Snowfall (The Snowfall Trilogy, Book 1) - Hardcover

Mitchell Smith is the author of critically-acclaimed novels of suspense, including Reprisal, Sacrifice, and Karma. His evocations of the natural world and of human nature, as in Due North, earned him a devoted readership. Smith has also written a trilogy of near-future, post-apocalpytic novels which illuminate what the Earth might be like after the next Ice Age: Snowfall, Kingdom River, and Moonrise.

Smith and his family live in Washington state.

Snowfall
1Sam Monroe was leading a two-day hunt. He had three Olsens and William Weber with him.The five men, all senior hunters except William, were the left hand of a two-hand hunt of the last winter herd. Six other men, Olsen-Monroes and Richardsons, were playing right-hand, swinging wide to the west around the flank of Alvin Mountain to hunt the stragglers as the caribou trailed by. They had taken the dogs and sleds with them.Sam Monroe was a big man, like all the men in his family, with heavy shoulders and a thick, muscled belly. His face was broad, deep-lined, and wind-beaters, burned the color of seasoned wood by more than forty-six years of sunlight glaring off snow. His hair, mustache, and beard were cropped short and grizzled gray.Old for a Trapper, he was still strong and enduring, so breathed easily after their long climb up the glacier's col. Sam had never cared for slit-goggles, which, it seemed to him, made too narrow a world, so he left them in his parka pocket and squinted into the brightness of late-afternoon sunlight on the snow, surveying the great river of ice.The Trappers called this glacier "The Old Man." It cut across their hunt country from north to south, paralleling the route of the great herds. Above the hunters, the glacier narrowed to only a mile or so as it shouldered its way between the two mountain peaks--Alvin, to the west; Mount Geary rising even higher to the east.The river of ice was frozen in immense curtains, laceworks thousands of feet high, draped and festooned one upon the other as if a torrential mountain flood had suddenly been halted, stopped still in its race and rapids, and turned instantly to stone, perfectly white, glittering now in June sunlight.Its stillness was deceptive. Among those enormous cataracts of ice were blue-black crevasses so deep that a large stone droppedinto them soundlessly vanished, dwindled into darkness ... and was gone, with no echo heard of its fall ending."They ran down the ridge." Sam Monroe pushed back his parka hood and stood leaning on his bow."More'll be along." Jim Olsen was a tall bony man with a thin, fierce face. He was eleven years younger than Sam, and preferred to lead the hunts he went on.And the truth is, Sam thought, the bastard is a good hunter. He had a momentary vision of himself, older, his knees stiffened, trailing along behind the others while Jim Olsen led them. He imagined the men turning to look back down the trail at him trying to catch up ... shaking their heads, saying to each other, "Why doesn't the old man stay home?""We're not going to wait up here, hoping they'll herd high. We'll go down for outrunners." Sam pulled up his parka hood. He was dressed, like the others, in dark-brown caribou hides cut and sewn into soft trousers, and a loose-fitting parka trimmed with wolf and lynx. His high moccasins were lined with fur and double-soled with elk leather, piss-tanned and boiled.He led them over the east ridge at a trot. As they crossed it, the Wall loomed into view behind Mount Alvin's peak. Blue-white in the distance, the Wall ran across the mountain range west to east, horizon to horizon. 
 
The Olsen-Monroes and other families of the Range had been told--by travelers stopping by to beg a hunt, and by Salesmen come to trade old-steel, southern paper, or copybooks for fur--that the ice-wall ran from the Atlantic Sea, thousands of mapmiles to the east, all the way past the Range to the Pacific Sea, where people in water-boats hunted swimming seals.The Wall was almost a mile high. The Trappers hunted along its base in the winter, sometimes, before the spring thaw. Then it became too dangerous. Clouds gathered along its rim, andstorms crashed and thundered down the cliffs, so fools prayed to Weather to spare them, forgetting their copy-Bible.In the three weeks of summer, great pieces of the Wall broke free and toppled from it, so the earth shook. Sometimes waterfalls poured down from the crest and foamed high surf in flooding lakes. These cataracts stopped toward the end of August, when all froze and became silent again.Over the glacier ridge and down the flank of Mount Alvin, Sam led the hunters through late afternoon, never stopping to rest. After a while, the five Trappers left deep snow for thin snow, then thin snow for granite, and finally left that, and went down into the spruce and hemlock that forested the base of the mountain.They made good time through these dark-green woods. Old snow and spruce needles crunched softly beneath their moccasin boots as they trotted along in single file. They carried yew longbows, each almost as long as its owner was tall, in their left hands. Thick hemlock branches plucked at the full quivers strapped to their backs, and caught at their arms and legs as they passed.Even in deep green shade, the men could see the scattered tracks and occasional dung droppings that a small group of caribou had left when they split from the great herd to feed.When he paused and bent to test it, the dung was still warm in Sam's fingers.They trotted, almost silently, for another little while, then stopped. Standing still, the Trappers could hear through a rising breeze the very faint, soft, clicking sounds of moving caribou. The men silently braced and strung their heavy bows, then slid long arrows from their quivers. The arrows were perfectly made, strictly straight, and well polished. They were fletched with goose night-feathers--edge-tinted in trade powder-paint with each Trapper's family colors--and tipped with broad hunting-heads filed from fine-hammered steel. Each arrow was banded in a hunter's personal pattern of narrow stripes, painted with evergreen sap and rock ochre.Their bows ready, arrows nocked to strings of twisted thread-stripped tendon, the five men spread out and moved quietly down through the trees. The breeze was slightly stronger now as daylight dimmed, and they moved only when its slow chill gusts came through, so their sounds became the wind's sounds. At last they reached the border of a small clearing, deep in soft old snow and dotted with sprigs of seedling spruce.The caribou were there. A branch-antlered buck, a younger buck in velvet, and a doe and her fawn were grazing along the clearing's other edge.Sam stood watching the animals from a screen of hemlock. He saw a flicker of motion to his right, a distance along the clearing's edge. Shit. It would be William, for sure. The boy is shaking that branch as if there were August blueberries on it!Sam decided not to wait. He stepped out from behind the brush as he drew his longbow, touched the arrow's feathers to his cheek, and released.His bow pulled ninety Warm-time pounds, and the long arrow sprang from it humming. Across the clearing, the young buck had only time to come alert before the broadhead struck him, chopped into his chest, and knocked him down.An instant later, Sam heard a bow-string twang behind him. Jim Olsen, he thought, and the arrow flashed across to take the older buck through the throat as the doe and her fawn leaped and landed running, crashing away through the evergreens.The Trappers ran to the fallen bucks, drawing long double-edged knives from their belts. Sam and Jim, by custom, cut their own kills' throats, and touched their foreheads with bloody fingers. Then the bucks were strung up into branches by their heel tendons, and the men gathered round and butchered them. They tied off the bowels, drew out the guts, bellies, livers, spleens, gall, lungs, and hearts ... . Then rumps, hams, ribs, and loins were butchered out and wrapped with the innards in the fresh hides, to make heavy bundles for carrying."William," Sam said, but smiling, since they'd taken so muchgood meat, "--when are you going to learn to be still in the woods?"The Olsens nodded, and William said, "I was still." Younger than the other men, stocky, and with lighter-colored hair, William Weber ate so much that in the summer weeks he had fat on his body."Never still and never quiet," Jim Olsen said. "You fart loud enough to scare the herds away." The men laughed.William, his face red, started to answer, and an arrow struck him in the back.Very much as the caribou had, he gave a little jump and started to run. But Sam seized him as he staggered near, and dove with him into the evergreens as Jim and the other two Olsens jumped into cover beside them.For a moment, they all crouched silent in the greenwood, brush, arrows nocked to their bowstrings.William groaned and tried to sit up, and the shaft stuck into the small of his back moved as if it were driving deeper into him. Jim leaned over to hold William still, and get a better look at the arrow. It was slender, painted black with pitch, and fletched with owl feathers."Tribesmen," Olsen said. "That's a Cree arrow.""Why?" Tom Olsen spoke softly. He was young, not much older than William. "They've come down before, and they never hurt anybody!"Now they have, Sam thought. Pitch arrows, short wood-and-sinew bows. Soft puffs of fur around the string just below the bow-tips, to ruffle the twang of the shot. And more than one of them out there, to take on five Trappers.Jim was staring at him, waiting for a decision."All right. Pick William up and let's get out of here."The three Olsens--Jim, Tom, and a cousin named Chapman--took William's bow and quiver, then lifted him up and slid quickly back into the denser forest behind them. Sam stayed, down on one knee, his longbow held horizontal and half-drawn, watching for a Cree to show himself.But nothing human stirred across the clearing, only small branches shifting in the breeze gusting down from the glacier ridge. The big blotches of ...