Read Too Cold For Snow for Free Online Page A

now lived with nomads the other side of the Verkhoyansk Mountains. They wore seventeen layers of clothing in winter, but he wore eighteen, just to be on the safe side. He hasn’t thought of a ditty for months because he saw a reindeer killed by a stab to the base of the skull. Odd how life seemed like a straight road but then showed its switchbacks. His mother-in-law scorned his music – said he’d been educated beyond his intellect. She could make him wither with shame. So he was fleeing two women, at least.
    The rhythm of walking was conducive to thought, and the genus of Siberian plodding in harsh midwinter was one most richly so. One tread. Two treads. One tread more. An action so mechanical it gave you time to think about things, as the reindeer cloaked you in a fog of frozen breath.
    Boz thought about his wife and Len McLaren – the two deserved one another. Anyone who could be seduced by a man who had kebab lamb fat under his fingernails deserved to be indecently and un-hygienically palped by them. The thought of the man’s hands on her flesh had first made him sick, then incendiary with rage before being spirited away into the dark place. Boz took to drink awhile as if he could afford to do so. If tequila is the fuel of incipient loopiness then he supped his fill, downing it as if Mexicans were smuggling it across the Brecon Beacons on mule trains, or in petrol tankers. But every so often someone would unkindly mention how his wife’s cartoon-hellish family, the Thompsons, were plotting their revenge – how they were going to watch him burn as he dangled from a home made gibbet. In some ways the Thompsons were inventive. It was a family to avoid. That and their gibbet.
    In rare blazes of sobriety he thought of dramatic ways to escape his plight, even considering a stint with the French foreign legion until Mel, the barmaid with a zoo of animal tattoos told him that: ‘It’s fantasy island for hard gay men, who like their castles in the sand.’ She could be ever so dismissive – Mel, who had been educated at the Sorbonne, but had discovered crack courtesy of a spiral-eyed Moroccan at Jim Morrison’s grave and had lost her way through great swathes of Europe courtesy of amazing hallucinogens and hospital-grade cocaine. It was her who had showed him the advert in the Western Mail from a Galway based television company that was looking for a Welsh speaker with high stamina and a rare sense of adventure to spend a year with the Eveny, a reindeer-herding people who take their stock back and fore across Siberia. One of their ancient tracks was about to be severed by the creation of an enormous pipeline. Last Migration of the Eveny, as they said in the Radio Times.
    He took the idea seriously and before he went for his interview he gave up the sauce and climbed up Twmbarlwm twice a day until his calf muscles resembled those of a Bolivian gaucho in the Altiplano. He cashed in his Premium bonds, sold his car and exchanged all the money for a lift in an old Soviet helicopter, a deal brokered by some vodka-jowled businessmen who looked as if they got their suits from a boutique called Mafia ‘R’ Us.
    The helicopter took off from a military airfield littered with broken Antonov planes, rusted relics of an Empire that only lasted seventy years. It was a sepia scene from some Cold War film or other, especially as the ice mist smothered everything. The flight took for ever, especially as they had to stop for ‘mail’ every now and then, landing on airstrips that looked no bigger than a cricketing crease where there was never so much as a letter to deliver or to pick up. On the other hand they did drop off cases of booze and picked up animal pelts, but he knew better than to ask a why or a wherefore. The captain had some words of broken English. His breath was a miasma of caries and slivovitz and he stabbed a Cumberland sausage finger to emphasise each triumphant word.
    ‘You…’
    ‘Yes, me…’ said Boz, smiling