we did. Thick knitted caps that went all around your face, and scarves and you don’t want to know what else. I think it’s a miracle what they come up with these days. I may be an old man, but I’m not going to grumble about progress, not me.”
He finished this speech by thrusting a basket at Shadow, filled high with local cheeses, bottles, jars, and several small salamis that proclaimed themselves to be venison summer sausage, and by coming inside. “Merry Day after Christmas,” he said. His nose and ears and cheeks were red as raspberries, mask or no mask. “I hear you already ate a whole one of Mabel’s pasties. Brought you a few things.”
“That’s very kind of you,” said Shadow.
“Kind, nothing. I’m going to stick it to you next week for the raffle. The chamber of commerce runs it, and I run the chamber of commerce. Last year we raised almost seventeen thousand dollars for the children’s ward of Lakeside Hospital.”
“Well, why don’t you put me down for a ticket now?”
“It don’t start until the day the klunker hits the ice,” said Hinzelmann. He looked out of Shadow’s window toward the lake. “Cold out there. Must have dropped fifty degrees last night.”
“It happened really fast,” agreed Shadow.
“We used to pray for freezes like this back in the old days,” said Hinzelmann. “My daddy told me. When the settlers were first coming into these parts, farming people and lumber people, long before ever the mining people came out, although the mines never really happened in this county, which they could have done, for there’s iron enough under there…”
“You’d pray for days like this?” interrupted Shadow.
“Well, yah, it was the only way the settlers survived back then. Weren’t enough food for everyone, and you couldn’t just go down to Dave’s and fill up your shopping trolley in the old days, no, sir. So my grampaw, he got to thinking, and when a really cold day like this come along he’d take my grammaw, and the kids, my uncle and my aunt and my daddy—he was the youngest—and the serving girl and the hired man, and he’d go down with them to the creek, give ’em a little rum-and-herbs drink, it was a recipe he’d got from the old country, then he’d pour creek water over them. Course they’d freeze in seconds, stiff and blue as so many popsicles. He’d haul them to a trench they’d already dug and filled with straw, and he’d stack ’em down there, one by one, like so much cordwood in the trench, and he’d pack straw around them, then he’d cover the top of the trench with two-b’-fours to keep the critters out—in those days there were wolves and bears and all sorts you never see any more around here, no hodags though, that’s just a story about the hodags and I wouldn’t ever stretch your credulity by telling you no stories, no, sir,—he’d cover the trench with two-b’-fours and the next snowfall would cover it up completely, save for the flag he’d planted to show him where the trench was.
“Then my grampaw would ride through the winter in comfort and never have to worry about running out of food or out of fuel. And when he saw that the true spring was coming he’d go to the flag, and he’d dig his way down through the snow, and he’d move the two-b’-fours, and he’d carry them in one by one and set the family in front of the fire to thaw. Nobody ever minded except one of the hired men who lost half an ear to a family of mice who nibbled it off one time my grampaw didn’t push those two-b’-fours all the way closed. Of course, in those days we had real winters. You could do that back then. These pussy winters we get nowadays it don’t hardly get cold enough.”
“No?” asked Shadow. He was playing straight-man, and enjoying it enormously.
“Not since the winter of ’49 and you’d be too young to remember that one. That was a winter. I see you bought yourself a vee-hicle.”
“Yup. What do you think?”
“Truth to tell, I never liked that Gunther boy. I had a trout stream down in the woods a way, on back of my property, way back, well it’s town land but I’d put down stones in the river, made little pools and places where the trout liked to live. Caught me some beauties too—one fellow must have been pretty much thirty