Too Cold For Snow

world contracted to the warmth of her hand and it was more than sufficient. And in the fuchsia bush the little warbler slept on as the light flashed out its steady semaphore. Keep away. Keep away. Keep away.

Too Cold for Snow
     
     
    In these northern latitudes Fahrenheit zero was considered bikini weather. It is the coldest inhabited place on earth. It was said that one old man had stopped walking for a moment one afternoon and the blood had frozen in his veins. The Eveny, a migratory people, therefore had every reason to keep walking and, besides, they were just keeping pace with the animals. Hovki, the God, made everything around them, but details of how he did this are vague. After all, it was a long time ago, but they do know they belong to all this, all that’s around them and to nature, as if it’s a cousin. Their word for bear is the same as grandfather. And they have been here long enough to know that the elders fly to the sun on the back of the reindeer.
    The animals lumbered across the moss, its sphagnum coverlet wrapping up all sound. Little bamboo rods of sunlight pointed the way among the endless thickets of birch which made the taiga seem uncrossable. The reindeer herders were hunchbacked by the weight of the cold, which had scattered splintery ice on the bundled layers of hide and pelt which cocooned them all from air which had most of the effects of liquid nitrogen. And trudging with the animals at five miles a day was Boz, who had come all the way to the lung-shattering temperatures of Siberia to avoid his wife.
    It was more a question of avoiding his wife’s vindictive brood of a family who had vowed, with a vehemence bordering on the vibrant lust of Albanian blood feud, that they’d never forgive him for leaving her in the lurch. Their collective memory was selective enough to forget that she was the one who had run off with the manager of the Smiling Kebab. The Smiling Kebab, for fuck’s sake!
    Boz was a composer of advertising jingles and he now lived with nomads the other side of the Verkhoyansk Mountains. They wore seventeen layers of clothing in winter, but he wore eighteen, just to be on the safe side. He hasn’t thought of a ditty for months because he saw a reindeer killed by a stab to the base of the skull. Odd how life seemed like a straight road but then showed its switchbacks. His mother-in-law scorned his music – said he’d been educated beyond his intellect. She could make him wither with shame. So he was fleeing two women, at least.
    The rhythm of walking was conducive to thought, and the genus of Siberian plodding in harsh midwinter was one most richly so. One tread. Two treads. One tread more. An action so mechanical it gave you time to think about things, as the reindeer cloaked you in a fog of frozen breath.
    Boz thought about his wife and Len McLaren – the two deserved one another. Anyone who could be seduced by a man who had kebab lamb fat under his fingernails deserved to be indecently and un-hygienically palped by them. The thought of the man’s hands on her flesh had first made him sick, then incendiary with rage before being spirited away into the dark place. Boz took to drink awhile as if he could afford to do so. If tequila is the fuel of incipient loopiness then he supped his fill, downing it as if Mexicans were smuggling it across the Brecon Beacons on mule trains, or in petrol tankers. But every so often someone would unkindly mention how his wife’s cartoon-hellish family, the Thompsons, were plotting their revenge – how they were going to watch him burn as he dangled from a home made gibbet. In some ways the Thompsons were inventive. It was a family to avoid. That and their gibbet.
    In rare blazes of sobriety he thought of dramatic ways to escape his plight, even considering a stint with the French foreign legion until Mel, the barmaid with a zoo of animal tattoos told him that: ‘It’s fantasy island for hard gay men, who like their castles in the sand.’ She could be ever so dismissive – Mel, who had been educated at the Sorbonne, but had discovered crack courtesy of a spiral-eyed Moroccan at Jim Morrison’s grave and had lost her way through great swathes of Europe courtesy of amazing hallucinogens and hospital-grade cocaine. It was her who had showed him the advert in the Western Mail from a Galway based television company that was looking for a Welsh speaker with high stamina and a rare sense of adventure to spend a year with the Eveny, a