Endless Winter

The weather was cold, wet, damp. It seemed like there would never be another summer again. The winter seemed endless. Each day we would reluctantly drag ourselves from the sleeping furs and peer out into the damp, misty gloom of another dull day. The cold seemed to have seeped into our bones making us feel weary with the world.

The tent itself was cold, damp and leaking. Everything inside it felt cold and damp too. Everything had a strong earthy smell, from us, from the travelling packs, from the tent, as though buried underground for a long time.

We knew too, if the weather did not change that we would die out here, in the cold and the damp. We needed to move, to carry on. We needed to find somewhere new, some place where we could begin to build a new life. This was not the place, but if we did not leaver soon, we knew we would never find it and we would end here.

Each day we awoke, we dreaded looking out of the tent to see what sort of day it was out there. Each day, we knew would be just another cold and damp day. We all regretted, even though we did not say, coming to this cold Northern land where the days seemed to be over as soon as they’d began.

Then one day I looked out on a bright sunny day. True, it had been snowing in the night, but at least it was dry and I could see further than a few mist shrouded yards from the tent. This was it. This would be the day we would move to some new place and try to make a home.