The Sun Stays Away These Days

Ah Frontiera, here we are at your last, you've thrown a rod, your life lies black on oily ground - all this snow and you're a mobile no longer; so I must walk. It's cold, and now I think of it, that cold that exists in enormous reservoirs at the poles of our world, seemingly to pass back and forth between, as if through a secret conduit as the seasons are unfurled. I will relax, I tell myself, "become one with the cold" as if it can't hurt me, because sometimes you have to tell yourself things in order to survive. My soliloquy proceeds as I gather thin paper birch branches and fashion them into snowshoes with rawhide strings from my pack, a woefully empty pack considering where I must go - the Brooks Range, even in October, is no joke - and I can make it to a trapper's cabin, south south-west near Lake Chandalar. Like the Inupiat Eskimos, I will sing my song, make up my tale, and live on. Garlock, lord of this valley, seven feet of branch-breaking, tree-scarring, log-rolling, stump-pulling black bear might, looks up, for the wind was behind me and his nose is ever aware; my prayer - "You've eaten well, for your winter sleep comes soon, you are not hungry enough for me" - I repeat it with calm confidence; Praise God - noble king Garlock, this time, gives me a pass. Two hundred miles, "Can I make it in three weeks, can I stay alive for four," I wonder as I walk, as I fish - pike, char; hard-fought with my hook, still the grayling cooks on my fire - with a few remaining blueberries I find for spice; over mountain pass, near the gorge's bottom, a rocky ledge, a rare stumbled caribou with broken legs, my knife finishes it, oh how warm and rich the liver. Over the blue cold of a nameless glacier - half the planet's glaciers are in Alaska, that blue in summer melting is half of all water flowing into all the seas; I exist with the cold, I'm only a part-day's travel from the trapper's cabin now. Click-thunk! I hear it before my leg is alive with pain; I've stepped on a trap. The evening's grim descent doubles and redoubles - I laugh or cry. Will I bleed, will I freeze, or will my life just vanish into shock, tucked into the ever-colder onset of night. Trapper, when will you next check your traps? December 21, 2016 For Shadow Hamilton's contest - 'Epic'