornbeam tree, which isn’t big enough by half, and too far.” He points to a squat, lonely, shaggy-barked specimen back up the hill toward his truck, the only tree he’s left standing.
So no wench. And I’ve offended Earl with my suggestions. He stiffens perceptibly, looks in my eye: “If the old girl tumbles, you see, I jump off.”
“Jump off?” The next sentence, were I speaking to a friend, would be, What are you, fucking nuts? But I hold my tongue.
My tone is sufficient. Earl strokes his beard, breaking icicles. He looks at the sky a long time. “Snow in an hour,” he says to himself.
He gets busy suddenly, climbs up the bank, clasps the taut chain connecting the great log to the skidder. With colossal strength, he frees the huge hook from its huge eye. I can only watch, wanting badly to leave. The dogs have taken to poking around in the woods above us, keeping their engines warm, chasing chickadees, the only other moving things in the world.
Once the log is free, Earl rummages around in a toolbox built into the abdomen of the skidder. From my vantage point, I can see what he cannot: small spills of sand dislodging from the stream bank. He rummages with no particular caution, comes up presently with a huge, heavy coil of thick rope. This goes over his shoulder, and he signals me to him. I hesitate, but step out of my skis, stab my poles in the ice, and climb up the bank, slipping in my hard-soled ski shoes.
A little desperately I say, “How about I’ll go call somebody for you?”
And he says, “No, no, I got this rope here.”
“Oh, man. That’s not going to hold anything!”
“It’ll hold me, Professor!”
Next thing I know I’m helping him uncoil yards of the heavy rope. When we get a free end he goes back to the skidder and dislodges a heavy stick of popple jammed into the cage. He ties the rope to this stick, gestures at me—stand back!—then he throws repeatedly and mightily up into the branches of the maple tree above us.
I say, “And just what are we doing, monsieur?”
He says, “We, sir, are making a belay.”
I know what a goddamn belay is from terrifying rock-climbing experience, and begin to get the picture, a picture I want no role in.
He tries four times, five, six, finally gets the stick to fly over the heaviest, lowest branch, about twelve feet off the ground, twelve more from the skidder, dragging the rope behind it. The dogs see the game in progress, rush down through the trees, pull up yipping and leaping under the branch. ’They’re right full of it,” says Earl ambiguously, not so much as a nod in their direction.
The stick finishes several feet out of Earl’s grasp, but no problem, he just yanks another branch off the skidder cage (and the whole skidder shifts a tick), uses it to reach up, and up, kind of dancing on the toes of his rude, thick boots, flanked by the dogs. Rope in hand, he pulls the throwing stick out of its knot, draws up some slack, then quickly ties himself into a nice bowline under his armpits.
“I’ll set her rolling from outside the cage,” he says. “If she goes over, you’ll have me, see? If she stays outta trouble, you feed rope. That’s all, Professor.”
“Oh, Captain, I don’t know.”
“Oh, friend, ya gotta. Eliminate the fifteen percent for me.”
The frenchified way he says percent catches my ear and stops my caviling. It’s fascinating how he doesn’t stop, once the game plan is in place. Next thing, I’m standing there holding the rope with him on the other end, only a thick maple branch to help me with the belay.
“Pull her to,” he says, and I pull till the rope is tugging at his armpits.
“Pull her tight-to,” he says.
And I pull her tight-to, about to keelhaul this near stranger.
Suddenly, to test his arrangement, Earl pulls his legs up, and he’s swinging, and I’ve got him, his weight nicely moderated by the maple branch. The dogs stand back, enthralled. Earl swings a few long seconds, no smile, drops his massive legs. “That’s all ya gotta do,” he says. “Unless she drives—then you pay out rope, “out?”
“Oui,” says I. Ten below and I’m perspiring again. I feel it dripping down my sides, freezing on my ribs.
And Earl leaps up on his machine, climbs into the cage further than I would advise if asked, depresses the mighty clutch with one outstretched boot, holds button one, pushes button two to start the thing, lets the clutch out very slowly. The same second the big tires start turning, the skidder lurches sideways and falls, rolling over upside down onto the ice with a tremendous crash. The dogs race away, back toward the millpond, terrified.
I’ve got pressure on the rope, but the rope simply pulls me off my feet and into the air, slides down the maple branch to the notch at the trunk, where it catches with a snap that makes me let go. I return to earth, find my feet, find the rope, grab hold, only then look: Earl is on his butt on the bank, suspended by the armpits in a high sitting position. I hold that rope, but don’t really have to—the tree has got Earl firmly caught, has saved him.
“Merde!” he roars.
The skidder is upside down, still running, all wheels slowly rotating, its cage pushed down through the ice, well crushed. I whip and snap the rope till it disengages, and Earl plumps down on his butt upon the broken stream bank. Wally and Desi rush back to him, lick his face.
He pushes them away, not unkindly. To me, he says, ‘You done good.”
I rush to him. ‘You okay?”
“Only but lost my shoe.”
And it’s true—his huge boot is missing, along with whatever sock he had on. His foot looks surprisingly pink and delicate, human, no bigger than my own, nails nicely clipped.
He stands slowly, won’t put weight on the foot, as if the problem is only that the ground’s too cold, but I can tell he’s hurt.
“I’ve got socks,” I say, and tumble down to the frozen stream, where I rifle my rucksack. The Nike swoosh emblazoned upon them looks foolish suddenly, but I rush back to Earl, hand them over. He tugs them on one over the other, wincing.
His skidder starts to smoke, then stalls.
“Diesel in the glow plugs,” he mutters.
The silence is sharp.
“Earl,” I say. I can’t think what else.
‘You did that perfect,” he murmurs, in the manner of a man who seldom gives or hears praise. “If you hadn’t gone gradual like that, you would have torn my foot off. And if you didn’t stop me cold when you did, I would have dove into the ice with the cage. And you can see how that woulda been.”
We look at the skidder a long, long time. His boot is killed under there somewhere. I’m shivering. Earl is shivering too. The dogs too. It’s cold as outer space if you stop, even for a second.
“Well, it was the tree that saved you,” I say. ’’You set it up just right.”
He breathes in a rapid ’’Yuh, yuh, yuh,” says, “Would be better if it had worked. I were too anxious.” He looks me in the eye for the second time, says, ’’I’m a little off my stumpage here.” It’s a surprising confidence, one I know I am not to repeat: stumpage is the right to cut trees on someone else’s property, bought and sold like mineral rights. Earl has crossed a boundary line; in effect he’s stealing that huge pine.
He stands, clearly hurting. At length, he says, “Back tomorrow with a second machine, get her up and out of here in no time. You, Professor, you better get moving—linger longer, your dogs’ll freeze and we’ll have to boil’em in cat grease to get ’em barking again!” No trace of a smile.
He collects his rope and limps up the hill away from me and the dogs on the path his skidder has made. A very fine, dry snow has started to fall. I watch him all the way to his truck, listen for it to start, then hurry to my skis, get them on, and ski myself warm again, then sweaty, sprinting back on the millpond ice in increasingly heavy snowfall (elementary sheaths, dentritic crystals, hollow bullets, bundles of elementary needles, plates with sectorlike extensions), speed to my own truck, then home.