Silvershod

by Ellen Steiber

In the north country

beneath a winter moon

a small gray stag with a silver hoof

speaks with a red-brown cat.

In the north country

in a darkened hut

a hunter watches over

an orphan child

and the red-brown cat

who is all that the child has left of her home.

She has changed his evenings.

He used to return to an empty hut

to eat, sleep,

then rise again at dawn.

Now he returns to a child laughing.

It is still a wonder to him.

Now he feeds wood to the stove,

eats the simple meals

she's so eagerly prepared,

and tells her of the five-point buck

he has never seen

and will never hunt.

Sixty winters he's followed the herds.

He knows every ridge, every trail, every tree.

He never comes home without a deer,

he finds them even in blinding snow.

She cannot understand

why he has never glimpsed

the one they call Silvershod.

He can only tell her

what he has known since he was a boy:

You can wait a lifetime to see the stag.

"He is small for a buck,

his pale gray coat

nearly bright as his hoof,

his eyes like amber.

And when he strikes the ground

with his silver hoof

colored sparks fly through the night air

and turn to colored gems.

Rubies cut like roses,

crystal drops like tears,

emeralds like the heart of spring . . ."

The hunter stops his tale

for he has never known

if it is true.

It is the child's sixth winter.

She listens to the stories

as a bride listens to her wedding vows,

breathless, hoping,

knowing that to see the stag

will forever change her life.

Each night she dreams of Silvershod

racing across a road of white starlight

sending topaz and sapphires and diamonds

tumbling through the night sky.

Pearls hover on the tips of trees.

Opals and citrine blaze fire

as they ring the wide frozen lake.

And then it's the stars themselves that turn to gems,

falling red and green, purple and blue from the sky.

In the dreams she reaches out

and catches the stones

and cannot understand why

when she wakes

they are no longer in her hands.

By day she cleans the hut:

a rough table

two chairs, two sleeping pallets

a basin for washing

and the blackened wood stove.

"I will find Silvershod,"

she tells the hunter.

"And then we will have a tall, gabled house

with crystal plates and goose-feather beds.

I will wear fine wool frocks and soft leather shoes

and you will no longer go out into the storms to hunt."

Each day she searches the slopes,

reads the marks in the snow.

She trails birds and squirrels,

rabbit and fox

and once the prints of her own dear cat.

She finds no trace of the stag.

In the hut she weaves a cord of silver thread;

when she sees Silvershod

she will catch him

and bring him home to be her friend.

Each day at dusk

the hunter returns

pulling a sled piled high with pelts.

And each night

beside the blackened stove

the child listens

to the story of the stag.

But the cat listens even more closely,

and somewhere in the snow-filled skies

the stag listens, too.

At last there are too many pelts to store.

The hunter takes them to the village

and leaves the child alone.

She sits by the window

as sunset colors the slopes blood red.

A quick shape darts from the trees,

quicker than the wind across the frozen lake.

Her heart skips a beat

as she glimpses

the small gray stag.

She grabs the silver cord,

races for the door,

but long before she reaches it,

the stag is gone,

leaving no trace in the snow.

Darkness falls, and the orange glow of the stove

lights the hut.

The child steps out into the night

where even starlight is ice.

She clears snow from a wooden bench,

sets the cat on her lap,

and gazes up at the stars.

urely, even they

cannot move through the frozen sky.

And, indeed, the stars are fixed,

waiting

until, half-frozen, the child returns

to the warmth of the stove.

The cat follows,

touches a cold nose to her neck

and curls sleeping in her arms.

The stars are patient.

They wait until the child dreams

until the cat stretches,

and slips out the window.

As if she understood the clear, bright song of the stars,

as if the roof were no higher than a chair,

the cat leaps to the top of the hut

and greets the silver-hoofed stag.

All here is known.

Cat and stag and stars,

they have all been calling to each other

for a very long time.

When the sun catches on the tops of the pines

the child wakes.

The hut is empty of all life but her own.

The cat has gone missing.

All that day

the child searches for the cat.

It is not until the moon blazes silver on the snow

and the stars burn fixed in the frozen night

that she finds her cat

sitting atop a round white hill

conversing with a small gray stag.

Carefully, the child counts five points on each antler,

and checks to find the one silver hoof.

Then she cries out, and mortal that she is, stumbles

knee-deep in thick wet snow

only to watch the cat dart away

and the stag after her

until it's the cat's turn

to give chase.

Never once do they break the surface.

They skim across the snow

like ghosts

casting no shadow beneath the moon.

And the child watches the wild dance

beneath fixed stars

until it slows enough for her to follow them

back to the hut.

There the cat waits on the bench,

as if she'd never left,

amber eyes gazing at the roof

where the stag strikes with his silver hoof.

It is all the child hoped for.

The stag strikes fire into the winter night,

and the night freezes that fire

into gems.

Blue sparks leap into the air

and sapphires fall to earth.

Red sparks fly into the black night

and rubies sink into the snow.

Green sparks to emeralds,

pink to tourmalines.

Amethysts like a rain of wild violets.

The stag's silver hoof strikes and strikes

until even the roof thinks itself a tinderbox of jewels.

It is a blaze of color,

a flowering of light.

The child will never know another night

like this one.

Silvershod stops

only when the child closes her hands

laughing

as gems pour through her fingers.

There are so many,

they are so big,

no one could hold them all.

She does not hear the cat cry out

or see her leap to the roof.

She does not hear the stag laugh

as he and the cat beside him

soar toward the blazing stars

that once again

wheel through the night skies.

The hunter returns

to find that the child has learned to juggle.

She stands in the moonlight

charmed

beneath a spinning arc of colored stones.

And still more spill from the roof.

He can barely find his hut

under the rain of precious gems.

He kneels in the snow

pulls his hat from his head

and fills it with jewels.

"Leave the rest!" the child tells him.

"Think how they'll sparkle in the sun!"

That night the snow drifts down from the stars

soft and silent and deep.

The sun has barely risen

when hunter and child

dig through the snow.

They dig until they reach

bare, frozen earth.

The gems are gone

as if they'd never been.

They have only the hat.

"It is enough," he tells the sobbing child.

"You will have your house and frocks and shoes.

It is enough to last a lifetime."

In the north country

a child wakes in a soft feather bed

and remembers

a red-brown cat

whose nose was cold against her neck.

In the north country

a child sits in a tall, gabled house

and remembers a pale gray stag

with a silver hoof

who gave and took

what was most precious.

In the north country

a child finds her dreams unchanged:

Each morning she wakes

and cannot understand why

what mattered most

is gone from her hands.