REID DICKIE is a writer and editor in Winnipeg on the Canadian prairie. You can dance there.

                                                      i am aspen smoke


I am Aspen Smoke. I am finished. The pain in my leg and arm is a wave of white agony washing over me. Soon it will drown me. Blood drains between my fingers as I grip the wound on my chest.

I am finished.

A sudden distraction, a misstep, an error in judgment and a fall. Left arm, broken. Left leg, broken twice. A sharp stone sliced open my chest below my heart. I am singing my death song through a gurgle of blood. A wolf howls not far off. Then another. And another.

I am finished.

Aspen Smoke is the only name I have had, unusual for my people. My mother squatted in dry grass and gave birth to me: a wet brown baby bawling naked on a buffalo hide. Nearby the aspen forest burned, its smoke clouding my first breath, my first memory. I am named for my first breath of aspen smoke. It was the height of summer; drought had parched the land that year. Fire grew fat on thirsty trees.

I have carried that name for nineteen summers. I am ready to relinquish it now. There are no trees in flames today, only the burning pain coursing through my body. The earth of my body sinks into water, water quenches the flames, which become air, breath. My death song carries my spirit away. A familiar feeling of detachment overwhelms me. A wolf growls.

I am finished.

The first fang rips into my throat. Wolves begin with the throat to insure the prey is finished. Bits of flesh, blood and fat spatter on the rocks as the wolves tear apart my body. Meat and muscle are torn from my arms, thighs, belly. Hungry mouths and sharp claws rip into my abdomen. Entrails torn from my gut pass through the gullets of wolves, barely chewed. A raven lands on a nearby rock promontory to impatiently wait its turn.

I pass from the light of day to the darkness of wolves’ bellies; huge groaning caverns accept my flesh in a soup of gnawing fluid. Bits of hair and bone float on the surface. I am dissolving. In a sensual but indescribable way, I am becoming wolf. Primal transformations, minute changes, slippages in being, another ingredient in enzyme stew, just a bubble in time, a bit of gas. Droplets of blood drip from the wolves’ whiskers, their milky grey eyes wide with delight. I am becoming wolf.

As my material form seeks the intestinal darkness, my spirit soars toward the light, a familiar well-traveled path. As my spirit transcends this life, my humanity transforms into wolfness. As a man, I am finished, as a wolf, just begun. Fresh, new blood, old, old ceremony. That is the exchange.

My agony becomes bliss. My heat merges with wolf heat. My breath, my fluid, my energy – wolfen now.

If this is death, when does it begin? No life is lost, nothing wasted, nothing ends.

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© 2003 Reid Dickie