All animals grow timid in the winter night..

 

FOX / one of my artworks from a few years ago

 

The sleeping, shining-white fox fits in wonderfully

with the stillness of the night, which still remains

magically bright. Mikkl is like a fragment of the

mysterious Ice Age, lying hidden in the frozen, quiet

brightness. In the transparent heavens the large moon

looks quite near, not as it does in Europe where its

light is cold and distant. Here it seems to belong to

our world, the luminous picture of a sharply outlined

ice landscape.

Mikkl’s behaviour takes on a touch of timidity. All

animals grow timid in the winter night, the hunters say.

[…]

“Poor Mikkl, you’re traipsing to your doom. In a few

days the fox-trapping will begin; they’re after your life.

They will pull your beautiful fur over your head and

send you far away to a place where a lot of people live

close to each other. There they will give you glittering

eyes made of glass, and then you will hang in one of

the thousand glittering shops in one of the thousand

glittering streets, together with thousand of other

glittering dead things. Do you know, Mikkl, there’s

so much artificial glitter there that the people no

longer know anything about light, about its coming

and going, and about the magic of twilight.”

I fetch water from the lagoon; it is so clear that I can

see the rust-brown weeds at the bottom. Mikkl also

laps up some of the clear water but without letting me

out of his sight. Suddenly he raises his head and stares

at me as though it were the first time in his life he had

seen me. Horror glares out of his wide, glowing green

eyes; then he leaps aside and runs off without once

turning around. He runs across the black field of stone

and at last disappears, a tiny spot in my sight, at the

foot of the great black mountains.

 

Perhaps they become clairvoyant, the animals, as the

darkness grows, and then see the true face of men?

 

—Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night [1938]