Noon, the following day. Laboring all night, the crew penetrates to the core. Body heat threatens the spoils, scarlet bubbles already boiling around black boots. The blubber is strawberry ice, darkening in the air to beefy red. Now they are felling the black forest, hacking out plates of baleen from obdurate stumps.
Hatchets swing again and again.
Females have the prettiest hair, they say. Meanwhile, gulls keen overhead, awaiting their turn at the board, and every yard stacks up its winter hoard, its alphabet blocks of plenty. She grew up on an apple and dairy farm in Dracut, MA, graduated from Dracut High School, and earned degrees at Lowell State College and the University of Wisconsin. She lives with her family near Anchorage, Alaska.