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forehead only betrayed his tension and despair.
    The boys were beginning to stir, and through the crocheted curtains, she saw the sun beginning to weave through the branches. The Karelian birches were silver with snow.
    It was a perfect day for skating. The sun would be out for a few hours, and Lake Saimaa was so beautiful when frozen. She enjoyed the summers, when Toivo would row her and the children into its center and they would sing old folk songs. But in her heart, Sirka preferred winter. Then, the lake stretched like a sheet of platinum, the tiny waves frozen underneath a thin glaze of ice.
    How she loved the forest! She loved the sounds of the snow crushing underneath her footsteps. She loved the howl of the wind as it navigated its way through the drifts and the plateaus of frozen earth. So, even though Toivo urged her to stay at home that day, Sirka insisted that she join him and the boys. She was too far along in her pregnancy to skate, but she sat majestically on the small bench of the kick sleigh with a woolen blanket wrapped over her lap as the boys pushed her through the forest.
    The boys laced their boots and thrust their small hands into their mittens. Toivo placed his one good foot in a skating boot, leaving the other to trail along in a shoe. “Hold my crutch,” he called out to his pregnant wife, as he tossed her the wooden support over the ice. Sirka sat there watching the four of them slipping and sliding over the shimmering ice, their laughter slicing through the cold.
    Yet, now, Sirka’s back was beginning to ache. A low, deep pain that she brushed off as a mere muscle spasm. But the pain beganto increase, and in the blue light of winter, her cheeks lost their flush, her pallor now like the snow.
    She had planned not to say anything. When they returned home, she would boil herself a cup of water and sing to the baby inside her. Her breasts were heavy, and she was grateful that, once the child was born, she would be able to feed at least one of her children with her milk.
    When Toivo returned with the boys, he saw that Sirka was not herself. Her eyes shone with pain and her forehead was wet and white. In a panic, he told the boys to be quiet and fumbled for his crutch.
    “I will go look for help,” he told his frightened wife, who begged him not to leave.
    “The baby is coming,” she said, and in the blue light of winter she looked like a small, terrified deer.
    She felt too modest to inform him that her dress was now soaked underneath the blanket, and that she imagined icicles forming around her knees. She remembered that her other children were born only a few hours after her water had broken, and that this child seemed far more eager to be born.
    The boys began to grow rowdy. In his despair, Toivo told them sternly to leave the two of them and to play a few meters beyond.
    “I could go find a doctor,” he said as he reached to hold his wife’s hand. She smiled at him and told him that she’d rather give birth here in the cold than be left alone.
    So he took the woolen blanket and draped it on the snow. And extended his one free arm to guide her from the sleigh to the ground. A little over an hour later, her legs covered by her husband’s sheepskin coat, the drops of blood dotting the snow crimson, she gave birth to a beautiful, green-eyed daughter.
    A daughter that, two years later, she would be forced to give away.

    When Sirka held her daughter for the first time, she noticed that the child’s hair was white, while the three boys had been born with red. She wrapped the child in her sweater. She examined the girl over in her entirety. She studied the child’s limbs, the moon-shaped fingernails, and the half-closed eyelids, to make sure that she was properly formed, and sighed with a mixture of exhaustion and relief as she brought the child to her breast.
    Even with the shortage of food, the little girl had not been a problem for the first two years of her life. Sirka nursed her, and