The Ecology of Subsistence

No daylight for two months, an ice chisel slivers frozen lake water refracting blue cinders. By light of an oil lamp, a child learns to savor marrow: cracked caribou bones a heap on the floor. A sinew, thickly wrapped in soot, threads through the meat on her chin: a tattoo in three slender lines. One white ptarmigan plume fastened to the lip of a birch wood basket; thaw approaches: the plume turns brown. On the edge of the open lead, a toggle-head harpoon waits to launch: bowhead sings to krill. Thickened pack ice cracking; a baleen fishing line pulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish. A slate-blade knife slices along the grain of a caribou hindquarter; the ice cellar lined in willow branches is empty. Saltwater suffuses into a flint quarry, offshore a thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin. Alongside shatters of a hummock, a marsh marigold flattens under three black toes of a sandhill crane. A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream; underneath, arctic char lay eggs of mercury. Picked before the fall migration, cloudberries drench in whale oil, ferment in a sealskin poke. A tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel rum; she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson.