Wintering Read Online Free Page A

to talking. “Not just on that stretch of river, but heading into the wilderness beyond. It was so incredibly reckless. To leave at that time of year, for starters. With our provisions? With his miscarriage of a plan? My God.” He paused. “And of course I should’ve been in college. Should have been running to college. But I didn’t even think of it. Can you imagine that? What mess of bent and secret lives was leading us into this? How much anger and grief?”
    “Folks always chase their sadness around. Into the woods. Up to the attic. Out onto the ice.”
    Gus closed his eyes. “I guess they do.”
    “You’re chasing yours.”
    “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it’s chasing me.”
    “Could be.”
    “But why was I being petulant three days in? Had he overestimated me? Was I still just a kid? A little boy?” He moved his head like he was nodding yes and shaking no at the same time. “Or were we just in over our heads? Who can say? I only know that when the trees above me lifted and I got off my knees and shook like a wet dog, Burnt Wood Lake opened up right before me. I looked back at my father, still a hundred yards behind, and do you know what I felt?”
    I looked at him, waiting.
    “Ready to keep going. If I’d felt otherwise, we might’ve stopped then and there. We might have avoided everything. But I didn’t want to. I took a couple steps forward into the river’s earliest, feeble currents and mistook their weakness for my strength. When my father hauled up next to me he said nothing, only pointed up the lakeshore. There, standing among the duckweeds and watermeal, in water up to its belly, its dewlap dripping, its huge antlers lit up, was a moose. He was beautiful. And furious, I could tell.
    “I said, ‘Why isn’t he running away? He ought to fear us. I could shoot him right now. He should know that.’
    “My father, he only said, ‘Yes, I suppose he should.’ ” He mimicked Harry’s voice—a perfect imitation—and then fell silent for a moment. “Good Christ, Berit. The things I didn’t know.”

I KNOW WHAT some of the folks around here used to think, that for years the worst of them labeled me a boondagger because I could lift a fifty-pound sack of U.S. mail and had no husband. The fact is, there’s only been one man in all my years and I simply chose to wait for him. Through the end of my first winter here, then through what seemed an eternity.
    Harry was the first person in Gunflint to show me a special gentleness. This was one warm summer morning after I’d strolled the shoreline, plucking flowers from the cracks in the bedrock. He’d been out at his nets, just a sixteen-year-old boy already making a living for himself. He was tying his boat to a cleat on the Lighthouse Road. “You got a fistful of carnivorous flowers there, Miss Lovig,” he said.
    “Beg your pardon?” I said, surprised to hear his voice at all. More surprised to hear him saying my name.
    He finished his knot and stood and offered his hand. “I’m Harry Eide,” he said. We shook hands and he continued, “Butterworts.” He nodded at the flowers in my hand. “That’s what you’ve got there. You’d have to walk a long way to find them anywhere else.”
    I looked down at the purple flowers, then up at his fresh and boyish face. He ought to have been smiling. Later he would tell me he hadn’t spoken in months. Since February. Which seemed hard to believe then and still does, though I never—not once—had reason to doubt anything he ever said.
    “What do you mean by carnivorous?” I asked him.
    “They eat bugs. Honest to God.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “My old man taught me.”
    “How do you know my name?”
    “I guess everyone knows that by now.”
    “My given name’s Berit,” I said.
    He smiled, or, rather, half-smiled, the right side of his mouth curling up, his right eye squinting. “Berit Lovig. Right. It’s nice to meet you. Get those flowers in a vase.” He took a step to