The first flake lands on the window glass and stays a long moment before it goes to water. Another joins it, then four more, then a slow uneven scatter that begins to hold. You are standing at the pine table by the window with your hands flat on the wood, looking out at the clearing. The light has gone the colour of old pewter. The spruces at the edge of the clearing are darkening from the bottom up as their crowns whiten. A kettle ticks on the stove in the corner, not quite at the boil. The cabin smells of cedar kindling and of the wool blanket folded over the back of the chair. You lift your hands from the table and the warmth of them stays behind in two faint prints on the grain.
You cross to the stove and lift the kettle off the plate by its bentwood handle. The iron of the stovetop is dark and matte, scored with long pale lines where pans have slid across it over many winters. You pour the water slowly into an enamel mug with a chipped rim, over a spoon of dried nettle and dried mint from the jar on the shelf. The steam rises in a thin column and then breaks against the cool air above the stove and spreads sideways. You set the kettle back. A small shifting comes from inside the firebox, a log giving up its shape, and a fresh line of heat moves out into the room at knee height and then at shoulder height, unhurried, finding the corners.
Outside, the snow is thickening. You can hear it now, which is to say you can hear how it changes what you could hear before. The creek beyond the woodpile, which had been talking to itself in small clear vowels all afternoon, has gone quieter, as if a cloth has been laid over it. The wind in the spruce tops has softened to a long exhalation. Somewhere further off a branch lets go of its held weight and drops it, a muffled thump, and then the forest returns to its new hush. You stand by the window with the mug warming your palms. A flake meets the glass at eye level and holds its six-pointed shape for a breath before it blurs.
You open the door. Cold comes in against your shins in a slow pour, and with it the smell of the coming weather, iron and green wood and something mineral that lives above the trees in late autumn and only comes down when the air is heavy enough to bring it. You step out onto the porch in your wool socks and stand beneath the overhang. The boards under your feet are rough with a soft silver grain where the rain has raised it over the years. The snow is falling straight down now, without wind, onto the split birch stacked against the cabin wall. Each round of birch holds a little white cap that grows as you watch. The axe is leaning where you left it, its head already dusted, the handle warm-looking against the cold pale of the wood.
You go down the two steps and out a few paces into the clearing. The snow finds your hair, your shoulders, the backs of your hands. It is not cold in the way that bites. It is cold in the way that settles. You tilt your face up for a moment and feel the flakes land and melt at your temples, at the corner of your mouth, on one eyelid. The sky above the clearing is low and even, a single soft grey without seam. You look back at the cabin. The window glows a muted amber from the oil lamp on the table. A thread of smoke is rising from the stovepipe, bending a little to the east where a breath of wind you cannot feel is moving through the upper air. Snow has begun to gather on the slate of the roof, picking out the line of each stone.
Back inside, you close the door and the sounds of the forest muffle again. You pull the wool blanket from the chair and carry it across to the window seat. The cushion there is flattened at the middle from long use, covered in a faded ticking stripe. You sit with your shoulder against the cold pane and your feet drawn up, the mug on the sill beside you. The nettle tea has gone the colour of weak honey. You lift it and take a slow mouthful and feel the heat of it move down into your chest. A bead of condensation runs from the lip of the mug and settles into the wood of the sill, where other beads have settled before, leaving a row of pale rings that the lamplight picks out softly.
The room goes on working around you in its quiet way. The stove breathes in and out through its damper. The kettle, off the heat now, clicks as it cools, one small tick and then another a long moment later. A mouse moves once behind the skirting board, a brief dry rustle, and then is still again, or has gone elsewhere. The oil lamp on the table burns with a steady flame inside its glass chimney, and every so often the flame dips a quarter inch as the wick finds a different grain of itself, and then lifts again. Outside the window, the snow keeps coming. The spruces are fully white now to halfway down their trunks, and the clearing is whitening in a slow unwatchable way, the bare ground showing through in fewer and fewer places, the stumps rounding off into soft shapes.
You draw the blanket up over your knees. The wool is the deep grey of a slate tile, with a single cream stripe along one edge, and it smells faintly of cedar from the chest where it was kept through the summer. Under your hand the weave is coarse and warm, with the slight oiliness of sheep's wool that has not been overwashed. You rest your hand there and watch the window. A single crow crosses the clearing without calling, low and unhurried, and is gone between the trunks. The branch of a young birch at the edge of the porch bends a degree under its load of snow, holds, bends another degree. A clump slides from a higher branch and falls through the lower ones, scattering into powder before it reaches the ground.
The light is going. It goes by degrees you cannot quite catch in the act, the grey of the sky deepening by a shade, the spruces darkening against it, the clearing holding its paleness longer than anything else because of the snow. Inside the cabin the amber of the lamp takes up more of the room as the outside fades. The pine of the walls, which had been honey-coloured in the afternoon, is now a softer brown, and the knots in the boards have become darker eyes. The stove's iron has the faintest red at its seams, visible only if you look away and then back. You look away and then back. The red is there, low and steady, a line of warmth held in the black.
You take another mouthful of tea. The mint comes through now that the tea has cooled a little, a green under-taste beneath the earth of the nettle. You set the mug back on the sill and rest your head against the wooden frame of the window. The glass near your cheek is cold, and the wood is not. A flake lands where your breath has warmed the pane and turns to a small clear bead that slides a half inch down and stops. Another lands above it and does the same. The snow on the outer sill has built to the depth of a knuckle and is smoothing out the corners where the wood meets the stone.
Somewhere in the stove a last small shifting. A log rolling a quarter turn, settling lower into its bed of embers. The kettle is silent now. The lamp burns on. Outside, the snow falls and falls, and the forest takes it without hurry, branch by branch, stone by stone, and the dusk goes on coming down through the trees like a second, slower snow. The window holds its square of grey. The mug cools against your palm. The blanket is warm across your knees. The spruces at the far edge of the clearing have begun to lose their edges against the sky, softening into the larger grey, and the light in the room steps down another degree, and the flakes keep arriving at the glass, each one briefly itself and then part of the gathering white, and the cabin holds its quiet around you, and the snow goes on, and goes on, and