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The Snowman & the Sycamore Tree
NORTHUMBERLAND
ENGLAND
On Christmas Day the old sycamore on the hill opened its eyes.
Its bark had always held a face, bearded with moss and frost, and now it leaned toward the little snowman in the golden light.
"Look at me, little man of snow," it rumbled, in a voice like wind through dry branches.
"I'm rooted. My fate is sealed to this earth. But you have legs."
"It's so peaceful here," said the snowman.
"Peace is a trap."
A knotted finger jabbed at the sky.
"The sun grows bolder.
I've seen a thousand thaws.
Go north, wherever the cold runs deepest.
A man who stands still too long lets the world decide what to do with him."
NORTHUMBERLAND
ENGLAND
He didn't argue. He packed a sturdy brown knapsack and pulled on a pair of black wellington boots. He had to wear them - without them he would sink to his buttons in every drift. They looked ridiculous. They felt wonderful.
The sycamore watched from its gap in the old stone wall, its craggy face softening into a creaking smile. "Chase the cold," it said. "Go as far as your legs will carry you. I'll hold the fort."
He took his first deliberate steps toward the fading gold, snow crunching under his boots, a line of prints wandering behind him. At the crest he looked back once.
The tree lifted a branch to bid him farewell.
SUTHERLAND
SCOTLAND
He followed the wind north for days, until the land simply stopped. Snow-dusted cliffs dropped into a roaring grey sea, and he stood on the very edge with his scarf snapping behind him.
Out in the surf rose a great stone stack, weathered into the shape of an old bearded shepherd leaning on a crook of rock. Am Buachaille - the Herdsman. He had watched this coast for longer than there had been words for it.
“I’ve chased the cold this far,” the snowman called, down. “But I can go no further.”
The Herdsman said nothing. Pebbles ground, and the tide boomed against his feet. His long stone face turned slowly from the snowman to the water, and he began, with enormous patience, to think.
NR BERGEN
NORWAY
At last the Herdsman spoke, in a voice like grinding millstones. “Water cannot be walked. But the sky is wide, and the cold winds are old friends of mine.”
He raised his crook. A soft white cloud sank out of the night, and the winter wind kneaded it into a great woolly sheep, dry and drifting, that nosed against the cliff. The snowman stepped aboard and sank to his ankles in cloud.
All night it floated north-east across black water beneath wheeling stars. When it bumped at last against a snowy Norwegian cliff, the sky burst into ribbons of green and violet. High on a ledge stood a small old Nisse in a grey coat and a pointed red cap, who didn’t seem surprised in the least. He nodded once, and pointed a mittened finger toward a path winding up into the mountains.
DRØBAK
NORWAY
Days slid by in silence and pine. Forests swallowed the snowflakes whole, rivers lay frozen hard enough to walk on, and hills rolled away like folded sheets. Nothing was chasing him, and for the first time since the hill he almost forgot to be afraid.
Then, from a ridge, he saw a village, and in it a tall yellow house with little wooden Santas along its walls and a red mailbox that said SANTA CLAUS. He broke into a run.
The windows were dark. The shutters were closed. On the door hung a hand-painted sign: BACK IN SUMMER.
He read it twice. Summer was the one place he could never go. He looked at the grinning wooden Santas, then down the long road leading out of the village, and let out a short, puzzled laugh that puffed away in the cold. Then he went on.
GÄVLE
SWEDEN
Sweden was one long white hush. For five days he walked it with no map, accompanied only by the crunch of his boots on the snow.
On the fifth day he reached the shore of a frozen lake, and across the ice came a thudding like a drum. A goat burst from the trees, a goat woven entirely from golden straw, with red ribbons streaming from its horns and legs. It skidded to a stop in a spray of snow, stamped, and looked at him as though it had been expecting him all winter.
He had only ever ridden a cloud. He climbed up anyway. The Yule Goat lowered its horns, and the world turned white and green and fast as they leapt away across the ice, north into the dark.
ROVANIEMI
FINLAND
The Goat set him down in a moonlit clearing at midnight, snorted at the pines, and trotted off. A log cabin glowed among the trees, and beside it a red sleigh waited with a team of reindeer steaming in the frost. A big man in a red coat stepped out with a lantern.
“It’s not every day a traveller arrives on a Yule Goat,” said Santa Claus. “What brings you so far?”
“I’m chasing the cold.”
Santa’s face grew serious. “Then you’ll want Qingnü, the lady of frost, far to the east. It’s a long road, and the warmth walks faster than you do. I could fly you there tonight.”
“There’s so much to see on the way,” said the snowman.
Santa didn’t argue. He tucked a folded red bundle into the knapsack, “for the day you come home,” and patted the seat of his sleigh. “Then let me buy you a little time.”
BLACK FOREST
GERMANY
The reindeer leapt, and the sleigh climbed into the stars. The cabin shrank to a golden speck. Forests, frozen rivers and one vast sprawling city slid beneath them like a map unrolling, and the snowman gripped the seat with both round hands.
They came down in a cobbled courtyard in the Black Forest. Beyond an oak door lay a workshop full of ticking, with no lamp lit and no light but the moon through a frosted window, where snow was falling.
At the far wall stood the Clockmaker, a man of brass and copper with a winding key between his shoulder blades. His back was to them. He reached up one slender copper finger and slowly turned the hands of a wooden cuckoo clock backwards.
Deep in the house, gears ground in reverse. Outside, the moon hesitated.
“Two weeks,” Santa whispered. “Winter owes you that.”
GASTEIN VALLEY
AUSTRIA
Two borrowed weeks felt like a held breath, but he could not afford to waste it. He set out to the east in a hurry, through sleeping villages and deep, quiet valleys, and had almost started to enjoy it.
Then, on a moonlit night in a street of timbered houses, he heard bells behind him, and heavy, shuffling steps.
He glanced back. A huge, shaggy figure with curled horns and a long red tongue was loping after him, birch twigs in one fist and a basket on its back, jingling with every stride. It was grinning.
Krampus didn’t look angry. He looked like someone who had found a new toy.
The snowman ran. Behind him Krampus whooped and gave chase, and the sound rolled out of the village, across the white fields and into the forest, and went on for a very long time.
ZABAR
HUNGARY
For two and a half days he ran, and Krampus’s laughter never fell far behind. Somewhere in the pines of Hungary his legs began to sag. His edges slumped, his knees went to slush, and he understood with horror that he was melting from the inside, from nothing but effort.
He staggered into a clearing where a small cabin glittered with rime. In front of it hovered the Téltündér, the winter fairy, with wings of frozen lace and a gown woven from snowflakes. She asked no questions. She took one look at his drooping shape, leaned close, and blew.
A ribbon of frost and snowflakes swirled around him, and the cold went through him like a clean, bright bell. His edges sharpened. His legs firmed. He stood up crisp and new, and when he looked round, Krampus had gone.
RIVNE OBLAST
UKRAINE
He thanked the fairy and walked east for a week and more, over frozen valleys and windswept ridges, growing stronger with each mile. He hardly noticed when the stars went out.
A mass of black cloud was boiling up from the north, twisting into a whirlwind, and inside it a face took shape: enormous, furious, with a beard of frost and a crown of ice. This was Karachan, spirit of the deadest depths of winter, who had decided that the small white stranger should be frozen solid and be done with.
It was a splendid plan, except that the snowman loved it. The gale felt like a warm bath. He flung his arms wide and laughed as Karachan scooped him into the sky, roaring, and hurled him east over forests and mountains, covering in an afternoon what would have taken months. Then, quite suddenly, Karachan lost interest.
VELIKY USTYUG
RUSSIA
Karachan dropped him in a snowdrift as if he’d forgotten why he had picked him up. The clouds rolled apart on a sunset the colour of peaches, and before him stood a carved wooden cabin with warm windows, ringed by birch trees. Four silver-and-white huskies hurtled out of the snow to circle him, nudging at his boots.
A woman stepped onto the porch in a pale blue coat embroidered with silver snowflakes, a long golden braid over one shoulder and a headdress glittering like frozen glass. “I am Snegurochka,” she said, opening her arms. “Karachan rarely brings guests this far. Where are you bound?”
“East,” said the snowman. “To find Qingnü.”
She looked at the huskies, sitting in a neat line with their ears pricked. “These four know every pass between here and the mountains,” she said, and harnessed them to a light sled. He climbed aboard.
BURABAY
KAZAKHSTAN
The huskies pulled him for nearly two weeks across plains so wide the sky seemed to bend. At the edge of a moonlit pine forest they halted, nudged his boots one by one, and bounded back into the white.
He walked on alone until the trees opened onto a gorge, spanned by a bridge of glowing blue ice. Beside it waited an old man in a pale blue coat, leaning on a staff tipped with a crystal shard, and next to him stood an ice-yak, its long frozen fur hanging in icicles.
“I am Ayaz Ata,” said the old man, as though the snowman had been expected. “You want Qingnü. She lives beyond these peaks, and the drifts are too deep for boots. But he was born in this ice, and knows every hidden pass.”
The yak lowered its enormous head and waited.
HENAN
CHINA
The yak climbed for days, past ridges and crevasses and wind that sounded like voices. At last the peaks opened onto a hidden plateau, where a palace of pale blue ice stood with sweeping roofs and lanterns glowing in its eaves.
The yak knelt. A woman came down the steps in flowing white and blue silk, her dark hair pinned with silver frost-flowers, and crouched until her eyes were level with his. This was Qingnü, lady of frost and snow, with a gaze as deep and quiet as a winter night.
“You’ve come very far,” she said. “And you still believe the cold goes on for ever.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Between the top of the world and the bottom lies a belt of burning sun. Even here, spring is already stretching toward this mountain.” Her voice was very gentle. “There is nowhere left to run.”
The snowman looked down at his round white hands. He had crossed a continent of winter, and the whole world was built to melt him.
MALAY ARCHIPELAGO
“So what do I do?” he whispered.
Qingnü smiled, a little sadly, as if she had been waiting for the question. “You don’t stop. You find another way.” She raised a pale hand to the southern sky. The air hissed and crystallised, and a tunnel of blue ice burst from the mountaintop, arching over the clouds and curving away around the belly of the world. “Winter will end in the north. In the south, it will soon begin.”
A silver sled appeared at his feet, carved with snowflakes. He lay flat on it, head first, and shot into the tunnel with a whoop.
Wind roared past. Through the glassy floor the world unrolled below: dark oceans, green islands, and one thin line of fire laid across the Earth like a ribbon. The equator. He raced over it in a heartbeat, and when he looked back Qingnü was a tiny figure on a far peak, waving.
THE SOUTH POLE
ANTARCTICA
The tunnel spat him out onto a white plain where nothing grew, in a hush so deep he could almost hear the stars. A striped red-and-white pole stood there, topped with a gleaming silver sphere, and beside it an old man with a high, round forehead and a long white beard, leaning on a gnarled staff hung with a calabash.
“Welcome to the bottom of the world!” boomed Shou Xing, star-god of the south, throwing his arms wide. “You came the long way round, young frost. The sun can't chase you here, but there is still adventure ahead.”
Then his face turned wise. “Listen to an old man. Watch the ice in the ocean. When it freezes, it will carry you across. And once you’ve crossed it, don’t stay. Continue north, and let the mountains lift you up.”
The snowman nodded slowly. He didn’t yet understand. He would.
ROSS ISLAND
ANTARCTICA
For a long while he walked the ice shelf. The days blurred. The wind was constant, the cold kept him crisp, and he was surprised to find that the fear had gone quiet, the way a noise does once you’ve stopped listening to it.
Then a dark hut appeared, half buried in the snow. He pushed open its heavy door: bunks, crates, a cold iron stove, lanterns hanging from the rafters. And on the bench by the frosted window sat a man.
He glowed faintly, blue as a shadow on snow, in heavy canvas and fur with the hood pulled low over tired eyes. The snowman sat down beside him and began to talk. He told it all, from the first hill to the line of fire. The explorer never said a word. But as the tale went on, a very old sadness slowly loosened its grip on his face.
KEMP LAND
ANTARCTICA
He crossed another endless plain without meeting a soul, the wind carving ridges in the snow, until a dark shape rose from the drifts that was not ice.
It was a pedestal, and on it sat a bust of a man, stern-browed, gazing out over a land with no people and no city for a thousand miles, perhaps towards something he once knew.
The snowman leaned on the cold metal and looked up. “You’ve been out here a long time, haven’t you?”
There was no reply.
The snowman patted the pedestal as he might pat an old friend who had simply decided to stay put, and went on his way.
SNOW HILL ISLAND
ANTARCTICA
Weeks of white slipped by unnoticed. Slowly the flat ground began to crack and tilt into glaciers, and the air filled with the smell of salt. He came to the very edge of the land, where a dark sea lay scattered with floating ice under a sky of pink and lavender.
A tall bird stood at the water’s edge in a black coat and white waistcoat, with a golden smudge at its throat: an emperor penguin.
The snowman said hello and began to explain where he had come from. The penguin tilted its head and answered in a long string of clicks and honks. They tried again, slower. Neither understood a single word.
At last the snowman pointed to the pastel sky. The penguin looked up, looked back at him, and gave one solemn nod. They stood side by side as the colours deepened, perfectly content without a word.
DRAKE PASSAGE
He followed the coast for days beneath a sky that rarely saw the sun, lit by stars and the shifting green of the aurora. Then, one freezing night, the ice ahead began to glow.
Out of the aurora came a ship: a tall wooden sailing ship with torn sails, glowing a ghostly blue, crewed by silent luminous sailors who tended their ropes with calm, faraway faces. It drifted to the shore without touching the frozen sea, and a plank of pale light slid down to the snow.
He thought of the old man at the pole. Watch the ice in the ocean. The Drake Passage lay frozen from shore to horizon, and this ship was going to cross it.
He climbed aboard and ran to the bow. The deck hummed beneath his boots as the vessel rose above the broken ice, and he pointed north into the dark.
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A man who stands still too long lets the world decide what to do with him