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'
Copyright © Doug Vinson | Year Posted 2016
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