Eulogy in Snow

1

In the heart of the tundra, a lone elk limps through the trees. She nudges aside the snow with her nose to reveal a clump of bitter sedge. It will not be nearly enough for her survival. It will have to do.

Every step she takes throbs up through her foreleg into her flank. As she moves, the pain diminishes—not because the wound is healing, but because the temperature is steadily plunging. At this rate, she will freeze faster than she will starve.

These things happen too quickly.

The rustle of a man's winter coat, stiff from sitting motionless for so long. An exhale, a pair of eyes sighting down the barrel. A crack like ice exploding from a tree.

The elk collapses. Red seeps under her motionless body, staining the pure snow, watering the roots of the undisturbed sedge.

And Winter stirs from her slumber when she feels the first blood.

It takes her some time to locate the elk's final resting place. By then, the hunter has already gathered the body. He drags it through the snow, smearing a trail of blood all over the pristine white. He may as well be asking the predators of the forest to find him.

Winter lightly rakes her hand across the tree branches, smiling as snow comes down in clumps on the hunter's head. He swears as it lands in the neck of his coat. She cups her hands beneath her mouth and exhales. A fresh flurry of snow sweeps through the clearing, stinging the exposed parts of his face. Petty, to be sure, but Winter has never been forgiving.

She shadows him back to his sled and watches him skin the deer. Half the entrails spill onto the snow. Winter senses a pack of wolves circling ever closer. Ribs protrude from their matted pelts. Drool drips from panting jaws and freezes along snouts.

She recognizes what she will do to avenge the first death of this cycle. It is one of the only things that gives her purpose anymore, when her hold on this land is weakening year by year. Every season, they swarm her forests in greater numbers. One day she will be helpless to stop them.

"No," she tells the wolves through the wind. "Not yet."

They howl back a chorus, but they turn and race back over and through the hills, because they know he is not theirs to claim.

Winter crouches and searches in the recesses of her land for what some might call a heart. It is the closest thing she has to a pulse. Yes—there it beats, as it has for hundreds of years.

Every season she suffers the same grief.

Every season she avenges the first death.