"In the city of snow,
Beyond Birch Tree Road;
Are promises of better land.

Where the grass wants to grow,
And you reap what you sow;
There, you will find a better man."

Martha's voice rings throughout Samantha's room as, for just a moment, the snowstorm stands still. It is muted, like the solemn silence of Bowed Lake in the all too sparing Summer's breeze. Sam is half asleep as her mother exudes her last note, barely squeaking out the finish to the mantra of Sam's early life.

There is so much on Martha's mind, of the day, of the night, and of the last four years. But she has no choice but to be strong, just as she always has been.

Martha softly sways her Sammy's disheveled hair away from her eyes.

Sam's eyes snap shut.

Martha releases, "Go to sleep, Qitu (baby.)"

Samantha lets out an obviously-fake, exacerbated snore.

"The storm will have passed by morning," Martha says and pauses for a thank you, a tear driven sniffle, or any affirmation that her daughter hears her. She receives nothing.

"You can sleep through it into the late morning if you wish. Piqpaksiruk (love,)" Martha affirms as she slips away into the same darkness in which they have dwelled in for months.

Samantha succumbs to dreams of an ethereal rolling field with ineffable flowers in varied assortments of size, color, shape, and intensity. Perfection is the limit of one's imagination for something they have never witnessed.

Weaving through the waters of the lulling hills, much like Sam's mother's thread weaved her new blanket, is a bubbling stream of silver and king salmon creating fire pit round ripples of water as they leap for hoops that are not there.

Behind these are the pink salmon, the pinks, swarming in multitudes that effortlessly triple the run of two summers before. More and more hurdle in. The draw of nature's most unexplainable cycle pulls Sam to the water. The fish continue to accumulate.

They threaten to overflow. They now fester.

This run that would have beckoned a feast for her village a moment ago has reneged into a decaying and lively graveyard of decrepit and rejected salmon. The glorious King Salmon deconstructed into a decadent, vulgar chum. Their color begins to fade, and with it, their flavor.

    Insipid. Pallid.
    By nature's laws, invalid.

    Their skin begins to fray,
    and their teeth fade to be as yellow
    as the flowers in the field.

    As the ground begins to tremble,
    an earthquake resembles;
    and her knees begin to shake.

    As she falls to all fours,
    embracing the floor;
    she hangs her head in a daze.

    She peers through her hair,
    and in the water, expects the air;
    but only finds gray dismay.

    The ground begins to freeze.
    Though she makes no final pleas;
    her soul is lost, as is the day.

She awakens to the sight of her rotting wood ceiling without sound and without movement; and she doesn't have the intention to change either. She scans its surface for a crack or a line that she hasn't yet seen, but she knows that ceiling as she knows the three streets that compose her town. They have already been surveyed.

She stares at this plank more mornings than not, and only on these kinds of mornings.

After what seems like and what very well could have been hours, her stupor is stricken by the often inefficient remedy of time.

She has to get out. She cannot stand to see anyone or say anything. Her eyes can't clear it and her throat won't strain it. She has to leave her home.

She sheds her otter blanket to find she is wearing yesterday's clothes.

"Oh well," she scoffs dismally.

After half hopping and half falling out of bed, she creeps across her cheap linoleum floor to her doorway that is short a door and peers into what her mom calls the family room.

It is entirely devoid of life.

Empty. Inhabited only by upholstery with stories.

Sammy slides through this destitute shell and confronts the front door's handle, no doubt the only clean thing in the home. She turns it clockwise and pulls. She manages an inch or so and hears snow toppling on the other side. She tries once more. Useless. Snowed in.

She passes her mother's sewing station, encompassing all sorts of scraps and furs and goods, to reach her mother's door. She sneaks a look through the slightly ajar doorway and spots the matriarch of the home lying on her back, asleep and alone.

Panting and thoughtlessly thudding back to her room, she sits on her bed. Five more minutes of blank morning staring pass and she turns to her right side. All homes in her village have a crawl size secondary exit in case of a fire. Her mother forbade that she use it, a prohibition of the inevitable cold, mostly; but rules haven't seemed to apply lately.

She lifts the hardened steel plate from its horizontal grooved tray and places it to her side. She sits in apprehension as snow fills a small square of her room.

"Another cold winter it is," she hears herself say bitingly. After grabbing her essentials, a bow with a matching caribou hide sheathe holding seven arrows, a knife with a caribou antler stock and an obsidian blade, a fire starting kit comprised of a few modified pieces of wood and some flint in a burlap sack, and her game bag, Sam burrows her way through the dandruff-like powder to find herself outside.

The village is a mess. It seems about three feet have fallen in the last two nightfalls. The sky is still gray, much like it was in her dream.

Her neighboring homes look like giant snowy ant hills, mere mounds of Earth rendered useless by the extreme, yet typical, weather. She trudges some fifty feet through her yard, passing one of the only snow machines in town, and eventually nears upon a smaller home in the village. John and the shed he was raised in mean much to Sam. He has been her best friend for as long as she can remember.

John could be perceived as quite the character. Thirty feet from his secondary exit stands his rendition of a palm tree, made of scrap metal and some jerry-rigged 2X4's. She still chuckles as she sees the product of his last week of boredom.

Proudly suspended from one of the green `palms' is a snow-sprinkled deceased wolverine with an arrow still pierced through its torso. Sammy sighs in envious astonishment as she forcefully brushes the snow from the killer's brown coat. John was too lazy to skin it and clean it the day before. He didn't even clean the blood from the critter's frosted fur. She removes her left glove and approaches the `tree.'

"I wonder," She ponders under her breath as her bare fingers trace the now solidified dark red blood.

She breaks the arrow in half, pulls both ends from the creature, and throws them in her...