Carl Alvarado

67°58’29.10”N

136°54’2.19”W IN THE WILD

HENRY WAS RUNNING BACK TO ME, yelping, with a look of terror in his otherwise fearless eyes. I had never seen a wolf show fear like Henry did that day, as the polar bear came bounding behind him over the desolate tundra. I immediately picked up my spear and I could see, as soon as he saw me grab it, Henry knew what was coming next. We both knew it was on. At that moment, I swear I smelled his adrenaline as much as he smelled mine. I started sprinting and he swiftly changed his direction so that we were both dashing head-on to the bear. It was the most extreme game of chicken in history.

Henry mounted the bear, sinking his teeth into its neck. I felt the tip of my went limp, my body went numb with the warm reassurance that I would live another day. I howled ferociously at the top of my lungs while streaking its blood across my forehead. “I really am at the top of the food chain,” I said to myself in whatever warped dialect of English I’ve come to speak; after all, I haven’t heard someone speak English in many years or heard someone speak any language, for that matter. In fact, I hadn’t heard nor even seen a human being for about thirty years.

At one point, long ago, my mind associated aloneness with grief, but I have come to learn that there really is no companion quite so companionable as solitude—with the exception of a noble arctic wolf companion, of course. No civil achievement can even come close to matching the feeling of achievement that comes after slaughtering a seven hundred pound polar bear with a spear made by oneself, and the help of a friend who belongs to a species of untamable carnivores.

bear attack on his own in the wild, but that is exactly the type of perceptual trap I meant to escape when I left society. Unlike you, I don’t quiver at the sight of my worst fears. This is simply because I don’t get told what is and is not possible. Not by other people and certainly not by myself. I warrant my world’s possibilities and I set my own limits, which, for the record, haven’t existed since I bare-knuckleboxed good ol’ Henry to usurp his alpha male status back in Alaska just for fun. That was just before Henry and I became friends, and just after I made the trek my life consist of highly impossible undertakings (such as befriending a wolf, and walking across an Ocean) according to everyone in your community. In my community, however, there only exists the fearless, focused and free. These events of my life, along with countless others, are the reason I spit in the face of limitations.

Although my speech is rusty, I can still write perfectly because I’ve had practice by tattooing various scriptures all over myself for many years. I wrote this passage, in ashes on my only piece of paper, (in hopes that someone might