In spite of the tree-cracking cold a number of curious gathered on the shore. They had come not so much to greet Ephraim as to establish whether or not he was an apparition. Ephraim was wearing what appeared to be sealskins and, on closer inspection, a clerical collar as well. Four fringes hung from the borders of his outermost skin, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. Frost clung to his eyelids and nostrils. One cheek had been bitten black by the wind. His inky black beard was snarled with icicles. “Crawling with white snakes,” one of them would say too late, remembering that day. But the eyes were hot, hot and piercing. “I say,” he asked, “what happened to my raven?”
“Hollis shot it dead.”
Ebenezer Watson kicked the runners of the long sled. “Hey, what are these dang things made of?” Certainly it wasn’t the usual.
“Char.”
“What’s that?”
“Fish.”
Ephraim stooped to slip his dogs free of their traces.
“Where are you from?”
“The north, my good fellow.”
“Where … north?”
“Far,” he said.
It was forty below on the lake and blowing. The men, knocking their throbbing feet together, their cheeks flaring crimson with cold, turned their backs to the wind. They retired to the warmth of Crosby’s Hotel, to which a first-class livery was attached. A sign posted in the window read:
WM. CROSBY’S HOTEL
The undersigned, thankful for past favours
bestowed upon this
LONG-ESTABLISHED HOTEL
is determined to conduct this establishment in a
manner that will meet the approbation of the public,
and therefore begs a continuance of Public Patronage.
REFRESHMENTS SERVED AT ANY HOUR
OF DAY OR NIGHT
Wm. Crosby
Proprietor
Ebenezer Watson took a coal-oil lamp to the window and cleared a patch of frost to keep watch.
“What did he mean his raven?”
Ephraim was throwing slabs of bear meat to his leaping dogs, settling them down, and starting to clear snow from a circle of ice with a board, flattening it to his satisfaction. Then he took to stacking goods from his sled on to the ice he had cleared. Animal skins. Pots and pans. A Primus stove. A soapstone bowl or koodlik. A harpoon. Books.
“See that?”
“What?”
“Crazy bastard’s brought reading books with him.”
They watched him pull a rod and what appeared to be a broadsword free of the sled ropes. Then he slipped into his snow-shoes and scrambled up the sloping shore, jumping up and down there, plunging his rod into the snow like one of their wives testing a cake in the oven with a straw from a broom. Finally finding the texture of snow he wanted Ephraim began to carve out large blocks with his sword and carry them back to his flattened circle. He built an igloo with a low entry tunnel facing south. He banked the walls with snow, tended to the seams, and cut more blocks for a windbreak. Then just before he got down on his hands and knees, disappearing inside, he banged a wooden sign into the snow and ice.
CHURCH OF THE MILLENARIANS
Founder
Brother Ephraim
The men turned up early the next morning, fully expecting to find Ephraim dead. Frozen stiff. Instead they discovered him squatting over a hole in the ice, taking a perch, setting the eye in the hook, taking another, starting over again. He threw some of the perch to his dogs, some he stacked on the ice, and now and then he nimbly skinned one, filleted it, and gulped it down raw. He also harpooned two landlocked salmon and a sturgeon. But it was something else that troubled the men. Clearly Ephraim had already found the yard in the woods where the deer wintered, walled in by some seven feet of snow into a trap of their own making. A buck hung on a pine pole lodged in the ice. Obviously it had just been dressed. The dogs, their snouts smeared with blood, were tearing into the still-steaming lungs and intestines that had been tossed to them.
“You shouldn’ta told him I kilt his bird,” Luther Hollis said.
“You scared?”
“The hell I am, Mister Man. I figger he’s only passing through.”
“Ask him.”
“You ask him.”
It continued overcast, the fugitive sun no more than a milky stain in a wash of grey sky. The men stopped counting the cracking trees or bunting pipes or exploding bottles. The temperature sank to fifty below. The men checked out Ephraim the next morning and he was still there, and the morning after and he was still there. The fourth morning the men had something else on their minds. Luther Hollis had been found hanging from a rafter in his sawmill. Dead by his own hand, apparently. He hadn’t been robbed, but neither had he left a note. It was baffling. Then, even as the men were deliberating, Crosby’s boy came running up to them. “I talked to him,” he said.
“Wipe your nose.”
But they were impressed.
“He told me he was something called a Four by Two. What’s that?”
Nobody knew.
“He invited me inside, eh, and it’s really cosy, and I got to see some of the stuff he has in there.”
“Like what?”
“Like he has a book by Shakespeare and cutlery in sterling silver with crests of some kind on them and a blanket made of the skin of white wolves and a drawing in an oak frame of a ship with three masts called Erebus.”
The Reverend Columbus Green knew Greek. “Erebus,” he said, “is the name of the place of darkness, between Earth and Hades.”
The cold broke, the wind gathered force, and it began to snow so thick that a man, leaning into the wind, squinting, still couldn’t see more than two feet ahead of him. Overnight the drifting snow buried roads and railway tracks. The blizzard blew for three days and then the sun rose in a blue sky so hard it seemed to be bolted into place. On Friday the men who had waited things out in Crosby’s Hotel found that the only exit was through a second-floor window.
Ephraim was still in place. But now there were three more igloos on the lake, many more yelping dogs, and what Ebenezer Watson described as dark little slanty-eyed men and women everywhere, unloading things. Ebenezer, and some of the others, maintained a watch from the window in Crosby’s Hotel. When the first evening star appeared they saw the little dark men, beating on skin drums, parading their women before them to the entry tunnel of Ephraim’s igloo. Ephraim appeared, wearing a black silk top hat and fringed white shawl with vertical black stripes. Then the little men stepped forward one by one, thrusting their women before them, extolling their merits in an animated manner. Oblivious of the cold, a young woman raised her sealskin parka and jiggled her bare breasts.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Whatever them Millenarians is it’s sure as shit a lot more fun than what we got.”
Finally Ephraim pointed at one, nodded at another, and they quickly scrambled into his igloo. The men, beating on their drums, led the remaining women back to their igloos, punching and kicking them. An hour later they were back, all of them, and one after another they crawled into Ephraim’s igloo. There was a good deal of hollering and singing and clapping and what sounded like dancing. The Reverend Columbus Green, who had been urgently sent for, bundled up and listened by the shore, not going too close or staying too long, a Bible held to his breast. Then he reported to the men waiting in Crosby’s Hotel. “I think they are singing in the language of the Lord in there,” he said.