When he said, "The cold will be coming right back," again in Norwegian, Thea could not help herself and asked, "How do you know?"
Smith replied, "The winds are already bringing it."
After dinner he set out his wares: watches and knives and small canisters of curatives and powders. He offered cigars, advertised as finer than the rolled-up dogshit they were peddling in the wanigan, and pipe tobacco imported from Zanzibar. He laid out boxes of chocolates and horehounds. When the jacks leaned in and whispered about hooch, he pulled his coat aside to show pockets with hidden half pints. He passed the bottles with a magician's sleight of hand, recouping quarters and dollars with equal cleverness. Standing behind a table in the mess hall, a green felt cloth covering the pine boards, sporting a suit of worsted wool and having traded his beaver-skin hat for a black stovepipe, his mustache styled with bear-fat pomade, his pince-nez magnifying his huge brown eyes, he looked like he could have sold a whip to an ox.
Clearly the jacks were in a buying mood, and Smith did a steady business. Even as he haggled in four different languages, even as he extolled the virtues of his fine Spanish blades and Swiss timepieces and pocketed the loggers' earnings, Smith managed to keep an eye on Thea. In her own way Thea made a sly study of Smith, too.
After Trond bought the last pocket watch, after Smith loaded his unsold goods back into his haversacks, after the jacks adjourned to the bunkhouse, Smith and the foreman and the bull cook and a pair of company men up for the weekend dealt their first game of seven-card stud. They uncorked a bottle of Canadian rye and passed it around the table
Abigail Sterle's croup had worsened, so after supper the Meltmen brothers brought her to Hosea Grimm's for care. Thea worked all through the evening hours, doing the job of four herself.
Thea's hands were wet to the wrist in beaten eggs when she drenched the last of a hundred pork chops in the wash and rolled them in cornmeal. She could hear the Saturday-night accordion and merrymaking from the bunkhouse. The poker game was winding down. Smith's back was to her, but every other hand he'd turn and leer. A second bottle was being passed around, and a cloud of cigar smoke hung over the table.
Thea wedged the last pair of pork chops onto the baking sheet— the sixth sheet, each of them loaded— and wiped her hands on her apron. As she did, the card game concluded and the players donned their coats and hats. Smith, his mustache losing its shape, gave her a last drunken grin as the men filed out. She stored the pork chops and stood alone in the mess hall. Exhausted, she thought about retiring for the night but then thought better of it and decided to make the next day's pies. So she boiled water for tea and kept working.
She had already spread the dough and lined the pie tins and mixed the apples and brown sugar and cinnamon when she stepped outside for a breath of fresh air an hour later. The snow had stopped and a full, bright moon hung on the edge of the sky. The bunkhouse had grown quiet but for a few last revelers skylarking outside the door. Smith was right, that hell of cold had blown back in. She hugged herself and turned to go in for the night when she saw a strange sight.
One of the draft horses was being led into the middle of the paddock, snorting plumes of cloudy breath into the night. The handler was nearly invisible in the shadow of the horse, but it was not the barn boss, she knew, for the man pulling the bridle stood at the horse's shoulder and the barn boss was no more than five and a half feet tall. When the man and horse reached the trough, the handler turned to leave, but only after hobbling the horse. Satisfied, the man loped back to the barn.
Thea noted what she had seen but thought little more of it until an hour later, when the horse began to scream.
No longer filtered by the cold and dark, the wolves' howls came over the ridge, near and frightening, as though each element of that night— the coldness and darkness and stillness, the moon's bright luster— had its own voice in the discordant choir of the pack. In camp, the jacks stirred. Some came outside for a smoke or to stare up at the sound as though it could be seen. Thea had been readying herself for bed but lit another lantern in the kitchen when she heard the wolves.
They wailed for what seemed an hour. The jacks returned to their bunks and a silence spilled over the night, eerier in its way than the close song of the pack. It was in that interval of calm that the wolves emerged from the ridgetop pines. The dog, Lodden, greeted the pack even as he retreated to the horse hobbled in the paddock, his hackles and slaver evidence of an outrage a thousand years in the breeding. Lodden moved silently, though, even as the draft horse screamed and snorted and finally collapsed onto the trampled snow.