Aurora

Message to Bears: Find Our Way Home

They thought she was part Inuit due to her cheekbones and bearcoat, but she'd been born in Spain of an Irish mother. She was a tracker who donned an amauti woven of moss and lichens. In it were housed the bones and tiny skulls of Arctic hares.

Her womb was like a dried fig, so she bore this makeshift shrine to the delicate shadows of babes she had lost. She sailed here because she'd read somewhere that 'tundra' meant 'barren land'. This Northern spot would understand her, she thought. Some kind of shared empathy to keep her endless wandering company. She spoke not a word, yet her silence deafened those who approached her. She tracked best at night, by the light of stars and newfallen snow.

It was rumoured she loved a Caribou and followed him in some nomadic trance. The truth was she sought a home that no longer existed and she was no longer capable of love. Her heart had been buried under Arctic ice two decades before. She would not look back. She looked up. Many a night she was sure she espied the face of The One She Had Loved in the Aurora, haunting her. The souls of the stillborn bundled on her back wept with her those nights, lulling her to sleep in the howl of winter winds.