To the Bright Edge of the World

by Eowyn Ivey

Between Science’s measuring and my God’s condemning, I find no room for the Soul.

Cowardice, sickly yellow thing, I found you like worms writhing beneath an overturned rock—I peeled back my self and beheld you at my core where a shining soul should have been.

Why, in our efforts to understand and observe life, must we so often snuff it out?

I do believe it’s one of my greatest regrets, that I never made it up there. I should have thought some of that over better when I was laying out my life. But I suppose that’s always going to be the case.

And I will tell you this: as an officer and leader, you will soon discover that adventure is a romantic notion, best left behind with childhood, and that you ought to be grateful for the opportunities allotted you.

There is a mythical element to our childhood, it seems, that stays with us always.

—So, he said,—a woman from a rib you’ll have, but not from a goose?

This explains why she fled with the stranger who came for her. She yet contends that he was an otter man, that it is his fur she wears across her shoulders. It puzzles me that she can be so self-assured & clever, yet hold to such absurdity.

There’s really not much to it, but somehow I missed it when I was away at college in Seattle. It was just small things—being able to light a campfire in my own backyard and stand around it with friends and neighbors. The cold air off the glacier. Ice skating on the lake in the dark of winter. The northern lights. The mountains. Knowing everyone at the post office. There is the feeling here that civilization is still just a speck, and it makes me feel small in a good way. Seattle made me feel small in a bad way, if that makes any sense.

And the truth is, Mrs Forrester, a camera is nothing more than a shrinking box with a glass lens. All the difference comes from the eye that looks through it.”

—He says the only living souls in this land belong to the Wolverine People, Samuelson translated. I asked if this is the tribe’s name. —Not that simple, Colonel. They mean what they say. These are wolverines that take human form. No nastier blend of character, man & wolverine. Ruthless enough to steal your last meal out from under your nose & smart enough to do it. Fables do not concern me.

Maybe once more he would sit at the table with me. We could talk again, of the instinct toward art and the capacity of stone, of flying mice and demi-gods. He could tell me of his next sculpture. He could remember who he once was.

But then he abruptly stood and dashed the lantern at his feet.

I am yet unsettled by it, the gaze of the black bear. For some time after Father’s death, I imagined, with both fear and hope, that I would someday meet a wild bear in the forest near the quarry, and that when I looked into its eyes, I would know that it was Father.

“This isn’t regarding your husband. We have no news about the Colonel’s whereabouts. The General wants to see you on another matter. It’s about your room here, where you do your picture-making.”

Father always said an artist must be at least half in love with his subject. I do not doubt a beauty of some sort can be found in the capriciousness and hunger of a wild scavenger, but it does not hold my desire. I am in love with the promise of something else.

Try as I might, I can find nothing to comfort me.

—She has a way, too, of joking about things most women are too shy to discuss. But she’s not crude like some of the whores I’ve known, he added.

She says he was a very different kind of Army man than I seem to be. I asked how so. —He was not so reserved, & he had little humility. I remarked that any man who has spent time in Alaska should be nothing if not humble.

Men who are afraid often make poor choices, I said.

Do you read the Bible, Colonel? he asked. I admitted that I did not. Religion has never held much interest for me. —There is a poetry to it, he said.—That’s what always draws me back to it. Even with all the ways it fails, I can still find that to admire. The poetry of it. At my best, I imagine it the highest of arts. An expression of what we wish we could be. There is hope in our wanting to be something better, even if we never manage it. Maybe that is what I can hold to. The wanting. Do you know what I mean, sir?

Your letter cut me deeply, Sophie. How could you so belittle me as to think that I would abandon you or lose my love for you because you suffer some ailment beyond your influence? In so few words, you lessened every act of love between us.

All that I have taken for granted, what I have known as real & true, has been called into question. I am certain only of this—I come home to you in love.

It is the light that I must come to understand.

[—] in the mountains. That kay’egay place. I come to look for you. I cry to you. I come to you. At times like this, I wish I were a praying man.