Free Tsuga's Children by Thomas Williams

last fall, on spruce needles instead of ice.
    After a while he came to the same bog Jen had found. He saw where a large animal, probably a bear, had crushed the blueberry plants. Here, as in the woods, the ground was so fibrous and spongy no tracks could possibly show. In the opening of the bog he could see the shadows cast by the low sun, so he got his bearings again. The meadow and lake should be due south, where the sun would be by the middle of the day.
    Before entering the gloomy corridors of the spruce he thought of home. He could turn around right now and find the bat cave, then, using fire, follow the passage back toward the waterfall and the world he had left. It was cold there, but only in that world would he find his mother and father and the cabin where he had been born. He would rather be shivering in front of a meager fire in that familiar room than here in this autumn warmth. He could turn around right now and go back. But then he saw in his mind Jen’s iron crampons upon the rock. In his fear and loneliness he had begun to forget them, but they were there and they were Jen’s and she was his little sister, who would also, in spite of her mad affection for a cow, be hungry and lonely.
    He could turn around and go back. He could make his body do it, but in a strange deep way the most important part of him, what he thought of himself, would still be here, left here forever in this alien valley. It seemed to him that when he came to this conclusion and could not escape it, something free and selfish and innocent left him forever, and he felt loss and sadness. Yet while he felt that loss and sadness he was a little less afraid. In a few months (if he lived that long, a new voice within him said) he would be ten years old, growing toward manhood. Ten was old, an age when tools began to stop being toys. The knife on his belt, though small, was not a toy, nor was his pack and the things it contained. They’d better not be toys, the new voice said. Your father is not here.

6. Toward the Meadow
    A small wisp of gray smoke came from the Hemlocks’ cabin chimney. The cabin was set deeply in the ice, as if the ice around it were a clutching hand, cold rigid fingers curving over the roof and around the log walls.
    Inside the cabin the air was dead cold except for a small space in front of the fire. Tim Hemlock lay sleeping on his pallet, covered with a bearskin robe, his thin dark face calm but not aware. Eugenia, bundled up in her parka, poked the fire carefully and fed it slowly from the last of the wood. She could do little else. She had gone once again onto the ice to follow Arn’s trail, but came again to that blank wall behind the terrifying falls.
    When she reached home she was so weak from hunger and despair she could barely chop loose and drag in the last of the wood and remake the small fire. All the food was gone except for the seed they would need to plant in the spring, carefully stored in hemp bags hung from the rafters. There was a bag of corn, bags of tomato, turnip, cucumber and squash seeds, beans and other vegetable seeds, and wheat and timothy. In a dark bin dug into the floor of the cabin were the precious seed potatoes. All this time she had tried not to think of using the seeds, but they must eat if they were to live, so finally she took some corn, found some seed potatoes with two eyes or more and cut them in half, and with the small amount of milk the nanny goat gave, made some chowder, which she fed to her husband with a spoon. He could not wake up enough to see her or talk to her, but took the thin chowder. When she lifted up his head and shoulders to feed him he seemed as light as a forkful of hay. Though he slept calmly and took his soup, he was growing thinner, his nose as shiny and sharp as a blade.
    The spring on the hill had frozen over for the first time in her memory. When she had to go outside and chop into the blue ice with a mattock she could feel the warmth of her life itself