Death is Forever

capture the shot she wanted. Right now the moon was at just the right angle to illuminate three of the river’s sinuous curves and to suggest similar curves in the folds of the mountains themselves.
    But the world was turning and the wind was pushing clouds into a single mass. Each passing second changed the most important element in the entire image—light.
    Erin’s watch cheeped a warning.
    She ignored it. The sound was only the first of several mechanical reminders she’d programmed into the watch. When she was shooting pictures, no other reality existed for her. Her ability to concentrate was a double-edged gift, putting her at odds with a civilization that required time to be divided and subdivided into portions that had no meaning beyond urban landscapes.
    “Dammit, hands, settle down,” she muttered as her numb fingers made slow work of resetting the camera’s finicky time and exposure mechanisms.
    The watch cheeped again.
    Even as she shut out the sound, part of her mind reluctantly understood that there was a world beyond her camera lens. And in that other world she had a plane to catch to civilization, the very civilization she’d avoided for seven years.
    Like the geese and shorebirds she photographed on the tundra, and like the whales she photographed from skin boats, she was southward bound. Unlike the birds and whales, she was heading toward days divided into hours divided into minutes divided into seconds, with no time off for good behavior, world without end, amen.
    She squeezed the bulb release, advanced the film, then squeezed again, listening as the shutter delicately framed instants of time that transcended clocks and heartbeats.
    Rapt, patient, shivering with a cold she didn’t feel, she worked over the camera again, compelled by the black and silver starkness of the landscape, photographing her farewell to a land she loved.
    There was a mythic quality to the arctic that had attracted her on first sight. That quality was reflected in the “uncivilized” lives of the Eskimo and Aleut subsistence hunters she’d met and lived among. She’d gone with men in skin boats through shifting leads in pack ice, hunting whales. Out in the frail boats she’d learned that primitive man feared, loved, and revered his prey.
    Modern man simply killed with high-tech weapons, risking nothing of himself and therefore learning nothing of himself or his prey, of life or death or transcendence. She had known those kinds of men, too. Modern men.
    She would rather freeze to death in the arctic than live as they did.
    Her watch’s warnings came at shorter intervals until they became constant, reminding Erin of the urgency of the telegram that had been read to her over the shortwave radio that morning.
    You must return immediately stop family emergency stop instructions to follow stop james rosen esq.
    “Shut up,” she muttered. “Just…shut…up.”
    She jabbed a numb index finger at the alarm button on her watch, silencing it. But she knew it was too late. Her concentration had been ruined, because she couldn’t turn off James Rosen Esquire as easily as she’d silenced her watch.
    You must return immediately stop
    Erin shoved aside the demand. She’d ignored civilization for seven years. She could ignore it for seven more minutes. She would have ignored the summons forever if she hadn’t realized that her own arctic cycle was ending.
    But it was.
    She hadn’t taken all possible pictures of the arctic, but she’d taken all the images that were necessary for her own needs. The violence that had driven her into the wilderness seven years ago had faded to a whisper. She wasn’t the same person she’d been then.
    The answers she’d found in Alaska no longer fit the questions she was asking herself.
    Jeffrey will be ecstatic, Erin thought, wishing the idea gave her greater comfort.
    Jeffrey Fisher, her New York editor, didn’t understand the part of her life she spent in the wilderness. Nor did he understand the restlessness that sent her out to places where others rarely went. He loved her photographic technique, her artist’s eye, but he was forever trying to get her to do “civilized” photography—English farmhouses and French vineyards, ancient Greek statues and modern Mediterranean resorts.
    At first she’d tried to make Fisher understand why she didn’t want his European assignments. She’d tried to explain to him that while civilization removed the grueling lows of physical