There may have been a no trespassing sign, but we never saw it. The snow on this February day in central Idaho was over four feet deep. Any signs hung on barbed wire or orange-tipped fence posts were buried under five months of freeze.
We began on the road beneath bluebird skies and brilliant sun, our skis gliding comfortably in the tracks left by snowmobiles. But we wanted to get off their trail. We were fearful for our two dogs. Rumor around town spoke of a young man setting leg traps along West Mountain Road, this road, so as soon as the tracks rose up to the meadow we stepped out onto untouched snow, cutting new creases in the field. The dogs, eager to explore, ran ahead but were unable to stay atop the soft crust, could gain no purchase. Reluctantly they filed in between my partner, Caleb, and me, walking easily on the hardpack his weight created.
Slowly, as we skied on, clouds started stealing in from the northeast, gathering at Council Mountain and threatening more weather. All weekend we had watched the storms come and go, sometimes dropping as much as an inch of snow in an hour, other times pelting our roof with graupel. It had been an unsettled February.
We fell easily into the rhythm of our exercise. The lenitive swish swish of our skis in tandem carried us over what would be, in summer, lush grazing for black-faced cattle, maybe red Herefords, or a field-nesting yellow-breasted meadowlark; animals and colors unimaginable in this, the deepest of our winter months. Blue sky offered hope for a departure from a palette dichromatic, merely white and brown; even the needles of the pines on the foothills before us were frost-covered and gray.
When I first moved to Idaho seven years earlier, this white, this silence, was damning. I spent the winter months feeling trapped by weather, longing for my feet on bare earth. Driving south, when weather permitted, in hopes of seeing green, seeing the yellow of arrowleaf balsamroot in the canyons near Boise, hearing water rush in the North Fork of the Payette. But I had fallen in love. With the mountain freshets in spring, with the golden-beaked tanager that came to our feeder, with the wild and sweet huckleberries, and dashing crimson paintbrush, and the robin trilling her morning song, the bugle of the elk, and nights in the wilderness to the north when the air was graced with the long holy melody of wolves at midnight. And the larch. The larch becoming the flame on the hillside, the surrender of summer, the cant of light in autumn pushing warmth through the boughs as the rivers returned to lower flows. The first snow became the sigh that brought us into our cabin, into rest. The quiet calming us as it does the hibernating bear, the rattlesnakes in their den. There is beauty here that can only be recognized when I accept each season as part of a greater cycle. What this deep moisture feeds are the gamut and chorus of summer. When I look to the miles of deep white snow, across the pasture and up the mountain side, I know the dream of the lily-petaled trillium beneath, the thimbleberry that will stain my tongue in August.
Yet winter at this high elevation can be deadly. The deep snows can become a trap for both fawns and elk calves born late in summer, as well as full grown ungulates that find themselves stuck in chest deep drifts: unable to outrun a predator or starved by the moisture that buries their graze. In McCall, the town where we live, families of mule deer and a variety of fox have come to depend on handouts to keep them alive at an elevation they might otherwise need to descend from. But this generosity doesn’t reach more rural landscapes, proof of which now lay ahead in a circle of fur and hooves; pink droplets of fresh blood that have melted and stained the snow.
The doe was likely a yearling. Its deathbed was surrounded by the tracks and scat of a variety of birds and mammals: coyote, magpie, raven, and, it seemed, a mink. Likely it was a wolf who brought her down, but perhaps she was already stuck and the canine visitation was one of relief, a quicker death than starvation. We bent to the scene with the interest of biologists, or sociologists, learning to understand this wild society and appreciating its natural sense. There was something easy in the deer’s repose, laying like an offering. The loss of one life to sustain others. I have watched osprey snatch fish from a high mountain lake, and once, a bald eagle grab a full-grown goose from the sky above the Snake River, and though it was difficult to witness, I could not begrudge the animals I revere doing what they do to survive. All I love in this vast and wild landscape includes a substantial amount of appropriate death.
We rose from the scene and continued to ski toward the tree line. Caleb veered east, recalling an abandoned homestead he had heard about from a colleague. We glanced at the horizon and spotted the telltale stand of trees, foreign in this cleared meadowland. It was near, maybe a mile or less, and we lengthened our strides, our imaginations churning in silence.
•
The house is typical of the 1920s or ’30s. Faded white, sharp-roofed, modest, with a touch of fancy in the decorative trim on the awnings, the porch extending into the snow. Three cottonwoods stand as sentinels in the yard, seventy, maybe eighty years in their rings, and from the limb of the tallest, a rope pulls taut into the snow, suggesting a black Goodyear tire somewhere in the frozen white beneath. I smile at the scene. The house looks like it was picked from a Sears and Roebuck, just as my dad’s Montana home, delivered by train and moved by horses to a place not far from the tracks. I search the yard for lilacs to complete the scene and find their brown fingers reaching from snow to sky, roots asleep in a promise of purple. Soon we see the top of a buried fencepost, a barrier that serves no purpose for at least half the year. Nevertheless, we enter the yard where we imagine a gate to be, expecting at any moment a dog, not unlike one of our own, to come bounding toward us as warning and welcome. Carhartt and Cisco, perhaps sensing the same, move eagerly toward the house, ears pricked, Cisco’s tail busy.
The house is so confidently placed in this copse, so perfectly camouflaged in color, that it takes me some time to realize that snow is banked against the beveled siding, in some places only three feet deep, in other places up to the first-floor window sills. The doors are frozen into their jams. I wonder how the family managed winters. The work of shoveling made twice as hard by the wind that would constantly move snow, like waves, to fill in paths cut from kitchen to outhouse. From mudroom to barn. I find myself admiring the kind of peace that might bring, not being able to get out, romanticizing. But as we near, the fantasy skews. The large picture window that once offered occupants a view into the meadow is broken, the snow now forming a ramp to the inside.
I sit on the back of my skis and look in. Carhartt, our older dog, the one more prone to adventure, sits beside me, intent to enter. The steep slope of snow is inviting. In a simple move I might crouch, shift my weight forward, and ski straight into domesticity. Peering through the window frame, I see the room is a mix of twin recliners, a rust-colored sofa, end tables and lamps. An empty fireplace adds warmth, even as it carries no flame. I unclip my skis and leave them by the snow ramp, perhaps out of decorum, and scooch carefully into the living room. I lower the zipper of my jacket and place my gray wool hat in my pocket.
I soon fall into the desire to explore that often overpowers my common sense. I am drawn to places like this. Many of Caleb and my adventures find us hiking to abandoned mines, decommissioned fire lookouts, and forgotten ghost towns. We like to reimagine lives in these places. To wonder at the hopes and hardships of people who homesteaded these valleys, built shacks near their claims, or created entire towns on the expectation of the windfall and the railroad that would surely follow. There are always clues as to the personalities that exist now as ghosts. A forgotten Reader’s Digest on the floor of a low-roofed shack near the Deadwood mine; an ornate bedstead leaning against equally lavish wallpaper peeling from the wood in an upstairs room of a deserted hotel; and once, in Utah, a toy pistol rusted and weathered in a dry streambed not far from a ramshackle lean-to. I am especially fond of an old photograph that we came upon last summer near the Snowshoe Mine in the Frank Church Wilderness. It lay on a rough-hewn countertop among rat droppings and coffee cans of rusted nails. The person in the photo was too faded to distinguish, but the leanness of the body, the raised hand, hinted at an intimacy within which we had no place. We set it gently on the shelf as we had found it, knowing that both the photographer and the photographed were long dead and would be forever unnamed.
•
I run my fingers along the tassels of a green and brown crocheted afghan that hangs on the back of one of the tan recliners and wander into the kitchen. There I find the ubiquitous white refrigerator and matching stove. Cans of food still line the pantry shelves, the familiar Van de Camp’s pork and beans, a soup of some sort, and several other cans with labels missing. The white porcelain basin of the deep kitchen sink is filled with dishes carefully stacked. It’s hard to tell if the thin plates were dirty when the occupants left or if time has made them appear so. I stand at the sink and look out the window toward No Business Mountain. How many times have women done this over the last seventy-five years? Looking toward the trees, searching the pasture for cattle, kids, taking reprieve from their tasks to imagine the tops of mountains or life in town, before returning to the dishes and the rhubarb pie in the oven. Out of habit, out of practice, I wipe my gloved hands on the towel that hangs from the oven door, careful to straighten it and smooth the hand-embroidered Sunday emblazoned with pink and blue wildflowers.
From the kitchen I go to a later addition, a bathroom, its plumbing exposed. The toilet is secure, but the floorboards rot behind it. There is an attempt at a shower. Craftsmanship lacks here, unlike in the rest of the house. I am uninterested and leave, crossing again through the front room, through the mudroom, seeking stairs to the room above. Carhartt is beside me, and I carefully test each step before giving it my full weight. I hold the painted handrail to my left and almost call to Caleb that we are going up, but instead I silently ascend. The smell of pack rats greets me in the stairwell, nails protrude from the wall where pictures once hung.
We reach the top to find only one room. Like the rest of the house, it is muted in white paint. Its ceiling slopes such that I must move to its middle in order to stand erect. The bed, a twin, the kind with a brown metal headboard and exposed springs, is pushed to the wall. The blue-striped mattress is stained, a hole where the rats have found their way in. I press my hand against the tick and push; the springs squeak a memory of climbing into my own childhood bed. A colorfully woven rug lies flat next to the frame in a way that beckons rest despite the unsanitary accommodations. I turn to the dresser and pull open a drawer to find rat droppings, another to find a red t-shirt, perfectly folded. In the corner, a pile of clothes looks like a crouched child in an eternal game of hide-and-seek. I tap the heap with my toe, but only stir up some dust. The room holds no closet, only a hook on the wall. At the peak of the roof is a small window, through which I see the wind has started blowing, flakes against the pane. Inside the house, stillness prevails.
Carhartt and I descend the stairs. When we reach the landing, I take a closer look at the mudroom, an addition made by enclosing the back porch. In my grandmother’s home, this is where the toys were stored, a rocking chair for morning coffee and sunrises, windows lining the entirety. I had passed through quickly before, not pausing to investigate, but now I spot a stack of books and bend to glance at the titles. They are not typical of the kind I usually discover in abandoned places. Instead of bawdy covers promising romance, or Stetsoned men seeking vengeance, I notice a copy of Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang and the same collection of Wallace Stegner titles that occupy my shelf at home. I sit cross-legged on the floor as I inspect another stack. I recognize the gilded spines of Little Golden Books and the felicitous covers of the Little House on the Prairie series. I skim the pages; nostalgia or a feeling of knowing sweeps over me. Did the child that grew up here feel a kinship to little Laura Ingalls? Was she, like me, a shy young girl who got lost in books, whose best friend was a dog, and who every day hoped that it was the last day of school, that she might at last be free from learning and turned over to the escapades of summer? I am always one to imagine myself in these places, to seek out my kindred ghosts. I excitedly grab for more titles and encounter instead a pair of brass casings.
.308? .306? I don’t read the caliber, though I am familiar with both. Guns were as common as books in my childhood home. We were ranch folk, rural. I was gifted a BB gun for my ninth birthday, a rifle at age fifteen when I was old enough to hunt. Later, I captained my college pistol team, a time when the sound of brass casings jingling in my pocket was more likely than that of loose change. The report of pistol or rifle fire meant the end of a hunt or another match won. But twenty years have since passed, and I think of a moment two years ago on the South Fork of the Salmon River, lying on a bare hilltop, a buck only fifty yards away. It was squarely in my sights, my finger gentle on the trigger and Caleb beside me. Then I heard a crack, though I never flexed my knuckle. An echo of gunshots resounding from the morning news. I stood. The deer crashed through the trees. I wouldn’t hunt again for three years.
•
I drop the books and rise to my feet. Outside the sky is darkening, and the walls of the mudroom moan against the winter wind. I spy another casing and no longer trust the floorboards. I look out the window for Caleb and Cisco, and when I don’t see them, I call out. I try to open the door despite the drift outside, then walk past each of the windows, examining their contents like a widower inspecting old slides, each frame white, each latch closed, until I reach the last whose glass is fractured in a series of concentric cracks. There, in the middle of the pane, a single bullet hole. I bring my face close, my cheek feeling the cold, and look through the small eye in its center. The pane is intact, but the bullet’s impact caused it to rupture into an ever-growing web, so that as I move away from the wound, the tree, the swing, the snow-covered pasture and gray sky, all appear as fractured pieces of themselves, repeated again and again in irregular fragments of once innocent glass. The sound of that single shot must have frightened, echoed up the stairs into the bedroom. Flushed birds from the trees. I try not to hear it, but I do. I hear it over and over again.
I look for Carhartt, but she has left. My gloved finger is tracing the edge of the bullet hole when Caleb calls to me. He bends at the window we slid through and asks if I am okay. I tell him about the casings and the shattered pane. We should go, he replies. And I walk into the living room and reach for the hand that pulls me out. I step into my skis and we follow our tracks out past the cottonwood trees and the lilac, over the fence and toward the road. I pause only to put on my hat and zip my jacket. I do not look back. The wind spins the powder in every direction. In a couple of hours all traces of our presence will be effaced by snow. The house will be filled with winter’s silence, save for the moan of the wind and the scurry of pack rats across the bedroom floor.
•••
CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate, 2020) and co-editor of Native Voices (Tupelo, 2019). She has published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals, including High Desert Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat, Whitefish Review, Broadsided Press, and Taos Journal of Poetry and Art. CMarie is the 2019 recipient of the Grace Paley Fellowship, a 2019 graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA program, a regular columnist for the Inlander, and nonfiction editor for High Desert Journal. CMarie resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho.