THE SNOWBEAST CHRONICLES

day forty and one: In Refusal of Honesty's Gambit.

The sun has risen twice, in my fevered reckoning, since my last entry. I say there is a part of me which believes it was scribbled by a hand bent not in service of mine own consciousness; but, alas, kneeling in allegiance to some other thing: some rebellious and radical thing, some scandalously savage thing,  some thing which hath secceeded from my original nature and declared war.

A twig is clicking ‘gainst another twing upon an other tree, adjacent. Ice on their berries is doubling the number of stars which watch from gleaming pupils wreathed by irises of dead light in the Heavens—from some place unfeeling and yet cruel, as if cruelty were the dead tree upon which we place our forged ornaments of compassion and love—God’s guiding hand issuing forthwith with back of hand leading.

My head rests in a slight indentation dug into the snow by my hands, which lay cold and long unmanicured,  in my sopping wet woolen gloves. My elbows ache, my knees throb. My shoulders wrench. My ankles click incessantly. The steely resolve of youth’s imagined alignment of will and reality has rusted and buckled.

I have had but one erection in the past 37 days. It was due (I am loathe to admit to myself) to that burning kernel which pierces the lining of my soul, which shines down in twinkling assurances: my need of vengeance, notorized in blood. I have succumbed, it seems, to the fetish of rage, fear, and confusion.

The vile Snowbeast has distanced himself from me in my tarrying. I have heard not his whimpers and snifflings. I have smelled not his foul and still-warm excretions in days—a sensually relieving fact, to be sure, but one which has suddenly cast my instincts into sobered purpose.

I have been walking in circles. For days. The monotonously symmetrical trees have hooded my sense of direction.

As if chasing the echos of that erstwhile cad’s bellowing sobs, I have bounced aimlessly and oblivious to witness, steered, believe, more by the machinations of dream and paranoia than by rational thought.

The berries.

They posses in them, by virtue of some magical twist of alchemy, the power to whittle down the wall between one’s own perception and the fiery colonnades of Hell. And so I refuse to ingest them—at once shattering the tyranny of fever, and at the same time condemning myself to the cruelest of death and punishment, that of Tantalus himself, for embargo. But this marionette will take the euthanasia of nature for cutting the strings which have manipulated me and contorted my nature. No longer will they misguide me and flaunt their power over me in the fiery discharge of my grossly abused gastronomy.

And so I will continue to track that bastard of the north, the Snowbeast, dreaming nothing but empty shadows.

day thirty and nine: the befevered dream.

Dawn has barely arrived and already I find myself awake, eyes staring wide into the horizon, waiting for the sun to ensure me that it is not so terrible a thing to be awake, at least. that the dreams which plagued my mind in the hours following his departure, perhaps his turning his back his back on me, were not real. And that at least they were over, in any case.

It is yet dark. Once already I’ve bumblingly and dumbly dropped my pencil while scrawling in my journal—if only to argue to the animal inside me that it is I who have control. Yet the patch of wet yellow snow which it fell into, the patch of snow which moonstruck fear volunteered my own urine into as the nightmares lay siege to my slumber, argues otherwise. Yes, yellow, the color of fear. The cherubic light of the sun’s first rays seem hesitant to bathe it of its mark of evil.

I say, I dreamed last night of the ordeal which brought me into this chill isolation to begin with, and which I have not yet summoned the courage to manifest in writing. That this is being written now, by my own hand, argues in favor of the parasitic brute evolving within me. It has grown ever hungrier, and its food source has only swelled along with, in concert.

I dreamed of my brother’s cabin.

A fire crackled in the hearth. I held a hot tin of coffee.

“I don’t know why you shaved,” my brother laughed. “You’re cheeks will chap.”

“You can’t well con a man looking like a heathen,” I said.

My brother poured more coffee into my tin and lit a cigarette, which he passed to me, the lit one for himself. “Right. But you can’t well march through the tundra with a baby’s face and expect to come out the other side looking like a man one could trust.”

At this point in my dream a small turtle flew in through the window.

“Turtles. Always flying in through the windows, curse them.” My brother picked up a turtle swatter and swung, but missed. The turtle then blew a heart-shaped bubble into the air from out its rectum, and sped away with the sound of a tiny steam engine. A knock came upon the door. I set my coffee down and answered. There Bramford and Culley were, grim and sober.

“The guide is at the road with the dogs and supplies,” Culley muttered as he plucked his gloves off. “Mikhail should be arriving shortly.”

He shut the door and we sat in silence, drinking coffee.

A knock. It was Mikhail, riding a locomotorized Sphynx.

He slowly and very loudly rode it inside the cabin, knocking over a coat rack and an umbrella holder, made of a hollowed-out elephant’s foot. He rolled up directly in front of my brother and raised his naive jowels up. “Have you any decaffeinated beans? I like a hot drink, but not to suffer the palpitations of thrill.”

I clutched the ivory handle of my knife more tightly, whereupon 10 white tentacles grew out and ensnared my hand, weaving through my fingers. I ran my finger up the cold steel blade, then poked its tip, just enough to draw forth a droplet of blood. My motive in doing this are uncertain. Perhaps to feel something. Perhaps to simulate in some insultingly miniscule way Mikhail’s doom.

The blood then began to hiss and boil, burning itself back into my finger, poisoned by the air in the room, now rank with the pollution of Mikhail’s Sphynx-mobile, that cursed thing. My body choked on it, as if it were swallowing up its own hot excrement. I coughed.

“Bless you, my good man.” Mikhail rolled over to me and put his hand on my thigh. “We need you strong for our travels, now don’t we?”

We locked eyes…

It is here that I can no longer bear to continue, for my hand shakes so severely I can no longer decipher my scribbling authorship. The sun is now up, almost fully. Yet thick, dark clouds cover the sky, choking it out. The horizon is a wall.

day thirty and seven: footprints and fugue.

Midnight has stricken the thicket. Twigs rattle and click ‘gainst one another, and echo, and become a chorus of hungry spiders’ mandibles in the twinkling dark. I draw cold breath in deep, lick my dried lips, and follow his oafish footsteps deeper into the trees.

By my count, it has been nearly 19 hours since that cruel mongrel, the Snowbeast, hunkered down and, in his reckless desperation, wept before me. In that span, I’ve consumed several more berries—none of which have agreed with my digestion. Indeed, I have lost much time relieving myself of their fiery remnants. They are like tiny coals, and I can feel every bit of each of them. Like a starved lion I smell his weakness, and feel my instincts swell and harden and throb. It is beyond choice now; my rage barrels forward, a steam engine with its engineer laid out, bludgened to death, across the cab floor. The sooty wrench, drenched in blood, resting in his own gnarled hand.

I loved once. A woman of incomparable beauty and faculty. A butterfly floating through the air, blameless.

The trees remain uniformly placed, but have become progressively denser. It is appropriate. His footprints hint at a rapid pace, his long strides carry him along effortlessly. But his travel is labored by woe. Indeed, he appears to be ripping out tufts of his own wiry hair and casting them about. It litters his path, and droplets of his blood appear also. I have collected several handfulls already as I stop here to rest.

The hair is thick, oily, and smells of rotted salmon roe. Presently I am attempting to wash it with melted snow—but the water glides off it as if it were made of penguin feathers. It dries almost immediately. I have heard tales of so-called “witch doctors” weaving their nemeses’ hair into dolls and conjuring dark magic—this happens in the uncivilized places of the world—to offend, harm, or curse the hair’s source. I tell you, there is no more uncivilized place in the world than this—whether ‘tis even of the world I once knew, I can hardly say—and so I will attempt this task. Though I am untrained in the arts of shadow and fear, I have become fluent in their language. They are my only companions and, besides the fangtoothed Snowbeast, the only entities that share this desolation with me. And so, familiar with the waxing demons hungry to lap up the spilled entrails of the yet living, having become one, I will attempt such a conjuring and ask it to be my envoy. This will come at the next fall of darkness and I will hold the eyes of the stars open to witness a side of this little world, tucked away here in space, that they have heretofore not known. Or refused to.

day thirty and six: cold vulnerability.

I have yet to leave the thicket of trees I came upon yesterday.  For a number of reasons, I feel that it is best to linger.  For one, I am safer here from the howling wind.  Yet I can endure cold gusts, I have endured them.  It is nothing so basic as visceral comfort that keeps me here.  It is something more.  The rattling echo of mystery is swelling in my mind, the knowledge that there exist out there in the open white tundra answers to questions I do not yet know.

These unfreezable berries.  I have been eating them still, more slowly than initially, and I can’t believe that this new diet has not somehow fortified my resolve.  Somehow strengthened me against the cold and dulled my anxieties.  I evolve.  I linger here, it is likely, because of some instinct.  The precision of these trees which shield me from the wind, planted so deliberately—to what purpose I know not.

And what I saw this morning, in the early hours, as the blush of sunrise spilled across the horizon, keeps my feet firmly planted.  The brutish Snowbeast, huddled in a far corner of this very thicket, weeping.  I tell you, I saw his broad shoulders shuddering.  I heard his wretched sobs, like groaning iron.  He knew not of my vigil, too consumed in whatever grief a beast like that may be capable of feeling.  ‘Tis a thing I never expected to witness, as shocking to my already disoriented sensibility as the lush berries I discovered yesterday.  And just as nourishing.  To see him, frail and finite, in the delicate glow of dawn caused my soul to swell with glee.  A crack in the wall of white, mournful daylight in those savage tears.

The insufferable Snowbeast, incapable of speech, could not shout to the cold abyss his suffering.  He could not lament to God beyond grotesque yelps and shudders.  And so I was unable to decipher the root of his melancholy with any precision; I could not distill into human thought or words what he was suffering.  Yet I know it runs deep and is horrid for him.  As any living creature can sense another’s wordless pain, I felt it radiating out of him, felt it darken my soul.  It is the darkness I have been seeking.  Like a compass, it has led me here.  My diabolical Polaris.  It fosters my malice, gives it a latticework to grow and thrive and bloom on.

To know that this miserly Snowbeast is not impervious to the throes of emotion… I may yet have the upper hand.  All traps are not toothed and spring-loaded.  Indeed, with careful observation I may learn what snares I may place for his weary mind.  And then, weeping fiend, you will know the fear of God.

The brute even used his beret to wipe tears from his cheeks.

I continued watching, hidden in the symmetrical shadows, until he took several deep, rasping breaths, shook the snow from his hindquarters, and lumbered away.  Before I lost sight of him, he plucked several of the red berries from a tree’s bough and pop them into his gnarled maw.  Then he disappeared into the thicket, which i suspect is much larger than I’d originally conjectured.

That bastard will suffer by my hand.

day thirty and five: berries in the cold.

Last night passed with difficulty.  The creeping thought that there is something more, something greater than the drama between the wretched Snowbeast and myself left me awake throughout.  Staring at the stars above, through the branches of the trees which I huddled under, my attention was caught by what appeared to be berries upon the outstretched twigs.

This being the most vivid sign of vegetative life I have yet to encounter in this massive white void, I was curious.  Berries.  Here, just above my head.

I reached up and plucked several from their holds.  They came loose easily, and I found—to my shocked bewilderment—that they were not frozen!  Not even the slightest frost laces these red orbs.  I squished one between my thumb and index finger, whereupon a perfectly fluid spirit rocketed out, sanguine in complexion, and dribbled to the snow at my feet.  The juice proceeded to burrow down into the snow like molten lava.  My gasp echoed through the wilderness.  The saliva which at times dribbles forth from the chapped corners of my mouth freezes nigh instantaneously—and yet these berries, these tiny red fruits, remain soft as if a delicate spring rain had just left it glinting in a kind sunlight, a rainbow in a pasture, cattle lowing!  A land of ice and hard cruelty, thus graced by sweet nectar, impervious to cold?

My rapture overtaking my outdoorsman’s sensibility, I promptly popped several of the little red gems into my mouth.  My God, I thought, the sweetness nearly overwhelmed me.  I fell backwards into the snow.  They were ambrosial, reminding me of strawberries and my mother’s embrace.

Luscious, they were.  Yet they have proven unkind to my digestion, leaving me nearly incapacitated with cramps of stomach and somehow my feet as well.  And yet another surprise leaped forth when, upon loosing the first of the typhoon from my bowel, I noted that the color of my evacuate matched, precisely, that of the savage Snowbeast’s!!!

The implications, I have determined, are significant.  Intention rules this land to an extent I had never imagined while holed up in the bunker, in the shed, cursing chance.  Chance.  Here in this chilled, wall-less labyrinth, there is, I fear, no such luxury.  Dare I allow myself to think, even for a fleeting second, that marionnette strings are pinned even to my shoulders?

The moon, yet to drop from the sky, looks an eyeball.  I have been throwing snowballs at it, yet find no success in curbing its glare.

Onward shall I tread.

day thirty and four: into the wild.

Away, away! Gone from that cursed compound.  As noted in this log’s previous entry, the vile Snowbeast extended to me what I interpreted as some form of either invitation or provocation which, regardless of specific intent, has prodded me to carry onward.  While I have no plan—indeed, I have resigned myself to die here, frozen, if that be my fate—I quite strangely have found purpose in this movement.

Here I pass by trees scattered about the snow, peppering the world around me with shelter from arctic winds.  I see foxes flitting between patches of brush and what can only by a stretch be called vegetation.  Yet I draw strength from this very phenomenon, thinking myself quite similar to them.  By only a large stretch of the imagination could I be named “human” any longer.

34 days of inundation by chill and slush; 34 days of isolation and constant beguilment from that blasted menace the Snowbeast; 34 days of remorse, regret, fear and crisis; 34 days of near-starvation, feeding on little more than on rats (which I had begun to speak with), wood splinters, and facial hair; 34 days of a knowledge of life and death which I never for one second desired or welcomed; 34 days hearing the echoing death-throws of my companions rattling through the ice which had formed in my mind; 34 days of attempts to apologize to them, on behalf of the living, on behalf of what feeling remained in my limbs and heart, through vocal chords turned frigid and stiff not simply by the air I breathed, but by my very own prideful nature.  Curse it to be man, we unlucky forms of life.  Punished by the Deity, imbued with the ability to conceive of a goodness in this world yet all the while knowing its impossibility.  Knowing that it is but imagination, a word, a thought, and as fleeting as the rotting brains which conceived of it out of fear of the Truth and betrayed themselves by virtue of Natural Tendency!  Woe!

And so I have traveled on, impelled to continue my trek by the tracks of the abominable Snowbeast and the messages he continues to leave behind him.  Only this morning I stumbled upon a buckskin overcoat of similar handiwork to my own boots.  Whether it is by the same hand made, I dare not conjecture.  I came earlier also across the devil’s droppings, but they were too frozen to be fresh.  The Snowbeast is far ahead, perhaps waiting in ambush; perhaps waiting in deliberation.  For his tracks run such a straight, intentional course that I cannot imagine he is stumbling about willy nilly.  No, he is guided by some force whether internal or external.  Is he whipped by a master?  If so, how mighty must this master be to have gained control over such a cullion!

Any master must be even more brutish, even more savage, even more cunning and devilish.  I cling more tightly to my knife at the thought.

And yet even as I sit here in a patch of densely packed trees, hiding from the wind, I am alarmed.  This patch of trees, which I sought out from a distance as the only shelter in a near radius, is shockingly symmetrical.  It is as if these trees were layed here by some hand, intentionally.  And yet the snow is too deep, the tundra too frozen, the trees too large and aged to agree with such a conclusion.  Bless my eyes, but these trees appear to me neither natural nor man-created.  My mind immediately flits—like a panicked fox, running from a hunter’s bayonet—to the thought of that hell-creature: the Snowbeast, who falls under the very same classification.

My fingers are becoming numb from the cold so I must conclude this entry.  Something is afoot.  The Snowbeast, that harbinger of peculiarity, is, I fear, not the only horror I am marching toward.  Some manner of queerness has set it’s will into motion, and I tread across its dominion.  Bravery is a silly word, one for children to bandy about.  Stupidity and heretic pride are more worthy descriptors of my task and the ambition which is slowly taking form inside me.

And little else of which to speak.

day thirty and three: a message in white.

Rue, rue, rue.  To rue, to wait.  To imagine an end to this trial, this tribulation which I have been cast away upon.  Hiding in the lower bunker, reeking of wretched Snowbeast excrement.  Tucked away in the shed with the rats, my only friends and yet my primary food source. When I became too disgusted with my diet—thinking, always, of the Snowbeast consuming my friends before, that I was slowly taking on his vile habits—I fed on splintered wood, even my own beard hair, which has now grown to a ludicrous length.

That has been my life for the past thirty three days. No change.  Nothing but a stark white existence, sterile of all by my own self loathing. My own disfigured psyche painting itself across this vast white canvas around me. Etching itself into the tree bark and under my fingernails and on my chapped lips.

But today is different.

Today something has occured, shattering the icy silence of my environ forever.

That blasted Snowbeast has reached out to me.  He has communicated to me a message of sorts, simple and yet frightening.

An arrow, Westerly, and yet of far greater significance.  He speaks to me plainly with this hieroglyph.  He challenges me newly.  Previous this was simply cat and mouse.  He has changed the game.  It is now cat versus cat.  Dare I leave my current shelter to seek out his meaning?  Is this a trap?  Is my acquiescence to his will tantamount to signing a death wish certificate?

To be frank, I know not how much longer I can endure eating the raw flesh of my rodent friends.  Yet I would have to kill and carry several of them with me in case of prolonged journeying.  And what else have I here to stay for? The reeking stench of my friends and brethren, digested?  Emptiness so vast I now fear eternity, infinity, the Face of God?  I knew weeks ago that I’d forgotten His Face.  Dare I say now that, perhaps, that was an intentional smudging of memory!

And so I tighten my boots, sheepskin, purchased of a drunken fool during a game of poker two days before my embarkation.  Thrice had I won winter fineries off of him—this raccoon fur cap which rests upon my weary head; here, a buck knife of impressive sharpness and precise curvature; and these boots which have carried me to one Hell—are they predestined to carry me to yet another?

I go, I go, because I must.  Because that drunken fool, in his whisky stupor, his stinking breath raiding my nostrils, scoffed at my hand before I triumphed over him.  Because the one card I needed, the Ace of Spades, did not turn over on the table until the last was to be flipped.  See the above depiction of the arrow and tell me, or attempt, that this is not some newly direct form of provocation!

The sun is high over head.  I do not hesitate to run from its light.  Indeed, I can feel the desire in me to run straight into blackness.  To annihilate myself and become no more than the slayer of the Cursed Snowbeast!

day twenty and four: reflection.

24 days have come and gone.  The sun has touched the horizon 48 times.  I have consumed what may pass for food 15 times.  I have wept openly 10 times.  Shut my finger in the door 3 times.  Stepped in my own feces 1 time.  Burning regret relentlessly clutches my breast and with every breath it advances the pressure with which it holds me.  An anaconda upon my very soul, I can hear it hiss, anticipating its inevitable triumph over my ever-weakening frame.  Salivating.  I will expire.  Time has all to eagerly sided with my foes.  My ribs crack with shame.  My lungs fill with guilty blood.  I gurgle and sputter Hail Marys to the deaf blanket of ice that surrounds me.  Only the snowbeast hears me.  He has not the capacity for empathy nor mercy.  My sallow cheeks testify to my cynicism.

The snowbeast.  Lurking, lurking, lurking around the perimeter.  This is not my home, nor my fortress, nor my shelter.  It is simply the casket I shall be buried in, covered by time.  My bones will be picked clean not even by maggots in warm earth.  No, my flesh will linger, frozen, until Judgement Day.  And while my fellow men will stand naked before God, my flesh will yet reek.  I will stand ashamed, the flesh on my face betraying my emotions while 1,000,000,000 skeletons, regardless of the fear or joy they feel at their impending judgement, glare blankly at eternity.  I shall cry for my plight.

And my brain, yet intact, will search for meaning.  In that search I will tap into my memories, which will writhe in my skull like so many anacondas.  Above the din of their woeful hisses, my mind will utter the tale that brought me here.

Bear me witness!  When we 7 left our wives and lovers to run a fool’s errand to the heart of the tundra, we expected to return in triumph, slayers of weakness and the possessors of a treasure more valuable than any of us could comprehend.  The writer’s of history, the sculptors and rulers of legend.

7 of us.  A miserable bunch.  With hubris we embarked, thick coats on our backs and sleds full of rations and guns and blind greed.  Our dogs leaping up ahead as they pulled, unaware as we 7 men of the darkness of this world.  Of its fickleness and nihilism.

We will die in poverty, all of us.

Today in the shed I saw another rat.  I know not where the origins of these creatures are.  I just hope they continue coming, for sake of my sustenance.  It feels oddly cannibalistic to eat them.  I whispered today, “you must understand, brother.  You’d do the same to me.”

My sanity dwindles.

day twenty: the shed, still.

It is, by my count, the 20th day of my maroonment.  I count days in sunrises and sunsets and measure time by watching icicles melt.  And with them, my hope of rescue.

I remain in the shed, which I discovered through violence to my face parts—the result of running full-bore into it’s splintered wooden walls.  Yesterday, as the sun dropped below the horizon, i discovered a small patch of my beard which yet remained frozen in ice on the walls.  It must have been ripped out during my face’s initial contact, caught in some imperfect crack in the wood.

Perhaps this patch of beard hair, frozen in an ice-amber nugget, will outlive even it’s former body, for hope is dim, as noted above.

I remain in the shed.  With me are cobwebs and darkness and my thoughts, which are haunted by guilt and the screams of my vile compatriots.  And yet I still hunger after what came here for.  Like a siren it continues to beckon me, and yet I lack the strength to tie myself to the mast.  If only that cullion, the snowbeast, would leave this white sea to calm again…

That irksome fellow has now taken to releasing his bowels in my former shelter, the bunker.  I discovered this yesterday, when I attempted to return.  It is distinctly warmer and less susceptible to arctic chill in the bunker.  As I entered, I noted that it seemed danker, and steam was escaping from the closet door, my former slumbering quarters.

Ice had clogged my nostrils.  Upon opening the door, the sheer heat of the egregious snowbeast’s fecal empire at once melted the protective ice shield, entered my sinus and left me promptly passed out upon the concrete floor.  The scene:

I awoke two-thirds of an icicle meltdown later.  Ironically the very stench which had stricken me so much as to render me unconscious had, like the smelling salts of the novel East Indies, rekindled my senses.

I gasped, stirred, and gasped again.  I tried to raise myself, only to find that I’d been bound to the floor!  A yellowed blanket of ice had pinned my down.  Now, I am a master at calisthenics and posses superior strength.  I shattered the ice-urine prison quickly.   Only one other creature was near enough to my locale to do such a thing, only one creature harbored the senseless malice necessary to act such an act!  That hellish ghoul from the Void, THE SNOWBEAST.  An act of war.  An act of absolute hatred.  A challenge upon my own virility.

Upon consideration, I concluded that that excrement was the last witness to my friends’ existences.  I realized this upon seeing grains of corn in the steaming mass.  We had eaten canned corn for our last meal together, the evening before I entered this frozen isolation and my fellows entered the Void.  He had deposited of them in the most human area of this frozen world, my sleeping quarters.  I speculate he did this in order to keep their regretful, shit-covered ghosts as close to my spirit, my dreams as possible.  He has spat in my face.  Is it a threat?  Is it a message?  Is it simply a mirrored image of my own hateful soul!?!

His urine yet soaks my clothing.  It is partly crystalline, partly liquified.  It reeks of radish, pork, and old toenails.  What he sustains himself on—other than glutting on the innards of my fellow gentlemen—I know not.  The evil of his digestive system is clear enough.

And yet I wait and I ponder why I took upon myself the task of one hundred thousand fools in my blind greed.  I think of nothing but my mistakes and my vengeance—whether ‘tis ‘gainst myself, ‘gainst Fate, ‘gainst my green-eyed compatriots, or ‘gainst the crude snowbeast I know not.

But I will have hit, ‘gainst whatever it must be exercised ‘gainst.  That I promise.

day seventeen: the shed.

It is the 17th day and yet I live.  Whether ‘tis to the chagrin of the reproachful snowbeast or by his will I know not.  What I do know is that there is a shed in this cursed compound.

I think this because I am now hiding within its confines.

I came into this wooden tomb by accident.  Lured to the outdoors by the hellish snowbeast on the afternoon of day 16, during a blinding snowstorm, I became disoriented.  That wretched snowbeast had used my own rations against me, setting them out in a line from the door of my bunker all the way to his own icy retreat.  He must have sneaked in through an open window and stolen the tidbits.  I should have been more vigilant.  It is not the first time I have left an open window unattended, nor is it the first time I have been dealt a sour lesson in the process.  I once did the same thing at my summer home in Wyoming.  I pesky squirrel entered my home and urinated on several of my maps.  I vowed that day never to make a similar mistake.  Contrary to my vow, I have made such an error.  This, however, is more dire.

Dizzied by the blizzard’s furious gusts, I fell to my knees.  Crawling, half buried, I continued following the food trail until I saw the gaping maw-like door of that hideous snowbeasts’ ice palace.  Promptly, and before he could skewer me with his very bone-javelin, made from the very remains of my fallen fellow adventurer (o we greedy clique!), I turned and fled as if I were an arctic hare.  My flight was brief—I collided with the shed.

“Ouch!” said I, somehow, through the dense layer of ice now formed on my rapidly graying beard.  “Damned Snowbeast!”  Hands to the shed walls, I found my way to the door, dug it out, and entered.

Within I found nothing of use but two frozen rats, which I have already consumed with no pleasure but with surprisingly comfortable digestion and expulsion.

And now I wait.  For another day, for another opportunity to escape, or thwart, or slay that frozen demon, the terrible snowbeast.


The above was written as if I, the Master Jeweler, were a man trapped in a shed and terrorized by the Abominable Snowman for no less than 17 days in 19th century Alaska.