A Thousand Trails Home by Seth Kantner

Author:Seth Kantner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594859717
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2021-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Sandhill cranes fly low over caribou trapped on shifting ice.

PART III

THE THIRD SEASON OF THE YEAR

On an afternoon in early February, a change is in the air. The sky is pale and cold, the tundra still white with drifted snow, but above the line of timber along the far riverbank—there—a yellow sun!

In the past weeks the sun has grown stronger each day, and now like a toddler learning to walk, it is floating free of the snow-covered land, bright and happy. Before long it sinks again and drops behind dark blue mountains. The sky glows and slowly fades to bluish-green twilight. Night returns, cold and black and glittering. By dawn a north wind is roaring, the temperature is minus twenty, and a ground blizzard shrouds the tundra. The land is furry gray, indistinct, bitterly cold, and the sun rises behind ice crystals, a cold orange face. Soon it descends into the frenzy. Above the storm the sky streaks pastel orange and gold. In the morning, clouds have moved in, and the following day is overcast and snowing, and the next—until a morning when the wind has died and dawn comes early, clear and chilly. On the tundra, twigs are fat fingers of frost. New snowdrifts squeak underfoot. The sun rises surprisingly fast, returning to flood golden light on the land.

By late March the sun is glaring bright, too intense to stare at, and the land is infused with light. Winter has lost its Darkness but holds on to its chill, and mornings are frosty, or windy with searing cold. In the long afternoons, the sun works to faintly warm the air. Along the shores, ptarmigan perch in willows like white lumps of snow against the blue sky, chuckling: buck-buck, buck-a-buck. Their feathers are puffed against the cold; their white furred feet grip branches as their sharp black beaks peck hard willow buds. Below, on the snow, snowshoe hares sit as still as porcelain statues, sunbathing in subzero air. The area around them is dotted with turds and pocked with tracks—theirs, and the bouncy tracks of mink and marten, the winding, careful footsteps of foxes and lynx, and the straighter trails where wolves and wolverine have followed the shores—each creature traversing the varied distances of their home territories, hungry and hunting for food and, in many cases that other need, a mate.

On the river, moose move deliberately, dark on the white ice, large and harried and haggard, fearing the trap of deep snow, yet needing to enter the willows to feed. Behind small islands they gather in herds, stomping down “yards” where they can maneuver and venture cautiously into the thickets to bend and break and swallow the endless branches needed to stay alive.

April brings more snow, and the land shines with a fresh new layer of paint, and the white tundra stretches to white mountains. Each day is longer and brighter, and traveling is the best it will be during the entire year. The land is huge, endless, and inviting after the heavy confining tarpaulin of winter storms, cold, and the Darkness.

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