Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover E. Catherine Tobler’s “To Drive the Cold Winter Away,” published in December 2024 in Strange Horizons. Spoilers ahead!
Narrator has returned to the island home of her childhood to bury her mother, and to live in the old farmhouse she’s inherited. After eighteen years away, the house feels as much a stranger to her as her mother had. In the surrounding woods, rotting railroad ties emit a stench of creosote that has driven away the birds; the abandoned rails run like a metal scar through the trees.
After all the funeral rituals, she goes outside to trash chipped pieces of her mother’s tea set. Under a sky “going bruised with the departure of the midwinter sun,” she sees something moving among the trees. Tomorrow, she resolves, she’ll go into the woods.
A friend of her mother’s visits the next day, and she isn’t able to follow her resolution until late afternoon. Nevertheless, camera bag shouldered, she sets out. As she steps into the trees, she feels “the world change as it always had there, the crossing of a boundary between one discrete space into another.” The dappled light, pine scent, and yielding earth comfort her, but the birdless silence is disconcerting.
She’s come to the island to work. With the railroad and logging mills out of operation, the place can be returned to nature. The Mi’kmaq called the island “the land cradled in the waves.” Then the careless white men claimed it. Snow begins to fall, and she takes out her camera. Though caribou and moose are long gone, she glimpses antlers among the trees and follows them, taking pictures. The antlers vanish. She continues in the direction they were headed, northward. The sound of distant laughter, male, deep and happy, speeds her steps.
It’s when she slips and falls that she sees the two men. Men, they must be, anyhow, despite their too-broad shoulders, their furred heads. One has moose antlers, wide and flat. The other has caribou antlers, many-branched. Wrapped around the “caribou” are glittery scarlet ribbons tied off in bows. The pair walk on. They’re clad in dark suits, a tailcoat for one, a boa of wildwood plants for his companion. Among the plants are out-of-season lupines and dogwood blossoms, springtime fresh.
She photographs the pair. If their costumes represent some winter tradition, she can’t name it. On her way home, she notices a gravestone-like slate slab bearing only the image of a fox.
The photos she develops are blurred. The scarlet ribbons look gray, the antlers like clumsy headdresses, just two young men larking in the woods. But she can’t put them out of her mind. Before sunrise, she’s back in the woods. She comes across a neglected asphalt road. On one side it’s lined with diverse hardwoods and conifers; on the other there are only pines, planted on land previously stripped for agriculture. She sees no birds or other animals, but eventually finds a horseshoe, so narrow it could only have shod a hoof like—a caribou’s.
Back among the trees, she works on a proposal that will convince her boss to pursue the island restoration. Arguments evade her. She sketches trees, the fox-stone, the young men. Later, she pores over her photographs and remembers hunters who’d gone into the woods, never, to her knowledge, to return. What if they’d discarded their safety-orange clothes for fur and antlers and an unimaginable forest life? She imagines growing an antler-crown, the color of her flaxen hair.
Next day she sleeps late and is surprised to wake still antler-less. Yet another neighbor visits. Light’s fading before she looks again to the woods. A lantern moves among the trees. Unlike other local kids, she’d never gone there for makeout sessions or wild parties but alone, “to see what she could make of the world beyond the tree line.” She goes out as before, camera in hand, and much later, the two men come.
Their lantern reveals they’re “human and yet not, two spirits seemingly bound into one flesh.” Fur, not clothing, covers them, and their antlers are genuine. She feels “small within their fathomless, black eyes.” She can’t move, except to snap photographs that will develop overblown, details lost. A memory remains, however, of them drawing her through the woods, unclothed like themselves, to a place where those in human skins can’t travel. A price is required; she feels this truth in her heartbeat and breath, and she says yes and yes again before they return her to the undergrowth where they found her. She will not remember, they say.
She will crumple her overexposed photographs, thinking of how, by some miracle, the Mi’kmaqs’ carved stones have remained, only becoming more deeply embedded until the passages they mark can’t be easily accessed without a price. She thinks of her mother, walking blind into lantern-light. They said she wouldn’t remember, but she does. She looks in vain for the fox-stone, though she digs until her hands bleed and beats upon the trees. At the house, she lets food rot, film degrade, dust gather, remembering her antlers emerging, her soft fur, stones beneath her bare hooves.
When her boss calls, she can’t tell him about the two men, but she convinces him to authorize her project. She works beside the restorers, bloodying her hands on the island’s dirt and stone. Healing comes over years, while her flaxen hair goes silver. She looks every day for a sign, a direction, “praying a prayer she did not know.”
Brushing her hair, she can feel two bumps rising along her temples. She doesn’t look at them, but she trusts the promise “that once her heart’s beat and her lung’s breath had been given, she would know the way by the curve of a flaxen antler.”
What’s Cyclopean: Beautiful language everywhere, though I’m especially delighted by “the willow-exhale of the moose.”
The Degenerate Dutch: “The Mi’kmaq had called the island home until the French colonized it, until the French ceded it to the British. How careless white men had been with it, as with all things, not considering who had been here first, who had done the hardest things in the stewardship of the land.”
Anne’s Commentary
I found Tobler’s story on a routine tour of the latest weird magazines. “To Drive the Winter Cold Away” was the title that grabbed me. As the holidays approach, we like to present a seasonal tale just right for reading aloud around the Yule log, or lacking Yule logs, a cheerily glowing space heater. A few paragraphs in, I was delighted to find mention of the Mi’kmaqs, who also figure in our current longread, Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. The Mi’kmaq Nation has over time occupied lands along the Northeast American seacoast from Canada’s Maritime provinces down to the state of Maine. King’s Mi’kmaqs left a sinister burial ground near Ludlow, Maine. Tobler’s Mi’kmaqs leave stones her narrator initially thinks of as gravestones, but which bear animal images rather than epitaphs and which apparently serve as boundary markers to a Faery-like parallel reality.
Tobler’s narrator doesn’t name herself, nor does she name the island she’s returned to. When entering a story, I always like to orient myself geographically. Before I could finish grumbling to myself about the lack of setting specificity, Tobler dropped me a clue. The Mi’kmaqs called this island “the land cradled in the waves,” while the white men called it after a prince. A quick search, and my guess of Prince Edward Island proved correct. The Mi’kmaqs were the First People of PEI, Abegweit or Epekwitk to them and their home for more than 12,000 years. That was plenty of time for them to carve their marks into the very rock of the island, from which the white men’s agricultural depredations “had not erased these places, but had only more deeply embedded them, until they could never be removed, nor could they be easily accessed. Not without a price.”
And why should things of great worth be without a price? For the narrator, the forest around her childhood home has been a refuge; stepping into it, she can feel “the world change as it always had there, the crossing of a boundary from one discrete place into another.” Discrete is the key word in the preceding sentence. It describes a thing separate and distinct, having an independent existence or form apart from other similar things. Returning to her mother’s house, its owner now, she feels as if she’s living in “a fairy tale, something happening to someone else.” None of the household things, the too-loud clock, the chipping tea set, the crystallized honey, belong to her, or are compatible with her needs. Just to stay in the house would be the stifling part of the fairy tale, the time before the protagonist escapes mundanity to adventure in a place where they could “live…and chronicle the world as it was, and the world that it would come to be.”
A happily-ever-after isn’t really what the narrator expects from her new situation. A happily-ever-after would be to live in and help create an ideal world. But, as she asks herself, “what was ideal anymore anywhere?” Realistically, the best she can hope for is to be allowed to work towards a world less fucked over than before; realistically, then, her field of action must be a particular bit of the world. This bit of the forest, on this island. She might get rid of the railroad ties and rails. Diversify the man-made monoculture of pines. Dig up the “hard, uncompromising” asphalt road. Coax back some birds. That will have to be her happy-enough-for-now.
But. What if the impossible ideal isn’t necessarily a tough truth to be swallowed? What if there’s a place in which two spirits, human and animal, can be “bound into one flesh”? Think of the hoary party-game or ice-breaker question: If you could be an animal, what animal would you be? Add this proviso: And what if, in becoming the animal, you could retain the “good bits” of being human and so become a creature of hybrid vigor, as it were? Add that you then get to live in an alternate world where lupines and dogwoods bloom year-round, presumably without throwing off ecological balances. Wait. Could that mean immortality for all? Immortality can cause big problems.
Don’t worry. Throw in some dragons, every fairyland’s solution to overpopulation. Plus slaying them, or taming them, or trying to do either, gives the hybrid human-animals something to do.
And if they happen to be naturalists, like Tobler’s narrator, they could spend a happily-forever studying the dragons et cetera and holding conferences to argue about which phylogenetic tree-branch to stick the beasties into.
On another note, having antlers would obviate the need for a Christmas tree, since you could hang ornaments on your flaxen (or otherwise) prongs. Glittery scarlet ribbons and berries-and-leaves are always festive, and so classy.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Despite DC’s mildly chilly December rain, I’m finding myself in a wintry mood. Stews and roasted chestnuts, steaming baths and fuzzy blankets. Cardinals on the feeder. Fresh wind and the scent of pine and crackling fires. I don’t so much want to drive the cold winter away as watch it cozily from the couch. Or read about it, imagining snow, while sipping my tea.
Not that “To Drive the Cold Winter Away” is entirely cozy. While the setting’s not far off from Pet Sematary—Mi’kmaq land, old magics—the mix of ecological catastrophe and blurred species boundaries reminds me powerfully of Amelia Gorman’s Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota. It shares a melancholy yearning for transformation. Maybe if we can become other, we can survive. Maybe, even, become more ourselves, some core version of ourselves that we don’t even know yet, enmeshed as we still are in seemingly-rational forms.
This is a different use of Mi’kmaq history than King’s, still written by an outsider but informed by a different decade. Narrator’s aware of the original stewards of the unceded land, but they’re no legendary excuse for the magic—though they seem to have been aware of it and perhaps involved in shaping it. On the other hand, I’m not precisely sure what role they do play. Land acknowledgment embedded in narrative? Reminder that humans can live in this place without breaking it? A device for talking about a specific place without overlaying European names or the fiction of mappable boundaries, leaving only the literal boundary of cold iron railroad ties to remove?
Narrator has come to the island to mourn her mother—except that’s not entirely true. She’s also come to mourn the island’s own losses, and to make an argument for repairing them. There are no birds—too much creosote in the air. There are few other animals, and no scat to sign their hidden presence. The monoculture forest has been designed for easy legibility, not for diverse resilience. This is a world deep in the throes of the Sixth Extinction. And it seems to be calling humans to fill those empty niches.
There are lacunae in the story itself. A nameless narrator, we’re used to. But time is out of joint, with grief but also with the woods’ disconnect from calendars. Clock ticks are too painful to bear. When unexpected time passes in the narrative, it’s never clear whether the break is literal or metaphorical. Food rots and chemicals for film development degrade, and yet the narrator’s boss still calls with no suggestion that anything is running late.
The boss, too, is a lacuna. What is Narrator’s work, that a years-long project removing poisonous railroad tracks might be part of it? That local photos might be all the funding proposal needed?
The antlered humans—fae, perhaps?—who lead Narrator into their realm of change warn her that she will forget. She doesn’t forget, she tells us. She can’t speak of what she’s seen, even on the page, but she remembers it and yearns. But I think she has forgotten, exactly as promised. She’s forgotten her name. She’s forgotten the details of life beyond the island. Lovers blur into uncertain lists. She’s forgotten any other work she might have. She’s giving her heart’s beat and her lung’s breath—her whole life—to the island. That’s quite the price, but it comes with rewards: the wonder of “her people” helping with the work, the “great rushing tide” of restored green, and eventually the promise of incoming antlers.
And where do the passages go? Somewhere the animals still live, transformed. Narrator suggests an underworld and imagines her mother there. We mourn, even knowing that some aspect of what we mourn might still exist. Somewhere.
We will be off for the holidays for the next two weeks, but will return on January 8th with a retrospective on a decade of weird reads. What will that look like—favorite unexpected finds? Best and worst of the classics? The branching of the blog tree from its Lovecraftian roots to infinity and beyond? Join us as we figure it out!
