Mad Bear and Ted came back to him and asked what was up. “I think the Little People live here,” Logan said. “I could swear they’ve been around here.”
Winter stayed late in 2005, and Easter came so early that part of western New York was still covered in white on the holy Sunday. In midafternoon, I went for a long ski tour in the hilly country south of Buffalo. Usually I like to keep a pace on fast tracks at a park or touring center, but a couple of times a winter, I go for tours like this.
Five minutes after I started, I was on an old logging road. To my right was a creek, on my left a short, steep slope. Something low to my left caught my eye: a perfect wheel of wet snow, a foot across, like the stone hoops high on the walls of the Mayan ball courts, and perpendicular like they were to the course of human activity. This one was at the base of a steep, white bank, twenty feet high. Its symmetry was remarkable, its sides five inches thick, the same as the hole through which passed its axle of air. I could have flicked it with my pole from the center of the road. I came back to study it.
It was the oddest natural thing I had ever seen in the woods. It seemed spun by wind or magic. A four-foot groove ran from it up the white slope. If nature had made it, it was most likely that something had fallen from the tree above it and rolled itself into this snow wheel. Still, it looked improbable. Human artists could only have made it with a mold. It should have collapsed under its own weight. And the snow that held it was so old, it was moist and gray at the edges. The night before had been turbulent. How had it lasted?
Curious works of nature or ones cleverly wrought, particularly into the shapes of circles, were thought works of the Little People by old cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. I could envision the fairy children at play, scooping into the white and rolling themselves a snow wheel, casting their baby spells to hold its form, fixing it like a marker or a monument to bemuse passing humans.
The Thursday before had been a full moon, and Michael Bastine and I had been storytelling in East Aurora. Maybe the fairy children had been working even then and heard themselves called. Almost expecting to see the prints of tiny hands and feet beside the snow wheel, I looked up from the groove to the tree from which it came.
The chief of the bank, this maple was strange in itself. It stood like a champion, bigger and bolder than its line of neighbors, a king to the whippy bushes that huddled at its roots. Its bare fellows were smooth barked and full-set on top of the bank. This one’s truculent roots showed like a maw of tangled teeth where the bank had worn away, either that or a gate to a world behind it. Pockets in its surface looked like little mouths or caves. Knots and gnarls in the bark above were the features of merry gnomes. What were they like at midnight! Did they grin, and move, and laugh with other trees! Did their squinty eyes glow! A thought came to me, something that Michael would probably say if he saw it: This tree was of the Little People.
I started skiing again, wondering if a bit of Mike’s intuition had rubbed off on me. That snow hoop had seemed like a gate or an arch marking the entry to another realm.
The skiing was surprisingly fast for so warm a day. The top inch was soft, but March’s freezes and thaws had left a hard, heavy base. In wooded areas, it could feel like full winter again. Still, connecting patches were thin, and rain was counted on for that night. This would be the last day anyone could ski this loop, surely the last long tour of the year in these parts. The thin sun alone might settle it that afternoon. Ah well, that tour was a good one for good-bye; I’d said farewell to other winters on that course. I thought about the seasons.
It’s rare for one to turn so dramatically, I thought, to be so clearly winter full of natural skiing and then snap to climatic spring overnight. A clean cut was better, I thought, one last ceremony of good skiing, than weeks of to and fro.
The winding, wooded trail opened on a bare hillside facing north. The city was there, as bright as where I was, but warmer and snowless. The streets were full of people coming and going from churches and gatherings, the women in their flowers and pastels, maybe hoping through their imagery to encourage the April to come. They’d had enough of snow—as had the world.
It was after equinox, and the whole continent hurled itself away from winter. I had skied back into it as if for a breath of time, a point of stasis in which things might fall clear, as if to catch back some important thought or mood whose only chance to be understood was to feel within it, while it could still be imaginatively held. Maybe this gesture into the natural cycles was what my life as a writer is about, to bring back things that should not be lost and hold them until people learn from them.
By the time I came out under open sky, I realized that I had been thinking about ancestors, and my own elders, all passed to the other side. On days like that—Easter—they seem close. Their memories passed before me.
The men in my family had dropped quickly, and to
