Carol Phillips
Woman Who Would Be Wolf
I think of snow. I sense its freshness, its purity. Being alone in its stillness and watching light bounce off crystals formed in the dark. Seeing its whiteness stretch to the horizon, its translucent blue when it turns to ice. Breathing its newness. Surely the world was created from snow. Snow was what the raven pierced and fixed into place. Risen from the sea, a gift from the goddess Sedena, surely this was how the land was formed.
I was born on snow. I gave birth on its clean surface. The midwife was near and my mother and my father, my husband, our aunts and uncles, our brothers and sisters sang and drummed my daughter into life. I searched the northern lights for one who just died and, seeing her, I named my child as I washed her soft skin in snow’s melted purity.
I long to live there still, there on snow. Not here, not in this town. I long to feel soft flakes falling, watch them drift across the floes. I long to feel the silence, allow it once again to seep into my being. I long to know the secrets it hides: the crevices that carve its depths to the earth’s crust; the bones of my ancestors whose spirits drape wintry nights in the greens of the tundra of spring, the blues of the sea of summer, and sometimes reds, the reds of their passion.
I wish to run with my dogs over wide plains of alabaster, trusting them to find the packed snow covering ice, and skirt around the hardened skin covering soft billowy powder. Even in wind that cuts the surface into grooves and builds ridges. Even when air swirls icy mists around us as the dogs pull and I push the sled over the uneven ground.
For I am like the one my mother spoke of, the one who became a wolf. The one who did not want her sons to support her. She built her own snow houses and so will I. She tried to fish, and stole when she caught none. But I, I will catch them. I will catch fish to eat. I will support myself. She was abandoned, and one day after catching no fish, she walked inland to hunt the caribou. I will walk inland too, me and my dogs, and hunt the caribou. She took off a shoe and was half wolf and half human. She took off her other shoe and became all wolf. When people come to hunt caribou, she knows they watch for her.
For I do not want to be crowded into a box, laid shallow in permafrost with all the others. I long to die in snow. I am happy thinking of this. Thinking of my body washed in its melt water and my hair braided and my jade knife placed in my hands. I long to be covered in caribou hide and taken inland and laid on luminous land, as my mother was, and her mother before her. I can feel even now the rocks that will protect me from the bear and wolverine. I can feel the cold embrace of the snow turning to ice. A child, a great granddaughter or niece, will be named after me and they will watch me dance in the winter night. And when they hunt the caribou, they will think of me.
This piece was originally published in the 2017 anthology Vision and Voice, from an Ekphrastic poetry event sponsored by Mariah Wheeler.
Carol Phillips’ essay, “Waiting In Time,” appears in the Main Street Rag Publishing Company’s anthology About Time. Her short story “Driving Lessons” won Second Place in the Carolina Women’s 2020 Writing Contest. Carol has written columns about mild traumatic head injuries and invisible disabilities for the Chapel Hill News, part of the News and Observer group. In addition, her short stories and haiku have appeared in small journals. She has been a member of the NC Writers’ Network since 2006, and served as a Regional Rep for four years.
