The Song Of The Ice

In a town in central Alaska, a little girl sits on the bank of a frozen lake. The moon is bright enough tonight that she didn't need her oil lantern to find her way, and it sits in the snow beside her, unlit, next to her mother's ulu knife.  She hugs her oversized parka around her, and she listens carefully to the song of the ice.

The ice will tell you everything, once you learn how to listen. 

Water is in all living things. It is in our breath, in our tears, in our blood. And it is the same water, cycling through the soil and the sky, through our bodies, over and over again. 

And the water remembers. The ghostly creaking, cracking, humming, noises coming from the lake are those memories persisting.The little girl had learned from her mother that the magical sounds were caused by the temperature changes; that the surface of the lake was like the skin of a giant drum. Deep in the ice of the frozen lake, its insides were rubbing against itself, and the shore. The moans and groans and whines and wails were vibrations, amplified. "That is what the sounds are," her mother had told her. "But that doesn't mean that's all they are." 

Her mother was gone now. Missing, they said. 

Missing, since last night. 

Missing in an Alaskan winter meant death, usually. The little girl had waited all day while the adults made half-hearted attempts to look for her mother, just like they always did whenever a native woman went missing. When night fell, that little girl had slipped away. She doubts they would look very hard for her either, if they even notice. And now, she listens, patiently, to the song of the ice. The water remembers everything. It would remember her mother, and lead her to her. 

The song of the ice tells her everything. 

The little girl stands up, her face set. She picks up the ulu knife. The thin, crescent-shaped blade gleams in the moonlight. She walks back to town, leaving behind the oil lantern, unlit, in the snow. 

The ice sings on. 

THE END