Cassie stood at the window to watch the two men move down to the landwash and away along the water. She followed their progress until they disappeared around the line of the beach and then turned back to scrubbing the kitchen floor. The boards were already spotless, but there was a knot of anxiety she was working against with the weight of her torso on the brush, the motion of her arms repeated and repeated until they burned. Sand grating against the bare grain of the wood.
She thought of John Peyton in the doorway, watching her. The naked emotion on his face that made her pity him and wish him away. He was a man who always and only wanted the best for everyone around him, which in Cassie’s mind meant he was fated to be disappointed. And likely to hurt a share of the people he cared for besides. It was a mistake to have given him the candles, she knew, there was that to worry about. And there were the weeks ahead of her, alone with John Senior.
Cassie was accustomed to having two months and more on her own in the winter house during the trapping season, the darkest time of the year. By December there were barely seven hours of light to the day to see her through the chores about the property, feeding the animals not slaughtered for meat in the fall and cleaning their stalls, carrying in her supply of wood, fetching water. Long evenings of pitch black outside the circle of her reading light and the fire tormented by wind in the chimney. Not a soul on the shore within a day’s hard travel. It was something she anticipated with equal measures of exhilaration and dread, the loneliness of relying on no one but herself.
When she first heard John Senior wouldn’t be trapping this year she was relieved at the thought of having his company through the winter, but now the idea distressed her. As if she was being cheated somehow.
After she had scrubbed every inch of the floor she swept it clear of sand. She packed bread and cheese into a pouch and collected a pair of Indian rackets, a rifle, powder horn and shot. She pulled on a heavy overcoat and followed the track of the sled down to the landwash. She turned in the direction opposite the one taken by the men, walking along the beach a mile and a half, then following a brook inland to where the country opened into a clearing of bogland studded with clusters of bare alder. There was plenty of snow down to cover the ground, but it wasn’t cold enough yet to have frozen the hidden pockets of bog-water solid and Cassie skirted the clearing, keeping close to the treeline to avoid stumbling into them.
Half an hour into the bush she came upon the tracks of partridge in the snow, the distinct prints overlapping in wide arcs, as if the birds were incapable of walking in a straight line. She took off her heavy leather mittens and moved slowly forward with the rifle at the ready. The birds would have moulted their summer camouflage for the coat of white feathers that made them nearly invisible against the snow. It was movement she looked for, white against the dark background of spruce, white in motion on a field of white.
She came upon a cluster of three or four ahead of her. She aimed just above them, the birds bursting off the snow when the gun fired, a dull explosion of down in the blue air. One of the partridge fell back to the ground gracelessly, like a bag of sand, then scrambled into the undergrowth trailing a useless wing and a string of feathers spotted with blood. Cassie removed her rackets and laid aside the bag of food and the powder horn to push her way into the spruce. The bush was thick and heavy going, the ground under the canopy of branches almost bare of snow. When she came upon the partridge it was lying at the base of a tree, as if it had run blindly into the trunk and dropped there unconscious.
There was always a pinch of sympathy she had to set her teeth against, seeing the creature this close. She took a breath through her nostrils and reached for the bird, but it jumped again, thrashing wildly under the branches. Cassie fell backwards, then struck at the partridge with the rifle butt until it lay still. She placed a boot on the bird’s broken wing to hold it against the ground and then twisted the neck backwards.
She laid a fire just above the beach, in a washed-out alcove of peat and tree roots that kept her clear of the wind. The sun was warm enough that she could take off her coat. She plucked the bird clean and singed off the pin feathers in the fire, then gutted the naked carcass and propped it over the coals on a stick.