There’s a bit of a funny story that goes with this tale. I might have mentioned that this is one of my earliest story ideas. But you also know I have a penchant for saving everything, so it only took a couple of tries checking out various USB sticks to find the folder with the files I was looking for.
I copied the folder onto my desktop and opened one of the document files, and it was only a page long so I closed it and opened another. This one was accompanied by a window asking me what I wanted to open it up with. I picked Wordpad, thinking it’s pretty universal, and while it did open the document, most of it was gibberish.
This wasn’t good. So I closed it again and tried a different one, and this time when the window popped up I picked PDF. And . . . got a message that it couldn’t open the file because it was corrupted. Then I saw that most of the files in that folder now had the PDF extension on them. This was really not good.
I clicked out of the folder and went back to the USB stick. Suddenly all of the files labelled PDF on the computer are PDF on the stick too. Really, really not good.
Crossing my fingers, I went back to my office and fired up my other, older computer, found a different USB stick with the files I needed, and tried that one. The files opened without any problem.
Here’s what I think happened. When I first started writing I used Corel WordPerfect, so the early versions of the story were saved in that. My newer laptop has a much newer version of Microsoft Word, so it could neither recognize nor convert these old WP files. I’m pretty sure I’d updated them since my days of using WordPerfect 5.1, but I could be wrong.
Whatever. The point is, problem solved. I saved the files I needed as Word files and they open up no problem on the newer computer. Whew! Now the only problem is sorting through the various versions. Apparently every time I made a change, no matter how insignificant, I’d save both the old version and the new version. So many redundant files . . . *shudder*.
I believe I also mentioned that this new story was based on an old poem of mine. Confession time. This poem was written in high school, before I knew jack about poetry. The assignment was to pick an article from a stack of newspapers the teacher had, and write poem about it. The article I chose was about a child lost in the snow. I know, I was weird even back then.
Anyway, we’ll start with the poem, and then on to the prologue of the story.
He had been gone
since early morning
leaving behind:
a mother
in hysterics
a father
who suffered ulcers
and siblings who
seem always
to find fault.
His friend had been
inviting him
since early fall;
so he went exploring
Winter.
His friend showed him ice
and frost pictures
and finally
she embraced him
and Winter
enticed him
to sleep.
Prologue
When settlers first came to the forest-covered foothills of the mountain, they were completely unaware of the Others who dwelt there. They cleared small plots of land and built their log cabins; they put up split-rail fences and called the land theirs. By the time the Others were aware of the intrusion, they were powerless to stop it.
The fact that humans had encroached on their territory took them by complete surprise, they weren’t sure how to react. Before this, humans had been considered a lower life-form. So the last remnants of the Others remained elusive, hidden, and gauged these newcomers carefully.
When their race was young, the territory of the Others encompassed an entire continent. They had no name and needed none, for their very existence set them apart from the other lifeforms. Though they never developed technology as we know it, they were a highly civilized, intelligent society.
Their ancestors roamed the land with the great lumbering dinosaurs, watched the soaring flight of the pterodactyl with envy, and witnessed the killing frenzy of the carnivores with revulsion. By nature they were a gentle, pleasure seeking race who had reached their peak and begun a slow, inevitable degeneration. Yet still, when the ice age came and the lesser beasts began dying out, they still had the creative spark to seek out ways to survive.
But the colder it became, the more of their race died. Their attempts to halt or change the weather were fruitless and they soon abandoned ideas along those lines. Their calculations proved they could not outlast the cold should it come to either building well stocked shelters against it or even hibernation. Relocating was pointless as well.
And so it fell to a small group of knowledge-seekers who had always kept apart with their rituals and experiments. By human standards they would be considered scientists, or at the very least alchemists, though their research would not be understood by the human mind.
They had seen they signs of impending disaster long ago and they knew that the others would fail. There was only one thing that could save them, they must adapt to the cold. They must change themselves. And so began the Great Transformation.
Not all were able to survive the Great Transformation. They very young, the infirm, the very old (and they were already a long-lived race), all of these were left to die in the encroaching cold. They died knowing their race would survive, though it was doubtful this gave them any comfort.
The transformed welcomed the ice age. They reveled in the cold that enveloped their land. The change had taken them from creatures of sun and warmth to creatures of ice and cold. But the price! Of the race who numbered well into the millions, only a few thousand remained.
They were tall and thin with pale, pale skin, long narrow limbs and hair of gossamer. Their metabolism adapted to their needs. The cold no longer mattered to them. The earth had changed, and they changed with it.
The ice lasted for thousands of years, but suddenly, the ice was spent. It began to recede, heralding a new era for the world. The race that the Others became lacked even the rudimentary knowledge to fight the changes now taking place. They had truly become children of the ice and snow.
As the ice receded, so did their territory. A few hundred years more and they staked claim to the mountains, the higher the better. And there they stayed, fear keeping them close to their territory – fear of being caught too far from their cold of the mountain when the thaw came.
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