"footsteps in the snow"

"The Hunters in the Snow" by Pieter Bruegel

In this chapter Ada and Inman finally meet, but it is not as the exhausted Inman had imagined it to be:

He would come walking up the road into Black Cove, and he would be weary looking. What he had been through would show in his face and his frame, but only so much as to suggest heroism. He would be bathed and in a clean suit. Ada . . . would be dressed in her fine clothes. She would see him and know him in every feature. . . . She would rush across the yard and through the gate in a flurry of petticoats, and before the gate had even clapped shut they would be holding each other in the roadway.

But they do not meet at the house.  When Inman gets there, he encounters the Georgia boy and finds out that Ada and a female companion have set out to bury Stobrod and Pangle.  He goes out in search of them. As he walks, "a dark voice" comes into his mind and says:

. . . no matter how much you might yearn for it [a happy marriage to Ada] and pray for it, you would never get it. You could be too far ruined. Fear and hate riddling our your core like heartworms. At such time, faith and hope were not to the point. You were ready for your hole in the ground.

Yet, despite the dark voice, he "knew too that there were footsteps in the snow and that if he awoke one more day he would follow them to wherever they led as long as he could put one foot in front of the other."

Midway through the chapter, the point of view shifts to Ada and we learn that she is going out in the woods near where they have camped with Stobrod to shoot turkeys for food.  It's the first time she's carried a gun with the intention of shooting a living thing.  But, Ruby assures her, "The worst you can do is fail to kill a turkey and there's not a hunter in the world hasn't done that."

Ada manages to shoot two of the turkeys, "a hen and a young cock."  Inman hears the shot and walks in that direction, "the main hammer of the LeMat's to full cock."  Befitting the novel's loose suggestion of The Odyssey, Inman recognizes her, immediately seeing "Ada's fine face atop some strange trousered figure, like a mannish boy," but Ada does not recognize him.  In fact, she sees him as "a beggar in cast-off clothes, rags thrown over a rood of sticks," just as the original Ulysses came "disguised" as a beggar to his home.

Even though Inman calls out her name, Ada "still did not know him. He seemed to her some madman awander in the snow."  Inman takes the rebuke to heart. "I'm no better than a rank stranger here," he thinks, "A wandering pilgrim in my own place."  He wants to leave, but "there was no trail to follow."  Instead he "turned back to her and held out his empty hands again and said, 'If I knew where to go I'd go there.'"

At that point Ada recognizes him.

Then Ada had only to look at his drawn face to see not a madman but Inman. He was blasted and ravaged, worn ragged and weary and thin, but he was nevertheless Inman. Hunger's seal was on his brow, like a shadow over him. Yearning for food, warmth, kindness. In the hollows of his eyes she could see that the depredations of the long war and the hard road home had left his mind scoured and his heart jailed within the bars of his ribs.

She tells him to come with her. As she turns to walk:

She paired the turkey's feet for handles and grabbed them up breast to breast, and when she did their wings opened and their heads flopped and their long necks twined as if in strange inverted love.

As they walk back to the camp, Ada talks soothingly to Inman and makes an analogy that he doesn't understand.  Of the scene in front of them, she says, "It lacks but fire on the ground and a few people to make it Hunters in the Snow."

She is remembering a painting she and her father saw on a trip to Europe.  Her father didn't like it, but Ada did.

He had disliked its every feature, finding it too plain, too muted in its colors, lacking any reference to a world other than this. . . . Ada, though, had been drawn to it and she had circled around it for a time but ultimately lacked courage to say how she felt, since her reasons for liking it were, point-for-point, identical to those Monroe used as support for his disapproval.

We suspect that Ada has more courage now.  Inman, exhausted, follows her voice and only has a sense that "some note in her voice said, Right this minute I know more than you do, and what I know is everything might well be fine."