The Snow Fort Treaty

Part One · The Line

Milo had lived in the yellow house for eleven days when the snow arrived. It came in the night, without any fuss, and in the morning the entire street had been put away underneath it. The cars were soft white loaves. The fence between his yard and the next one had shrunk to a row of small white hats. Milo stood at the back door in his socks and studied it for a long time. He was ten years old, and until that morning he had seen snow exactly once.

That was from the window of a bus, and it had melted before the bus stopped. By the time he had located boots, two pairs of socks, and the gloves that his mother had bought for a winter he had not believed in, somebody was already outside. A girl in a red hat was digging in the yard next door. She had a shovel taller than she was, and she was using it to pile snow into a long heap along the fence. Milo waded across his yard and stopped at the row of white hats.

The girl continued digging. "That's your side," she said without looking up. "This is mine, and the fence is the line." Her name was Ruby, and she had lived in the brown house her entire life. She informed him of this while she dug. She also informed him that she was building a wall, that the wall would be taller than her father, and that she did this every winter. Milo asked what happened to the wall in other winters, and Ruby stopped digging for the first time. "It falls down," she said, "and that's not the point."

She returned to work. Milo stood on his side of the line and watched the heap grow, and he thought about the only thing he had ever wanted to do with snow. He wanted a tunnel, and he had wanted one since he was six. That was the year his grandmother sent him a book about a boy who lived in the far north and dug a snow house with a tunnel for a door. The boy in the book crawled through the tunnel into a round white room.

In there it was quiet and warm, and the wind was something that happened to other people. Milo had read that book until the cover came off. Now there was snow up to his knees in his own yard, and a plow had pushed an enormous heap of it against the garage. He fetched the dustpan and began to dig. By noon they had both made progress, and neither was speaking. Ruby's wall ran the length of the fence and came up to Milo's chest.

She had stamped the top flat and planted a broom handle in it with a sock on the end for a flag. On his side, Milo had excavated a trench into the plow heap as long as he was and twice as deep. His gloves were soaked through and his fingers had gone from cold to hot to nothing at all. He did not care. He lay down in the trench and looked up at the narrow strip of white sky, and it was the best place he had ever been.

Part Two · The Collapse

The trouble started after lunch. The snow that had fallen in the night was the dry, powdery kind that squeaks under your boots, and it did not like to stay where it was put. Ruby's wall began to lean. First it leaned a little, like a person listening. Then the whole middle section slid off sideways with a soft sound, like a sigh, and the sock flag went over with it.

Ruby said a word that Milo's mother would not have appreciated. Then she picked up the shovel and started piling it all back up again, exactly as before, which Milo thought was either very brave or not very intelligent. Milo was about to say something about it when his own trench answered for him. He had started roofing it over with slabs of snow, laying them across the top like the pages of a book.

The slabs were too thin, and the snow underneath them was too loose. He had positioned the fourth slab and stepped back to admire it. That was when the entire roof came down with a whump and filled the trench to the top. His boots were in it up to the ankle. His tunnel, the one he had wanted since he was six, had lasted approximately as long as a sneeze.

They ended up on Ruby's back step at the same moment, for no reason except that it was the nearest dry place. Ruby had snow in her hat. Milo had snow in places he had not realized a person could keep snow. For a while they sat and looked at the two ruins, hers a long low lump and his a filled-in ditch. Neither of them said anything. Then Ruby said, "It falls down every year," in a flat voice, as if she were reading it off a sign.

And Milo said, "I've never seen snow before this week," and immediately wished he had not. Ruby turned and looked at him properly for the first time, and she did not laugh, which he had expected. She asked where he had lived before, and he told her, and she asked whether it was true that the ocean there was warm enough to swim in at new year. He said it was.

"So you don't know anything about snow," she said. "No," said Milo, "but I know what I want to do with it." He told her about the book, and the round white room, and the tunnel for a door. Ruby listened with her chin on her knees, and her eyes traveled to the plow heap and stayed there. "The book," she said, "did it say how the boy made the roof stay up?" Milo considered the question.

The book had said a great deal about the roof, and he had skipped most of it to get to the part about the room. But he remembered one thing, because it had seemed like magic at the time. The boy in the book did not dig into loose snow. He cut blocks of snow that had been packed down, and then he left the blocks alone for an hour before he touched them, and when he returned they had turned hard. The book had called it waiting, as if waiting were a tool.

Part Three · The Treaty

Ruby was already on her feet. She did not have a snow saw, and neither did Milo, but what she did have was the blue recycling bin from beside the garage, which was square and deep and empty. She packed it with snow, stamping it down with her boot until it would accept no more. Then she tipped it over onto the lawn and lifted it away, and a square blue-white block sat there on the snow like something that had been delivered.

It was soft, and you could push a finger into it. "An hour," said Milo, "the book said an hour." They made eleven more and went inside. The hour was the hardest part of the entire day. Ruby's mother gave them cocoa and dry socks and did not ask why two children who had not spoken that morning were now sitting at her table drawing walls on the back of an envelope. Ruby's little brother, who was four, wanted to know whether the fort would have a dragon.

They told him yes. Milo explained what the book had said about the snow. The tiny crystals, once pressed together and left alone, grew into one another at the edges, the way frost grows across a window. Ruby said that sounded invented, and then she checked the clock again. When they went back out, the blocks had changed. They were still blue-white and still square, but a finger would no longer go into them. A fist would not either.

Ruby knocked on one, and it made a sound like knocking on a door. They looked at each other over the row of blocks, and then, without exactly deciding to, they started to build. The wall went up along the fence, because the fence was where Ruby's original wall had been. But this time it went up in blocks, like bricks, with each one positioned across the gap between the two below it, which was another thing Milo remembered from the book.

Where Milo's trench had filled itself in, they left an opening at the bottom of the wall. It was one block wide and two blocks high, and it went directly through from Milo's yard to Ruby's. They roofed it with three of the hardest blocks, laid flat. Milo crawled in first, on his stomach, and the roof did not sigh and it did not whump. The light inside was blue. The sound of the street went away, as if somebody had closed a door on it.

He emerged at the other end into Ruby's yard, which was against the rules, except that the rules had changed. The treaty was Ruby's idea, and it was written on the flat side of a cereal box with a green marker. Article one declared that the fence was not the line any more. Article two declared that the wall belonged to both yards, and so did the tunnel. The flag was the sock, and nobody was permitted to argue about the sock.

Article three was about the dragon. It had been added by Ruby's brother in red, and it could not be read. They signed it, both of them, and pushed it into the snow at the end of the wall where the wind could not take it. The porch lights came on at five, first Ruby's and then his, two yellow squares in the blue darkness. The wall stood between them, higher than either of them now, with the sock stiff as a board on its broom handle.

Milo crawled into the tunnel from his side, and Ruby crawled in from hers. They met in the middle, lying on their stomachs with their chins on their fists. It had begun to snow again, small flakes, slow and far apart. From inside the wall they watched it come down over two yards at once. Somewhere behind them, in the brown house, a small voice was asking when the dragon would arrive.