The boy opens the gate to the meadow where the late spring grass and blooms display themselves. He carries a sharpened hoe and pitchfork one in each hand. His lunch, drinking water and slings hang around his shoulder. He stops at the galvanized steel drum set into the ground by the path. The lid was warm and white in the sun. After dropping his tools and harness, he hoists the lid onto the ground and looked into the well. There was only a dim glistening at first then a circle of translucence reflect his face and sky. He reads the water for unaccounted disturbance. As he does a dim crescent moon emerges below. He hold this view of his shadowed face and the sky for several heartbeats.
A woman steps out of prefab hut on an Arctic ice field with a large caliber rifle on her shoulder. The sun was due east casting long shadows westward. She pulls the bolt of the gun and checks the chamber for a shell.
At the field, he takes a bearing on the poplar trees half a mile away. He then takes out weeds from the rows, sliding the ones with seed heads into his sling. After his load becomes unwieldy he walks the earth scented plants to the spot where his fork handle announces his mornings territory. He dumps the weeds then returns to the rows using the bearings he had redrawn in his mind.
By noon the weeds form a mound large enough to lie in and nod off.
The woman watches the gauges in the instrument shack and reads the last 18 hour history of electronic measurements. There are abnormal patterns with numbers outside the 2nd standard deviation. The wind is blowing snow into hard crescents drifts. The ground drifting is 4 meters so that the woman can only see the maw of blue sky overhead and her boots on the snow pack below. The horizon is gone, there was no north, south east or west only up and down. She holds the yellow rope and sliding it through her mitts, follows it back to the hut. Outside the door today's bear spores are almost worn away by the wind.
As the sun moves due west the boy piles weeds using the pitchfork. He joins one pile to the other until only one remains. As he works he sees the large brindled dog trotting down the red dirt path. It slows, sniffs on one side of the track then turned and smells the other side. The dog turns and looks boldly into the boy’s eyes.
At the hut the woman saw dusty red earth and green crop rows in her minds eye. She hadn’t seen the polar bear today because of the drifting snow. She unloads the rifle and puts it into its shackled closet.
