Snow Eater

SNOW EATER

Spring is here.

Until now, this was a featureless white plain, a slightly-hilly canvas framed by an impenetrable evergreen forest to the south and east, and an inscrutable mass of mountains framing the northern and western border.

Some of the younger elk still nosed about, but the birds knew to avoid the area at this time of year. The winds became less bracing. The skies were clear and empty of clouds more often than not. And if one sat still along the northern rocky boundary -- my favourite spot was at the landing pool of a narrow waterfall that, through the winter, froze into a frosty jade-white partition -- along this boundary you could sit and wait, and bid farewell to the winter.

The first gurgling breath of the world as it awoke from the winter started, as always, with a whisper. I saw deep emerald bubbles meandering their way under the thinning surface of the frozen pool. Water was moving, as always, in the lowest places, finding them. I heard what could have been the rumblings of distant thunder, but that would be impossible on such a cloudless day. My squinting eyes took in the electric blue of the sky, then scanned the snowy plain in time to see the last of the elk scatter southward into the forest. A mist had sprung up and they capered through it to disappear into the green.

The rumble bellowed forth again. The earth was breathing. Whatever titan slept down there, it was waking up. For a moment, I thought I saw the snowy plain heave upward, pillowing and sighing like the sheet on the largest bed imaginable.

And then with the sound of trillions upon trillions of ice crystals clawing vainly against granite and slate of the valley below, the snow sank. In its place was nothing short of astonishing: a rocky, tiered chasm that disappeared into the depths unknown hundreds of feet below.

The thunderous calamity had the half-life of a dynamite blast, but it was the mist -- not billows of dust and smoke -- that remained. The snow plain was now neatly bisected from the northeast to the southwest. The mountains and the forest would be separated for another nine months, by a black-toothed grin four miles long.