eaders never learn any more than do the inhabitants of the future exactly why Earth has been plunged into a new ice age. But for several hundred years now, as our story opens, such has indeed been the case. Glaciers stalk the land, extensive reborn forests carpet much of the globe, and life everywhere is hard for the remnants of humanity. The tropics receive a luxurious eight weeks of warm weather every year. But the zone where our story begins—somewhere in the old United States around the vicinity of Wyoming, Montana or the Dakotas—knows only a brief warmth for two weeks of the year. But the several hundred inhabitants of the community known as Long Ledge—the Trappers, they call themselves—have adapted marvelously. They hunt, they trap, they raise potatoes and onions, they preserve a culture that worships Mountain Jesus as the son of the Weather. Their rude houses hold over 300 many-times-copied books. In short, they are a tough, albeit rudimentary, outpost of civilization.
Chief among the Trappers are Jack Monroe, a renegade returned; Catania Olsen, the tribe's doctor; and Newton, an exile from the mysterious south who has intermarried into the tribe. The story mostly inhabits Catania's point of view, although intriguing shifts to other perspectives intersperse the text.
The peaceful Trapper lifestyle is about to come to a gory end, however. The neighboring Crees have been bumped from their territory by invaders, and in turn descend on the Trappers. After a climactic battle, a mere handful of some 43 Trappers survive to flee south. Pursued by a squad of Crees, the Trappers find a refuge among the Garden people, who offer their own seductive snares. Eventually taking their leave of this community, the Trappers descend into Texas, where the majority of them choose to remain. But Jack, Catania, Newton and his mate Joan, unwilling to become herdsmen, choose to continue onward for the Gulf Coast. There, a surprise concerning Newton's lineage awaits, and Catania must make a pivotal decision about her final future in this harsh world.
A brutal peek at a primitive future
In this beautifully brutal, compulsively readable novel, Mitchell Smith has crafted one of the finer post-apocalypse tales of recent years, recalling such classics as Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow (1955) and John Wyndham's Re-Birth (1955). While examining the roots of civilization and sketching its ruins, Smith also manages to tell several love stories and limn the clash between the soft and hard cultures that have arisen, all without sacrificing one iota of narrative momentum. That's a big accomplishment, subtly and humbly brought off without any hand-waving or pyrotechnics.
Smith's Trapper characters, no mere analogues of Inuits or any other past tribe, are a curious, hitherto-unseen mix of barbarism and 20th-century ways. They revere their distorted book-learning, telling many tales of the Warm Times, yet are capable the next minute of plunging into berserker rages or staging Neolithic funeral ceremonies. This blending of ancient and postmodern traits convinces us that we are indeed witnessing a futuristic milieu. Personages like Jack Monroe and Newton are drawn in mythic proportions: either man might have given Conan a worthy fight. Catania is a kind of Dr. Quinn, medicine woman, who is nonetheless capable of Red Sonja levels of violence, as all the Trappers had to be simply to survive into adulthood. Add in their love for their sled dogs—one of whom, Three Balls, becomes a significant character as well—and the Robert-E.-Howard-meets-Jack-London vibe, with its depiction of incredible demands on physical and mental prowess, is complete.
But Smith does not stop there. His creation of the paper-making Garden culture is well done, as is his portrait of the Gulf Coast civilization eventually encountered. And odd glimpses of a genetic- engineering culture centered in distant Boston offers more tantalizing windows on this reworked world. Additionally, Smith's portrayal of how the Trappers conceive of the Warm Times, the linguistic tricks that the passage of generations has played, withstand comparison to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker (1980) and John Crowley's Engine Summer (1979). Consider this way the Trappers speak of how stars are fueled: "the perfect burning of the tiniest things." Such poetry is found throughout Snowfall, making the bloodshed and sacrifice suffered by the Trappers both more painful and partially redeemed. Although not a tale for the faint of heart, this novel follows Catania Olsen to the happiest fate she could have found.
