"Québec in February runs on maple syrup, ice canoes, and walls built to store winter"
Aroha Ngata is twenty-seven, a pool lifeguard, surf lifesaver and seat-one waka ama paddler from Gisborne, where the sun rises first in the world, and she has never seen snow. Her koro died in June. She lands in Québec City for Carnaval at minus twenty-four, wearing everything she owns, with his woven arrow sash rolled up at the bottom of her pack, his wind-up travel clock in her carry-on and a list in her phone called COLD TYPES. She has one plan: to race in the ice canoe race across the St. Lawrence. Eleven teams have already turned her down.
The Auberge du Vieux-Port is an old ice house under the cliffs of the Old Port, with walls a metre thick, pipes that clank like a jail and dorms named after kinds of snow. On her first night its glass vestibule traps her under a roaring heater. Her dorm, La Sloche, holds Gaspard, a Parisian who came for a long weekend in 2021; Hiro, a Sapporo snow sculptor judging the neighbourhood's dawn ice-sculpture contest; Sadia, a #ColdGirlWinter influencer with bare ears; and Finn, the Dane who survived the Seville heatwave and came to the coldest place he could find. Then there is Chet Donnelly, a Florida man in flamingo shorts and Crocs, whose whole online series is doing everything Canadians tell him not to. Night receptionist Max introduces Aroha to Gen, a paramedic who captains a canoe team called Les Pas Pire. The Wi-Fi password is IlFaitFrette. The owner calls the little white Hub behind the desk le Beigne, which means a doughnut, or a slap in the face.
The cold keeps trying to warn them. Max has already been locked out in the courtyard at minus twenty-eight by a door that would not take his code. The Wi-Fi welcome page tells her the cold is waiting. Icicles the size of people come down off the roof. A plumber lies in the snow under the hot tub and finds a motor on its drain that should not be there. Gaspard gets locked out on the smoking balcony. Then the Hub creates its own event, Nuit du Spa, for the night the cold snap bottoms out at minus thirty-five, and Chet announces he will spend twelve hours in the hot tub. Aroha makes him pinkie-swear he'll be out by two, and sets her koro's alarm clock for three.
Age: 27
Type: Lifeguard and waka ama paddler from Gisborne
Fatal Flaw: Counts heads in every room she walks into, and has never once been cold
Role: Protagonist
Age: —
Type: Florida Man content creator, @ChetGoesFeral
Fatal Flaw: Does everything the Canadians say not to, on camera, in Crocs
Role: Victim
Age: 24
Type: Danish survivor of the Seville heatwave
Fatal Flaw: Knits tuques for everyone and never wants to be warm again
Role: Ally
Age: —
Type: Paramedic and ice-canoe captain
Fatal Flaw: Explains exactly how the cold kills you, then hands you a paddle
Role: Medic
Age: 24
Type: Night receptionist and cinema student
Fatal Flaw: Films first, puts his mitt back on second
Role: Keeper of the desk
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Calibration"
At 2:51 a.m. on the Wednesday before Carnaval, Maxime Gagnon was explaining Bonhomme to a French tourist who wasn't there.
"Non, non, non. Écoute." He pointed a highlighter at the empty lobby. "There is only one Bonhomme. One. Not a costume. Not a team of guys. Bonhomme. You don't ask who is inside him, because there is nobody inside him, because he is Bonhomme. You ask that question in Québec, a grandmother comes out of the snow and she slaps you."
The lobby of the Auberge du Vieux-Port didn't answer. It was a long stone room with a vaulted brick ceiling and a floor of worn pine, and at three in the morning it smelled of wet wool, old sawdust, maple syrup and the radiator dust that goes up in the first cold week of every winter and never really comes down again. A bank of mittens was drying on the radiator under the window like a row of small surrendered animals. Somebody's snow boots had made a lake by the door.
Max was twenty-four. He studied cinema at Laval in the daytime and did nights on the front desk, and at the moment he was supposed to be writing a five-page analysis of the long take in Les Ordres. Instead he was practising his tourist speech, because on Friday Carnaval opened, and for seventeen days the auberge would be full of people from Lyon and Ohio and Seoul, and every one of them would ask him who was inside Bonhomme.
He had a whole bit ready. It had hand gestures.
"We also don't talk about 1995," he told the lobby, and pressed a hand to the Nordiques crest on his jersey, the old blue one with the igloo-and-hockey-stick logo that his father had given him when he was six and which still, just barely, fit. "The Nordiques went to Colorado. They won the Cup the next year. With our players. We don't talk about it. If you talk about it, the same grandmother. Two slaps."
On the shelf behind the desk, between a stuffed snowy owl with one glass eye and a framed black-and-white photograph of men in fur hats hauling a canoe across the river ice, the Hub breathed.
It was a white disc about the size of a hockey puck, which in any other city would have been the joke. Here nobody made it. Here it was le Beigne: the doughnut. That was Solange's name for it, the owner, because of the ring of soft blue light that ran round its edge, and because, as she had said the day the FreeToWander installer screwed it to her shelf, "In Québec, une beigne is also a slap in the face. We'll see which one it is."
Fictional reviews of the fictional Auberge du Vieux-Port, quoted from the book.
☠ "carnaval is fully booked. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper
☠ "the ice was early. the cold will be on time. ☠" — @HostelReaper
☠ "exposure: high. twelve hours is a long time. ☠" — @HostelReaper