East

He spotted the tracks in the fresh snow outside of his cabin first thing that morning and felt a sense of dread within the deepest pits of his gut.

There had only been a handful of times that a wandering hunter had found themselves on his land in the last few decades but all of those times he had been acutely aware of their presence, watching quietly from the corner of his cabin window, rifle tensely in hand, until they moved on— as they always did. But none had ever come close to the cabin and certainly none had ever slipped by him undetected. Perhaps he had begun letting his guard down after so many years of careful diligence or maybe his keen senses were finally beginning to fade. He didn’t know which he feared more—being found or losing his wits. He knew the wilderness preys on weak old men.

The tracks were odd for every reason. They were too brazen in how they crossed directly in front of his cabin as if taunting him with their discovery. But he also considered how their path seemed too straight and intentional, as if the destination were not his cabin, but the lake beyond. The lake was frozen solid this time of year allowing for easy passage into the forests but this was something only someone with knowledge of the lake and of his lands could know. Not only did the winds and frigid temperatures make survival outdoors for more than mere minutes impossible —but most baffling were the print themselves… small and slender as if belonging to a woman or even a child and barefoot with the noticeable imprint of the heel and toes.

The winds began to pick up blowing the fresh snow in a whirlwind that would soon dissolve all traces of the mysteriously lain prints. The howling, whipping winds burned his exposed flesh. He briefly considered going back inside to warm himself by the fire or to retrieve his rifle, but the tracks were calling to him, beckoning him to follow. He began trekking towards the lake—aware that his skin was turning raw and that his body would most certainly freeze before his return.

He found himself in the vast open space surrounded by pines. If one hadn’t known that a sheet of sleek icy glass lay concealed beneath its snowy surface, it would appear to be just a meadow blanketed in snow within a dense forest. He knew the exact spot where the icy shoreline began and there he stopped and waited, unsure why he was there or what to do next. His eyes caught movement up ahead of a figure with long dark hair in a thin white dress, her back towards him, walking slowly and methodically over the snow-covered lake.

These wild and hostile lands were home to just two types of men—those who were bound to it by blood whose bodies were well adapted to thrive in its harshness or those who fled to it out of desperation and a willingness to take their chances at survival. His grandfather, being of the latter, had spoken to him of the ancients’ stories about these lands, had spoken of a woman who came from the east, the direction of new beginnings who would guide a weary traveler away onto his next destination. He remembered his grandfather speaking of seeing such an unusual woman on these lands more than once as he approached the end of his life. He worried that the old man was going crazy after so many years of isolation. Watching the ghostly form before him now, he was unsure whether the woman was indeed a ghost or a hallucination. Perhaps he was becoming a crazy old man himself. That is what these lands did to men like him who did not belong. Men like him awaiting judgement.

He had felt this sensation before. The searing pain throughout his limbs that gave way to numbness. His mind wandered dreamily in and out of lucidity. As a young boy he had come to live with his grandfather in the rustic old cabin. Young and inexperienced in the ways of the wilderness, he had attempted to cross the thawing lake too late that first spring and had plunged into its frozen depths. The seizing cold that overtook his body made him unable to breathe. He recalled the familiar sensation of slipping away, standing at the threshold of something that felt as welcoming as an embrace and easy as a nap.

The last thing he remembered before the peaceful sleep overtook him was the image of the delicate figure in white walking towards him from across the icy lake.

.......

He opened his eyes in his own bed, lids heavy and his thoughts foggy. He heard the crackle of a fire and felt a wave of warmth on his skin. Kneeling down in front of the stove, was the ghostly woman, tending to the fire. He studied her. Her paleness was a deathly white that matched her snow-colored dress. Her black hair hung long and heavy over her back. Her legs and feet were bare and dirty but revealed marble skin un-reddened from cold. He wondered if blood pumped through them at all.

“You…” He croaked almost inaudibly, his throat and vocal cords constricted from freeze. She glanced up at him and her stark black and white features were softened by unusual grey colored eyes that appeared gentle and human.

“I hope you don’t mind that I undressed you from those wet clothes.” She pointed to his clothes which were laid out neatly before the fire.

He stared at her in disbelief.

“I dragged you back here,” she explained. “By your feet. You’re quite heavy. Your lips were blue and your body was stiff with cold.”

He continued to gape at her in stunned silence.

“I’ll make you something warm to drink,” she said rising to her feet. “That may help you find your voice.”

The little cabin contained just one room, built by his late grandfather who had survived decades of long bitter winters within the same old drafty walls until the wilderness had finally taken him. He thought about how he himself had left the cabin and his grandfather once many years ago, a young man with big dreams of leaving this place behind once and for all and making his own way in the civilized world. But when life veered far from his plan and broke him of all hopes and dreams, he traveled back by foot in the safety of the night’s darkness for months—arriving finally at the old abandoned cabin that was to be both his sanctuary and prison.

He watched the woman fill the iron kettle and place it upon the stove. Even if his vocal cords hadn’t been recovering from freeze, he still would have struggled with formulating words as it had been decades since he had last spoken them out loud to someone other than himself. But despite this, she seemed to already know his questions.

“You’ve been unconscious since this morning,” she told him handing him his mug of steaming murky coffee. He took a sip that felt as if it seared his insides from throat to gut. He watched her, remembering at once the dread he felt when he first came across the tracks in the snow.

“Who… are you?” he asked in a long loud whisper, regaining command of his tongue.

“East,” she replied.

He hesitated. “…Your… name is… East?”

“Yes.”

East. The last word he had spoken aloud to another person. As a younger man on his way to a life of exile, an unsuspecting stranger he had come across on his journey casually asked where he was heading. “East” had been his response. Towards the cabin where he would forever remain. With that one word, he knew that she knew everything about him. How and why he had ended up at that cabin. What he had done. Dread and regret filled him.

“Why are you here?” He asked her.

She silently took a seat in his chair by the fire and gazed at him with those ice colored eyes. “To take you across the lake,” she said finally.

“You could have taken me before.” He scoffed, “no reason to bring me back here to coddle me.”

She smiled warmly. “You fell before the lake,” She explained. “You need to regain your strength so we can cross it together.”

As he tried to make sense in his mind of what was happening, she stood up and walked over to his bedside. Speaking gently and directly she told him, “Now that you are awake and able you can come with me. We will keep traveling east over the lake and beyond the forest.” Since his near drowning as a boy, he had never stepped foot onto the frozen lake, never traveled further east than its shoreline, and it terrified him that she knew this.

“I don’t understand. Where would we go?” he said.

“Once you come with me, you’ll see that you don’t mind the cold anymore. And you will no longer be afraid of walking on the frozen lake.”

He lay there pondering this request. How weary he had grown from decades of isolation and loneliness. How exhausted he was of being afraid. How the bleak cold that seeped into his old aching bones and never left, had become a burden too great to bear. How tempting death’s peaceful offering had been for him. A gust of icy wind rattled loudly against the drafty old windows—the wilderness taunting him, reminding him that it waited, just as it had for his grandfather and every man that turned old before him.

.......

Together they trekked through the calm snows under a moon lit sky. East led the way until they stood at the same spot where the ice began and she turned to look at him. She met his eyes and smiled and he understood that she wasn’t exactly a woman or a ghost—but something else entirely.

“Are you ready?” she asked reaching out her hand to him. He glanced back in the direction of the shabby old cabin in the distance, but the longing to return was gone. He nodded, taking her cold hand is his and stepped tentatively onto the powdery surface and the icy depths beneath. She was right that the cold no longer bothered him, instead it felt as warm and inviting as those final moments in the frozen lake as a boy. Together they continued east on a path he had started on long ago but with a destination that lay much further than the frozen lake and the forests beyond.