No Up, No Down, No Light, No Sound

There is no up, no down, no light, no sound. Your legs are bent above you—or maybe below—and you are as immobile as a fish in ice. You thrash and jerk your head from side to side and achieve nothing but filling your ears and nose and mouth with snow. You inhale the icy crystals and choke. The biting cold penetrates every surface of your existence. Your world is dark, your head raging with the rush of panic-laced blood coursing through you.

A kaleidoscope of thoughts explodes in your mind—the foremost being that you are too young to die. The second being that the land betrayed you. You who revered her as the virgin wilderness she is. You who mapped and measured her peaks and valleys with precision and care, with zeal and unwavering fortitude against all her wintry rage. You would be a part of making her glory known! You would show the world how vast and grand is this land.

How foolish you were to think she could be tamed.

***

“Copper, come.” Judson Beaumont spit into the white snow. Dribbles of tobacco-stained saliva clung to the tip of his graying beard and froze, adding to the amber-colored icicle already forming there. He trudged through the layers of crunchy ice and loose powder, and soon Copper joined him, silently bursting from a cluster of patchy trees. Snow dusted the dog’s thick, white and russet fur, its pale eyes the same icy blue as the cloudless Alaskan sky. The same blue as Eloise’s eyes, though she never appreciated the comparison.

“Are you telling me I’ve got the face of a dog, Jud Beaumont?” She’d crossed her arms and huffed. “Just what every woman wants to hear.”

He was never good with words around Eloise, always realizing too late that he must have said the wrong thing, though he didn’t understand why she’d be bothered by having husky eyes. The pup was an amazing animal—loyal and resilient, born for big things. And he thought the same was true of his wife. She was a strong, comely woman who’d agreed to marry him and follow him to a harsh, rugged land when everyone else thought they were crazy. Like the husky, she had a spirit of adventure.

But unlike the dog, Eloise wasn’t born for the cold.

Copper walked ahead, sniffing out the traps Jud had set along Ferguson Valley Trail. She let out a soft whine and stopped beside a bushy spruce, tail wagging. Jud caught up to her and saw the reddish fur of a marten poking out from the snow. He pried opened the metal jaws of the trap, removed the death-stiffened animal, and secured it to his pack. Copper tilted her head and lifted one paw in the air.

“Fine. Here you go.” Jud removed a glove and fished around his coat pocket. He tossed Copper a chunk of jerky; it was a small price to pay for the dog’s service.

In the heartbeat of time that Jud’s hand was exposed to the bone-chilling cold, his fingers stiffened, and his skin turned red. He marched in place and huffed as he pulled the glove back over his hand. His breath came in puffs, smoke wafting from the belly of a warm-blooded man.

Even after ten years, the winter air still shocked him, still made his breath hitch in his lungs as if it had frozen and crackled into little shards. Out here, the cold was his greatest enemy. There was no room for mistakes, no second chances; man was no match for the cold.

But this is the life he chose—a choice that cost him everything he loved most. 

Jud deserved to be cold. 

***

In all the ways you imagined your death, you never realized it could come and take you so silently. In the frozen blackness of your icy cocoon, you command your wild mind to still, to cease its fruitless raging and return to you. Stop, and think. Remember your training; think. Think. You must conserve your energy and oxygen. Maybe the surface is closer than it seems. Maybe freedom is just feet away.

You work your mouth and eject a wad of spittle. It falls on your cheek and slides toward your ear. You decide the opposite direction of the spit’s descent must be up. Up. This way is up. You chant it in your soul, hoping the words will spread like fire to each trapped limb and melt away the snow packed around them. You wiggle your arm, frozen in your company-issued winter coat, but it’s like you’ve been poured into a concrete mold and left to harden. Nothing moves.

You imagine the look on the foreman's face when he finds out you’ve lost all your instruments, all the measurements, all the work. Because they are, indeed, lost. You are lost. And you know now that you are going to die.

***

Jud rarely had to worry about bears when he’d checked traps with Eloise; she’d talk the whole time and scare everything away. She used to make up songs to memorize the names of trees and plants—would come up with little rhymes to help her know which ones would “keep you fed” and which ones would “knock you dead.” Sometimes, she’d tell him stories on their walks—summarize entire novels she’d read during the dark seasons. He wondered how so many adventures could fit in one book, how people could cross oceans and deserts in the span of a chunk of pages. It was some kind of magic that he could only experience through Eloise’s words. Because Judson Beaumont couldn’t read.

Eloise brought the woods alive.

Now, he often wondered if a body could die from all-consuming silence. After Eloise was gone, the quiet became so overwhelming, he started making conversation with Copper just to hear something besides his own breathing.

But sometimes when he walked the familiar trails, he could almost hear Eloise’s clear voice echoing off the trunks of barren trees, singing one of her silly, made-up songs. “Baneberries look like little baby cherries, but they’ll stop your heart and then you’ll have to be buried.” Jud knew the cold was intense when his tears froze against his cheeks. 

Copper barked and the sound rang across the snowy path. They caught something; maybe a fox or a lynx. Jud’s thighs burned from the trek, the high steps through deep snow. Copper barked again, and the sound was lower, where the path dipped and sloped. “I’m coming.” Jud envied the dog’s seeming imperviousness against the cold. She belonged to this land, while he was only a trespasser. She had an understanding with the cold; rarely did she resist leaving the warmth of the cabin to venture out in subzero temperatures, but when she did, Jud always listened.

***

Death is coming for you. You can smell it in the air that circulates in the darkness. You can feel it in the numbness of your fingers and your ears. You force your breathing to slow and for a moment, the story of your life begins and ends in a heartbeat’s span. You think of your mother; you should have hugged her more. Should have written more. She would have loved to hear of your adventures; going ice fishing, watching the sled-dog races, seeing the way the winter sky lights up with glowing ribbons of green and blue. You would have described it as luminescent eels in a black pool, and she would have asked you to send her a postcard.

You think about home, about the girl you went steady with in high school. You wonder if she’s married now. You think if you were to make it out of this, that maybe you should meet someone and settle down. You picture yourself back in Kansas, surrounded by your family, eating watermelon on the Fourth of July. Fireworks pop in the sky and fizzle in the darkness. You feel content, peaceful. Sleepy.

***

Copper barked once more, but this time Jud was certain she had strayed from the trail. She was lower, standing on the slope of the snow-covered hill. The air sparkled. Sunlight refracted in the dusty flakes that hung in the air like mist. But there was no wind. This was the dust of freshly disturbed snow.

Jud reached Copper, chest heaving from the strain of hiking downhill. “What is it, girl?” He patted the dog’s head and squinted against the brightness. Protruding from the snow like a severed branch was a smooth, straight stick. Unnatural. Manmade. It was lined with tick marks and numbers, like something you’d use to measure a length of fabric or a plank of wood.

Or the elevation of a mountain.

Copper began to sniff and paw at the ground. Unbidden, one of Eloise’s songs came to mind and looped in Jud’s head. “If the snow doesn’t seem right, hightail it out of sight.” He knew better, and she knew better. She could always tell before he could when the conditions were ripe for an avalanche.

But sometimes, you get comfortable and stop looking for danger. You think you understand the world of ice and darkness. Sometimes you miss the signs and just don’t think fast enough.

And the snow is always faster.

Jud had searched for hours, sweating from the efforts of digging through the aftermath of the avalanche. His throat had gone raw from calling her name. And when night fell, he’d had to admit that she was gone—that no one could survive that long under a mountain of snow.

He’d wished every day that it was him who’d be taken.

Copper sniffed in circles, crystal eyes narrowed at the ground. Past the woods and beyond the valley, the frozen, wild land of Alaska stretched for a thousand miles, dotted with rare, brave, adventurous souls. And Judson could feel the presence of another one, there, somewhere in the snow. 

“Find ‘em, Copper.”

***

You would have loved the land. Treated her well. Why did she have to chew you up and spit you out? Chewed. That’s how you feel. Crushed and wet and cold. No. Warm. It’s warm now. You’re home again, standing in your childhood kitchen with its faded wallpaper and checkered floor. Your mother is standing at the mint-green stove making cookies. The oven door opens, and a wave of sweet heat hits your face. It beckons you closer, promises you relief. You peel away the layers of wet, snow-caked clothes and crawl inside. It is dark and quiet and warm. You let your eyelids fall, give in to sleep’s call.

You hear a voice on the other side of the door.

Why is your mother barking?