The frozen lake cracked beneath his feet. The ice shuddered up through his legs and into his spine. An eerie, hollow groan cast out against the frigid morning when the ice stretched.

The air was still dark, and the sun was not yet attempting its ascent above the mountains that stood watch. The jet sled behind him was filled with his ice fishing gear: jig rods, buckets, and a popup hut. He looked back towards shore—too far.


The man breathed rapidly, and ice formed in his beard around his mouth and under his nose. His heart was slamming against his chest, his stomach up in his throat. He tried to force himself to move in any direction – commit to the ice or turn back, but his feet refused to move. 


The ice flexed again, visibly this time, a thick wave of clear glass that lifted him slightly. The crack underneath his feet expanded, popping and exploding. 


He dropped the jet sled rope and started running. The ice was clear, black – thankful he remembered to wear his spikes. He ran, mind blank, thighs burning. 


A sound rose from behind him. Realizing he was further from shore now, he stopped and looked back. 


Six deer were on the ice, and one was in the water, screaming in guttural harmony with the hollow sounds of the flexing ice. He was roughly where he had been standing before instinct replaced adrenaline and freeze became flight. The jet sled lay just a few feet ahead of where the one deer went through.


When had the deer come on the ice? He hadn’t even heard them. 


Flecks of ice floated in the air around him. “Frost flecks,” his mother used to call them. “That’s when you know it’s cold, cold,” she’d say. “Cold enough to kill a man in under thirty seconds if he falls through the ice,” she’d whisper sternly to his father whenever he wanted to go ice fishing in the raw desolation of deep winter in the north. 


She was long dead now, but her voice echoed like an old record stuck in a loop. 


He was not particularly religious, so he prayed to his mother. 


Hey, ma. I know it’s been a long time since we last talked. I will accept death when it comes, unlikely as gracefully as you did, but I would like to avoid meeting the reaper today. 


He looked back at the deer on the ice. The one in the water had stopped moving, its head stuck on the ice where water had gotten through the hole. “Kill a man in under thirty seconds,” the echo of his mother repeated with clipped precision. 


The other deer stood there, seemingly spooked by the one in the water. Deer only group up in the winter, and mostly for warmth. Ironic that now one just froze to death surrounded by its kin, and quickly. 


He stared across at them until one of the deer looked directly at him and straightened itself up with grace and pride. The man could feel the animal’s grief and felt guilt—he suddenly felt as if he had interrupted the stewardship of this animal into the afterlife. He disassociated while this deer died. Maybe he could have helped it.


“Ain’t no animal on this earth truly as stupid as humans would like to believe,” his father used to say. “We think entirely too damn high of ourselves.” 


His father used to say a lot of things like that, and as the old man got older, he would talk more about the intelligence of animals and humanity’s hubris. 


“Man thinks we’re the only intelligent species,” he’d yell from his bed as he lay at home succumbing to cancer. “Hmph! We can barely cooperate or communicate with each other; ain’t no damn way we think we’re more capable than them animals out there that do it all the time.” His father would mutter into the night about the animals, how humans did them wrong, and how they took too much. The world would suffer because of it. He’d lay there, half dreaming, whisper ranting to the log walls about humanity’s arrogance. 


As he looked at the little herd, the man realized that his father was right. Humanity defined intelligence and meaningful interaction only based on its own limited experience. Somewhere along the way, humans forgot how to see things beyond their scope of practice and decided to define intelligence, society, and culture based on how they presented and evolved them.


The man bowed his head at the deer, reverence and respect replacing curiosity. Its black eyes stared at him, unblinking, and he suddenly felt the animal’s sorrow hit him from across the ice, palpable and thick against his shoulders and chest. 


Each deer bellowed once, either up to the sky or down to the ice, quick staccato sounds that echoed against the mountain ledges and fed themselves around the pine barrens that blanketed the foothills.


He felt the song bubble up before he could stop it and sang to the deer across the water: 


Then I heard a sweet voice from the top of this mountain, 

Saying, “child put your hand in mine” 

I started climbing slowly

“Watch your steps at the edges,

And take one step at a time.”1 


The small herd snapped their heads up at the sound of his low rumble of a song, but they didn’t move. And when the last word came out, half low whisper and half melody, the deer all turned and ran back towards shore, their white tails at attention behind them, beacons against the dark sky. 


“Well, I guess it’s time you ran the gauntlet, kiddo,” his mother whispered to him from the deep everywhere and the shallow nowhere.


He took a deep breath and looked up. The stars seemed particularly rigid, but they get that way when there’s no moisture in the air to soften them. 


“Thirty seconds,” the wind whispered behind him.