Qanak

Qanuk

My father was Inuit. He said he could smell the snow before it came. He would lift his nose toward the sky and inhale and say, No Qanuk's tonight. In the morning - maybe. When he was a boy, his toes froze inside his boots, and three of them had to be removed. He remembers holding them in his hand as brittle frigid bricks.

When I was young he tried to teach me to smell the snow coming, but it was never something I could master. Sometimes, I could come close. My sense of snow comes more from the things I see.

First, the pallet of the sky changes from flat grey into cold-rolled pewter. Nimbostratus clouds appear next and layer themselves upon one another. They don't so much hang as cling. Then, a grey mist infiltrates and paints the topmost portion of the mountain range. It slips down their faces, trickling through the canyons, filling them like water in granite cups. The tips of the mountains seem to recede and brace themselves against the heavy onset of dropping degrees.

Deer bed down in drifted banks, their flanks heaving to keep them warm, their ears fighting the bite of the frost that comes from the black blanket of night. The trees also freeze, squeezing their cambium close to their core. The ends of their thin branches, veinous and spindly against the sooty sky. Their bark  the only barrier from the bitter winterization of the land.

I step outside to see if any snow is coming. The air has thinned to a place so slim that sound can travel freely, as if on a whim, without interruption, without the effects of endless convection. I exhale the word Ohfuckitscold, and the word travels unimpeded across the tundra and slips into the forest. The waves of my words no longer have to curve around warm particles in the troposphere; the syllables no longer slowed down by the rays of the sun.

The wind comes out of the canyon and smacks me in the face, and I cannot smack it back. I curse it, though, and the curse gets caught in my nearly frozen throat. I inhale through my nostrils and try to warm the icicle air. The scarf I donned, wrapped nine times around my throat and face, blocks the polar cold. The cilia crinkle and tickle my nostrils. I clumsily rub my columella.

Even the atoms in the breath I exhale close in on themselves and search for warmth toward their nuclei. Cytoplasm has no plan to gel to a standstill, but it cannot be avoided. The particles I inhale feel foreign, even though the molecules they embower hold precious grains of oxygen that fuel what parts of me make heat. Cellular respiration constricted by arctic weather infiltration.

Right before the snow arrives, there will be a breeze that, on the face of things, seems gentle but is there to sweep the warm air to the side. Only then will the snow descend.

On the barn door, frost grows almost imperceptibly, creeping across the surface, annealing into a fridged state.

The only thing I see that moves in the ghostly peak of this beastly mid-winter is bison. Heavy-breathing, heaving mammoth-like beings, massive behemoths that move slowly over the blowing tundra. The snow, when it finally decides to fall, will glow on their backs under the moonlight. The tips of their horns, their nostrils, their eyes the only thing not engulfed in hoar, diabolic when viewed against paperwhite terrain.

The snow screeches and squeaks as I trudge to the barn over layers of accumulated qanikcaq to make sure the horses are not frozen in their tracks. They are remarkably immune to the cold as long as they have food. I pull my gloves from my hands and warm them between the butt cheeks of my brown gelding. He barely registers my frozen fingers nesting in the folds of his fur. His billowing breath escapes his lungs, an adagio of exhalation. The resulting carbon dioxide hangs in the ejected plume balloon. The air enters his nostrils and passes down his long esophagus and is warm by the time it hits his lungs. His breathing tube six times longer than mine.

He is covered in hair, every square inch, the insides of his nostrils and his lip, inside his ears. Even his sheath, which stays tucked to his belly, stays warm, sucked up into its sanctuary. His feet are not frozen, though they stand on one remaining toe - in snow. His hooves step on iridescent, invisible particles of ice rubbing against ice, and millions of microscopic calving bergs collide. Together, their sound is a squeak near the level of the ground. I see that he, too, can sense the oncoming storm.

I realize as I am watching for the snow's arrival, that my body is not designed to deal with cold like this. With very little hair, the arrector pili intact but gone from my body's ability to recall it at will, now only appearing without warning in the form of goosebumps. A lot of good they do me now in my down jacket and rabbit fur hat. Left to my own devices of sleek skin with no hair, I would perish in this environment in seconds flat. But perish, I do not, for I have a warm home to step into when I am done looking for the storm, a nesting box kept free from cracks, places where the air could slip in. The difference in temp from outside to inside, is almost one hundred degrees.

As I step back inside and begin to warm up, I wonder where the bugs and bees, and birds go in winter. I won't see them again til spring. Their normal routes have been rerouted into near inactivity. Are they all held in holes below ground, waiting for winter to fade under the weight of spring approaching?

I remove my boots and wiggle my feet up and down. I am grateful that I do not have frozen toes to fondle. As I place my palms toward the fire, I say a gentle goodnight to Tonraq and hope that he is proud.