'Some Kind of Grace,' a holiday essay by Margi Preus

It was after Christmas and before New Year's, at the seam of the year, the coldest time, when it is mostly night.

It was night. A long time ago, maybe about 1978.

I was standing on the deck of a small cabin on a lake just outside the BWCA. Why I was outside escapes me — perhaps, since there was no running water in the cabin, I had just brushed my teeth, and now was listening for the ice to let out one of those long, groaning booms or a shivery, lightning-like crackle. But at this moment the lake is silent, the quiet as thick as Christmas pudding, padded by feet of soft snow and miles of nobody. Just me and the crunch of snow underfoot, a measly sound in all this stillness.

From within the cabin, I can hear the shuffling of feet as my two companions pack their backpacks. They have a cockamamie scheme to ski across the BWCA, from one end to the other. It wouldn't be such a cockamamie idea, except that the decision is spontaneously made. There's been no planning; they'll leave tomorrow with what clothes they have and what food they can scrounge from the cabin: a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, two boxes of mac and cheese, a bottle of hot sauce.

My job will be to meet them with the car at the far end of their trek.

So they're inside packing; I'm out here, taking one more listen because there is something … some odd sound, so small, or so distant. Is it a sound? Or is it my imagination? The remnant of a memory? A shred of regret?

I look at the dog. Did I mention there was a dog? He stands attentive, his face inscrutable. He seems to be listening to something, his head cocked, his eyes intently staring at the black distance.

The guys come out. "Listen," I demand and they still their feet, to stop the snow from complaining.

They listen. It takes a while to pick it out.

"It's an owl."

"A coyote."

"A wolf."

We put on our boots, jackets, hats, mitts and, finally, skis, and ski out onto the lake. And stop. You have to stop completely, even stop breathing, to really hear anything.

We've heard that stars make a humming sound, and the Northern Lights make noise, crackling or clapping, maybe — so say the people who live in the far, far north. The sound we hear now is thin and vague and unlikely, trailing off the way a falling star fades from view.

We'll go a little farther and try again.

The lake rolls out, a long starlit path. Our headlamps cast bobbing pools of light ahead of us. Our breath, a frosty vapor, trails behind. There are no shadows, as the moon has not declared itself. On this cold, clear night the stars are brittle bits of ice in the sky, a sky that's as dark and unending as the forest that stretches north and north and farther north.

We stop again, try to stop breathing in order to listen. It seems there is nothing — not a sound, not even a dog barking in the distance.

It could be a loon, but, no — of course the loons are long gone this time of year.

No, it comes to us with a kind of horror that what we've been hearing is the pathetically thin voice of a human being crying, "Help me."

That in itself is heart-stopping enough, but even worse is that we can't tell where the sound is coming from. The lake is long, the wilderness vast, stretching from here to Hudson's Bay. This person could be anywhere.

We look at each other, our headlamp beams whitewashing each other's faces.

We look at the dog; the dog looks at us, his eyes glowing eerily in the glare of the headlamp. Inscrutable.

We stop again to listen, to try to discern if we are going toward the voice or away. It's agony, the time it takes to be quiet; it feels as if it takes forever to stop the skis from shuffling, to quiet our rustling windbreakers, to stop breathing, to still our hearts. Do we have this kind of time? You can't help fearing that you won't hear it again. That you're too late, it's over; it makes your heart pound in your ears, the fear of it, and then that's all you can hear — your heart pounding.

So we go on, skiing down the long sleeve of the lake, not knowing where we are going, just toward some thin voice that is or isn't real. We don't know if we're going in the right direction, now, or in our lives generally, although of course we aren't thinking of that. We can't see past our headlamps and so can't see where, in the future, our three lives will diverge.

Never mind about that. Right now we are all just worried about the person attached to that voice, lost or hurt, in the darkness. Nothing good can happen until we find the source of the voice!

And even then … even then we can't be sure that all will be well, can we? Still we plunge on, not knowing. There's so much not knowing on that night; the amount of unknowing is as deep as the dark sky, and as vast as this forest.

Now I can't remember. Did the dog lead us? On the far end of the lake, there was a landing and a little dirt road. Nowadays there are probably places along there, lit with electricity. There is probably a blinking cell tower now — that would have changed things in this story considerably — but for the better? Let us see.

He is hatless. You can practically see the heat escaping off the top of his head. Along with his sense — his jacket flaps open. No gloves, either, and it's got to be 10 below zero.

We're not far from the only other cabin on this lake, a place belonging to a trapper, and we get the boy there. The cabin is warm inside; the windows are steamy from a kettle of water on the woodstove, the whole place redolent of wet wool, kerosene, tobacco and muskrat musk.

The trapper is an old man. Yes, he is old, and yes, he is a trapper. I'm not making him up. He doesn't seem surprised when we impose on him in the middle of the night — he's awake, he says, and automatically puts the coffee on. He throws grounds into a big enamel pot and lets the stuff boil on the stove.

We piece together something from the boy's incoherent ramblings about a party, a ride, being dropped off, staying with friends. He is beyond lost.

The old man's eyes are sharp, but without a hint of surprise. He's seen a lot in his many years in the woods. He puts a cup of hot slurry in the young man's hands and says, "You gotta wear a hat. You can die without a hat."

But during the night the carcass froze shut and the boy couldn't get out. A sorry way to end his life, he thought for a while, until he heard voices: his dad and brother. About time.

"Dad!" the boy yelled, but they didn't seem to hear him. He could hear the two of them talking out there — what a find this was, a nice moose, what should they do with it. And so on.

"Dad! Dad!" the boy yelled. He called out his brother's name — his name escapes me now. But they couldn't hear him.

The old man pauses. "Ha," he laughs. "You know, I can't remember how it ends."

We look at our own rescued boy. He is silent, shivering.

How will this kid remember this night in the trapper's cabin, the one warm, glowing place of refuge for miles and miles and miles, and he, through some kind of grace, and somebody happening to be brushing her teeth outside on a subzero night — he is in it and alive and being talked to by a kind old Joseph sort of guy, who doesn't ask questions, just makes coffee and puts some straw in the manger, or in this case, moves his traps off the couch and retrieves a crocheted afghan for a blanket. Not to push the metaphor, but it does smell like a stable in there.

We leave the boy curled up on the lumpy couch under the afghan and step out into the great North Woods again. It's as vast, deep and dark as God, frightening in its immensity and mystery. It can kill you, this place. You stumble around in it hatless, gloveless, lost, but then somehow, instead of being killed, you are swept out of the darkness and into light, into steamy warmth; a cup of muddy coffee finds its way into your hands.

Someday, you'll look back and think: Did that really happen? It seems like a made-up story, like, say, the story of the boy who crawled into a moose carcass — but you lived it, you say to yourself, so it must have been real.

For now, the three skiers head down the long ribbon of lake, under the stars which may or may not be humming away up there, the dog trotting ahead, sure of where he's going. In the morning the guys, giving no thought to the previous night's portent, will set off on their ski trek with their mac 'n' cheese and hot sauce. The drive on snow-slick Hwy. 1 in the fishtailing Chevy will probably be the more dangerous enterprise, but, somehow, you'll all live through it.

Margi Preus is the author of "Heart of a Samurai," "Shadow on the Mountain" and "West of the Moon." Her mystery for young adults, "Enchantment Lake," will be published in March by the University of Minnesota Press.