The Stars, the Snow, the Fire

John Haines

To one who lives in the snow and watches it day by day, it is a book to be read. The pages turn as the wind blows; the characters shift and the images formed by their combinations change in meaning, but the language remains the same. It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone by and will come again.

Far across the Tanana, a mile or more to the south of us, a group of wolves was singing. I call it singing, not howling, for that is what it was like. We could distinguish three, perhaps four voices – wavering, ascending in pitch, each one following on the other, until they all broke off in a confused chorus. Their voices sank into distant echoes on the frozen river, and began again. A light and uncertain wind was blowing out there, and the sound grew and faded as the air brought it toward us or carried it away southward. It might have come across a thousand years of ice and wind-packed snow, traveling as the light of stars from a source no longer there.

More likely he was one of those eternal children who will never make a name or a fortune; a child of the weather, without complaint and harmless as a fly. He would never lose his innocence, no matter how badly the world behaved toward him. Disappointment would weather on him like the faded blue of his clothing, and he would go on in his quiet way, working and looking until death found him.

I look at my hands and flex my fingers. They have handled much, done things I hardly dreamed of doing when I was younger. I have woven my nets with them and made my snares. I have pulled the trigger of my rifle many times and watched a bird fall or a moose crumple to the ground. And with these hands I have gone deep into the hot body of the animal, and torn from it the still-quivering tissue of lungs, heart, liver and guts. There is blood under the nails, dirt and grease in the cracks of the finger joints.
I have learned to do these things, and do them well, as if I’d come into something for which I had a native gift. And a troubling thought will return sometimes: having done so much, would I kill a man? I do not know. I might if I had to, in anger, perhaps, passion of defense or revenge. But not, I think, in the cold, judging light of the law. I have seen a war, a dead man floating in the sea off a Pacific island, and I was there. By my presence alone, I took part in many deaths. I cannot pretend that I am free and guiltless. Justice evades us; the forest with all its ancient scarcity and peril is still within us, and it may be that we will never know a world not haunted in some way by a return to that night of the spirit where the hangman adjusts his noose and the executioner hones his axe to perfection.

Last night a thunder storm came through our area. We've been having quite a few late afternoon storms this summer. I went out to watch it. I saw a bolt of lighting curl and snarl across the sky like a whip crack. The thunder shook my house.
I am always startled by how humbling it is to be faced with storms, mountains, oceans, and any part of nature on her own scale and terms. I am always startled how calming it is to be humbled. It makes me wonder if humility isn't the best guard there is against anxiety and fear. You can worry all you want, but once you recognize your place, just how small you are beneath the leaden sky, it becomes difficult to do anything but laugh at your fears.
Reading Haines is like looking into the mountains.