PEGGY’SCOVE, Nova Scotia (AP)–First there was a deafening explosion, then not a sound in Peggy’s Cove. “All the crickets stopped,” said Darrell Fralick, one of 60 residents of the fishing village of pastel homes and sun bleached, granite boulders. “It was dead silent.”
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia (News Services)– A Swissair jetliner with 228 people aboard crashed off Nova Scotia late Wednesday after the pilot reported smoke in the cabin and attempted an emergency landing at Halifax airport. Rescuers said people had been found in the water southwest of Halifax, but it was unclear whether anyone had survived the crash.
~*~
I took the phone when it was handed to me.
“Hey, Doug,” I said, and, “How are you taking it?”
We talked for a while, the distance between Missouri and Minneapolis a long one, then he finally asked, “Did grandpa tell you the story about the footsteps in the snow?”
He hadn’t.
~*~
“Cold,”Tom said needlessly, breath escaping through clacking teeth in small, errant puffs.
Glen barked a laugh. “I said it, didn’t I? It’s been wanting to do this for a week.” He stopped clumping through the woods so that he could wipe a gloved hand across the brim of his hunting cap. The motion dislodged a small rain of collected drizzle that had been wanting to turn into icicles.
“I thought it would be snow.” Tom stopped, too, and leaned up against the white-frocked bole of a tree.
“It’s snowing.”
“Uh huh,” Tom chuckled wryly, “and raining, and sleeting ...”
Glen's eyes gleamed behind his glasses -- wide, round glasses with black sunshades on the sides that he'd had to wear since he’d had his eyes operated on. He moved on. Tom followed.
They had left the older man's truck up at the top of the hill, where it was accumulating a pane of ice across the windshield. They would have to chisel that off before they could go back home. There weren't that many woods between them and the lake, though; the trees were older growth, thinly spread, making it easy enough going, although Tom was still surprised at how spry his wife’s grandfather was. Eighty-seven and still running traps in the middle of winter, just like people in this rural part of the world had been doing for generations.
Pa usually checked his traps on a four-wheeler, but Tom and Lanita were only going to be at her grandparent’s for a few days over the Thanksgiving holiday; Tom had wanted to come out. Not enough room on the four-wheeler for two.
“Hey, Pa, what kind of squirrel is that?” Tom had long ago given up on any formalities with this family. Lanita’s grandpa was “Pa,”and that was that. When he’d married “Sissy,” he had been accepted into the order of things as quickly and thoroughly as if he had been born into the clan.
Glen stopped and looked to see what Tom was pointing at. The cold was pricking at his eyes, but he could still make out the sleek dark shape poised halfway up the trunk of a hickory tree. “That’s a black’un. We don’t have too many of those around here anymore, most of `em nowadays are reds.”
Tom nodded and they kept hiking down toward the lake. He could see the iced-over surface through the leafless trees, a flat oval plane that extended off to the left and right as far as the trees would let him see.
“Getting lighter,” Glen said, looking up at the sky. Full dawn should have been fifteen minutes earlier, but iron-heavy clouds bowed down toward the earth, and the sun was a thin, lighter-colored disk barely visible through the trees to the east. He looked back at where he was walking, seeing deer tracks punched in the snow and a half-eaten nut. That had probably been the squirrel’s, dropped when he andTom had come by and scared him.
“The lake’s frozen over, right?” asked Tom.
“Ayup. Solid. You could drive a car out there.”
“Aren’t your traps in the lake?”
“Right at the edges. You cut a hole and drop `em in. I have to come back and chip `em out every day or they’ll freeze back over and I won’t see 'em again `til spring.”
The slope steepened as they neared the water’s edge. For a few moments they were too busy negotiating the bramble and thorn weeds that had grown up in the underbrush to talk. Tom found himself wishing he had borrowed that pair of coveralls Pa had offered. His own jeans, even at two layers thick, just weren’t enough to keep out the damp or the grasping thorns. His coat was a good one, anyway, and inside ithe was almost toasty warm. Almost.
Alow limb plucked his ball cap from off his close-cropped hair, reminding him that his face and legs were still cold, even if the coat was doing its job for the rest of him. He reached back up and retrieved the hat even as Pa slid the rest of the way down the slope on his heels and butt. Securing the cap more solidly in place, Tom followed. He slipped a bit getting his footing once he got down. The surface of the lake was iced over, for sure, but on top of that was a slick, semi-liquid layer of slush that hadn’t frozen yet. Probably wouldn’t until it quit sleeting.
Looking around, he saw that Pa was keeping to the snow-covered bank, where the footing was likely a little better. The old trapper got his bearings.
“Just up thatta ways a little,” he said, jerking his head east down the bank. He started that way, his boots leaving well-defined treadmarks in the snow.
Tom nodded. He kept to the lake. The snow on the bank was deep, and he was only wearing low-rise hiking boots. Already he’d had a cold bath of snow sneak in to chill his socks; he didn’t want another.
They walked side by side for about two dozen yards, until they came to a place where a small tree had fallen over into the lake during a windstorm. Its lower branches still looked supple, as if they hadn’t been too long in the water, but they had been trapped in the ice when the lake had frozen over. The bowed trunk made a small arch back up to where its roots had pulled out from the side of the bank.
“Got one right in front of that tree there. See it?”
Tom shook his head, wiping freezing drizzle and rain out of his eyes. He didn’t know how Pa could see the trap-hole. His own glasses were splattered with droplets of rain, and only his body heat was keeping it melted.
The trapper stomped his way through the snow to a spot about three feet out from the bank, almost right under the fallen sapling. By the time Tom got there the older man had already fished out an ice pick from one of his coverall’s deep pockets and was chipping away at a rough, half-foot diameter hole, sheened at the top with ice from having been left to the weather for a day.
It didn’t take long for Glen to break through the thin crust.
“Man, that looks cold,” Tom said. The sloshing water was almost black, tiny bits of broken ice bobbing around on the surface.
Pa grinned and plunged his arm into the water up to his elbow. Tom winced and looked away, goosebumps on his own arm raising in sympathy as his grandpa-in-law fished around for the trap’s chain, hiding somewhere in the branches and mud covering the lake bottom.
The drizzling rain and sleet made a soft, gentle pattering on the lake, on the bank, and on the trees that circled the frozen water like sentries. Tom panned around, trying to take it all in at once. It was so different from the city. There wasn't this comforting silence in the city. There were other things, good things. But it wasn’t like this.
“Not a thing in this one.” Glen made sure the empty steel frame was properly rigged, then let it slip back under the water.
“Are there more here?” Tom asked. They’d already been to a river and a pond that had just one trap apiece.
“One,” Pa nodded. “Over thataway.” He pointed.
Tom nodded and followed the trapper into the silent snowfall.
~*~
Glen traipsed through the woods to the lake and slid down the bank. It was as cold as when he and Tom had come out the day after Thanksgiving. He figured it would stay that way for the rest of the winter. At least the rest of the weather was being more cooperative. The sun might even peek out through the clouds once or twice before the day was done.
He stopped to get a fix on things, to see where he had gotten onto the lake, and saw that it was where Tom had slid down onto the ice. He blinked and looked again. There were Tom’s footprints -- splayed-out ovals where the slush had splashed around the boy’s steps. The cold had frozen them. His own, higher up on the bank, had filled with snow, but Tom’s were iron-solid out there over the water. They made a meandering path a few yards out from the bank that would remain until spring softened the hard water.
~*~
Doug said, “Grandpa says he keeps remembering those footsteps.”
I didn’t say anything for a long while. The silence on the phone was heavy with each of our thoughts. Finally Doug whispered softly, his voice close to breaking, “He keeps seeing them.”
Now, so do I.
** *
TUSCOLA, Ill. (AP)– For a small-town farm boy, Tom Hausman had seen a lot of the world, living in five cities in 10 years. The Illinois native was on his way to Europe on business Wednesday night when his plane, Swissair Flight 111, crashed off Nova Scotia, killing all aboard.