Defeated by the whiteness

Njoro fought her way through the howling wind.
The skis felt like enormous lead chains tied to her feet.
She wondered if she would be able to withstand this for much longer.
She’d been walking for days. Ever since the passing of the Savage.
He had eventually given in one morning. Not that he hadn’t put up a fight. So much power in him. Such a pity about the misuse of it, and the consequences he suffered.
Anyway, it’s probably turned out a great lesson for his soul.
It’s all about learning.
Now she was learning her own lesson.
She had been forced to move purely by intuition, and never expect to see further into her own future than as far as her eyesight carried.
At the moment it was as far as the tips of her skis.
She would have to dig a cave.
She loosened the sleigh she was pulling, picked out the wooden shovel and started digging.
Things had acquired a certain routine now that she’d been on the move for so long in this place. It wasn’t long before she could slide herself through the narrow entrance and start rigging her temporary nest.
Soon the fire was made, and she no longer smelled the strong smell of the burning fat, but only looked forward to the rich portion of bear she would soon be digging into.
Under the circumstances, she did well. Alone.
A satisfying feeling.
After eating, she crept into the fur sack, and soon as she lay down with a steaming cup of peppermint, she couldn’t think of a better place on Earth to have occupied at this point.
She let her thoughts float. She thought of Lhasa. Of Pi. Of the frozen expression in the Savage’s face as she left him back there in his icy grave.
No ceremony, just a brief blessing, and then she had set off.
How many days, she didn’t know. There was no point in counting – it wasn’t about such things as days and nights. The light was absent anyway, and the only thing that mattered was being on top of the moment.
If she survived the moment, her reward would be another moment, and so on.
A simple arrangement, and not such a bad deal after all.
There was magic also, even if she didn’t dare to make any journey into the Otherworld, as there might not be anything to return to in the physical world if she left it for the merest fraction of time.
She was fragile.
And that made her strong.
At one point she had been working her way across a part of the ice that was surprisingly flat and agreeable to cross.
Above her the stars shone clearly, and there wasn’t so much as a gust of wind, but it was bitterly cold.
At first she just kept staring at the tips of her skis as always. It was a question of hard and determined work to walk while pulling the weight of the sleigh. Then, as she paused to breathe and have some water from her pouch, she glanced at the sky.
A fantastic display of the Aurora Borealis spread out across the sky above her. Flickering waves of green, blue and violet were flashing above her like nothing she’d ever seen. It was as if the sky had exploded, stretching thousands of kilometers into the heavens.
She found herself speechless, gazing into the colourplay as though spellbound.
They’d had occurrences of the Northern Lights before on this trip, but nothing like this. This time it was as if Heaven itself had come alive and opened its gates to her.
Then she remembered something Mungpuk had said during her first encounter with the phenomenon further south. He mentioned that one of their old tales told that if you were to find yourself alone with the Lights, and waved something white at it, you would disturb it and could risk it stretching down from the sky and get you.
Njoro thought for a while.
It was just her, the ice, the Earth and the Lights.
She felt brave.
She unfastened the small leather backpack, and fumbled around inside. Then she pulled out a small piece of white silk that she had used to wrap her sacred stones in before leaving them all behind in one of the first camps.
She hesitated for a moment, then lifted her arm and waved the white silk at the sky.
It was quiet.
Very quiet.
“Well”, she thought, “It’s a nice story.”
Then she re-packed her sack, put it on, and started fastening the sleigh to her harness.
Just as she was fiddling with fastening the leather strips, she heard the sound.
A low, humming sound coming from deep below the Earth.
It grew in intensity, and above the humming she heard icy cold sparkles of something that sounded like tiny crystalline explosions.
Then there was light.
White, ruthless light, shining from all around her. From within the arctic night itself.
She instantly ducked and hid her face in her hands, trying to cover her ears with her elbows in the process.
A difficult maneuver, especially when you’re panic-stricken.
She lay there for what felt too long, and didn’t dare glance upwards to the sky. Her heart was pounding manically, and a terrible wave of regret washed through her mind.
She was sure this was the end of her journey.
But eventually it seemed like the deep sound faded, she could feel the vibrations leaving her body.
She tried to lie as still as she could for as long as she could, but had to peek out after she’d started shaking with cold from not moving.
It was gone.
Only the stars were shining.
She dried the sweat from her forehead as she rose to her feet.
Then she slowly started moving, in a quite unstable and not very elegant way.
“Point taken”, she thought.
Then the girl Njoro from Lhasa kept moving into the dark landscape, with her eyes firmly fixed on the tips of her skis.