Snow Hunters: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

faces as close as they could to his and moved their fingers in front of him. Unable to understand what was happening, Peng’s head twitched. The fear centered on his lips.
    They stripped him of his clothes. They found some food he had been hiding. They took everything.
    There had been a wager to see if Peng was really blind.
    He spent the morning in his coat and nothing elseuntil a guard, his amusement fading, found him a spare set of clothes. There were no spare boots and so they took turns wearing Yohan’s. He was given dressings to wrap over his feet. The rest he wrapped over his eyes.
    Crossing a field that afternoon, Peng stopped. He looked out toward the mill.
    He said, —I’m waiting for someone to die. For a dead man’s boots.
    Then he dropped the bucket of water he had been carrying and pressed his hands against his face and his shoulders shook. In the field the water spread and froze. And Yohan, for a moment, was unable to move, looking down, shocked at the sudden appearance of their reflection.
    •  •  •
    A doctor once wrote Yohan’s name on a piece of paper, in English, with a pencil, and gave it to him, though whether that was how it was spelled the doctor did not know, he had guessed. Yohan slipped the paper into his shirt pocket and in the nights he would open it and stare at his name written in another language for the first time. And he would memorize the letters, saying each one in silence, extending the muscles of his tongue, his mouth even then forming shapes unfamiliar to him.
    It was how he would spell his name; he would use those letters the doctor had imagined for him and call them his own.
    All these faces he no longer remembered, just some of the parts. Where they had been and how they were wounded, whom he buried and who lived, all of them the years could not retain. They were now remnants. How he once watched a man bring a ladle of water to a friend’s cracked lips. How a man, naked in the winter, washed himself in a corner with the warmth of the used laundry water. Two men once attempted to escape, only to return the next day with their wrists bound. How one of them reached for the guard’s rifle and placed it into his mouth.
    How clean were the eyes of the dead.
    In that last year, long after Peng was gone, he was brought to a table where there was a basket of clothes and a sewing machine. And that doctor who had written his name showed him how to operate the machine and then headed toward the corner of the field tent to rest, sitting on a wooden chair with a book on his lap. In the warmer nights he slept there because it was easier, because there were not enough of them for the shifts.
    And as Yohan mended whatever clothes he could, trying and starting over, the doctor read aloud from thebook so that the guards and the wounded could hear as well, and they all turned to him as he flipped the pages with his stained fingers.
    In those times, in that vast tent in the field, there was only his voice, a steady wind, the whistle of glass, and a story.



4
    I n the fall, Yohan climbed to the top of the hill town. He passed the church where the road ended and crossed a sloped meadow, heading toward the tree on the ridge.
    The tree was tall and had been shaped by the wind. Its branches were long and thick, extending out in one direction. Some nearly touched the ground.
    He rested there, on the peak of the hill, and looked out at the distant lighthouse and the old plantation house to the north. Breakers approached a cliff. The wind was steady, consuming the noises, and he watched the town go about its day.
    It was his second year here. He had grown accustomedto the heat and the warmer seasons. His skin had darkened and his muscles had returned to him. He kept his hair short, walking with Kiyoshi to the barbershop every few weeks.
    Earlier that day he had gone to the market in the large square overlooking the port. He walked through the aisles, passing the stalls, listening to the vendors