The Snow Child’s Footprints

In the small coastal town of Umiak, where winter swallowed the world in white for six months, I spent my childhood listening to my father’s stories. One tale, passed down from his sister, always made me shiver despite the warmth of the stove. This is the story as I know it.

It was a bitter January night, the kind where the snow squeaked underfoot and the Northern Lights writhed like trapped spirits. My aunt Nivi, then a girl of ten, was alone in the house with my grandparents. Her twelve siblings were outside building igloos and sliding down the drifts by the frozen shore, their laughter faint through the double-paned windows. Nivi was bored, searching for a game to play. She wandered from room to room, the old house creaking with the cold, until she reached the smallest bedroom at the end of the hall.

Through the half-open door, she saw her younger sister Aput, who had been born in the heart of winter, jumping on the bed with wild abandon. Aput’s face was lit with a toothy grin, her dark hair flying, and the bedsprings groaned in protest. Nivi called out in Inuktitut, ‘Aput, you shouldn’t jump on the bed! I’ll tell Mother and Father!’ But Aput didn’t stop. She just kept bouncing, her eyes locked on Nivi with an eerie stillness that belied the motion. Nivi, annoyed, marched to the kitchen where her parents were drinking tea.

‘Mother, Father, Aput is jumping on the bed again,’ she declared. Her mother frowned. ‘Aput? She went outside with the others an hour ago. She’s likely on the ice by now.’ Nivi shook her head, insisting, ‘No, I just saw her in the back room. She’s there right now.’ Her father set down his cup, his brow furrowed. The three of them walked to the bedroom, but when they opened the door, the bed was empty, the room silent.

The house had only five rooms. They searched each one, peering under beds and in closets, but there was no sign of Aput or anyone else. The only sound was the wind rattling the windows. Then her mother went to the window and looked out at the snowfield. There, in the moonlight, she saw a set of small footprints leading from the back door to the edge of the yard—and then nothing. Just the empty expanse of white. Aput was outside with the others, playing in the drifts, laughing as if nothing had happened.

But Nivi knew what she had seen. That night, as the family gathered for dinner, Aput sat quietly, picking at her bannock. When Nivi whispered, ‘Why were you jumping on the bed?’ Aput looked at her with the same eerie calm and said, ‘I wasn’t. But I saw who was.’ A chill ran through Nivi. She never found out who that was, but sometimes, late at night, she’d hear a faint creaking from that room, like a bed rocking with no one in it.

Years later, when I first heard this story, I laughed it off as a child’s imagination. But my father was solemn. He said, ‘In Umiak, we know better. The snow keeps secrets. It shows you things that are not there, and hides things that are.’ He told me that the footprints in the snow, those tiny barefoot prints, were found the next morning leading away from the house and out onto the sea ice, where they vanished among the pressure ridges.

No one spoke of it again. But every winter, when the snow piled high and the nights were long, the children of Umiak would play a game: they’d dare each other to go into that old room where the bed still creaked, and to look out the window at the snowfield. If they were brave, they’d see the footprints again, just for a moment, before they faded like breath on glass. And if they were unlucky, they might see the face of the snow child pressed against the window, smiling with Aput’s grin, waiting for one more soul to join her in the endless white.