The Marsh King's Daughter(44)

The day was sunny and cold. The sun reflecting off the snow was so bright, I had to squint. My father called this kind of weather a January thaw, but nothing was melting today. We sat on the edge of the porch and strapped on our snowshoes. We’d had a lot of snow that winter, and nobody was going anywhere without them. My father made my snowshoes from alder branches and rawhide the winter I was nine. He used a pair of Iversons that belonged to his father. When he got too old to go snowshoeing, my father promised he would give them to me.

We set off at a brisk pace. Now that I was almost as tall as my father, it was no problem keeping up. I didn’t ask where we were going. My father used to surprise me with mystery outings like this, mostly in connection with teaching me how to track, but it had been a while. As I followed him toward the low end of our ridge, I tried to guess our destination. It wasn’t hard. In the rucksack my father carried was a small lidded coffeepot in which to melt snow for tea, six biscuits that were hard as rocks but would soften after we soaked them, four strips of the dried venison and blueberry mixture my father called pemmican, and a jar of blueberry jam, so I knew we wouldn’t be back in time for lunch. My father’s rifle was locked in the storage room and Rambo was tied in the woodshed, so we weren’t going hunting. We were carrying snowshoe poles, which meant we’d be walking a considerable distance. There was nothing between our ridge and the river except a few small ridges I’d already explored, and there was nothing on them that was worth hiking out to see anyway, so these couldn’t be our destination. Taken all together, it was obvious we were heading for the river. I still didn’t know why. I’d seen the river many times and in every season. All I could think was that my father had found some interesting ice formations he wanted to show me. If this was correct, the effort hardly seemed worth it.

When we came to the river at last, I expected my father to turn upstream or down and walk alongside it until we came to whatever it was I was supposed to see. Instead, he walked straight out onto the ice without breaking stride. This was a surprise. The Tahquamenon was swift and at least a hundred feet wide, and while most of the river was frozen, great sections of it were not. Yet my father walked purposefully toward the other side without so much as a backward glance, as if he was walking on solid ground. All I could do was stand on the shore and watch. Normally I’d follow my father wherever he led, but how could he possibly think the river was safe to cross? Ever since I was old enough to roam the marsh by myself, my father had warned me over and over that I must never venture onto the river during winter no matter how solid the ice looked. River ice was nothing like lake ice because of the currents. It could be thick in some places and thin in others—and, unless you were using an ice pole to test the thickness, which my father was not, there was no way to tell. If I fell through the ice into a lake or a pond, I’d be cold and wet but I wouldn’t be in serious danger because marsh lakes and ponds were generally shallow. Even if I had to swim to get to a section where the ice was strong enough to stand on, I would manage. But if I fell into the river, the current would sweep me under the ice faster than I could draw a breath to yell for help, and no one would ever see or hear from me again.

This was what my father had taught me. Yet now he was doing the opposite. I’d always thought of my father as so powerful that he was nearly indestructible. Something like a god. I knew he was human, mortal, but if only half the stories he told were true, my father had gotten himself into and out of many dangerous situations. But not even my father could survive a fall into the river. And death by drowning was not the way I’d choose.

Only maybe . . . maybe this was the point. My father never did anything without a purpose. Maybe this was what he brought me to the river to see. He knew I was afraid of drowning. He also knew I was desperate to explore the other side of the river; I’d asked him to take me across in his canoe many times. I hadn’t figured he knew how claustrophobic the marsh had become for me, or how much I longed to see or do something new, but maybe he did. Either way, he put the two together, the thing I wanted most and the thing I was most afraid of, and brought me to the river so I could face my fear instead of keeping it inside and letting it fester.

Quickly I climbed over the ice blocks along the shore and stepped onto the river before I could change my mind. My heart thudded. Inside my mittens, my hands were damp with sweat. I placed my feet carefully, trying to remember the path my father took so I could follow his footsteps exactly. The ice moved up and down as I walked, like the river was breathing, like it was a living thing and it was offended by this arrogant human girl-child who dared to walk across its frozen surface. I imagined the River Spirit reaching an icy hand up out of the water from one of the many gaps in the ice, grabbing my ankle, and pulling me in. I saw myself looking back from beneath the ice, my hair streaming and my lungs straining as the River Spirit pulled me down and down and down, my face as wide-eyed and terrified as my mother’s.

I kept walking. The brown water rushing past in the open places made me dizzy. My mouth was sour with fear. I looked back to see how far I’d come, then looked at my father to see how far I had to go, and realized it was now just as far to run to safety in one direction as it was in the other. I wanted to stop, wave cheerily at my father to show him how brave and fearless I was. Instead I ran, flying over the ice as fast as a person wearing homemade snowshoes could run. My father stretched out his hand and helped me climb up the riverbank and into the trees. I bent over with my hands on my knees until my breathing slowed. The significance of what I had accomplished was almost overwhelming. I was afraid, but fear didn’t stop me from doing what I wanted to do. This was the lesson my father wanted me to learn. The knowledge filled me with power. I spread my arms wide and looked up into the sky and thanked the Great Spirit for the wisdom he gave my father.