The Winter Count

Part One · The Survey Line

Kit had a secret, and it lay face down at the bottom of her backpack. She had been pleading to join the winter count since she was eight, and in the January she turned twelve her mother finally agreed, on three conditions: that she wore every layer she was issued, that she remained within arm's reach on the riverbank, and that she did not, under any circumstances, complain about the snowshoes. Kit accepted all three in the kitchen, where it was easy. Her mother was a wildlife biologist for the state, and every winter, the morning after a fresh snowfall, she walked the same seven miles of the Callow River valley and tallied the tracks of every creature that had crossed it overnight: deer, fox, coyote, hare, mink, otter, and the delicate embroidery of mice. The survey stretched back forty years, preserved in a row of green binders on a shelf in her office, and Kit had read every one of them.

She had read them for one particular reason. On the second page of the oldest binder, in handwriting that slanted like rain, the very first biologist on the survey had recorded the track of a lynx crossing the river below Hob's Bend, and nobody had documented one in the valley since. There was a column for lynx on every tally sheet, and for four decades it had remained conspicuously empty. Kit's mother explained that lynx probably still drifted through the high country occasionally, following the snowshoe hares that were by far their favorite food, but that a valley so close to farms and roads was a different matter, and that Kit was not to get her hopes up. Kit promised that she would not. Then she packed a notebook with a page already headed LYNX, which she kept face down at the bottom of her pack, in case anybody noticed it.

The first obstacle, as it turned out, was largely her own feet. The snowshoes were broad aluminum frames with a rubbery deck and a binding that never quite fitted her boots, and for the first hour she floundered along in them like somebody carrying two trays, treading on her own edges and toppling sideways into the powder while her mother waited patiently and did not laugh. The valley itself was profoundly still. The river had frozen from bank to bank, white and lumpy, with a dark seam of open water showing here and there where the current ran swiftly, and the spruces on both slopes drooped beneath their burdens of snow. Their survey route followed the northern bank, and they never ventured onto the ice. Kit's mother said the river belonged to the animals, who were lighter, and who understood things about ice that people did not.

Every set of tracks they encountered involved the same ritual, and Kit had memorized it by the third set. First they halted well short of it, so as not to trample anything. Then her mother laid down an orange plastic card printed with a ruler in black centimeters, directly beside the clearest print, and photographed it from straight above, so that anybody examining the picture years later would know exactly how large the track had been. Then she measured the width of the print, its length, and the distance between strides, and recorded everything in pencil, because ink froze. Kit considered this an excessive amount of ceremony for a deer. Her mother said that a track without a scale in the photograph was not evidence, merely an anecdote, and that the binders were trustworthy precisely because nobody had ever skipped the card, not once in forty years, not even for deer.

She also explained, with the patience of somebody who had instructed innumerable volunteers, why so many of the tracks were concentrated on the river rather than in the forest. Animals in winter were miserly with their energy, she said, because every stride through deep snow consumed warmth and fuel that they could not easily replace, so they traveled along the easiest routes available, much the way people used sidewalks: frozen streams, packed trails, the margins of fields, the lines of fallen logs. The river was the valley's principal highway. By noon Kit had observed the evidence everywhere, the tidy dotted line of a fox trotting straight down the center of the ice, deer crossing in a churned and trampled crowd, and the distinctive prints of snowshoe hares, two long hind feet planted ahead of two small front ones, clustered thickly wherever the willows grew down to the water.

Around two o'clock, in an open field above the bank, they discovered the most peculiar evidence of the entire expedition. A line of mouse prints, tiny as stitches, meandered across the snow and terminated in the middle of nowhere. Beside the last print lay a deep impression the size of a doormat, with feathery lines fanning out on either side, as though somebody had lain down in the snow and made a snow angel with enormous wings. Kit crouched over it for a long, astonished moment. Her mother explained, very quietly, that an owl had descended out of the darkness during the night, captured its dinner in a single soundless pounce, and departed, and that the snow had preserved a perfect copy of the wingtips. Kit gazed up at the empty gray sky, and felt the way a person feels upon realizing that somebody has been observing her for hours.

Part Two · The Wrong Cat

It was shortly after a lunch of half-frozen sandwiches, below the old stone bridge, that Kit discovered the cat tracks. They descended out of a thicket of alder and crossed the bank in front of her, round prints in a straight line, with four toe pads and a broad heel pad and, as far as she could tell, no claw marks whatsoever, and she knew from the field guide that dogs and foxes usually displayed their claws, while cats kept theirs retracted. Her heart began to pound so violently that she could hear it in her ears. She did not shout, because her mother had instructed her never to shout near tracks, but she produced a sound that was remarkably close to a shout, and her mother came shuffling over on her snowshoes, crouched, and laid the orange card down beside the clearest print.

The card delivered its unambiguous verdict in approximately four seconds. The prints were barely three centimeters across, scarcely wider than a large coin, and they had sunk deep into the soft snow, almost to the tops of the toes. Her mother pointed silently along the trail, which led back up the bank toward the Halvorsen farm, where a stout orange cat was sitting on a fence post in the sunshine, observing them with an expression of tremendous self-satisfaction, like a tiny landlord who has just collected the rent. Kit's face went hot with embarrassment despite the temperature. Her mother said that it was a cat track, and an excellent one, and that Kit had interpreted it correctly; it was only the cat that was wrong. She photographed it anyway, with the card, as conscientiously as if it were a tiger, and entered it under domestic cat, and the empty column for lynx remained empty.

For the next mile Kit, mortified, did not examine a single track, however interesting. She stared at her snowshoes, which had finally begun to cooperate, and contemplated how foolish she had been, and the page in her notebook headed LYNX, and whether it was possible to tear a page out of a notebook inside a backpack while walking. Then, because there was nothing else to look at, she began to notice, gradually, the snowshoes themselves, the way they distributed her weight so widely across the surface that she sank only an inch or two, while her mother's boot, when she stepped off her frame to clamber over a log, plunged in almost to the knee. She remembered the cat tracks, small and deep. And she remembered a paragraph in the field guide that she had read without really considering it, about the lynx.

A lynx, the field guide explained, had enormous feet for its size, wide and round and so densely furred underneath that in winter they functioned exactly like snowshoes, allowing it to bound across soft snow after hares that would otherwise escape. A lynx track would not resemble a slightly larger cat track. It would be astonishingly wide, perhaps as wide as her mother's palm, blurred at the edges by fur, and shallow for its size, because the animal's weight was distributed so broadly. Kit realized that she had been searching for the wrong thing all morning, an ordinary cat, only bigger. What she ought to be searching for was something that traveled across the snow the way she now did, as though it weighed practically nothing. And she knew where to search, too, because she knew precisely what a lynx ate, and where its dinner congregated.

Part Three · The Side Creek

She asked her mother to stop, and showed her the page in the notebook, which was still headed LYNX, and explained, almost in a single breath, about the snowshoes and the hares and the willows. Every hare track they had encountered that day had been crowded near the side creek that descended from the north and joined the river just above Hob's Bend, where the willows grew thickest, and the side creek was frozen too, a narrow white corridor leading up into the forest. If a lynx ventured down into the valley at all, Kit argued, it would follow the hares, and it would follow the easiest available path to reach them. The side creek was not on the official survey route. Her mother considered her for a moment, then her watch, and then the sky, and announced that they had an hour of reliable daylight, and that one hour was exactly what they would take.

They followed the creek upstream along its bank, single file, with Kit in front for the first time all day and her mother close behind her. The forest closed in overhead, dark spruce and the pale trunks of birches, and the snow beneath the trees was deep and soft and muffled every sound, even their breathing, and there were hare tracks everywhere, crossing and recrossing the creek like stitching. Twenty minutes upstream, where the creek curved around a boulder the size of a car, Kit stopped so abruptly that her mother bumped into her. Coming down the frozen creek toward them, in a straight, unhurried line, was a row of enormous round prints, each one as wide as her mother's open hand, soft at the edges, without a single claw mark, and pressed so lightly into the snow that they were hardly more than shadows.

Neither of them said anything. Her mother handed Kit the orange card, which she had never done before, and Kit laid it beside the clearest print with her mittens off and her fingers trembling, and her mother photographed it from directly above, then again, then once more from the side, and finally measured it twice. The tracks were fresh, she murmured, from last night or early this morning. They descended the creek, paused at the boulder, and turned for a few strides toward the open valley below, as though something had stood there among the trees and surveyed the river with great interest. Kit felt the back of her neck prickle, not unpleasantly, the way it does at the beginning of a story you already suspect you will love. Then she glanced up the creek. Between two dark spruces, for less than a second, she distinguished a pair of ears with black tips, perfectly motionless. She blinked, and there was only snow, and neither of them ever completely agreed about what they had seen.

That evening, at the kitchen table, her mother opened the newest green binder to a fresh tally sheet and slid it across to Kit, along with the pencil. Kit wrote the date and the location, Hob's Creek, twenty minutes above the river, and then, in the column that had been empty for forty years, she wrote the number one, small and neat, and sat contemplating it. The photographs glowed on the laptop beside her: a huge, soft paw print in blue evening snow, with the orange card lying beside it, its black centimeters crisp and straight. It was not an anecdote. It was evidence, and anybody could verify it, in forty years or in a hundred. Kit tore the page headed LYNX out of her notebook after all, very carefully, and taped it inside the cover of the binder, where the next person would find it. The following morning she mailed the Halvorsens a photograph of the prints, with a note thanking their cat for the excellent practice. The cat, her mother reported afterward, had not been impressed.