Free The Long-Shining Waters by Danielle Sosin Page B

framed canvas and holds it to the window. It’s a scene of the lakeshore, sunset-orange, with a gull in the water, one in flight, and in the distance someone in a tiny boat. The painting is bigger than Rose’s, and maybe hers didn’t have a boat. For $12.99, she can hardly go wrong.
    Buoyed, Nora opens a Santa box, hoping to find it filled with ornaments, but it contains just a string of lights. A stuffed mink stares from a log. A piece of shellacked wood says Welcome to the North Shore, with rocks painted to look like a family glued on. Nora lifts a tray with Norwegian rosemaling. It’s pretty, but cracked right down the middle. She unearths a pair of moccasins decorated with plastic blue beads. Too small for Nikki. Nothing else worth getting.
    The lake looks different once she’s through Two Harbors, striped dark blue and light, grey and white. Looking out, it’s hard to tell where the water ends and the sky begins. Nora stubs out her cigarette. Part of the painting is visible in the rearview, a gull crossing an orange sky.
    The nautical map between the doors to the johns. It had a boat on high seas, and a serpentlike sea monster looming menacingly in the distance. She writes it in the notebook and sets down her pen, a wave of shock breaking over her again. It’s gone. All of it. Just like nothing.

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    The constant sound of chopping wood is in the air and the sweet smoky smell of boiling sap. Grey Rabbit has chosen a far section of the grove in order to work alone. The reuniting of the families has been a swirling wind—the stories told and reenacted, harsh news, and softer tales of sorrow and relief—but now she wants to think in quiet.
    Grey Rabbit kneels under a wide bare maple, the shadows of its branches like dark veins over the snow, and talks to the tree as she touches its bark. She is known to have a gift with the maples, and she wishes to continue to do well with them. She feels the need to prove herself, to stop the concerned glances of Bullhead and Night Cloud. She places an offering at the base of the tree, fingers the spot, and makes her first cut.
    She aches for Coming-In Woman, who lost her eldest girl. No one knows what became of her. Some say spirited away, others say she was taken by an animal, most believe she fell through the ice.
    Little Cedar is nearby with a group of children. Having finished with their work of setting out containers, they are running and chasing through the trees. It’s clear that he’s unhappy with her for making him stay in view, but that’s the way it must be for now.
    If her dreams ended after Little Cedar regained his strength, they would have been a good omen, a warning of the danger he had been in. Grey Rabbit takes a spile from her bag and pounds it into the cut she’d made. But the children of her dreams still come, and always, as before, they’re desperate and beyond help. She knows no one who would cast bad medicine on her, nor of any large offense connected with her family. And yet there were no stories told of hunger as bad as what her family suffered. She must approach Bullhead and make an offering, ask her advice about the dreams, but the time never seems to be right. Why that is, she doesn’t understand. She needs to be alone, and to listen if she hopes to gain any understanding. Yet once alone she begins to feel severed. And that rift is more frightening then the worst of her dreams. Her mind turns in circles like a wounded fish.
    Grey Rabbit stands and breathes the damp air. She can’t see Little Cedar, though she hears the playful voices of the children in the woods. She calls his name as she peers through the trees, walks through the snow with its long-veined shadows, calling again, louder and more insistent. She told him not to run off. She won’t begin on another tree until she has him in her sight. “Little Cedar,” she calls in a harsh tone, and then turns to find him standing close.
    He’s short of breath and his face is red from