Part 4

Now, in the version of the story I was told – from some traveller who heard it from his own father, if you recall – the Snow Maiden appears to a country feller out walking his dog. That dog was a border collie, and as obedient as they come, but the snow had already rubbed the gloss off its usual impeccable behaviour. It was all sniffing and scratching now, straining at the lead and desperate to go bounding through the fresh drifts.

The feller let it off the leash, there being no denying the dog its pleasure. But no sooner was it free than it began growling and yapping at something only it could see or hear. When the country feller scolded it for making such a racket, and spoiling an otherwise peaceful walk, that hound took off in circles as though chasing its own tail.

The poor beast seemed torn in two. One moment it lowered its head and sulked beneath its master’s rebukes. The next its ears would prick up, and it would start snivelling and twitching at whatever it sensed ahead.

If you’re a dog owner, you’ll know how a pet can find itself in a dilemma. A dog likes nothing better than to please its master, yet sometimes it understands better than its master how to achieve this. You’ll know this if you’ve ever taken a dog hunting. You might think that kill has staggered off and fallen somewhere over yonder, when that dog knows well enough it’s the other way entirely.

Anyway, this dog resumed its yowling much to its master’s chagrin, but at a curtailed level, which it must have considered a compromise. The master thought different.

Truth be told, he was the kind of feller always on the lookout for disobedience – which was how he’d been with his wife, too. Nothing vexed him more than being shown up, especially in front of another dog-walker. He’d laugh it off at the time, but once they were alone, he’d snap his knuckles hard against the dog’s snout to remind it who was boss.

That poor beast would snivel and display the whites of its eyes, the way dogs do when they’re cowering and pleading. Most likely it didn’t appreciate fully just what it had done wrong. Not that it blamed the master for its confusion. It kept faithful with the old boy regardless.

It wasn’t much in the mood for backing down on this occasion, and would surely have had its nose walloped, had the feller’s attention not been arrested by a huge explosion of snow right where the dog had been fixated.

Now I don’t want to spoil the story ahead of time, but that dog never did get credit for trying to warn its master. That’s life though, isn’t it? That’s a dog’s life, as they say.

It was the darndest thing he’d ever seen. Came out of nowhere. “Just a puff of snow, boy,” he said to that dog trying to calm it, either that or himself. But it was more like that whatsit, the “Big Bang.” From nothing to everything all at once. One moment silent and pristine, a snow-covered blanket pulled up and tucked under the chin of the sleepy landscape, not a whisper of breeze disturbing its season-long dream. Next thing, the blinding advance light of an explosion.

The feller went over and over this spectacle, thinking no one would believe it. He wrote it down again and again, turning it over in his mind, reaching for every dictionary he could lay his hands on to make sense of what he’d seen. He started with the standard ones – borrowed, him not being a dictionary sort – and then worked his way up to the scientific and meteorological volumes, the specialist kind you only find in libraries or proper educational bookshops.

Incandescent burst of supernova cracking open the frozen cosmos. Shockwave of aurora dancing across the sky. Crystalline fragments of ice suspended in the air, each a tiny prism scattering light to the darkest corners of eternity. A snowflake, an infinitesimal star in the twinkling galaxy. A particle fused with light and energy. A vortex of swirling ash, opening and loosening a glistening, otherworldly, hot white orb. A crystal palace ablaze, burned back into the ice until all that is left is a snowy hillslope where nothing but flat land existed a moment ago.