CONTRAILS VANISHED FROM THE SKY

I HAVE TO PUT MEAT ON MY BONES

     She could barely move in the morning.  The stiffness in her arms and the pain between her shoulder blades screamed for a hot bath that was nothing but a dream.  Betula's previous introduction to arduous snow shoveling had been limited to winter tales from the Ancient dwellers of the northern stretches of the continent.  Those cited much cursing about the slaving chore of the dark season, the thankless combat with that recurring plague, the snow.  Her childhood's winters had few duties of that sort beyond a sweeping of entrances and walks; animals made their own trails and the rare appearance of a large sled pulled by an old mule was a magnet for crowds of children.  Quite sore now, she found in herself a twinge of sympathy for the Ancients' nightmare but, as she recalled, they were not shoveling their way, they were shoveling out their vehicles to travel on highways made passable by larger machines toiling mightily.  At great expense, no doubt.  However her haughty point of view took a crashing fall. Wasn't that a machine she had been shoveling out?  With a darn small shovel for sure.  Her displeasure with her thoughts grew worse with a glance at the mayhem carrying on outside.  The Ancients' curse might just be a repeating phenomenon.

     With more snow coming, would there be another avalanche soon?  Could she risk being caught outside on one of her necessary outings?  The day went slowly with little reading done; while anticipating sudden catastrophe it was hard to concentrate on the fat-rich diet of the Arctic Inuits.  When darkness fell, Betula tried to stay awake, fearing a slumber so deep that she would not even feel an entombment she would never know she had not survived.  She slept soundly anyway and woke at dawn to the same sarabande of the snow flake hordes.  One more day went by with more of the same and the avalanche came mid-morning of the following day. Just as sudden, but louder, briefer perhaps.  The wind cleared the top of her canopy quickly, but the descent of the snow level on its side was very slow.  She geared up and cracked open the canopy for air, then enough to allow her to reach out and move the layers of snow away.  It was heavier, wetter than previously.  That wouldn't ease the shoveling chore.

     Peeling off at night and trying to make a feast of a strip of protein in snow melt, Betula was somber.  She cursed the weather, her exhaustion, that body of hers with the strength of a rabbit. At least she could sleep that night.  It did not take her long to close her eyes, but it was only minutes before she was wide awake.  The dream had been terrifying.  Nothing but sounds at first, the roars of a storm, waves crashing on reefs, surf rolling in thunder over shore, all of that over radio transmissions between two boats, one 'George', the other at Nachwak.  Trying to make sense out of what she heard, Betula cranked up her flashlight to search the old Atlas and found Nachwak to be a twenty-mile fjord at the foot of her roost and George a river with a very long estuary emptying into Ungava bay on the west side of the Labrador peninsula, all of that presently under a couple thousand feet of ice.  The conversation in the dream suggested that the George boat was late for a rendez-vous at Nachwak where a blow was crowding-in numerous ice floes and threatened to trap into the winter the boat sheltered there.  Its captain left supplies for the George crew and headed out and South promising to send a rescue helicopter from Goose Bay, a world away, some four-hundred miles distant.  The George boat reached Nachwak to flounder there in a crushing between bergs.  Two survivors, one of them the radio operator with a portable set, made it into an inflatable raft to find that the promised supplies had been washed out by the tide.  The radio operator, who had the voice of a woman or a very young man, reported standing on shore, well above the reach of the surf, with 'Mary already half-dead in her frozen gear.'  They were in each other arms and they had vowed to freeze together, standing like the seal hunters of old times abandoned on the ice by a scoundrel of a captain.  Their cursing rose into the ether until the end when the rhythmic crashing of the surf alternating with the tumbling of the gravel on the beach was all there was to hear.

     Eyes wide open in the thick of a dark night, Betula was catching up with reality.  The brushes with death she had experienced lately were sobering events that prompted resolutions to be more careful in the future, but this was another dimension altogether.  She had never heard of seal hunting on ice floes and could not even imagine herself trotting about in pursuits of animals on floating ice.  Cuddled in her blanket in her reclined crib, she recognized that her skinny body's rabbit constitution would not propel curses into the ether for very long while freezing on a beach.  First thing in the morning, she would return to that ethnology volume she had been neglecting.  Boy, be they natives or workers in the Arctic, these peoples were tough.  She had to learn it.

     A hefty breakfast was in order, Betula had to put meat on her bones.  She suspected that Liriodendron's reading choices had led him to believe that he might encounter survivors of the cataclysm in the far North.  That made sense.  At home there had long been reports of elusive savages surviving in the impenetrable wilderness of the Amazonian rainforest.  Primitive human groups were familiar with catastrophic disruptions of their lifelines, be that by fire or deluge, or massacre by kin or foe.  Populations shrank in numbers, some disappeared and some recovered, often in different locations.  Homo erectus' two-million-year northward trek from the warm shelter of an African jungle rich in prey and tasty fruit was unlikely to have been motivated by wanderlust or a nascent appeal for tourism.  Those who walked across deserts and over mountain ranges to reach the Asian steppes and Siberian forests to cross over the Bering land bridge and settle the Americas, those peoples did not have cold feet.  The toughest ones, perhaps, went even further North to settle on icebound lands.  The Yakuts people of Siberia, the Inuits of the Arctic shores were the hardy descendants of those travelers of ages past.  They were hunters and ice fishers accustomed to the near total darkness of half of each year and, even if they had abandoned their dwelling in igloos by the time of the cataclysm, could they not handle a life a little colder, ice a bit thicker?  What could a disruption of the social order have meant to them?  Screens on solar powered television sets going dark?  Cell phones mute?  Big deal.

     They certainly had a better chance at it than Mona's grandfather with his porcupines, thought Betula.  Yet there was a nagging rub in her thinking.  If indeed those peoples had survived two-thousand years of hardship in the frozen North, what would they think when a seagull the size of three bears landed in their midst, when its head would slide open and a bizarre creature would appear, waving hello?

     Their tradition of oral history would have taught them that there once was a people who came to their land and were given to flying in giant birds, but they knew that those folks were of a wicked race that brought much misery to the world.  Would they now drop to their knees and joyfully welcome that second coming with much reverence and prostrations in the snow?  Or would most of them flee leaving a few hunters to raise their spears or those ingenious, elegant bows the book showed to be made of bone and tendon.  They could score a dozen hits to her chest in seconds.  Seeking a settlement of just a few inhabitants might lessen the threat, but even so, Betula had no trinkets for a quick gesture of peace.

     She recalled an anecdote cited in her History of the Ancients where a propaganda booklet of their Second World War counseled distributing candy bars to the children of conquered populations.  No doubt the eventual rotting of their teeth had lessened the aggressive impulse in their nationalistic inclinations, but why not offer some healthy goods instead?  Betula thought of the multicolored dried fruits or the mocha bars Fixit-the-nth had smuggled aboard her craft to replace the ones lost to her protein strip trade.  Best of all, the mealworm cakes with the whole of the little beasts jellied on their top would certainly bowl over a crowd.  Or surely get her shot.  Maybe the liver-colored protein strips she had been living on would be a better choice for handouts.  And there she was, sitting on two seasons worth of possibly useless treats.  Darn it, the choice was clear, she had to put meat on her bones, and if these hypothetical peoples had turned to cannibalism, so be it, she would make a good meal.  Hadn't she often wished to return to dust in the Mother's embrace?  Well, ending as a savage's turd on an icy waste wasn't so glorious, was it?  It was more like a challenge to belief. Introspection be damned, time to eat!

Next, HERE COMES THE SUN