The autumn that Charlie left the island, Emily began to roam. One moment she was there under my vigilant, watchful eye, and the next she was gone. At first her wanderings threw my parents and I into a panic. We entertained visions of Emily absently stepping off one of the cliffs that framed stretches of the shore, or startling a black bear, or drowning in the icy grasp of the Lake that fascinated her so completely. We fanned out from the light station, one of us first checking that she hadn’t set off in Sweet Pea, which was kept on the beach near the light, pulled high up beyond the grasp of the waves. We searched the boundaries of the coastline, along the paths that traced our route to the sheltered bay where the boathouse was, through the bog where we picked cranberries in late summer. We called her name, our voices swallowed by the thick cushion of moss that carpeted the forest floor or the mocking laughter of the Lake as it rolled onto the rocky beaches or slapped against the bluffs. We knew she would not respond. Emily never did.
As often as not, we found her, oblivious to our concern, absorbed as only Emily could be absorbed in the activities of a hill of ants or watching a red squirrel move her kits to a new nest. I once observed her for what must have been hours simply looking at the blossom of a columbine. She sat in the sun on the dry earth, legs crossed, head resting in her hands, staring at the nodding flower. She didn’t move, didn’t touch it or smell it. She just looked. I called to her, but my voice mingled with the sounds of the forest, and she paid it no more heed than she would the call of a jay or the buzzing of a cicada. So I sat, too, legs crossed, head resting in my hands, and watched Emily while the sun marched across the sky. After a time she stood, brushed the bits of twigs and leaves off her skirt, and walked to me, smiled, and took my hand to help me to my feet. I realized that she was aware of my presence the entire time. I sat in her world. I was part of it. I just wasn’t the part that mattered right then.
My father had newspapers delivered to the island. They arrived a week or more at a time, and he devoured every last word, sharing stories with us around the dinner table, or in the evening by the fire. That year, 1936, the papers carried news of parched farms, of crops withering in fields, of livestock suffocating, their lungs filled with soil carried by the wind. By stark contrast, the winter was cold, remarkably cold, so cold that we all slept together in one big bed, dressed in our long underwear and piled beneath stacks of woolen blankets and quilts stuffed with down. It was a cold snap that stretched from December to February, holding a nation of weary and troubled people in its icy grip.
Emily and I spent much of that winter huddled around the woodstove, warmed by Mother’s soup, flavored with herbs she had harvested and hung to dry in the pantry and rich with the meat of freshly snared rabbit. I escaped from the little island to the pages of Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare’s plays, and Tom Sawyer. I wallowed in stories of adventure and romance, resisting Pa’s attempts to draw me to the articles in the Times Herald newspapers stacked sequentially in abundance in the rafters, endeavoring to stretch my interests and broaden my perspective. Emily, on the other hand, spent hours with her pencils and paper, working sometimes for days on a single drawing, rendering from memory a moth or columbine flower and filling it in with vibrant pastels or colored pencil. At times she sat, captivated by the dancing flames inside the woodstove, so completely still that I wondered if the wind creeping between the siding boards had frozen her into a statue.
It was late that February when Emily once again disappeared. The red on the thermometer barely stretched above its bulbous base, and the air itself hung sharp and crystal cold. It was much, much too bitter for a little girl to be wandering aimlessly in the woods. A scrawny ten-year-old, fearless and determined to be her sister’s protector, I did not then think of myself as a little girl.
Pa was splitting firewood, Mother peeling potatoes, so it was I who donned my coat, wrapped a thick scarf around my head and neck and took Mother’s fur-lined mitts to keep my hands warm, and embarked on yet another quest to find my twin. My breath hung in the air, little puffs of smoke, as I strapped on snowshoes, quickly fastening the buckles before stuffing my hands back into the soft rabbit fur. The snow was deep. In places the days-old flakes had drifted to over several feet, and the distinctive tracks of other snowshoes patterned the ground around the cottage and outbuildings. Emily had at least had the foresight to wear snowshoes, and I could detect her trail as it diverged from the well-worn paths and headed out onto the Lake.
Superior covers such an extensive area that it rarely freezes over completely. Day after day of cold temperatures and calm waters can, by February or March, mold the ice into a solid expanse that stretches from island to island and island to mainland. Sometimes even then the wind will tease up waves, sending them over and under and through, jumbling the frozen surface into floes and open water. But that year, the Lake was solid. My ears hurt from the muffled silence as I stepped away from the shore, my snowshoes following Emily’s prints.
As my feet wandered, so did my thoughts. The snow-drifted surface of Lake Superior turned into the desolate English moor, and I slipped into the world of Jane Eyre, romantic, tragic, stumbling toward my destiny, until a shuddering, cracking boom froze me in my tracks. My heart pounded and my skin prickled. The romance of the moor disappeared, replaced by the isolation of the undulating mounds of snow-covered Lake and the silent forests along the shore. Another bang rang out as the plates of ice shifted and adjusted. It’s just the Lake speaking, I told myself. Like an old woman settling into bed. I stood about half a mile from shore, near the entrance to Walker’s Channel, the ominous cliffs of Hardscrabble Island catching and releasing the groaning of Superior.
I saw her then. She stood still, a black silhouette, tiny and vulnerable in a world that stretched great and white and silent from horizon to horizon. She was not alone. I could pick out five from where I stood. Three of them were pacing along the jumbled mounds of broken ice that defined the shore; the other two were tracking, their noses to the ground, switching back and forth as they loped through the windswept snow, their gray fur full and glistening in the late-afternoon sunlight. Emily was between the two groups.
Her name caught in my throat. I lurched forward, clumsy in my snowshoes, stumbling as I attempted to run. The wolves were working together, circling, edging closer and closer to my sister’s silent form. My mother’s mitts, too big for my childish hands, dropped off and landed in the snow, but I pressed forward until I too, tripping over the wooden frames strapped to my boots, landed in the snow. When I raised my head, I was close enough to see the yellow eyes of a large male as he glanced in my direction before returning his focus to my sister, circling as a unit with the others in the pack. Emily turned slightly and crouched down, catching those piecing yellow eyes with her striking gray ones, fearless in her round, pale face. I lay still in the snow, my bare hands prickling from the cold, not daring to move. The wolf stopped. Their eyes locked. The other wolves stopped too. I could hear them whining, see them pacing in tight patterns while they waited on the alpha. Minutes passed before Emily moved again, and then she simply stood, turned and walked past the brute toward me. And as she had done the day I watched her absorbed in the columbine, she smiled, took my hand, and helped me to my feet before collecting my rabbit-lined mitts from the snow.