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Louie
Darkness came early. We quickly fell asleep for a second night behind our not-so-sheltered, white, bushes. When I woke the following morning, the wind was still thrashing the shrubbery around our tent, but, strangely, our abode was completely silent. Why wasn't it fluttering as usual? Maybe our fly has flown the coop! I tugged open the partially frozen tent door zipper. I had to marvel. Not only had we discovered a terrific way to keep our tent fly from flapping, but, buried beneath a foot of fresh snow, we had become one with the landscape. For an instant my heart sank and I regretted we had agreed to cross the Gennargentu mountains to stay with Iole and Bruno. "Inside day!" I happily sang out, rebounding, and immediately wondered what tricks I could dream up to play on my tent-mate today. Sharon was not as keen. "How long do you think we're going to be snowbound?" she asked anxiously. I gave her my best educated guess: A silly face and a shrug. The dump of snow worked like a charm to keep our tent quiet, but it made everything a chore. I shouldered the drift off one side of our cardboard-stiff vestibule, and crawled out on all fours from beneath our sagging igloo, then trudged twenty feet through knee-deep snow before adding some colour to our white world. As I snowshoed my way back to the tent, Sharon, still bundled in her sleeping bag (large bladders were worth their weight in gold), leaned through the doorway and tossed out a two-liter cook pot. "Don't fill it with any yellow snow!" she instructed. With my bare hands, I scooped only virgin snow into the pot, then scrambled back inside the tent. "The next time I'm cycling in the Mediterranean, I'll pack my Ski-Doo mitts." I said shivering and puffed on my cupped hands in a feeble attempt to warm them. Somewhat surprised, I noted it was warm and cozy inside the tent - the snow provided remarkable insulation. "As long as we remain in here," I said, shaking my still numb hands, "we'll be fine." "Yeah, but what do we do about food and fuel?" Sharon asked. She was always the practical one. We spent the day snuggled in our sleeping bags, reading, listening to Italian radio stations, and sipping hot cocoas while trying to ignore the gnawing in our empty bellies. By noon we had consumed all our edibles and exhausted our sparse supply of reading material. Sharon, searching for something to read, grabbed my Journal. She read contentedly for some time, then began snuffling and snarping. I looked over at her and wondered what her problem was. She was carrying on as if she were about to asphyxiate herself - with all her chortling, she had forgotten to breathe. "What is it?" I finally asked when she surfaced. "Louie!" she choked, still gasping for air. "Louie!" she shrieked again, and wiped a tear from her cheek. "The three shepherds we met in that mountain hut you wrote all their names as Louie!" "Yeah," I retorted indignantly. "That was their name." "Lui," she cackled hysterically, thoroughly enjoying herself, "means 'him'." |
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