She was thirty years a wife and home-maker and before her husband died she never fished the ice. There was a long garden that fled west from the house with ornamental roses and a pumpkin patch that borrowed the shade of a pacific yew, and it was there she found her work during the hours he spent in an office working tax affairs for the rich of Coeur d’Alene.

     When the white of winter crept down from the border ranges in November and hushed the wooded slopes of the Kootenai and Bonner Counties under reams of heavy snow, the garden became stiff with frost and wouldn’t yield to fork nor spade so she came into the house and found other things to occupy her time.
     She made hot stews and pies with fruit she’d preserved from the Fall and sat on a window bench and whispered a mist upon the cold panes and listened to radio broadcast sent down from Canada until she heard the tyre spikes chatter on the drive and knew that he was home. She would open the door and wrap a cardigan around her ribs and watch him lower the gate of the truck and hoist the fish over his shoulder to bring them into the kitchen where he’d wriggle from his coat and laugh, with a whiskey breath, of the ones he’d seen the others lose under the ice.
     In January of every year, on the anniversary of his passing, she loads the same old truck with tackle and bait and gear for cutting holes and charts a course north from her home to fish the frozen discs of the northern lakes and contemplate his life and death.
     She is self-taught from books and film, because there is no-one else to teach her how to cut the hole and weigh the hook and every year she learns a little more and deflects the questions from her neighbors of the strangeness on her pilgrimage with smiles and then a little belly meat from trout on her return. Despite the promise of this gift they watch her with a puzzled look from behind the comfort of their curtains as she stamps around the truck and makes her preparations.
     She kicks the crusts of snow from the tyres and stands on toe-tips to make a final inventory of the equipment in the flat-bed of the vehicle then climbs into the cab and turns the heater on. Beneath the padded bulk of her one-piece suit she owns a tiny frame and sits in the massive seat waiting for the frozen glass to clear, the bud of her nose pluming white air from the recess of her taffeta hood.
     When the window clears she pedals the rig slowly out from the driveway and on through the suburbs that line the Spokane River before cutting north on the forty-one and out into open country. A young sun rises on her left, still low and flat, but diamond hard and it winks between the snow laden firs standing sentry along the roadside and makes her squint as she strains to reach the glove compartment to find her sunglasses. There she also finds her husband’s old fishing knife, a bone handled lock-back with a blade a long time blunted which she cradles in her palm as she drives on past Rathdrum, Spirit Lake and Blanchard. She fords the Pend River at Newport and the land rises about her in glittering white folds and still she holds the knife and strokes a thumb along the smooth bone to take the memory of him through this simple object of his past.
     She pulls the rig into a gas station off the fifty-seven, returns the knife to the compartment and lowers herself from the cabin.  A boy in a padded coat and diesel stains on his fur mitts creaks the snow beneath his boots as he comes from the store and asks her how much she needs.
     Fill her full, she says.
     Yes ma’am. You paying inside?
     She smiles. I will. I need some bait.
     Ain’t a problem.
     The door plucks at a tin bell as she steps inside. The shop is empty and the counter unattended. She pulls back her hood and lifts a flask of screen wash from a shelf and then on to a pair of chest refrigerators at the back of the store and places the flask on one and slides open the lid of the other and takes out a bag of perch eyes and slides back the cover. She squeezes the bag gently and watches the gelid beads shape and distend through the plastic. 
     Got lures if you need ‘em, says a voice from the counter. 
     She allows herself another squeeze and turns and sees him leaning on his palms and takes it all up to him.
     I’ve a box full in the truck, she says.  Just need something fresh.
     That your truck? He asks, pointing through the window with his glasses.
     That’s right
     Big rig.
     She is.
     He replaces his glasses but beneath his eye-line and looks her over and mounts a condescension in his face that hardens her inside.
     Where you coming from?
     Coeur d’Alene.
     Where you aiming for to fish?
     Up on Priest Lake.  She takes some gum from the rack and taps it down on the counter.  I come up every year.
     Is that right? He says. All the way from Coeur to fish up there.  Go any further on up you’ll need a passport stamping
     She carries him with a laugh.
     Besides, he continues, holding the bag of eyes to run it through the register. There’s better catch on the Pend Oreille and it’s right on your doorstep. You never think of that?
     That is true, she says. And I thank you for the advice, but that lake is full of tourists don’t know a glow hook from a jigging rod. Besides, my husband used to make the Priest his home in the winter before he passed, so that’s where I’ll find him.
     I’m sorry for your loss.
     Don’t be, she says. He had a life.
     Alright then.

   They exchange some bills and she collects the things from the counter and doesn’t turn back from the door when he wishes her some luck on the ice. Outside the boy has retreated to his booth and he lifts his cap as she pulls the truck back out onto the highway.
     The road is empty of traffic all the way to the junction where she takes the turn to Coolin and the lake. Ahead the border range shimmers in the sun, its immaculate canvas broken only by a black seam of fir rising through the snow on the timberline.
     With her nose on the wheel, she steers the rig through a silent Coolin, the holiday lodges that creep to the shoreline shuttered for the winter. A bait shop and bar by the pier the only buildings still burning light and they soulless and empty. Beyond the town she finds the track to Sherwood Beach and feels the slump of the truck as it looks for traction in the heavier snow. To either side of the track stand sculptures of ice, cast by the gradual accretion of the snow on the pines and honed by the wind into shapes formless and unknown.
 She parks the vehicle between two similar rigs and hops from the cab and lowers the tailgate. It takes all of her strength to lift the trolley down and fix the skis. Then she loads the tackle, drill and lure box and returns to the cab for the bag of eyes and coffee flask She locks the door and hoists the harness over her slender shoulders and pulls the trolley out onto the ice.
     Her breath smokes wildly around her as she inches the trolley forward, the marble perfection of the lake’s surface unbroken to the distant shore. To her right a cluster of ice shanty’s hove, spartan and still, like some abandoned settlement of boreal indigenes. Ahead, groups of men huddle on the ice for warmth and company and drink from monogrammed flasks and wave for her to join them as she passes, but she always fishes alone.
     She finds her spot and taps the ice with a rod to know the thickness and stands blinking into the sun.  The wind slips off the border range in cutlass gusts of spite that pull her into her suit and force her hands to slap her arms to urge a little pulse through her thin blood. Renewed, she lifts the augur drill from the trolley and pushes the spike into the ice then twists it slowly and listens to it chew its way to the water below. When the hole is cut and the lip widened with the saw she forms the pole, baits it with some perch eyes and settles herself on the bait box to wait. No sound to her ears and the delicate weight of the pole in her mittens and peace.
     With time her thoughts drift round to him and the hours he spent here on this lake whilst she waited for him to return. She counts the milestones of their life together; the courtship, the marriage, the search for children that did not come and the slow descent into the monotony of routine and separate pursuits. She thinks of former lovers and opportunities declined and wonders of the myriad channels of a different life made possible by different decisions. Through all of this she lifts the hook and refreshes the bait and pecks her lips at the coffee from the flask and understands what kept him here so often.
     The sun journeys around the lake and the surrounding desert of white enfolds her into a meditative introspection, enough to make her forget the reason she is there and she becomes numb and sleepy. As the pole-tip starts to droop towards the ice, she feels a whisper of energy beneath the surface and then a kinetic force riding up though her boots and shins which makes her drop the pole and pull the hood from her head and then, with a glottal pop, the fish rears though the hole in a fountain of spray and flops onto the ice.
     The mackinaw flounders briefly, its stippled green flank rising and falling as its mouth snatches at foreign air before settling to an even heave. A yellow eye, lidless and wide enough to draw the entire landscape into its orbit, focusses her at its centre.
     She matches her breath to the fish and leans back on the box and twists around to see who might have borne witness, and knowing that none did, she leans upon her knees and meets the eye.
     Wondered when you’d show, she says.
     The mackinaw curls its tail to the sky and sparkles in the cold, hard sun.
     A few more minutes and I’d have been asleep.
     It wouldn’t have mattered, says the eye.
     I know it, she sighs. So here we are.
     Here we are.
     You know, it’s funny, she says, wrapping her arms around her knees, I can never work out if it’s me that finds you up here or the other way around.
     Where else would I be?
     You could be anywhere, she laughs, I mean, not like this, but in some other way, some other form.
     I could but this is where you look for him, says the eye.  It’s obvious.
     I suppose it is.
    She straightens on the box and then leans her elbows back to her knees to admire the fish, its length and colour and  the glassy hinge of the jaw but always her gaze is drawn to the unyielding gravity of the eye. She tries to remain silent, to provoke a movement or word, but it will only issue its hot yellow stare, unblinking and relentless.
     I’m not gonna try and justify it, she says eventually.
     Is there any?
     Justification? No there ain’t, so I’m not gonna try. Not for me, not for you.
    We are the same.
    Could be, but it don’t make a bit of difference. He was worth more to me dead than he was alive, and that’s all there is to it.
     Depends how you measure the worth, says the eye.
    She scowls. Only one measure of worth in this world that’ll suffer any scrutiny and it ain’t found in the company of men.  That is when they’ll oblige you with their company instead of spending every hour holed up in an office or sitting up here drinking with the rest of ‘em.
     Then it was an act of punishment. Of revenge.
     Hell no. I did it for the money. I didn’t hate him enough to kill him. I didn’t hate him at all.  I’d be lying to you if I said I don’t miss the son of a bitch from time to time.
     That’s remorse.
     I suppose it is.

     Is that why you come? Asks the eye.
     She smiles thinly. That and to make sure he hasn’t popped up anywhere.  I sunk him not two hundred yards from where you lie.
     You know those chains will never break, or rot or rust, the eye says, probing her with its hypnotic glare. You come because there is a thread of guilt, a weight of shame and regret that you always seek to hide
     Hide from who? You or me?
     We are the same.
     She pulls her mittens from her hands and places them beside the box and pulls the band from her hair and finger combs it through then pulls it back and fastens it again.
     And that is why you always appear, she says knowingly.  You’ll keep coming until I make that admission.
     I’ll always be here, says the eye.
     She reaches behind the box and then stands, her boots skating slightly before lifting her head to the sky. She sees a faultless cerulean vault rising from the prairieland to the South and running changeless and clean beyond the border range and the spine of the Rockies into Canada.  Faint impressions of stars form in ashen clusters and the pale rind of a moon, orphaned by the night, stands alone.
     That is a shame to know, she sighs as she lowers her head to meet the eye. Sure is peaceful up here.
     Swiftly she raises her arm and in the same arc heaves her body forward to bring the hammer down into the mackinaw’s flank. A pocket of blood erupts from the hole and the fish bucks and curls on the ice. She lifts the hammer and pounds it back into the fish, her knuckles white on the wooden handle and lifts and brings it down relentlessly in a welter of violence until the mackinaw lies in a ribbon of gore, its once graceful form shredded into bone and blood. The remnant head still gasping.
     She pushes herself to her knees and fights for breath in the thin air. She looks down and meets the eye with hers and sees no trace of pain nor message of reprove. It stares at her unmoved and still. With one last spasm she brings the hammer down two-handed into its centre and gasps as it detonates into an amber explosion that covers her face and neck and slicks the ice around her.
     She drops the hammer and wipes a sleeve across her eyes and stoops to collect the debris of rendered tissue carefully in her arms. She slides it to the hole and pushes it gently over the lip and into the water.
     I’ll see you next year, she whispers softly as it slips to the fathoms.

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