She had thought she was someone else, but now she realized she was wrong. That girl was as real as the smoke on the mountains that turns out to be rain, as the cry of the animal that sounds like a child but is not. That girl would never survive here.
But if she was not that child, who was she?
She was something new—something rolled from the snow.
In the dark she hugged herself. Snow girl, she said to herself. I am snow girl.
There is no census here, Ranger Dave had said, but Naomi suspected otherwise.
There was always a census—whether written in the scratchy pad of a farm boss checking off the field hands, or recorded in the head of an old woman who can recite the complete genealogy of every single resident going back three generations.
The key was finding it.
After rising, Naomi did a set of push-ups in her room. She was diligent about keeping in shape, following the training she had in self-defense classes. The hiking was good, but keeping her upper body strong and capable was important. Warm with glow, she grabbed a muffin off the counter of the diner and headed out.
The office for land management was in the hamlet of Stubbed Toe Creek, at the bottom of the mountain range road the Culvers had taken several years before. The hamlet looked like a long-ago village, the homes with steep roofs so the snow would slip off. An icy river tumbled nearby over green rocks.
Naomi parked on the main street near a bakery, where the group of mountain climbers she had seen at the motel were gathered, laughing and drinking coffee from steaming cups. The heady smell of doughnuts sailed out the window. A sign advertised homemade fudge.
Farther down the street a butcher shop with windows covered in white paper had prices for wild game processing—add extra fat for a fee—as well as homemade elk jerky. The locals going into the butcher shop looked much different than the climbers outside the bakery—hoary old men in oilcloth coats and their ageless sons carrying rifles as easily as their own hands. In front of the butcher shop was a dented truck with an elk lying casually in the back, a ribbon of blood running down the gate.
“I’d like to look at your homestead claims,” Naomi told the clerk in the small office inside a large drafty town hall that also contained a tiny library and an interesting-looking historical museum. The clerk was a middle-aged woman with bouffant hair, wearing a lime green top and pants that lit up the somber room. She was the kind of helper Naomi had often met over the years: the town historian, gossip, and librarian all rolled into one. Naomi, naturally friendly, had learned to appreciate these helpers, and show her gratitude.
There were over forty claims. Naomi spread them over a long table. The claims went back a century: faded papers ornate with cursive script and flowery language. To All Who Are Present, Greetings. Some of them were so old that President Theodore Roosevelt had signed them. Others were more recent, up until a few decades past.
The claims were written in a language Naomi didn’t understand. One hundred and sixty acres at the northwest quarter of section two in township three south of range five east of the Willamette meridian . . .
She rubbed her forehead. She would figure it out.
“Confusing, isn’t it?” The clerk smiled from the counter.
She came over, showing Naomi how to locate the claims on her map. Her warm stomach pressed lightly against Naomi’s arm: it was soothing.
“Most these claims were for a hundred sixty acres,” the woman explained. “No one needed that much for a cabin, but that was how the land came. The government was thinking of farming, even though it’s pretty clear this ain’t farming country.”
The clerk picked up a claim: Desmond Strikes. She located the area quickly enough, using her stubby pencil to draw the claim on the map. It was on the road below where Madison went missing. “Now, this one is easy. This is the Strikes claim. It’s still got a store on it. His grandson runs it now.”
Naomi didn’t say anything, only smiled encouragingly.
The clerk picked up another one. “Now this one was for what we call the Devil’s District, ’cause of all the wolverines used to be up there, before they got hunted out.” She showed Naomi where on the map the claim lay, in the higher reaches.
Naomi thought of the glacial forests: beautiful but inhospitable.
“But why take a claim here?”
The clerk smiled back. “You got to remember, Oregon was built on timber and trapping. It was fur traders and trappers that created the Oregon Trail. When the Homestead Act came along, some thought, Hey, my own piece of land to live off. They weren’t thinking how hard it would be.”
“How many stayed?”
“Well . . . the fur trade has lasted longer here than most places. We still got some trappers around. You’ll see them—look like mountain men all right.” She gave a merry laugh. “Used to be the land was valuable because of the trees on it. Then the government put a stop to that, so no one much wanted it anymore. Some came for gold, only to be shown for fools. But nowadays you got to inherit the claim. Otherwise it’s all government land.”
Naomi had a sudden image: a little girl, her leg caught in a trap, mewling in pain, lost in a forest.
“You sound like you know a lot.”
“My grandfather was a trapper. He had a cabin way up on Mink River. We used to snowshoe in when I was a kid.”
“What happened to it?”
“Lord, don’t know—it’s been years. Probably in ruins.”
“Is there any way to know if someone has been camping on one of these claims?”
The clerk laughed a bit, her belly shaking in the lime green top. “They’d be welcome to it.”
By the time they were done marking her map it was after lunch, and the clerk looked tired. Naomi felt she owed the lady coffee. She brought back a hot mocha from the bakery down the street, along with a small box of wrapped fudge. The clerk accepted the fudge like her grandmother had made it, and in this hamlet, she might have.
Naomi held the sheaf of claims out to her. “Do you have a way to make copies?”
“Of course,” the woman said. “Got a copier in the back.” She paused a moment, and asked deferentially: “You a historian?”
“Of a sort.” Naomi smiled.
Naomi stepped outside to a clear sky. The high mountains, all white, beckoned above her.
She drove back up the mountains, wanting to use the last hours of the day to search.
Naomi was beginning to enjoy her time in the forest, despite the sadness of her call. She could see tiny red-throated birds on the snow. She could hear the loud whapping sound of an owl in the dark trees. Overhead hawks circled, moving so slowly they seemed part of the sky. Several times she had seen eagles, their throats as white as the snow below them.
The forest was alive.
Bear hair on a tree. A sky like an upside-down gold pan raining sleet that left stars in her hair. A musky smell from afar: a skunk traveling fast—she could see his black-striped, humping form. Towards the end of the day, before the sky or her watch told her night was coming, the sound of wolves awakened the dusk.
Jerome would like this, she found herself thinking, with her eyes on a dazzling set of cedar trees set like signposts in the wild.
Jerome always saw the beauty in everything, even her.
It was too sad of a thought for Naomi, and she began to run, a bit, in the snow, feeling like a foolish child, and then a crying one. She lay down and made a snow angel, and when she arose she saw the crescent of her bottom, the sweep of her hips, and she was reminded she was a woman after all.