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By Root 614 0

and splayed in a grotesque distortion of a snow angel, my melancholy morphed into fear. I could die out here. Hell. Maybe I was halfway there. My thoughts floated to a sad story about a kid a few years older than me in school. His parents had been trapped in a stalled car, after an accident out in the middle of nowhere, during an ice storm. Knowing they were going to freeze to death, the mother wrote a good-bye letter to her son. The morbid rumor circulating afterward claimed the letter was gibberish and that the final word trailed off at the end into one long line of nothing. Like she’d slowly dragged the pen across the center of the paper as she’d frozen to death and died.

Cheery thought. Maybe you should think about that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde made-for-TV movie you watched 93

as a kid, where in the end the woman froze to death on the ship and her beautiful blue eyes were wide open and com- pletely iced over.

The image still haunted me.

Wasn’t delirium a fugue state right before death?

Last time I’d been in a dreamy pre-death state, my dead brother had shoved me back toward the land of the living before he disappeared into the great unknown. Come on, Ben, I could use some wise Lakota words about now.

I heard nothing but the roar of the wind and a faint . . . Mooooooooo.

What the fuck?

I listened.

Mooooooooo.

I had to be hallucinating.

Mooooooooo.

I lifted my head and heard it again.

Not one moo, but a collection of moos. A chorus of moos. High and low notes ringing out dissonance across the prairie amphitheater.

Great. I was dying in a fucking cow pasture, being serenaded by a phantom bovine choir.

PETA would have a field day with this.

Field day? Jesus. I was in a field. That was goddamn funny. I started to laugh. I laughed until the frigid air lined the inside of my lungs and my stomach hurt. I thought I might laugh until I cried. Or until I died. 94

But I wanted neither to die with tears on my cheeks, nor to live with the telltale tracks etched into my skin like a brand of shame.

In order to survive I had to move my ass.

Somehow I managed to lift my stiff body to my hands and knees. I sat up and rested on my heels. Flying daggers of ice slashed my face when I stood. I clenched my teeth and shook off the stinging pain. With my shoulders hunched against the wind, I shuffled through the powder, using the rope as a guide back to my truck and inside the blessed warmth of the cab. Once I’d thawed some, I realized I’d lost my sunglasses. I also realized I was seeing better without them. Maybe since I wasn’t so damn snow blind I could see the fence line. Too late to give up. I was already out here. It’d be stupid to go back. I rubbed a foggy spot at the bottom of the windshield and saw a flash of red. I blinked, afraid it’d been another illusion.

Nope. A red streamer fluttered in the wind. I rammed the truck in gear and gunned it about twenty feet. Sure enough. My dad had fastened a long strip of red plasticlike lumberyards used to a twelvefoot two-by-four I knew it marked the turnoff to the cattle shelter.

I cranked the wheel a hard right, hit the gas, and plowed through a snowdrift. By the time the windshield wipers slapped away the snow, I saw the ass end of my dad’s Dodge and narrowly avoided smacking 95

into the open tailgate.

My adrenaline kicked in when I noticed the driver’s door was open and a dark shape was half-buried in the snow by the front tire.

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Stages leading to hypothermia:

Frostnip: characterized by skin pain and numbness, exposed body parts become blanched (white). Frostbite: redness, swelling, formation of blisters or water blisters (blebs) followed by gangrene of tissue and underlying fat, resulting in black, leathery dead skin, requiring amputation.

Clinical stages of hypothermia:

Excitatory: rapid breathing, increased activity as victim shivers, attempting to warm up, as blood vessels constrict to conserve heat. Heart rate drops as the amount of blood ejected by the heart is reduced. Fatigue and confusion set in.

Adynamic: victim is without movement; breathing slows as