Caribou Portrait

We could have been walking through a sheep paddock. The late September snow from a few days earlier was trampled to gravel and dust in a hundred-foot swath from one horizon to the other. While the words unfold like hyperbole – the exaggerated effusions of someone who will next explain that he is hungry enough to eat a horse – they are in all actuality understated in the effort of describing the vast ocean of life that had crashed against the high tundra plateau the day before. Or, describing the aftermath anyway…