Some nights she still goes over every detail, beginning with the weather and proceeding to the drop of blood on the old sheet - her quick wish for a man with straight white teeth and red lips - and then his arrival. His voice outside, her hand on the coin of frostbite on his cheek, his gift of an apple.

Everyone said it was eastern weather, the snow so deep and even that the carol was always in her mind, and she asked her father and sister who St. Stephen was, but as usual they didn't know. The absence of wind, a certain mildness in the air, a certain depth: instead of cutting sideways, the weather came down. People said this was the way it snowed in Ontario, and she thought, since I cannot get to Ontario, Ontario has come to me.

Everything was quiet except for the awful spoon against the awful pot. Lucinda, making porridge downstairs. It was early and the sound carried easily up to the small dark child she used to be and remembers being. She heard her father go down, she heard him speak to Lucinda, she heard the spoon start up again with the circular scrape of bad luck for which there was only one antidote that she knew of. Over the side of the bed snaked her thin white arm.

Light entered the room. It came through the four-paned east-facing window packed along the edges with strips of sheet, every window in the house the same, all bandaged against the weather. It picked out the chest of drawers, the straight-backed chair, the double bed, of which one side was empty and the other occupied, but not by much, she was so little, and it changed in tone from brown to grainy white like a screen before the movie begins. In this pre-movie light her little fingers were busy.

From under the bed came her wooden box, from inside the box a small package in brown wax paper, from inside the package a heel of fruitcake so moist and rich that when she eased a bit of it away from the paper it left behind a mat of golden crumbs.

Soon she'll go downstairs and say good morning Lucinda through nearly closed lips so that her sister will not smell her breath, but in the meantime she pictures herself running away to the apple-strewn east like Claudette Colbert running lickety-split to Clark Gable.

Nineteen thirty-eight, and snow is a change from dust. There have been times when so much dust has fallen so continuously that when she rose from bed in the morning her head left behind a white oval on the pillowcase. Towns have dried out except for their names: Swift Current, Gull Lake, Maple Creek, Willow Bend. Hotel towels are so thin, a traveller's nose goes through the other side.

Here you find almost every extreme. The coldest winters and the hottest summers, the longest days and the shortest, the richest soil and the poorest, the biggest views of the simplest skies, the least rain, the most wind, the best light and the worst dust in this best and worst of all worlds. Heads or tails. The wide plain of southwestern Saskatchewan rolls away to the east forever and away to the west, but not so far, before rising into a cold dry Scotland. It's the sort of landscape you can run your finger over, an apparently flat surface that's less flat than almost-even, and it's the almost that makes for its beauty and the even that lays it open to the wildest weather. Frosts in June, tornadoes in July, hail-storms in August, and drought all year long.

It's a bit like Christmas. V/hat will be in your weather stocking today? Oh joy. A plague of sawflies.

Children grew up never tasting an apple and thinking Ontario was heaven.

At breakfast Lucinda drops a knife. Her father looks up in instant irritation only to soften when he sees who's to blame. Of course Norma Joyce notices.

But noticing isn't enough. She has to say, "It wasn't me this time," in a tone of four-square insistence. A child who always has her fists up. Who has to let everybody know she hasn't missed a trick. Who has to make everybody uncomfortable.

She is eight years old. Afflicted by early puberty, pencilled in by body hair, as weather-sensitive as a fish. At night she lies in bed belting out "Good King Wenceslas" until Lucinda comes to the foot of the stairs and says HUSH. Then there is only the sound of the treadle going up and down under Lucinda's slippered foot. Lucinda sews and dark hairs appear on Norma Joyce. In the morning she looks at herself and feels sewn inside out, threads left hanging by a clumsy child or an ill-intentioned adult. She plays with the tufts of hair under her arms.

They had been reading "Rapunzel." Lucinda was perched on the side of the bed, Norma Joyce was lying back with bare arms cradled behind her head because it was summer, and Lucinda stopped in mid-word and bent over to look. Touched the shadow in her sister's armpit (skin as soft as talcum powder) and Norma Joyce's own fingers went up to feel.

Eight years old and still with all her baby teeth. Something out of season. A child leaping ahead in a kind of gulping prematurity - the aggressiveness of summer, the loss of light spring air. She was foliage in the wrong place, a jumble of weeds growing out of someone's back.

Midafternoon now, and everyone's indoors. She is at the kitchen table absorbed in The Flopsy Bunnies, Ernest is filling the kettle (afloat on tea should be the words on his gravestone), Lucinda is in the rocking chair darning socks on a wooden egg. She reaches into her ragbag and pulls out a piece of old sheet.

"Norma Joyce? Here. Make a hem."

There they are, the two of them, seated in the kitchen in this quiet time before he arrives. Beautiful, saintly Lucinda interrupting and believing she has the right to interrupt because all she sees is a tiny book in the hands of a tiny, out-of-proportion child whose forehead puts Elizabeth the First's to shame, whose earlobes could double as pillows, whose baggy eyes could sleep an army. All she sees is a child who never helps.

"I hate sewing," comes the plain, passionate answer, not calculated to offend, maybe, but offensive.

"Don't say hate on a Sunday," and Lucinda offers her a threaded needle.

"Oh Norma," softly, "for pity's sake," and she puts down her sock again. Both sisters watch the fat drop of blood spread across the poor old sheet. It forms a little red bird on a white background.

The sky drops. Big flakes of snow. Then wind. The first blizzard of the year puts an end to peaceful weather. For twelve hours, snow like flour blows sideways. At five o'clock they have potato soup, buttered bread, glasses of milk, bread pudding: a white meal in white weather, after which Lucinda picks up the lantern and heads for the woodshed, but not before turning to speak in that schoolteachery voice of hers.

"Don't stir until all your pudding is gone. Norma Joyce? Are you listening?"

Ernest has moved to the rocking chair and taken out his pipe. No help to be had from there, but when has Norma Joyce ever asked her father for help? This is her evening and her morning, the rotting-away looseness of milk-sodden bread that follows the slimy lumpiness of oatmeal porridge. She puts the pudding into her mouth and gags. Oh the horror.

And then, as luck sometimes has it, the salvation. She hears voices. Lucinda's voice and a man's. She slips on her coat, her mittens, and goes outside. Her sister is on the porch cradling wood (old fence posts, scavenged and split up into kindling) against her chest and holding the lantern high with her free hand so that the tall stranger is easy to see.

He comes right out of the wind and snow, his interested eyes on beautiful Lucinda, a coin of frostbite on his cheek. For a moment the two sisters look down at his relieved and smiling face, then he climbs the steps to meet them. Just before reaching the top he bends over to knock the snow off his trousers. In that moment, Norma Joyce steps forward. She slips off her mitten and puts her warm hand on his cheek.

"Most people," he says, taking in the odd little girl, "would just say, hey, you've got frostbite."

Inside, he mops the melting snow off his hair and neck, then takes an Ontario apple out of his knapsack. He polishes it against his flannel shirt, sets it on the kitchen table, says he's only sorry he doesn't have more. His name is Maurice Dove.

She will remember the hard white penny. It feels like congealed wax and turns eraser-pink in the warm kitchen. She will remember touching it for a second time, when it's puffy and hot, before saying with considerable satisfaction that from now on this will be the first place to freeze. "It's going to freeze all the time," she says.

He wants to know if all little girls are so bloodthirsty. She has no answer for that. She just has the triumph of having surprised him into noticing her.