Read Too Cold For Snow for Free Online

thoroughly smoked wader-kebabs. The youngsters couldn’t give a hoot.
    To make the two American visitors actually feel like royalty Ryan had made cardboard crowns which they wore to great effect, causing all the dinner guests to guffaw at the way they donned them at rakish angles. Sharon said the swan looked liked the biggest thanksgiving turkey they had ever seen . It took up most of the table and even then its long neck lolled over one edge. A warm miasma of conversation had settled in, and they were all heady with the effects of drink.
    ‘Shall I carve?’ asked Kenny, running the blade of a carving knife against a whetstone. Twm had suggested he do the honours as he was the one with the knife skills, an in-joke based on some of the stories Kenny’d told him about gang life, and about the way they sometimes duelled with Kitchen Devils. Ryan was now on his feet.
    ‘By Royal command, I give my subjects consent to eat a mute swan. And have some potatoes while you’re at it.’
    Kenny looked at Twm and at Karen as if he was torn between which of them warranted the most of his love, but as he chewed on the breast meat of the enormous bird he knew that he had enough to go around. Twm excused himself as he needed to pack his stuff while he was still able to think – he’d swigged back the sloe gin as if there was no tomorrow and was more than slightly befuddled from the drugs. The flesh of the stately bird was plentiful, if tough, and the remaining diners munched through it doggedly.
    Taking the air outside Kenny and Karen listened to the plaintive sound of the last of the summer’s shearwaters. Cocklolly, it cried as it wheeled over the island in the dark before turning its elegant wings for Uruguay, to shear its way across the tempestuous South Atlantic. Cocklolly , said the spirit guide, departing. Kenny knew he could find his own way home now. His hands interlaced with Karen’s, his eyes straining to see the retreating bird in the absorbent dark. The world contracted to the warmth of her hand and it was more than sufficient. And in the fuchsia bush the little warbler slept on as the light flashed out its steady semaphore. Keep away. Keep away. Keep away.

Too Cold for Snow
     
     
    In these northern latitudes Fahrenheit zero was considered bikini weather. It is the coldest inhabited place on earth. It was said that one old man had stopped walking for a moment one afternoon and the blood had frozen in his veins. The Eveny, a migratory people, therefore had every reason to keep walking and, besides, they were just keeping pace with the animals. Hovki, the God, made everything around them, but details of how he did this are vague. After all, it was a long time ago, but they do know they belong to all this, all that’s around them and to nature, as if it’s a cousin. Their word for bear is the same as grandfather. And they have been here long enough to know that the elders fly to the sun on the back of the reindeer.
    The animals lumbered across the moss, its sphagnum coverlet wrapping up all sound. Little bamboo rods of sunlight pointed the way among the endless thickets of birch which made the taiga seem uncrossable. The reindeer herders were hunchbacked by the weight of the cold, which had scattered splintery ice on the bundled layers of hide and pelt which cocooned them all from air which had most of the effects of liquid nitrogen. And trudging with the animals at five miles a day was Boz, who had come all the way to the lung-shattering temperatures of Siberia to avoid his wife.
    It was more a question of avoiding his wife’s vindictive brood of a family who had vowed, with a vehemence bordering on the vibrant lust of Albanian blood feud, that they’d never forgive him for leaving her in the lurch. Their collective memory was selective enough to forget that she was the one who had run off with the manager of the Smiling Kebab. The Smiling Kebab, for fuck’s sake!
    Boz was a composer of advertising jingles and he