The storm came down out of the northwest on the third day of February, 1858, and by the time Sorley Dace understood it was not going to pass in an afternoon, the creek below his cabin had vanished and the tamaracks along the bog had gone from black to grey to nothing at all.
He had lived alone on the upper Namekagon for six winters. He knew the shape of a bad storm the way a man knows the creak of his own stairs. This one had a low, steady voice to it, not the shrieking kind that blew itself out by dark but the kind that settled in and meant to stay. He brought in wood until his arms shook. He banked the fire, set a kettle of beans at the back of the hearth, filled every bucket he owned with snow to melt, and strung a rope from the door to the woodpile and from the woodpile to the little lean-to where his mule, Deacon, stood with his ears flattened and his breath smoking.
By dusk the wind had found every chink he had ever failed to chink. He stuffed moss and rag into the cracks along the north wall and sat close to the fire with a blanket over his shoulders, mending a snowshoe lacing by feel more than sight. It was the kind of night when a man alone has too much room in his head. He had built the cabin that way on purpose, a single room, low, sixteen feet by fourteen, so that there would never be a corner he could not see from his chair. Still the corners filled up with things.
He did not hear the first knock. He heard the second because it was not a knock at all but the flat of a hand striking the door three times, and then a voice, a man's voice, calling a word into the wind that the wind took away.
Sorley stood so fast the snowshoe clattered off his knee. Nobody came up the Namekagon in February. The logging crews were thirty miles south on the Chippewa, the trader at the forks had gone down to La Pointe before freeze-up, and the nearest cabin belonged to a Norwegian named Halvard who would not have walked a hundred yards in this weather for his own mother. He took the rifle down from its pegs, then stood holding it, feeling foolish, and set it back. Whoever was out there was asking to come in, not breaking down the door. He lifted the bar.