CHAPTER ONE
Hannah’s parents would not let her go to town. It was barely a town anyway, Timmins. It was so far from Toronto that her friends would ask her, “Didja see Santa?” every time she came home. Timmins was essentially a crappy mall, a hospital, and a bus station. At eight, she hadn’t cared; at ten, she couldn’t go to town without an adult; at fourteen, she couldn’t go because —
“Hannah,” called her father. He stood by the woodpile, removing his mitts and pulling a hatchet from his belt loop. “Give me a hand?”
She went over and helped him lift the tarp that covered the kindling. It was birch kindling, the kind that smelled sharp and tangy when it burned, but the tarp had ripped overnight and now the wood was soaked and useless. Hannah looked up at the chimney stack that rose over the cabin. There was no smoke, but she could see waves of heat rising off the brick mouth. That meant the fire was burning well and they wouldn’t need kindling.
“We’ll need more kindling,” said her dad.
“Why? The fire’s already going. It hasn’t been out since we got here.”
Hannah’s father looked at her with his Learning Face. That was what her younger sister Kelli called it, the Learning Face. It was a seriously annoying face. “What if we need a fire outside, to smoke fish?” he said.
“Gross.”
“What if we want to use the wood oven?”
“What if we need to make smoke signals?” said Hannah sarcastically.
“Hannah, don’t be smart,” said her father. “Look, I’m going to show you something.”
He dropped the tarp, hooked the hatchet onto his belt, and put his snowshoes back on, stuffing his mitts in his pocket. She could see the nametag, “G. Williams,” that was sewn inside of them; hers said “H. Williams.”
Hannah was already wearing her snowshoes, so she followed his wider tracks easily as he moved to the edge of the clearing where their cabin sat, past the tarped-over snowmobile and the SUV. They hadn’t brought the other vehicle; it was a car and would never have made it down the back roads to get here. Even in the summer, they always brought the four-wheel-drive vehicle. Her parents called this place “camp.” When she was younger, Hannah had fooled some of her friends by saying that she went “to camp” for almost every school vacation, but then stupid Kelli had blabbed and then everyone knew that it was just a cottage — a three-room, dingy cottage with an outhouse in the backyard, on the edge of a smelly pond.
They wended their way through the bush until they came to a little stand of poplar trees with a few frozen yellow leaves still clinging to them, almost hidden in the bigger, bushier arms of the blue spruce and waxy green hemlock. Her father looked up into the branches of the poplar. “These should work.” He reached up with one hand and grabbed a branch, and with the other he loosed his hatchet and chopped the branch off. He held up the iced-over poplar branch, and Hannah noticed the nicks on his red knuckles. Her dad loved to work outdoors without gloves. “Can you burn this?” he asked.
Hannah rolled her eyes. “No, it’s green wood. And it’s wet. I’m not ten, dad.”
“That’s right,” replied her father, “you’re fourteen going on forty. But sometimes you have to make do with less, right?”
Hannah shrugged.
He knelt down and placed the branch on the flat part of his snowshoe, holding it on its end with one hand. “In the winter, all wood is wet — on the outside.” With the other hand he brought up the hatchet and quickly made a series of downward motions on the sides of the branch until the bark bristled out like a skinny, grey-green porcupine.
“Instant kindling,” he said.
“Great. Is there an instant travelling stick, too, so I can go back home?”
“You never know out here,” he said. When he had his Learning Face on, Hannah knew, it was hard to get him to do anything but talk about the bush.
“I’m cold, and it’s lunchtime,” she said.
“Okay.” He stood and brushed the snow off his coat, turning his head to the line of clouds that were being pulled toward them by grey, pouting tendrils. “Smells like another storm, eh?”
Hannah let her breath out loudly, but didn’t reply.
They trooped back. The last two days had been warm and humid, but last night the temperature had dropped so quickly that the wet snow had chunked back into ice and broken through many of their tarps, and even Nook’s doghouse. Hannah and Kelli had spent all morning scraping ice and snow off the porch, the woodshed, the cars, the doghouses, and the outhouse s
teps to see what damage had been done. The snowmobile tarp was also ripped, and a chunk of falling ice had broken the gas line. Fixing it was tomorrow’s job. Hannah had volunteered for that one, mostly because it meant she could drive into town with her father to go to the hardware store.
They removed their snowshoes and propped them against the dogsled in the cold porch that separated the front door of the house from the elements. There were two more dogsleds behind the cabin, as well. The one on the porch was very small and was called a kicksled. The two behind the cabin were trail sleds, much longer and heavier.
Hannah’s dad put the green kindling in the big woodbox just outside the door. The box slid from the cold outer porch to the inside of the cabin, right through the wall. The opening was protected by a thick piece of yellow plastic that swung inward, like a doggy door.
When they went inside, Hannah slapped a sodden woodchip-covered glove onto the counter that separated the kitchen area from the rest of the main room and stooped to undo the laces of her boots. From the doorway to the bedroom she shared with her sister came Kelli’s voice. “Illegal manoeuvre! Illegal manoeuvre!”