Paras’s coat was thicker this year than it had ever been—if she were still at the racetrack, Rania would have clipped her by now, and she would be wearing blankets, light during the day, heavy at night, and even a wool square over her haunches during training. Her coat kept her plenty warm, though—as long as she stayed fairly dry, it fluffed up nicely whenever she moved around. Trotting about, really moving, was the most warming thing, but she was, as always, careful in her choice of when and where to get this exercise. Her fluffy coat was the reason, when she left Anaïs this time (honey, shredded beets in the oats!), that she got back to the pond without realizing what Frida pointed out after she jumped over the fence. Frida said, “You do understand that you’re covered with snow, don’t you?” Frida was lying with her forelegs and her hind legs curled underneath herself. Now that she thought about it, Paras could just feel a little cold weight along her spine. She put her head down and shook herself. Snow lifted off and fluttered around her. Where it landed, she touched it with her nose. It was light and intriguing.
Frida said, “Look where you came from.”
Paras turned around. She hadn’t thought she was trotting through snow. She knew snow—quite often it crunched under your hooves. Once, when she was a yearling, she and her three companions had been let out in new snow. They had frolicked and floundered, the thin, frozen surface giving way so that they dropped through it and then leapt out of it again. Now she saw that the whiteness receded into the distance, and there, in a long line, leading to the spot where she had jumped the fence, were her hoofprints, round and dark in the smooth, blank field. Frida said, “You’d better hope that those fill in by morning.”
Paras looked upward. The air was thick with sparkling flakes; a light breeze whirled them around, but they fell and fell, into her face, into her eyes. She glanced at the pond—it was white, too, around the edge. Paras crunched through the ice until it was in fragments around her cannon bones, cold and sharp. The water in the middle was covered with a film of ice that was not yet white, but almost. She tapped it with her nose; it broke; she took a long, freezing drink.
Frida sighed.
Paras suspected that she was thinking sad thoughts—she had come to understand that many of Frida’s thoughts were sad, that there had been that human who had mysteriously disappeared, that without a human a dog was a little ill-at-ease in a way that a horse was not. Dogs, evidently, saw humans as friends, whereas horses saw them as co-workers. “Well,” said Paras, with her newfound sense that everything would work out, “at the moment, I’m tired and full, so I’ll sleep, and then we’ll see.”
“What are you full of?” said Frida.
Paras pretended not to hear. For now, she wanted to keep Anaïs to herself; anyway, she didn’t think Frida would care for oats.
After Paras curled up and went to sleep, Frida lay still for a long time, trying to keep her feet warm and her nose curled under her knee, but more than once, she could not resist looking at those hoofprints. Finally, she rose to her feet and slinked away, looking back once to see if Paras had awakened, but no—not even her ears flicked. Frida knew from her recent experience that a horse didn’t sleep as much as a dog did, but she was asleep now. Frida took off at a run.
Frida could follow the hoofprints perfectly well—not only by sight, but also by smell, and the fact of the matter was that even a human would notice that Paras had defecated on the dirt road to the north of the pond. What surprised her was that the hoofprints went to the other side of the Champ de Mars, away, from Jérôme’s shop, toward the Avenue de Suffren, a street Frida had explored several times and had never found of the least interest. She might have enjoyed exploring the soccer field, but the fence was too high, and she might have visited one of the dogs she heard barking in the area, but all of them seemed to be safely locked in upstairs rooms. She had visited one vegetable shop, but the man there stayed inside, unlike Jérôme, and none of the customers had noticed her. Nevertheless, the hoofprints stopped at this shop. As far as Frida could tell, everything all up and down this block was closed up tight. She sniffed all the doorsills, growled at a couple of cats but asked no questions, and looked at the hoofprints again. Next to the vegetable shop was a bakery. Frida paused, put her forefeet on the windowsill. The light was dim, and she could see nothing. The glass was cold, with frost creeping upward in tendrils; she could smell nothing. In frustration, she gave a little whine. The door opened, and someone wrapped in white exclaimed, “Out! Out! Get away, bad dog!” Frida backed up into the dark street, and ran off. It was snowing harder now—Paras’s hoofprints had nearly disappeared. When she got back to the abutment, Paras hadn’t moved, and Nancy was so soundly asleep that she didn’t even flinch when Frida touched her with her nose. Nancy, she thought, was a fool—a dog was a dog, and a mallard was a mallard. Frida might exert all of her willpower but still be overcome by instinct, especially if Nancy were to move, but Nancy remained as still as a rock—her feathers, fluffed, were chilled, too. And so instinct did not kick in. Frida lay down in her spot and thought happily about carrying her bag to her usual shops early in the morning, when Jérôme was just taking in supplies and organizing them. He might give her something ugly—something that humans would not like, but that was fine with a dog. He’d done that before. She fell asleep and dreamed of a nice knucklebone.
Paras woke up first, and she did not understand where she was. Something was hanging over her. Something else was all around her. The only warm spot was right beneath her chest. She shook her head and blew out her nostrils, and the air that came out was a white fog. Then she shook herself, and with that, the whiteness encompassing her splintered and fell in little pillows to the ground. She realized that it was snow, that the branches that normally arced above her as she slept had been weighted down with it. They now trembled and lifted, and she could see the world. Not that there was much to see—the earth was white, the trees were white, the pond was white, the sky was white, and the air, too, was still white with flakes drifting downward in the stillness. She turned her head. Snow was mounded against her side almost to her withers. She made her skin shiver; the snow shivered, too, and slipped off.
It was only then that she began to feel cold, and to feel cold meant, as always for a horse, that she had to move. She stretched her foreleg and started to stand up, but Frida was there instantly, saying, “Be careful! Be careful!” She dropped two carrots in front of Paras’s nose. How disappointing‚ they were tasteless, floppy carrots—but she ate them. Frida pressed closer. She said, “The snow is higher than my chest. I had to bound over to the market. It took me forever and was exhausting. I could hardly bring anything back. The streets are not much better than the Champ. No cars anywhere.”