Follow Your Nose Home
"Fern, how do you find your way when the snow hides everything?" Halle asked. She was halfway down the lane with her boots squeaking and her hood pushed back. Snow had fallen in the night, and again after supper, and the whole village had gone soft and round and strange. The fences were pillows. The well was a white mushroom. Fern trundled beside her boot, small enough to walk in the trough Halle's feet left behind. Fern did not answer straight away. She stopped. She lifted her grey-brown face and her nose worked, quick, then slow, then quick again. "Birch smoke," she said. "That's Talla's chimney. We're one house past the pump." Halle looked up and could not see a single chimney through the falling snow.
Halle pulled her scarf down and breathed in hard. Cold. Only cold, sharp as a clean nail. "I smell snow," she said. "And snow doesn't smell of anything." "Snow smells like the inside of a tin," said Fern. "But that's the easy one. You're sniffing the way people run for a sledge. Close your eyes. Let your nose walk first." Halle closed her eyes. Standing still behind her own eyelids felt oddly tippy, like standing on a boat. She waited. The cold came, and under the cold something else arrived, slow as a visitor stamping off their boots. Warm. Brown. Sweet at the edges. "Bread," she said, and opened her eyes, and there was the bakehouse light, two doors along.
They went down the lane together at hedgehog speed, which is slower than most people think and exactly as fast as snow falls. At the bakehouse wall the air was cinnamon and scorched flour. Halle put her mitten flat against the warm stone and held it there until her fingers prickled. "What else?" said Fern. Halle breathed. Under the cinnamon there was woodsmoke, and under the woodsmoke something green and sharp. "Fir," she said. "Cut fir." "Boughs by the door," said Fern. "For sweeping the step." They were there when Halle looked, stacked and frosted, their cut ends bleeding a little resin into the cold. She had walked past them every day that week and never once known they were smelling at her the whole time.
Past the bakehouse the lane bent toward the stable. Halle smelled it before she saw the lamp: straw, and the big grassy warmth of animals breathing all night in one small room. Then the pump, which smelled of iron and wet rope. Then Ottir's back door, which smelled of onions and wet wool and, faintly, of dog. "That one's easy," said Halle. "Every one is easy," said Fern, "after." Snow settled on Halle's eyelashes and melted there. She realised she had stopped watching the lane entirely. She was following a path made of warmths and sharpnesses, laid end to end along the village like lanterns, and it had been there the whole of her life.
At the woodpile behind the bakehouse, Fern stopped. The snow had drifted deep against it. There was no gap to see, no dark mouth, no sign at all that anything lived in there. Fern put her nose to the drift and moved along it, three steps, four, her spines dusted white. Then she stopped and pushed, and the snow gave, and there was the gap, exactly where it had always been. "How?" said Halle. "It smells of me," said Fern. "And of old bark, and the straw Ivo packed in. Nothing else in the village smells like that." She backed out, shaking her head. "I could find it asleep. I nearly always do." Halle crouched down. Bark, straw, dust. She could smell it too.
The idea arrived all at once, the way the good ones do. "Fern," she said. "Could I find my own door like that? With my eyes shut?" Fern's small dark eyes considered her. "Your house is eleven doors from here," she said. "I know where it is." "Knowing where it is," said Fern, "is the thing that will get in your way." Halle laughed, and her breath went up white. She pulled her hood forward, shut her eyes, and set off with one mitten trailing the fence rails. Fern came behind her, small in the boot-trough, saying nothing at all, which is the most useful thing a friend can say to somebody walking with their eyes closed.
Halle went quickly. That was the trouble, though she did not know it yet. She counted the fence posts under her mitten. She counted her own footsteps. Somewhere she lost count of both, and started counting the smells instead, and they came too fast to hold: smoke, smoke, iron, straw, smoke again. "Fern," she whispered, "how do you do it?" "Close your eyes," said Fern from down by her ankle. "Let your nose walk first." "They are closed." "Then let it," said Fern. "You're asking your feet." Halle stopped, put out both hands, and touched a door. The wood was rough. There was a bootscraper by her toe. She was almost sure. She opened her eyes.
Onions. Wet wool. Dog. It was Ottir's door, and she had been standing in front of it feeling very certain indeed. Inside, someone laughed at something, and a spoon rang on the side of a pot, and the sound came out muffled through the snow like a voice under a blanket. Halle sat down in the drift and laughed until she had to wipe her eyes with her cuff. Fern arrived at her boot, unhurried, entirely unsurprised. "Four doors short," she said. "I was so sure." "You were sure of your counting." Fern's nose twitched once. "Counting is a thing you do to a village. Smelling is a thing the village does to you. Go slower and let it."
So Halle went slower. She shut her eyes again and walked the way Fern walked, which was hardly walking at all: a step, and then a wait, and then a step. Snow touched her face and melted. The tin smell of cold. The tarry smell of a fence post. Somebody's washing, frozen stiff on a line, giving off almost nothing, and that almost-nothing was itself a thing to know. She stopped being in a hurry to arrive. That was the odd part. The lane was long and dark and freezing, and she would happily have stayed in it another hour, breathing. Then, four steps later, the air changed, and she knew the change the way she knew her own hands.
Cardamom. Her mother ground it into the milk on snow nights, and the smell got into the curtains and the coats and leaked out under the door into the cold. Under it, lamp oil. Under that, the particular dusty-wooly smell of her own coats on their own hooks, which she had never in her life noticed and now could not believe she had missed. Halle put her hands out. Door. Rough wood, a split in the third plank, the iron latch cold through her mitten. She opened her eyes. Her own house. Her own window, gold and small, with snow banked up on the sill like a sleeping cat. "Oh," she said, very quietly, to nobody. Fern came up the step behind her and said nothing, and glowed a little, in her way.
Inside, the warmth came at Halle all in one soft push and made her face sting. She set Fern down by the hearth, where the snow on her spines went first to beads and then to nothing at all. Fern smelled of wet leaves when she was damp. Halle had known that for a year and had never known she knew it. There was milk on the stove with the cardamom in it. There was a mitten drying that had been scorched last week and still smelled faintly burnt. There was her own hair, cold and outdoorsy against her cheek. She sat on the floor with her back to the fire and breathed the whole house in, slowly, one thing after another, keeping none of them a secret from herself.
Later, in bed, with the blankets over her ears, Halle did it again. Wool. Smoke from downstairs, coming up through the floorboards. Candle. The cold sliding in at the window, carrying the tin smell of more snow on the way. Fern was in the basket beside the bed, in the straw, a small grey shape with green-tipped spines and her nose still working gently at the dark. "Fern," Halle said. "Tomorrow I'm going to find the bakehouse that way. Right from our step." "Close your eyes," said Fern, already half asleep. "Let your nose walk first." "I know," said Halle. "I will." Outside, the snow kept coming down and laying everything over, and none of it mattered now.
The village went quiet the way it does under new snow, as if somebody had shut a door on the whole world and left one lamp burning. Downstairs a chair scraped. The last of the milk smell drifted up and thinned out. Halle turned on her side so she could see the basket. Fern's breathing was very small and very regular, the size of a thumb. The candle had burned down to a stub in its dish, and its flame leaned, and the room smelled of warm wax and wool and the faint green ghost of fir. Halle leaned over. She blew, once, gently. The light went out. The dark came in soft and smelled of home, and she was asleep before the smoke had finished rising.