Keela, Chapter 1: The Heat Spirit

I am the heat spirit.

I have been here since the creator shaped the world, and I will be here long after you are gone. You feel me in your lover’s panted breath upon your neck, hear me as I crackle and pop wood in your smokehouse, see me blur and distort the distance in the baking summer air. I sooth you as you sit next to your blazing hearth in the long dark of winter, delight you with springtime melt, put the fear into you with writhing wildfire.

But I am not alone, for the creator gave me an adversary when they shaped the world. The cold one - the spirit that invigorates with cool breeze when amicable, numbs when indifferent, savages with frigid chills when incensed. We stand apart, our strengths waxing and waning as we grapple with each other under the day and night suns, bearing seasons and weather along the way as one of us prevails over the other. It is this underlying struggle that forms the conditions of all that follows, though to understand it in its entirety I must first beg your indulgence in explaining a bit more about this world and how our energies shape it.

It begins with a coquettish love full of youthful exuberance, a love born of passion and not compassion, that shapes this northern valley. The day sun’s love of this land waxes and wanes, so in winter she only peeks demurely over the southern sawtooth horizon with curiosity, as if to glimpse the apotheosis of the cold spirit’s power ravaging her former partner in the long dark. But she can’t quit this love, and she starts to thirst for her northern love once more. Winter solstice passes and she returns to her shunned lover, staying a bit longer each day while I recuperate my strength. By the month of the hawk the spring equinox has arrived, and the annual deficit of daylight begins to recover, for all provinces of earth receive the same amount of daylight each year. I thaw free from the cold spirit’s fatigued hold of snowpack and fracture the ice over the ghostly White River that runs through the valley, swelling it with meltwater and flooding the land where its broken ice jams itself, making islands of hills along its banks. Night ends for summer as the day sun stays with her valley at all hours, riding her lover even at midnight. I realize my full strength under her ample light, with only rumbling thunderstorms and brief spells of twilight where sunset imperceptibly transitions into sunrise to temper my power. But the day sun’s love is fickle, and soon she sees something beyond the valley that sparks her interest. She dips under the horizon to meet it briefly, spending more time away from the valley each day as her love falters. In the month of the dog salmon the dark returns, and the night sun bats lashes and shows her cratered face among the celestial ocean. The autumnal monsoons come, and under decrementing daylight my battle with the cold spirit grows dire. Soon the cold one forces my capitulation with its indomitable might in the light-shunned valley, and jails me in thermal corridors under thick river ice while it holds everything above silent and still. The long dark returns and night’s deficit is remade, and the measure of time is internalized through one’s aching hunger. Eager eyes watch the jagged horizon for the day sun to set at her southernmost point, and all breathe again after knowing she is returning to empower me. I am the conduit through which her energy flows.

Look there at the ground of fine-grained soil saturated with water – do you see the land is breathing? She is the creator’s first and primal effort, the powerful and omnipresent earthen spirit. The cold spirit and I are symbiotic with her, though we live a faster life. As the cold one and I battle, her earthen lungs expand with fallen monsoons and thunderstorms that swell and freeze and contract as they thaw and drain. She breathes slowly, for the lightest, most buoyant substrates that settle on the surface of her porous body are a slow conduit of thermal changes that course through her body. But even in blistering summer my heat only reaches her shallows, for in her depths the cold spirit has made a home. Here, groundwater seeks the coldest parts of her earthen body and even travels through ice to reach them, freezing and forming massive blocks of exclusive permafrost that are in places taller than five thousand of your generations standing atop each other. Solid ground is a fiction in this vast valley. This layer of ice age is slow to change but look at what us mischievous spirits have done to her across millennia of respirations, of freezing and thawing cycles. We’ve left her body of magma and permafrost a pockmarked battlefield of curving geocryology. We’ve dotted the thermokarst landscape with oddities of pingos and palsas, bogs and shallows born of rain or pooling meltwater in cavities of thawed permafrost in the sagging surface, curious rock piles where permafrost formed and displaced minerals to the surface. Our energies shape her, as much as the creator did when they first made the world. But there is one final ancient power that has shaped the land with us, a power more closely aligned with the cold spirit than I, though unpredictable and liable to turn on either of us at any time.

On the southern horizon lies a ribbon of serrated mountains, colder than others of similar elevation due to their northernly latitude. Upon the earthen spirit’s clavicle these perpetually white-capped granite citadels are the realms of keen arctic air and the deepest colds, where my cold adversary frolics with the other spirit. Listen – do you hear its wispy words in the thin air? The speaker is as strong as the cold spirit and I, but temperamental as I have ever seen. In mid-sentence its soothing ambience and gentle touch can give way to raking prejudice. Though they share a home upon couloirs and shifting escarpments, I suspect the whimsical wind spirit holds no loyalty to the cold one, for it ravages their alpine home with cutting, shearing gales. Among these peaks is one where it rages most violently, a peak that I have not summited since distant time when it was an ambitious hill and animals and humans spoke to each other. The great one: Denaalee. Master of mountains, it is a giant atop a granite batholith, stood up by subduction and rising like cork in water to become the sentinel of the valley. It has watched over the flood plains for epochs and will continue to do so long after the last memory of your people is gone, for this mountain never thaws, and water never permeates it and breaks it apart as it freezes. It is nearly beyond weathering. The lands below remain tense as the wind spirit dances upon its summit, playing with storms like children’s toys, spinning and deflecting monsoons and ocean currents around the mountain and sending torrents of arctic winds sweeping down its granite and rhyolite slopes to fan out across the flood plains without notice. In time, I’m sure it’ll carry Denaalee away particle by particle, spreading its remains across the valley, from the southern mountain arcs to the last bastion of trees bordering the vast plains of the arctic range. With your short lifetime you might not notice how our whimsical interactions change the land, but you will notice how they guarantee that no season is like any other. In some cycles I have little fight in me, and the cold spirit brings frigid winters earlier and for longer. There was even one cycle where I had no fight in me at all and summer never came. But in others, I bake the valleys under cerulean skies and I linger long into autumn. And whatever fight I have in me against the cold spirit, the tempestuous wind spirit will always have its say and surprise, for it can only be counted on to be unreliable. Sometimes it vanquishes me, other times it dances with me and spreads my wildfires or thawing chinooks.

Little knowledge of these cycles and what transpires in the valley escapes though, for the land is hemmed into the edge of the world by the surrounding arc of mountains. The only thing that passes into the outside world with ease is the White River, a ghostly, ghastly river central to our story that is fed and stained by glaciers, those transitory elements between earth and sky, mountains of glassy ice that are not fluid yet flow in masses. These glaciers lie beyond far horizons near an ocean, but instead of making a day’s journey to drain into the ocean, which is the target of any river, the meltwater meanders inland and across a continent to drain into an arctic sea. This whimsical river once traveled in the opposite direction as it does today, draining a great lake that had once laid on the northern plains, and perhaps the land decided to repurpose the long channel rather than form a new yet more efficient one. Or perhaps the land wanted to show its colors, for these few glaciers stain the river’s entire continental stretch with pale hues of volcanic ash and rock flour. Across seasons these hues vary as the glaciers melt in different areas and at different rates, from their bases by geothermal heat and the pressure of liquefaction, or from their faces where meltwater leaks into cracks and crevasses. Laden with cloudy silt that holds the sunlight out, the watery procession stays frigid as it carries the mountainous remains out to the ocean, ebbing and twisting through the land of the midnight sun. It’s impossible to walk neatly along its banks because its path constantly changes as it piles clay and silt into sandbars, leaves oxbow lakes in its wake, carves away new banks and channels where alder and willow spirits live tenuously at their eroding banks. Oh, you didn’t think the only spirits I was going to mention were us ancients, did you? It’s true I’m a big deal, but this story isn’t about us ancients and our primal dramas of magma and ice and pressure.

The ever-changing tapestry of this buoyant valley, from the wet flush of the alpine slopes to its lowland drainage basins, is teeming with spirits nourished by the abundant midnight sun. Come, bask in my afternoon comfort this spring day while the wind spirit saunters through, swaying and fluttering white spruce and paper birch with its touch. These are among the most powerful tree spirits, though command resides with us. All trees lean and bow to us as I thaw the ground under their roots, and the cold spirit prunes and stunts them as it freezes it. Even the tallest of the subarctic forest, black spruce, may survive a hundred long darks and still be skinnier than your fist. And they all fear my displeasure, for I’ll make thirsty their vast numbers and dry seas of spruce into tinder under the midnight sun, and if fateful spark summons apocalypse, then I’ll turn this arctic boundary into a cremated ash land. I am death.

But in the wake of my fiery passion I am resurrection, resuming the work of the unknowable creator who first seeded this world. Without tree canopies to restrain me, I reach into the barren ground and thaw the ice, forming amethyst peat bogs and viridian hummocks, mounds of sedge and ponds full of sphagnum moss. You would be amazed by the spirits I find in the thawing ground, like of ancient seeds of flowering plants stashed into middens by ice age squirrels. After millennia I release them from their stasis and into the future, rousing them from the cold spirit’s induced torpor so they may make a home in the sterilized desolation. Neon green sprouts punctuate the ashen earth amid charred trunks, and stillness gives way to tiny stalks and leaves that sway and undulate and dance with the wind spirit. Soon the ice age flowers bloom alongside their descendants… do you see that cream-colored flower there, the one with the longer petals spaced farther apart? That is the ancestor of the one next to it, a thousand-thousand times removed. And alongside these ancients is a succession of opportunistic species. Tinges of pastel ambers, crimson, golden, and fuchsia begin to appear as flowers blossom upwards along their stalks, turning graveyards of charred trunks into grassy marshes and lush meadows full of lush fragrances of fireweed, pink louseworts, bog laurels, forget-me-nots, geraniums, columbines, rosemary. The rampant floral candescence will rival the vibrance of a clearing sunset in a storm’s wake. Would you believe the fecundity of such a bloom after my ravaging? Soon willows and shrubs follow, and the boreal forest will be made anew as white and black birch thrive.

But this is not a story about a gust of wind or a dandelion, even though they have parts to play in it because all spirits are interdependent on one another in relationships and roles often unseen. As the forest cycles through death and life, so too do the animal spirits that make their homes in it. Survival is the heart of this story, and each spirit has differentiated itself to execute their unique food and climate strategies to meet this endless quest and exist for another day, another meal, another brood. Some fight; some take flight against the cold spirit. Most leave when the long dark comes, but those that brave the harshest realm of the earthen spirit are a diverse and formidable lot. Some travel long distances in search of a few scarce types of scattered food across the sparse winter land, others depend on a variety of nearby foods. All are honed by adversity and full of grit, but each is regarded for their peculiarities and their method of how survival is achieved. Raven, clever and treated with deference for it, but also mischievous, manipulating and whimsical, and heeded warily and sometimes treated with contempt. Of the raven kin is Dotson’sa, the great trickster raven that stole and released the day sun into the world. And mischievous like raven is red fox, a solitary hunter admired for his cleverness and cleanliness. Not admired is mosquito - a nuisance, subject to maledictions and anathema beyond any other. In sufficient numbers they are a fatal predator of caribou. Also loathed is longnose sucker, the bottom-feeding fish regarded as a thief and not always eaten, for fear the consumer inherits its thieving ways. And voles - essential. They are the smallest mammals, yet pivotal as they bridge the gap between plant and carnivore energy, feeding on vegetation and feeding themselves in turn to snowy owls, jaegers, hawks, foxes, others. Chickadees – simply my favorite. They eat a third of their body weight in short winter days and shiver it off through the night to stay warm. Spruce beetle, apocalyptic insect, short-lived and tiny but ravages the forests like my wildfires. Honeybee, nurturing insect, gardener of the valley and gold-dusted bruiser, a furbearer like their wolf, bear, caribou and moose cousins. But unlike their cousins, their feathery hairs that extend outwards in all directions don’t hold warmth but pollen. The insects siphon nectar from flowery depths with tongues nearly as long as their bodies. Stay long enough and you will see their effect on the land in every flower and willow catkin and berry shrub, and their actions ripple through populations of the largest animals, moose and black bear. These most northerly social insects are among the few of their kind that thermo-regulate, holding antifreeze in their cells so that when arctic willows blossom, their pregnant queens brave subzero weather and even blizzards to establish themselves. Other animals are crafty in ways I hadn’t expected too - wood frogs are cousins to permafrost, freezing in autumn nights and thawing when I return the next day. When the long dark comes in earnest, they’ll remain frozen in stasis until I return. And the mighty black bear, fearsome and powerful above all else, yet it sleeps off winter and is not above feasting on willow buds and grasses or turning over logs and brush in pursuit of tiny voles.

And your brothers and sisters - the ones that refer to themselves as the People of the Willow River Country, of which all modern animals were once part of but transformed from in Distant Time – these original people have their ways, too. Not since Distant Time did all spirits share a single language and speak to each other, but now we all have our own languages and walk about dumb to what the others are saying. Sometimes we can deduce meaning through the tone of other’s strange utterings - a raven’s frantic screech communicates terror, the guttural growl of the black bear communicates its seriousness, the chirping of beaver kits who haven’t developed their vocal cords indicates their contentment. But most vocalizations are a mystery. What are the wood frogs saying in the pond? The red squirrels in the spruce? And the howl of the grey wolf, teekkona - what do they say in those hauntingly beautiful, soul-chilling overtures, sung like a dialect of the wind spirit’s language that howls over the summits? So often I pause if I see one and turn my attention to its cry, and you may feel a chill run down your spine as I neglect you. One of them that has come to this valley, but he does not howl like the others. Look - there he is now, by the river on his favored rock - do you see him there, basking in my warmth under the blooming midnight sun? His fur is a canvas of white and grey, tips tousled and wispy where the meandering wind spirit meets him. He stands tallest among wolves with his commanding frame, yet I have never seen him around another. There is no music from this one, he who does not speak nor howl, but only stalks and prowls alone through our valley. His silence is only broken by brief chaos when his sustaining savagery pulls other spirits from their bodies. He puts the fear into me, this one who walks with the cold spirit and brings chills wherever he goes, always continuing forward to the next kill, ending the endless quest of others. Teekkona. Nemesis.