Free Broken Song by Kathryn Lasky

bloodhounds after him? He looked down. There didn’t seem to be any drops of blood on his pants or coat or on the road. Still, he decided he should get rid of it. He had just raised his hand to heave it into a ditch when he thought better of it. Thiswas the only weapon he had. Perhaps he should not be so quick to throw it away. And it was more than just a weapon, it could also be a useful tool. Reuven walked to a bank of snow by the side of the road. He wiped the knife in the snow until the smear of blood was completely gone.
    Rachel had begun to stir on his back. He hoped she would sleep some more, but she had slept when it really counted so he shouldn’t complain now.
    He planned to walk as far as he could on this road until the first light of the new day broke. Then he would take to the woods. It was a good road with lots of trees and shrubs to hide them, and he wanted to stay with it as long as he could.
    He figured with the long nights and the short days of this month of December, he had at least six or seven more hours of walking time in the shadows of the night and into the gray light of the dawn. Then he would need to rest. He would be dead tired. Barns were very tempting to sleep in, but there was the danger of the farmer coming out and discovering you. There was someplace, or the memory of a place, that seemed to nag at the back of his mind. A taste swam up in his mouth—the taste of those sour apples. Then it burst upon him—that place near Berischeva! When he had stuck his hands down into the snowy hollows formed by the drifts around the apple trees’ roots and found those apples that even the worms had deserted. But he remembered being surprised how comparatively warm the air felt within those hollows. Even the apples themselves were somewhat warm when by all rights they should have been frozen solid.
    Of course not! He remembered a book of Uncle Chizor’s with the engravings of the Eskimo people in their snow huts. Uncle Chizor had explained to him that snow can act as insulation. The packed snow blocks out the wind. The spaces between the snowflake crystals trap air.
    When dawn came, he found a deep drift. He tunneled out a little snow cave for himself and Rachel. The knife was helpful, although his little snow cave hardly looked like the neat igloos he had seen in the pictures in his uncle’s book. But it kept Rachel and him fairly warm. A wind had come up during the night that would have been bitter if they had been exposed. Reuven liked the snow cave. It was cozy and bright and most important, he felt safe. He and Rachel were hidden away as completely as animals in their winter hibernation. Unfortunately, they were not hibernating, so they could not stay in the snow cave forever. As soon as the darkness fell, they had to be off. Vilna, he figured, could not be more than thirty kilometers away. They should be able to make it easily within two or three days at the most.
    The next day an extraordinary thing happened. Rachel had been whimpering. The whimpering always started in a vague, sporadic way. She would not immediately call for her mama, but with dread Reuven could almost see her lips begin to press together to make a wretched little humming noise, like a prelude to the sound “mmmm” and finally the word “mama” would tear from her. But this time the “mmm” sound was cut short and then he heard her squeal, “Chickie! Chickie!”
    Straight ahead in the road was a chicken that had seemingly appeared out of thin air. There were no farms nearby, and Reuven guessed that a cart must have passed this way and a chicken had escaped from its coop without the driver noticing. Chickens were not to be passed up. And this one seemed a bit weary from his time on the road. Indeed it seemed so pleased to see another living thing that when Reuven bent down to grab it, the bird practically flew into his arms. He ran to the side of the road. Pressing it down on a rock, he chopped off its head with the