@@CHAP@@ JANUARY 1931
IT WAS A BITTER AFTERNOON, DURING ONE OF THE WORST winters the province had ever seen. A ten-year-old girl walked into the forest with her two brothers and didn’t come out again.
The youngest, Jep, remembered they were looking for cranberries, drawn over the snowy fields and across the river into the wetlands and forest on the other side. He blamed the oldest, Landon, for getting them lost. Landon always reminded Jep that there were no cranberries to be found in January. That they had been seeking beech nuts, buried deep under the snow. Six-year-old Jep had been told to stay home but followed his siblings anyway.
The three of them had trod a large, meandering loop of the forest without finding a single cranberry or beechnut. Kathleen wanted to press on, up into the pine forest on the ridge, but it was too far for the smallest feet in their party, so Landon turned them homeward, unsure of his way among the snow-buried trails. After, he would claim it was Jep’s fault they ended up at that part of the river at all.
Neither disputes that it was a late winter afternoon, with blank, heavy clouds overhead. Three children walked among evergreens so dark they seemed black, the snowscape slowly turning blue-grey as the light slanted. Twelve-year-old Landon in the lead, his hat frosted like a birthday cake. Kathleen, ten, in the middle, glaring at the back of his head. Behind them, jumping from one boot hollow to the next, came Jep, bundled in his oversized coat and scarf. Unseen eyes watched their progress with silent, patient interest.
They emerged from the woods on the ridge that swept up from the river and stopped. They could see the farm where it lay a few miles ahead, skirted on three sides by fields marked with fletchings of trees and fences. The river traced the foot of the ridge for several miles, then ran down to join the Grand River and finally empty into Lake Erie.
Kathleen started whistling. A long gust of wind shook the branches of the trees behind them, the evergreens adding their hissing chorus, until the children were surrounded by the sounds of rushing water, the creak and groan of branches rubbing together:
“Stop that,” Landon snapped. “You’ll call them up.” “No, I won’t,” Kathleen said, but she fell silent and tucked her face back into her scarf. The wind died away. Sparkling lights flickered at the edge of their vision, dancing along the snow. A trick of the fading winter light, the children thought.
Below their feet, the ridge plunged straight down to the bank for half a mile in either direction, cut by a narrow gully that was a creek in warmer seasons. The downed ash tree they had used to cross the water hours earlier lay several miles northwest. It would be dark by the time they reached it again. To the left, the river was wider and deeper, the ice hidden under a blanket of pristine snow. To the right, it narrowed and broke into shallow rapids, the current moving too quickly to be caught by the frost.
“We’ll cross there,” Landon said, pointing to a place just above the rapids where the ice was solid and impressions of animal tracks marred the snow. Without waiting for a reply, he plunged down, breaking a path for the others to follow.
When they reached the bank, Landon stepped out first, sliding his boots one at a time through the snow. Kathleen took Jep’s hand and towed him along in her wake. To their right, the ice fell away, revealing the rushing, blue-black water of the rapids. As Landon pulled ahead, moving quickly towards the opposite bank, Jep tugged free of Kathleen and hurried after him.
Kathleen placed her feet hesitantly, arms windmilling for balance when her boot slid on the hidden ice. When the boys reached the other side, they waited for their sister impatiently, cold and hungry and eager to be home. Landon tucked in Jep’s scarf, brushed the snow from his hat. Darkness rushed up the valley, the very last of the light dying in the northwest. Purple-blue shadows slithered across the snow to lick their boots.
“Kath, come on!” Landon called. But Kathleen had stopped in the middle of the river, staring at the gap in the ice where the rapids rushed. As they watched, she took two steps towards the open water. As though she were hypnotized, Jep would say later.
“Kitty?” Jep started towards the river’s edge, but Landon grabbed the back of his coat.
She took another step and paused, her head cocked, eyes on the open water: “Can’t you hear it?” Kathleen’s voice was barely a whisper above the wind over snow. “Someone’s calling me.”
“That was us,” Landon yelled.