For the tens of thousands of years that these narrow valleys and abrupt hillsides have been populated by human beings, life has been characterized by winter, not summer. Warm weather, high blue skies and sunshine, flowers and showers — these are the aberrations. What is normal is snow from early November well into May; normal is week after week of low zinc-gray overcast skies; is ice that cracks and booms as, closer every night to the bottom of the lake, a new layer of water cools, contracts and freezes beneath the layer of old ice above it.
There are, as it happens, two crucially different climate zones that are divided by an invisible line running across New Hampshire, drawn from Vermont in the southwest corner of the state near Keene, through Concord in the center of the state to the lakes north of Rochester in the east and on into Maine. When, south of that line, in November and December and again in March and April, it rains, north of that line the lakes are still frozen over and it snows. The land is tilted higher in the north, is rockier, less arable, with glacial corrugations like heavy-knuckled fingers reaching down toward the broad alluvial valleys and low rolling hills of Massachusetts and Connecticut and the coastal plain of eastern New Hampshire and Maine. South of that unmapped line, the climate is characterized by weather typical of most of the northeastern industrial United States; north of it, the weather is typical of eastern Canada.
This has been the case since the autumn of the year of the first appearance of human beings in the region — late-arriving bands of Pleistocene hunters drifting south and east all the way from Asia behind the herds of elk and woolly mammoths — and it remains true today, so that, not surprisingly, the lives of the people residing south of that line from the beginning seem to have reflected the generosity and temperance of the climate there, while those who have lived north of it have reflected in their daily lives the astringency, the sheer malignity and the dull extreme of the climate there. It is the difference, let us say, between China and Mongolia, or between England and Scotland, Michigan and Manitoba: people adapt, or they quickly die. Or they move.
Thus, when in autumn in the town of Lawford the first ice and snow of winter arrive — usually in early November, sometimes even earlier — the natives, whether Pleistocene or modern, do not look up in surprise and dismay and hurry to prepare their houses for the coming season. No, they barely notice winter’s arrival. They barely noticed its absence in the first place. The ice in the deeper lakes did not break up until late April, and there were gray patches of old snow in the deep woods and on the north slopes well into May. The nights were not reliably free of frost until June, and then it returned by late August, when leaves of maple trees and sumacs near water turned red and birches turned gold. Every day long black V’s of Canada geese flew over, and soon the leaves of the oaks and hemlocks, elm, hawthorn and birch, were turned out in brilliant colors — deep red, flame yellow, pink, purple and scarlet. By the first week of October, whole long gray days passed without the temperature’s rising above freezing, while the leaves, their colors dulled by the cold, tumbled from the trees and swirled in the autumn winds, and stalks and reeds clattered in the icy clasp of the marshes and ponds, and animals drew into their caves for a six months’ sleep.
When the snows do come, it is as natural and as inescapable and in some sense as welcome as gravity. Starting long after midnight, a clear starry sky with a sickle of moon in the southeast fills slowly with low dark gray clouds, until the sky is covered from horizon to horizon and all the light seems to have been wiped from the valley, every dot of it, every pale reflection, every memory. The first scattered flakes drift almost accidentally down, as if spilled while carted by a high wind to somewhere east of here, to the Maritimes or New Brunswick: a single hard dry flake, then several more, then a hundred, a thousand, too many to be seen as separate from one another anymore: until at last the snow is falling over the valley and the hills and lakes like a lacy soft eiderdown billowing out and settling over the entire region, covering the trees, the rocks and ridges, the old stone walls, the fields and meadows behind the houses in town and out along Route 29, the roofs of the houses, barns and trailers, the tops of cars and trucks, the roads, lanes, driveways and parking lots: covering and transforming everything in the last few moments of the night, so that when at dawn the day and the month truly begin, winter too will have arrived, returned, seeming never to have left.
The burgundy 4x4 pickup driven by Jack Hewitt left Route 29 at Parker Mountain Road and lunged down to the narrow wooden bridge, where it crossed the Minuit River and headed uphill, through the woods and past occasional trailers, half-finished ranch houses and now and then, set in among the trees, a tar-paper-covered shack with a rusty tin stovepipe sticking out of the roof, a gray string of wood smoke disappearing quickly into the falling snow. The truck headed toward Saddleback, moving fast along the rough unpaved road, blowing high fantails of snow behind and kicking up loose stones and dirt with its huge knobby tires.
It rumbled past the Whitehouse place, the house where Wade and I grew up and where our parents still lived, crossed Saddleback and continued on to Parker Mountain. Seated next to Jack was a man named Evan Twombley. He was a large burly man dressed in brand-new scarlet wool pants, jacket and cap. He smoked a cigarette that he kept jammed into the right side of his mouth while he talked out of the left. It was a very busy man’s way of talking and smoking at the same time, and it had the desired effect: even when he spoke idly, he was listened to.
Although one could not be sure Jack was listening. His head was canted slightly to the side, a characteristic pose, and his lips were pursed, as if he were silently whistling and was listening to the tune in his head instead of to Twombley, who, after all, was only expressing slight anxiety about the weather and its effect on the deer hunting, and this after Jack had already assured him that it would have no effect whatsoever, except to make it easier for the hunters.
Twombley seemed unable to accept Jack’s reassurances. “I mean, it’s not enough snow, and won’t be for a while. Not for tracking the bastards,” Twombley said. “There’s no advantage there, kid. And it’ll be hard, you know, to see very well in the damned stuff.”
Three rifles, two with scopes, hung in the rack against the rear window of the cab, and all three swung and clunked against the rack in tandem as the truck dipped into a gully and out. The incline got steeper, and Jack double-clutched and shifted down, and the truck leapt ahead.
Jack said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Twombley, I know where those suckers are. Rain or shine, snow or no snow, I know where they hide. I know deer, Mr. Twombley, and this particular piece of land. We’ll kill us a buck today. Guaranteed. Before ten.” He laughed lightly.
“Guaranteed, eh?”
“Yep,” he said. “Guaranteed. And it’s because of the snow. We’ll be still-hunting, see, instead of stand-hunting. This here is your best snow for tracking, actually, real powdery and dry, couple inches deep. You don’t want no foot-deep wet stuff. Right about now the does are holing up for the day in brush piles, and the bucks’re right behind them. And here we come right behind the bucks. I guarantee,” he said, “this gun gets fired before ten o’clock.”
Jack crooked his thumb at the rifle hung from the bottom hook of the rack behind him. “Whether it kills a deer or not is more or less up to you, of course. I can’t guarantee that much. But I’ll put you inside thirty, thirty-five yards of a buck the first four hours of the season. That’s what you’re paying me for, ain’t it?”