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.
