But release me from the bus in the evening, and the world is mine. The misery of the classroom seems an imaginary fairy-tale dungeon, nothing worth telling my parents about. The bus drops us by our orange mailbox on Davis Road. My brothers and sisters start the walk down the lane, but I stand on the road, waiting until the bus breaks down into orange and red taillights and then disappears altogether. My siblings hurry through the dark, eager to be out of the cold. I stand, clutching my book bag, waiting. Around me is the silver darkness of an Alaskan midwinter afternoon. The stars are out, and the Big Dipper swings low. Silver birch and cottonwood line the lane to our house. Our house is the only house on the lane, and not even its lights can be seen from the road. I do not know why we call our driveway the lane. We just do. It is only one car wide, and in winter it divides itself into two tire tracks with a hump of brushed snow down the middle. My siblings are far down the lane now. I walk alone between trees that lean in over me with their burdens of snow like ermine capes upon their bare arms. It is night, and yet it is easy to see. The snow is white on the ground and on the branches, the trees are ghostly grey, and in between there is darkness. The dry snow of the lane crunches and squeaks under my boots.
First the house is a few stripes of yellow light through the trees. Then I come to where we have cleared for our garden. The trees are cut away and the once-furrowed soil is now covered with a wavering quilt of snow. I see the house squatting darkly amid the snow, long and low like a crouching animal. The snow-load is heavy on the roof, but earlier snows have slid off the peaked aluminum, to create a wall of snow around the house that makes it look like my home has pushed up from under the earth and snow like a mushroom.
And then I am up on the wooden porch that rattles under my boots, and the door must be shouldered open because the frost always coats the bottom edge of it and tries to freeze it shut. I thud it open, breaking into my mother’s territory. Our house is made of dark logs chinked with pink and yellow fiberglass, and the ceiling is low. Yet I remember it as being full of an amber light, rich as honey, breathing out the warmth-and-cookies smells of home. Moose stew, as inevitable as thrice weekly math assignments, is already bubbling over the blue flames of the gas stove. The radio is always on, and my mother is always doing something in a highly untidy and inefficient manner. When she does laundry, she does mammoth loads of it, heaping chairs full of warm laundry, weighting the table with stacks of folded underwear and towels, heaping a box to overflowing with mateless socks. If she bakes cookies, there are tall leaning stacks of sticky bowls, showers of flour on the counters, the floors, and the husky dogs that sprawl everywhere in their sleep, and scatters of cookies cooling on every horizontal surface in the kitchen. When she knits us hats and sweaters, one pattern is never enough to please her. She must combine patterns, change the colors, rework the instructions. She has knitted my father a parka with twenty-seven different colors in it that is a combination of fourteen different patterns. It is an epic work of needles and yarn. My mother is of mythic proportions in my mind. To say that I love her is like saying I love the earth. My love is a puny thing beside her, unnecessary to her continuance. She is the home, the house, the food, the warmth, the hearth-witch. She leaves me almost entirely to my own devices; this makes me love her even more.
Down into the basement, rattling down the steep old stairs. Down here it is like a den, beds here, walls there, more beds, more walls. A veritable maze of nesting places for children, stacked bunk beds, green metal army surplus bunks, a menagerie of dressers, every horizontal surface festooned with laundry both clean and dirty, with papers, books, and a scattering of toys. I change clothes, pulling on layer upon layer upon layer of worn-out jeans and corduroy pants and T-shirts and shirts and sweaters and a surplus US Air Force parka. Put on my socks, my brothers’ socks, and my father’s socks and a pair of canvas military surplus mukluks. And up the stairs and out the door with Rinky at my heels. Disappear into the night of the forest. Run silently down the rabbit paths, bent almost double to keep from disturbing the snow that rests so delicately upon each twig and swooping branch. Rinky ranges ahead and beside and beyond and behind, but is always there whenever I pause and crouch down in the snow. He grabs the sleeve of my old parka, leaving teeth marks in the fabric. Sooner or later, all my clothes bear the mark of his teeth. I do not mind. He tugs at me until I rise, and then we range together, he and I, following the paths we have created and keep packed, looking to see what is different from the last time we passed this way. Here is the blood-speckled trampling of the snow that marks a fox’s kill. Here something has gnawed the bark from a fallen branch, and there something large and heavy has crossed our path. This trail and its faint musk fills me with excitement. Moose. Moose in our woods. The time will be soon.
I never need to tell my mother when I have found signs of moose. She knows. Perhaps she is a witch, the way she knows. I will find the knives sharpened on the counter, I will see a new roll of butcher paper. Days ahead of time. Then, one evening, it will happen. All six of us will be clustered around her table, our heads bent over our books. One cannot move an elbow lest one obscure a sibling’s math book, shuffle the pages of someone’s report. Pencils scratch, the dogs snore beneath the table, someone mutters over a stubborn calculation. It is unnaturally quiet for a house inhabited by eight people. My sisters have their hair in curlers, there is the muted chink-chink of my father’s pipe against the ashtray.
Then it happens.
“Evelyn. Turn off the lights.”
My mother is standing close to the cold blackness of a window. I rise and turn off all the lights, flicking switches until the darkness outside flows in from the windows, oozes out from under the couch, and fills up the room. No one moves, save my father. As I stand by the light switch in the darkness, I hear his heavy tread as he crosses the room to stand beside my mother. They peer out the window and speak softly to each other.
If I am silent and unobtrusive, I can slip to a parallel window and likewise peer forth. They will be in the garden, pawing the snow away from what remains of the cabbage patch, churning to the surface a scatter of frozen leaves, a half-rotted head, a tough green stalk now frozen solid. They remind me of ships, tall sailing ships, I cannot say why. This time of year their racks have fallen, leaving their heads misshapen and knobby. Their noses are long and seem saggy, like stuffed animals without enough stuffing. Their huge Mickey Mouse ears swivel in the darkness like antennae, but they are not really alert. Their attention is all for the paltry leaves of cabbage, the frozen broccoli stalks, the forgotten head of cauliflower they have churned to the surface. They are unaware of the darkened house and the silent watchers marking one of them for death.
There are four this time. There is a game I play, predicting which one we will take down. I play it now. Not the cow. Never shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs. Leave the cow. Not the old bull. Why he is with them now, at this time of year, I will never understand. But there he is, and his meat is sure to be tough. That leaves two, the young calf, born this spring by the look of him, and the older calf from the spring before. It will be him, the older calf, I am sure. But of this I say nothing aloud. The chain of command does not appreciate such speculations.
“Let’s get ready,” says my father. And it is all he needs to say. My younger sister and my two little brothers are already gathering their books and heading for the basement. They are all still too small to be anything but a nuisance out there tonight. I hear them go down the darkened stairs, and in a moment a light clicks on in the basement. Yellow light wells up from the stairs, bleeds into the darkness around me, lending vague shapes to the hulking darkness of the furniture. Sissy and Candy, my two elder sisters, drift toward the basement and down the stairs to find suitable clothing. It will be hard for them. They own very little that can tolerate blood spatters and possible rips, very little that will keep out the deep cold as we crouch to our bloody work. I am already by the door, pulling on the garments I frequently leave heaped there, much to my sisters’ disdain. By the time my father has pulled on his parka and chambered a round into the 30.06, I am ready.
He jerks