The Snow Fort Treaty

Part One · The Line

Milo had lived in the yellow house for eleven days when the snow arrived. It came in the night without any fuss, and in the morning the entire street had been put away underneath it. The cars were soft white loaves, and the fence between his yard and the next one had shrunk to a row of small white hats. Milo stood at the back door in his socks and stared for a very long time. He was ten years old, and until that morning he had seen snow exactly once.

That was from the window of a bus, and it had melted before the bus stopped. By the time he had found his boots, two pairs of socks, and the gloves his mother had bought for a winter he had not believed in, somebody was already outside. A girl in a red hat was digging in the yard next door with a shovel taller than she was, piling snow into a long heap along the fence. Milo waded across his yard and stopped at the row of white hats.

"That's your side," said the girl, without looking up. "This is mine. The fence is the line." Her name was Ruby, and she had lived in the brown house her entire life, and she told him so while she dug. She also told him that she was building a wall taller than her father, and that she did this every winter. Milo asked what happened to the wall in other winters, and Ruby stopped digging for the first time. "It falls down," she said, "and that is not the point."

She went back to work, and Milo stood on his side of the line and watched the heap grow. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with snow, because he had wanted it since he was six. That was the year his grandmother sent him a book about a boy in the far north who dug a snow house with a tunnel for a door. The boy crawled through the tunnel into a round white room, where it was warm and quiet, and the wind was something that happened to other people.

Milo had read that book until the cover fell off. Now there was snow up to his knees, and the plow had shoved an enormous heap of it against his garage, and he fetched the kitchen dustpan and began to dig. By noon they had both made a great deal of progress, and neither had said a word. Ruby's wall ran the whole length of the fence and came up to Milo's chest, with a broom handle on top and a sock on the end for a flag.

On his side, Milo had dug a trench into the plow heap as long as he was and twice as deep. His gloves were soaked through, and his fingers had gone from cold to hot to nothing at all, and he did not care one bit. He lay down in the trench and looked up at a narrow strip of white sky. It was the best place he had ever been. It was also, he noticed, making a very small creaking noise.

Part Two · The Collapse

The trouble started after lunch. The snow that had fallen in the night was the dry, powdery kind that squeaks under your boots, and it did not like to stay where it was put. Ruby's wall began to lean, a little at first, like a person listening, and then the entire middle section slid sideways with a soft sigh. The sock flag went over with it. Ruby said a word that Milo's mother would not have liked, and then she picked up the shovel and began to pile it all back up again, exactly as before.

Milo thought this was either very brave or not very smart. He was about to say so when his own trench answered for him. He had started roofing it with slabs of snow, laying them across the top like the pages of a book, but the slabs were too thin and the snow underneath was too loose. He set down the fourth slab and stepped back to admire it, and the whole roof came down with a WHUMP. His tunnel, the one he had wanted since he was six, had lasted about as long as a sneeze.

They ended up on Ruby's back step at the same moment, for no reason except that it was the nearest dry place. Ruby had snow in her hat, and Milo had snow in places he had not known a person could keep snow. For a while they sat and looked at the two ruins, hers a long low lump and his a filled-in ditch. "It falls down every year," said Ruby at last, in a flat voice, as if she were reading it off a sign.

"I never saw snow before this week," said Milo, and he immediately wished he had not. Ruby turned and looked at him properly for the first time, and she did not laugh, which he had expected. She asked where he had lived before, and he told her, and she asked whether it was true that the ocean there was warm enough to swim in at New Year. He said it was. "So you don't know anything about snow," she said. "No," said Milo, "but I know what I want to do with it."

He told her about the book, and the round white room, and the tunnel for a door. Ruby listened with her chin on her knees, and her eyes traveled to the plow heap and stayed there. "Did the book say how the boy made the roof stay up?" she asked. Milo frowned. The book had said a great deal about the roof, and he had skipped most of it to get to the room, but one thing came back to him, because it had seemed like magic at the time.

The boy in the book did not dig into loose snow. He cut blocks of snow that had been packed down, and then he left them alone for an hour before he touched them, and when he came back they had turned hard. The book had called it waiting, as if waiting were a tool. Ruby was already on her feet. She did not have a snow saw, and neither did Milo, but she did have the big blue recycling bin from beside the garage, which was square and deep and empty.

Part Three · The Treaty

She packed the bin with snow and stamped it down with her boot until it would hold no more. Then she tipped it over and lifted it away, and a square blue-white block sat on the lawn like something that had been delivered. It was soft, and a finger went right into it. "An hour," said Milo. "The book said an hour." They made eleven more blocks and went inside, and the hour was the hardest part of the whole day.

Ruby's mother gave them cocoa and dry socks and did not ask why two kids who had not spoken that morning were drawing walls on the back of an envelope. Ruby's little brother, who was four and named Dex, wanted to know if the fort would have a dragon. They told him yes, to be nice. When they went back out, the blocks had changed. They were still square and blue-white, but a finger would no longer go into them. A fist would not either.

Ruby knocked on one, and it made a sound like knocking on a door. They looked at each other over the row of blocks, and then, without deciding to, they started to build. The wall went up along the fence, where Ruby's wall had always been. This time it went up in blocks, like bricks, with each block set across the gap below it. Where Milo's trench had filled itself in, they left an opening, one block wide and two blocks high, going straight through from his yard to hers.

They roofed it with three of the hardest blocks, laid flat. Milo crawled in first, on his stomach, and the roof did not sigh, and it did not whump. The light inside was blue, and the sound of the street went away as if somebody had closed a door on it. He came out the other end into Ruby's yard, which was against the rules, except that the rules had changed. The treaty was Ruby's idea, and it was written with a green marker on the flat side of a cereal box.

Article one said the fence was not the line any more. Article two said the wall belonged to both yards, and so did the tunnel. Article three was about the sock, and nobody was allowed to argue about the sock. They signed it and pushed it into the snow at the end of the wall, where the wind could not take it. The porch lights came on at five, first Ruby's and then his, two yellow squares in the blue dark.

Milo crawled into the tunnel from his side, and Ruby crawled in from hers. They met in the middle, lying on their stomachs with their chins on their fists, while the snow began to fall again, small and slow. Then, from the far end of the tunnel, something small began to growl. It was a long, low, terrible growl. A pair of mittens came creeping toward them, then a green hat with felt spikes, then a four-year-old face. "I am the dragon," announced Dex. "I have come for the sock."