It is about 6:30pm and I am standing beside my house outside. my house is the last before the open road to civilization. It winds around the corner to the wolverine landing strip where you wait to catch the plane out in the middle of a snow pile. i am standing in a puddle of light cast by the street lamp above me and staring at the emaciated trees that make up the forest surrounding me. They seem to be about the same width as the wrists of the 4 foot tall 11 year old girls in my class, with the same strange gray smudges on their skin and dents in their sides. Still, the snow settles perfectly on their every right angle. They are completely still in a kind of unearthly silence. Behind me every once in a while I can hear the huskies whimpering and howling at their chains, their yelps have the same intensity as babies and little girls in distress. It seems that if you freed them from the shackles they spend day and night in they would run right across the river and up on to the moon. The there's the shrieks of kids playing out in the cold, doing god knows what, getting their limbs cut off skiddoing, begging their daddies not to shoot their doggies, drinking with their uncle- fathers or jumping off the mountainous snow hills the tractor adds to every morning.
Rhonda on of our grade 4 students got her thumb cut off on the weekend snowmobiling. They drove her 3 hours to Hay River and then flew her to Edmonton, 6 hours without any medicine.
I got a call from Donna, a lady that has a new litter of puppies that are always out in the cold beside the school. She told me that they have two females left and they are going to shoot them so do I want to take one?
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