“Slide down,” she says.

“Can you say ‘Push my sled, Henry’?”

I try to get Birdie to say more than two words at a time and to say my name in the sentence.

“SLIDE NOW,” Birdie tells me.

I start her sled with a gentle push, and as it picks up speed, Birdie puts her arms out like wings. The dry snow makes the sled squeak.

“You’re going fast, Birdie. Hold on to the sides!” I shout. “Steer toward the hay bales!”

Dad puts hay bales at the bottom of the hill to stop our sleds so we don’t slide out into the road. I watch Birdie zoom down the hill, the red of her mittens two bright spots moving in the air.

“I DO!” Birdie shouts back.

She doesn’t steer with her hands, but she leans her body from side to side, like a hawk in the air.

“Here, Henry.” James gives me his dowsing stick. “You take it. You’re the real dowser. I’m gonna go up in the woods and see if I can knock down some pinecones for your mom to start fires with.”

He’s sure I’m a dowser even though I haven’t dowsed for real. The last time I went with Dad on a well-drilling job, I offered to try dowsing. When I said that, Dad stood still for a second, staring at me, and answered, Lincoln could use a hand digging the drainage ditch. Which didn’t make sense, because you don’t dig the ditch until you find the spot to drill. And you don’t find the spot to drill until you dowse for it.

I think he didn’t want to watch me try and try and not be able to do it. Or hear what people in town would say when they heard what happened: Too bad that Bower boy can’t dowse like his father.

James runs across the ice, as excited about getting pinecones for Mom as he was about finding the antler. I once heard my father say it was wonderful how James gave one hundred percent to whatever he was doing. Especially since he almost drowned with his mother when he was Birdie’s age.

I stared at my father when he said that, not because of what he said about James’s mother. Everyone in Lowington knows she died throwing James to safety on Eagle Lake when her snowmobile broke through thin ice. But because I thought maybe that was where I got my percent thinking from.