I go fishing in winter. I lose my footing on a snowy bank and fall in. The cold dumbfounds me, and I remain below. It’s a small stream, but very deep. The green, dark slabs of the sides go down into caves — narrow and slippery tomb entrances where the motions of the water have washed everything to smooth stone: the great slabbed walls of the boulders, the little scattered pebbles.
I paddle in place, still in my fly-tufted fisherman’s cap and deep-woods parka, the pockets of which undulate about me like a lazy skirt of fins. My boots plunge and rise ponderously below me, up and down, ineffectual. All is silence here, a corridor of darkened shale and the long pulsations of the moss-colored, somber current.
At night, I watch above me the glow of the rescuers’ fires on the banks, under the snow-heavy branches. Figures move trudging along the verge of the water; suddenly they spear the current with the glaring streams of flashlights. For a moment the fiery lights crisscross around me, like an underwater lattice. But then they break apart, and veer off elsewhere.
At dawn, everything is greyness and silence. Then the ice forms overhead, and I slip down among the boulders and they never find me.