We had some awful steps across that frozen lake. Snow above the knee, snow shoes not present, something about a below zero forecast. Minnesota has more ice than a Botswana diamond mine and we had a group of seven. Some pushed ahead of the group and some took their time. Even a snail can pursue at an invaders pace. Banshees of the night. Two of us had headlamps but that was over by the time we reached the island, only a mile from our cabin, as the crow flies. With the snow it felt like five miles of semi-submerged mud atop a bogged-down wetland and that black silhouette in the distance looked like a silk dress wrapped around a pretty women. So someone said, there it is and we were nearly there to the island. It looked like a turtle, to me. We collapsed under a relic stone still, probably used for cooking, but I couldn’t tell. It may have been fifty–make that sixty–years old. It just applied for artifactship; a young relic. The snow was deep enough to burrow like dogs and so we did burrow in like dogs; enough to juke the wind and above the stars were far enough away to spy on. We turned our headlamps off but only out of respect to those dyeing suns. It was here we passed the moonshine and tried to find the dipper. We breathed like Nords. All hail the northern winter.
Continue reading On the Turtle’s Back
