Winter Coming Down

Dewey, Montana

The rain that has shadowed me for a week, and taken all shadow, turns to snow that removes the grain from wood on the fence posts outside the log cabin I have slept in for two nights. Snow comes like a hand over a mouth and everything is quiet, everything is waiting for a kiss, for a slap, for confirmation that if we put out our open hands we can handle this one moment of change. I am a dog that feels the clouds sitting over this canyon, yawning into the steam of optimistically strong coffee. One leg scratches the other. The dog in me sighs swallowing tastelessly. "There will be no escaping another winter," I think to myself out loud. I have been courting this since I sat out the fires in August. "I ordered this winter walk myself...just get through the sub-zero temps and the mountains. Just see me through" Grizzley's walk these roads and tackle the river. Forget about the map in the Tracker's Field Guide showing where the ursus arctos call home. I am not the only wanderer. Snow.
Raisins grow fat in hot water and cinnamon on the stove waiting for dry rolled oats to be stirred in. Shutting off the stove and my stomach I step out into the wet, into the cold weighing of everything through glassy eyes, then the unsuppressed shrug of it. All this leaving becomes easy, one cough that brings on another. Staying on. There is the trick. Feelings catch up whenever I sit too long at a table and I'm given my mind to chew on. Everything I tied a sheet around and sunk behind me eventually floats to the surface if the pot isn't constantly stirred by walking. So I stir. Tucking laces into my boots before stepping into them and pulling my hat down to keep my glasses dry I walk toward the saloon to see Rita, to hear her tell me to stay in her cabin for another night allowing the storm to move through the canyon; this white that makes what is already breathtaking become unbelievable. Rita is the owner of the polished bar of Dewey, the fire all the mountain moths dry their wings around wet from the hunt, wet for conversation. The bar took in 41 bullet holes the first season open. I am told the story and pointed to holes through pine boards and walls. We talk about having breakfast down the river as the snow moves toward rain and back to snow again.
If you told me this town was a prop from the Northern Exposure television series set in Alaska I would believe you. The log cabins facing the winding road have flat square faces as they did a century ago, bleached antlered elk skulls angle down like soft lights always illuminating lost hollow need over weathered boards I walk slowly beneath when evening comes...just to get this feeling right. Old pick-up trucks and campers that match the number of homes, exceed it, rest in the moving air timelessness, paint on old steel having gone appaloosa in weather and age even the dead looks picturesque. This is a place that you'd want to be hit heavy with snow so the whole world have to completely bypass and leave you to winter, to reading books on a bed of silver furs,the making of children and smelling cranberry candles and cedar logs burning, turning to ash till spring whimpers in a quarter year from now. We'd eat smoked meat fattened on alfalfa grass and tender sage. We'd talk about your grandfather's rifle, the way he wore that coat all year long until it became a continuation of his leathered brown skin. "It is good that some things never change," we say in soft paper voices as if the saying it secures some things in state for another year, another winter. The ivory that I have carried for a thousand miles would become two lovers I'd stain in tea. You would ask me to trade Osa's knife, knowing down deep that I couldn't trade it in spite of that look in your eyes. Your son would be holding the she-bear's claws I carried since Jersey, feeling stories digging through roadsides of evergreens in the remnants of fur caught between nuckle, sterling beads and cord. I would turn the dead tree that watches you undress through your window into a pine bear wearing claws around his neck and feathers gently lifting in his cape. If winter held us here.