Too Cold For Snow

pemmican, was the staple food. But there was reindeer milk, and in the night fermented reindeer milk, served from sacks that must have been intestines at one time. Although this strange beer was tainted with hairs and passed from lips that had never known a toothbrush, there was something effortlessly comforting about the slow effect of the alcohol and the accompanying susurration of beasts encamped outside their tents, and the occasional smile of the children who were wrapped in so many layers of fur that glimpsing so much as an eye was an achievement.
    At each camp you fed the fire with vodka to placate the evil spirits. One evil spirit for another, thought Boz. They burned mountain rhododendron which gave off a sublime smell. And in a new tent, with fresh larch branches on the floor and reindeer hides weighted with stones around the back and sides of the tent, the mingling of heavy aromas was enough to wrestle you to the ground. The reindeer bells made Boz think of yachts as they warned off the wolves.
    Each day was a repeat of the one before, the brash of tiny birch twigs snapping underfoot, the pantomime observances of trying to pee in sub zero air. He’d read too many stories about Arctic explorers taking off their socks and a couple of toes peeling with them. Boz passed water as if it were a timed sport. In this universe, cold is the unending, basic condition. Heat is a luxury, a temporary flicker. Keep on moving.
    They had been walking a week. Once they passed a cliff that had been sheared open by a deluge to reveal nearly intact mammoths – the animals that first scooped up river mud with their tusks to form dry land. Boz was due a delivery of batteries which the chopper was going to drop near an oil well marked as a black gush on the map. It was one of only three features on the homemade map which the helicopter captain had drawn him for a price. There was also a military installation that was marked with a gun and a small hillock which was a geological mystery.
    For the herders his maps were idiotic. They didn’t have any fixed points in their entire world view, so they would relate everything to their movement through a place. Dyu was the present camp site but only a destination for a moment before it turns into home and the starting point for the next migration and so three words would follow each other over and over again – amdip, duy, erimken – previous site, present site, next site – amdip, duy, erimken – a triad of movement.
    But even though they were in the right place on the right day the helicopter didn’t show. With a mild sense of panic gripping his bowels, Boz decided to walk along the wire perimeter of the oil installation, but it seemed to go on for ever and Boz noted with a sinking feeling that the filming might be over. As he might be over, at least the Welshman who left his wife and ran away with the reindeer might be a done chapter. If the chopper didn’t find him, his life as it had been lived was over too. Soon it would be winter, and the days would barely exist. He would be marooned with people he couldn’t call friends because he didn’t even know the name for friend in their language, but for whom he cared deeply, because of the simplicity of their lives, the doggedness of their journeys and the chinkling chimes of their children’s laughter. These were kids who didn’t have so much as a single toy between them and yet they played constantly. He ate marmot with them and so much reindeer meat that he was almost permanently constipated. One day he sighed with relief when they mentioned sausages until he found out they were made with reindeer blood in a skin of intestine.
    And then one day he saved a little girl from drowning. No-one said thank you and her mother received her sodden body with no tears or even a shrug. But something happened. Acceptance happened. He watched them slathering bear fat on her wounds where her ribs had struck some rocks before walking out to see the men rounding up the animals for castration.
    A flash of silver caught his eye and he could see what looked like a small bulldozer making its way across a snowfield towards the fence. The reindeer herders froze. This was another sight that wasn’t budgeted for in their cosmologies.
    In a land which had never had a Renaissance, and where science first came in the form of an airplane which had buzzed low over the treetops with its cargo of cartographers, geologists and one anthropologist, even the