Beyond the window of my father's shop, midwinter light skims
the snow. My father stands, straightening his back.

"How
was school?" he asks. "Good," I say.

He puts his sander down and reaches for his jacket on a hook. I run
my hand along the surface of the table. The wood is floury with
dust, but satin underneath.

"You ready?" he asks. "I'm ready," I say.

My father and I leave his workshop in the barn and walk out into
the cold. The air, dry and still, hurts my nose as I breathe. We
lace up our snowshoes and bang them hard against the crust. A rust
color is on the bark, and the sun is making purple shadows behind
the trees. From time to time the light sends up a sheen of pocked
glass.

We move at a good clip, dodging pine boughs, occasionally catching
a shower on the back of the neck. My father says, "I feel like a
dog let out to exercise at the end of the day."

The stillness of the forest is always a surprise, as if an audience
had quieted for a performance. Beneath the hush I can hear the
rustle of dead leaves, the snap of a twig, a brook running under a
skin of ice. Beyond the woods there's the hollow road-whine of a
truck on Route 89, the drone of a plane headed into Lebanon. We
follow a path that is familiar, that will end at a stone wall near
the summit. The wall, square on three sides, once bordered a
farmer's property. The house and barn are gone, and only the
foundations remain. When we reach the wall, my father will
sometimes sit on it and have a cigarette.

I am twelve on this mid-December afternoon (though I am thirty
now), and I don't know yet that puberty is just around the corner,
or that the relentless narcissism of a teenage girl will make
walking in the woods with my father just about the last thing I'll
want to do on any given day after school. Taking a hike together is
a habit my father and I have grown into. My father spends too many
hours bent to his work, and I know he needs to get outside.

After the table is finished, my father will put it in the front
room with the other furniture he has made. Fourteen pieces in two
years isn't much of an output, but he's had to teach himself from
books. What he can't learn from manuals, he asks a man called
Sweetser down at the hardware store. My father's furniture is
simple and rudimentary, and that is fine with him. It has a decent
line and a passable finish, though none of that matters. What
matters is that the work keeps him busy and is unlike anything he
has ever done before.

A branch snaps and scratches my cheek. The sun sets. We have maybe
twenty minutes left of decent light. The route back to the house is
easy all the way down and can be done in less than ten. We still
have time to reach the wall.

I hear the first cry then, and I think it is a cat. I stop under a
canopy of pine and listen, and there it is again. A rhythmic cry, a
wail.

"Dad," I say. I take a step toward the sound, but as abruptly as it
began, it ends. Behind me snow falls with a muted thump onto the
crust.

"A cat," my father says.

We begin the steep climb up the hill. My feet feel heavy at the
ends of my legs. When we reach the summit, my father will judge the
light, and if there's time he'll sit on the stone wall and see if
he can make out our house - a smidgen of yellow through the trees.
"There," he will say to me, pointing down the hill, "can
you see it now?" My father has lost the weight of a once sedentary
man.

His jeans are threadbare in the thighs and tinged with the rusty
fur of sawdust. At best he shaves only every other day. His parka
is beige, stained with spots of oil and grease and pine pitch. He
cuts his hair himself, and his blue eyes are always a
surprise.

I follow his tracks and pride myself that I no longer have any
trouble keeping up with him. Over his shoulder he tosses me a
Werther's candy, and I catch it on the fly. I pull off my mittens,
tuck them under my arm, and begin to unwrap the cellophane. As I do
I hear the distant thunk of a car door shutting.

We listen to the sound of an engine revving. It seems to come from
the direction of a motel on the northeast side of the hill. The
entrance to the motel is further out of town than the road that
leads to our house, and we seldom have a reason to drive by it.
Still, I know it is there, and I sometimes see it through the trees
on our walks - a low, red-shingled building that does a decent
business in the ski season.

I hear a third cry then - heartbreaking, beseeching, winding down
to shuddering.

"Hey!" my father calls.

In his snowshoes he begins to run as best he can in the direction
of the cry. Every dozen steps he stops, letting the sound guide
him. I follow, and the sky darkens as we go. He takes a flashlight
from his pocket and switches it on. "Dad," I say, panic rising in
my chest.

The beam of light jiggles on the snow as he runs. My father begins
to sweep the flashlight in an arc, back and forth, side to side.
The moon lifts off the horizon, a companion in our search.

"Anybody there?" he calls out.

We move laterally around the base of the slope. The flashlight
flickers off and my father shakes it to reconnect the batteries. It
slips out of his glove and falls into a soft pocket of snow beside
a tree, making an eerie cone of light beneath the crust. He bends
to pick it up, and as he raises himself, the light catches on a
patch of blue plaid through the trees.

"Hello!" he calls. The woods are silent, mocking him, as if this
were a game.

My father waves the flashlight back and forth. I'm wondering if we
shouldn't turn around and head back to the house. It's dangerous in
the woods at night; it's too easy to get lost. My father makes
another pass with the flashlight, and then another, and it seems he
has to make twenty passes before he catches again the patch of blue
plaid. There's a sleeping bag in the snow, a corner of flannel
turned over at its opening.

"Stay here," my father says.

I watch my father run forward in his showshoes, the way one
sometimes does in dreams - unable to make the legs move fast
enough. He crouches for better leverage and keeps a steady bead on
the bag. When he reaches the plaid flannel, he tears it open. I
hear him make a sound unlike any I have ever heard before. He falls
to his knees in the snow.

"Dad!" I shout, already running toward him.

My arms are flailing, and it feels as though someone is pushing
against my chest. My hat falls off, but I keep on clumping through
the snow. I am breathing hard when I reach him, and he doesn't tell
me to go away. I look down at the sleeping bag.

A small face gazes up at me, the eyes wide despite their many
folds. The spiky black hair is gelled with birth matter. The baby
is wrapped in a bloody towel, and its lips are blue.

My father bends his cheek to the tiny mouth. I know enough not to
make a sound.

With one swift movement he gathers up the icy sleeping bag, presses
it close to him, and stands. But the material is cheap and
slippery, and he can't get a decent grip. I hold my arms out to
catch the baby.

He kneels again in the snow. He sets his bundle down, unzips his
jacket, and tears open his flannel shirt, the buttons popping as he
goes. He unwraps the infant from the bloody towel. Six inches of
something I will later learn is cord hang from the baby's navel. My
father puts the child close to his skin, holding the head upright
in the palm of one hand. Without even knowing that I've looked, I
understand the infant is a girl.

My father staggers to his feet. He wraps his flannel shirt and
parka around the child, folding the jacket tight with his arms. He
shifts his bundle to make a closed package. "Nicky," my father
says.

I look up at him.

"Hold on to my jacket if you need to," he says, "but don't let
yourself get more than a foot or two behind me." I grab the edge of
his parka.

"Keep your head down and watch my feet."

We move by the smell of smoke. Sometimes we have the scent, and
sometimes we don't. I can see the silhouettes of trees, but not
their branches.

"Hang in there," my father says, but I don't know if it is to me or
to the infant against his chest that he is speaking.

We half slide, half run down the long hill, my thighs burning with
the strain. My father lost the flashlight when he left the sleeping
bag in the snow, and there isn't time to go back for it. We move
through the trees, and the boughs scratch my face. My hair and neck
are soaked from melted snow that freezes again on my forehead. From
time to time I feel a rising fear: We are lost, and we won't get
the baby out in time. She will die in my father's arms. No, no, I
tell myself, we won't let that happen. If we miss the house, we'll
eventually hit the highway. We have to. I see the light from a lamp
in my father's workshop.

"Dad, look," I say.

The last hundred yards seems the longest distance I have ever run
in my life. I open the door and brace it for my father. We wear our
snowshoes into the barn, the bamboo and gut slapping as we make our
way to the wood-stove. My father sits in a chair. He opens his
jacket and looks down at the tiny face. The baby's eyes are closed,
the lips still bluish. He puts the back of his hand to the mouth,
and from the way he closes his eyes I can tell that she's
breathing.

I unlace my snowshoes and then undo my father's. "An ambulance
won't make it up the hill," my father says. Holding the child
against his skin, he stands. "Come with me."

We move out the barn door, along the passageway to the house, and
into the back hallway. My father takes the stairs two at a time and
turns into his bedroom. Clothes litter the floor, and a fan of
magazines is on the bed. I hardly ever go into my father's bedroom.
He snatches up a sweater but tosses it away because of the
roughness of the yarn. He gathers up a flannel shirt and realizes
that it hasn't yet been washed. In the corner is a blue plastic
laundry basket that my father and I take to the Laundromat every
week or so. Betweentimes he uses it as a kind of bureau
drawer.

"Hand me that," he says, pointing.

With one arm, he sweeps the magazines from the bed. I set the
laundry basket on the mattress. He takes the baby out, wraps her in
two clean flannel shirts, front to back, the small face above the
folds. He makes a nest of sheets in the basket, and then he lays
the infant gently in. "Okay then," he says to steady himself. "Okay
now."

I climb into the truck. My father sets the basket on my lap.

"You all right?" he asks.

I nod, knowing that no other answer is at all possible. My father
gets into the truck and puts the key into the ignition. I know he's
praying that the engine will start. It catches the first try only
half the time in winter. The engine coughs, and he coaxes it to a
whine. I'm afraid to look at the infant in the plastic basket,
afraid I won't see the tiny puffs of breath in the frigid air,
mimicking my own.

My father drives as fast as he dares. I grit my teeth in the ruts.
The frozen lane is ridged up from the early snows and thaws of the
fall. In the spring, before the town comes by to grade it, the road
will be nearly impassable. Last spring, during a two-week melt, I
had to stay at my friend Jo's house so that I could go to school.
My father, who had taken great pains to be alone, finally walked
into town one day, both to see his daughter and to break his cabin
fever.

Marion, who tends the register at Remy's, tried to bring him home
in her Isuzu, but she couldn't make it past the first bend. My
father had to walk the rest of the distance, and his calf muscles
ached for days.

The baby snorts and startles me. She gives a wail, and even in the
weak light from the dashboard, I can see the angry red of her skin.
My father puts his hand out to touch her. "Atta girl," he whispers
in the dark.

He keeps his hand lightly on the soft mound of flannel shirts. I
wonder if the motion of soothing Clara is coming back to him now
and hurting his chest. The road down the hill seems longer than I
remembered it. I hope the baby will cry all the way to Mercy.

My father guns the engine when he hits the pavement, and the truck
fishtails from ice in the treads. He pushes the speedometer as high
as he can without losing control.

We pass the Mobil station and the bank and the one-room elementary
school from which I graduated just the year before. I wonder if my
father will stop at Remy's and hand the baby over to Marion, who
could call for an ambulance.

But my father bypasses the store, because stopping will only delay
what he's already doing - delivering the infant to someone who will
know what to do with her. We drive past the small village green
that is used as a skating rink in winter. In the middle is a
flagpole with a spotlight on it.

Who left the baby in the sleeping bag?

My father turns at the sign for Mercy. The driveway to the hospital
is lined with yellow lights, and I can see the baby, scrunching her
face, ugly now. But I remember the eyes looking up at me in the
woods - dark eyes, still and watchful. My father pulls up to
Emergency and leans on the horn.

The door on my side swings open, and a security guard in uniform
pushes his face into the truck.

"What's the horn for?" he asks.

Excerpted from LIGHT ON SNOW © Copyright 2004 by Anita
Shreve. Reprinted with permission by Little, Brown and Company, an
imprint of Time Warner Bookmark. All rights reserved.