Above the Arctic Circle a shy sun rises, breaking the horizon with a gasp so long the shadows of daylight seem to produce a perpetual late afternoon. My cabin is near the south end of a small meadow in a great basin on the Porcupine River, butted up to the western slopes of the Richardson Mountains of Northern Canada. I see the sun as long as it shines, but soon it will shine no more. Winter is long and black.

Gray light filters from my loft to the kitchen. I fry bannock to have with stew left over from yesterday. The wood stove is too hot and little black islands dot my flour cake. CBC Northern is re-broadcasting some highlights from the Montreal Jazz Festival. I dance a little and hum to the stove because tonight I will see her.

I have never seen her before except maybe in my dreams or maybe once when I almost froze to death, but I never remember her. She is greater than that. She is that thing unseeable that is always there. She is faith. She is myth.

A lifetime ago when the first winter blizzard came I hiked to the mountain; the land was flooded by pristine clouds and snow crunched under foot like thousand year old bones. A herd of caribou passed in their collared majesty like an achingly slow processional, their breath spurted into the steel air, heads high, called from the south. It was a silent migration, the sound of cotton tumbling. The snow folded the scene and stored it until she came again to paint a new one.

The acid smell of kerosene lamp mixes with burning bannock, it fills my nose with a cruel and artificial smoke. My home, a carefully walled den closed with books and occasional music, is borrowed space where I discovered her. A heavy chair sinks in the northern corner, sharing a large gas lamp with the workbench. On the bench is a vice, tightly bolted to the wooden slab, rough hewn and splintered, the vice jaws open slightly but clamp on the drive gear of a snowmobile, the bearings torn and jagged. Curtains of tools and small annoying metal things covered the cold wooden wall. Propped in the corner are a spade, a scoop shovel, two axes and some spare handles.

The stew has long lost its firm texture but the mush still holds a peppered flavour. I eat without relish; the meal is one I would eat many more times during the winter. The slow pretense of the CBC commentators lauds the music with scripted praise. In the tea, however, I see her again, the tea of arctic Chamomile, which grows in delicate patches on the northern edge of my meadow. The shadows of stunted pines keep the plants moist even through the midnight sun. In August precious white blossoms crown the humble shrub with garish confidence. The blossoms are heavy with piquancy, high and tart, toned by the stems of dogwood and accented by the clean bark of pine.

It is now dark. It will be late before the moonrise but I know the meadow well enough to begin. The ice that rushes my lungs kindles my excitement. I walk from the shadow of the eaves into the magnificent afternoon starlight, only a faint grey, dying on the horizon, betrays that this land has seen the sun at all. The snow outside my cabin is brittle as twigs and I stand high with my aluminum snowshoes.

My meadow is flat. The mountain, the river and the thin forest, a litany of northern character. I am not far from the tundra and the Arctic Fox comes to this range in search of food. The Inuit have a name for the fox I could never write and it's impossible for me to pronounce. They speak the name with a nasal sound that ends in a purring. I call it Adonai, my redeemer.

Before I knew her I was a trapper. I thought it a romantic endeavor and I was good. The pelts would not turn white until the world was snow bound, and it was the white pelts that would get a greater price so I buried myself in the white world for six months to trap foxes. In the shop behind the cabin I piled them on the sled, the frozen pelts clattered like stacks of dinner plates. The fox's meat is stringy and bland so I seldom ate it.

Sometimes I would sense her but not know where she was. Once a fox broke from a trap, tearing its paw off. I tracked the crimson trail for a few metres to find it curled up licking the pain from its rear paw, a steaming tongue lapping at the frozen stump. I could feel her then, somewhere beside me, holding my breath in her hands and returning it with a soft immeasurable sorrow. It was like breathing with my heart.

She is a patient teacher, but exacting. She showed me the fox's soul. It was like crepe paper, endless spinners of crepe paper. It twisted down and down to the center of the earth until it flowed into a single point. Thousands and thousands of strands attached to the surface. Some were lifeless strands; string from a tumbled kite. After she showed me I ran from broken line to broken line trying to tie them again to the world but all I managed was to tumble my stack of frozen dinner platters. The lesson was over and I woke sobbing gently and cold and ran outside. I built a giant fire on the edge of my meadow. It lit up the entire bowl, casting an enormous figure on the mountains, a hideous silhouette in strange ritual, moving not by will but by the revelry of the flames. I stood in a woolen shroud with my head bowed.

In my shame I had built a sauna, heavy tarps and white-hot rocks. Some would shatter and shirk in flame. They survived weeks of sub-zero weather but the winter was never a sure crucible, only heat was. The sauna was dark but for the dimming glow of the rocks. The steam filled the tarp tent with a hazy red glow. It was thirty, then thirty-five degrees. Soon forty. Then fifty. Every pore opened to a screaming torrent of sweat. I grew weak and lonely. My body limp, the heat forcing faint breath, and I woke to jazz.

I dig all afternoon though I know she won't be here until the northern lights emerge. I sculpt the meadow with my shovel and my hands. Often, when I'm not sure how she will look, I close my eyes, remove my mittens and my gloves, to touch her skin. I push and comb and pack and mold her face on that meadow; her deep river eyes and a mound of snow as tall as my summer cabin for her nose and a mouth, not full of devouring teeth but large lips, in a smile, to whisper and kiss and pray.

I bristle as she is coming. The great chariot of the Aurora Borealis mounts the sky in a dazzling colour concert of light. The sun is the same dull glare every day but the northern lights move like the iridescent silken skirt of an angel, like tumbling rainbows on black ice. I find myself running; sauna hot from the day's work but not cracked.

The sled is heavy with frozen foxes and difficult to pull but I don't want to mar her with a damn snow machine. I scatter the pelts near the river in a frenzy, each one a strand of her hair. They sail through the air flat and smooth, buoyant on the powder. There are hundreds. I begin to throw handfuls as if they will never run out, but they do.

The empty sled rides high and smooth as I trot to my cabin. The moon, about a quarter, is rising, dimming the dancers in the sky, but the meadow is brighter now. She is waking from her slumber.

The snowmobile wails up the mountain through the grey dust. I lean forward hard, to balance the craft. Distance turns my cabin to toy and the meadow to my easel. The mountain is not high but the moon had risen fully when I reached the top. I look back and feel as if I am on the wrong side of the snow. It makes the horizon keep dwindling, and the great canopy of night looks as it did when I saw it for the first time on the ocean. I shouldn't be earth, I should be sky. I jump from my machine to lie in the snow and wait for her.

The snow speaks, it changes moods, the Inuit call it by eleven different names, all with great quiet reverence. Some think the cold cruel, some think it a hoax, but cold is just a way to quiet the ground so the snow will speak. Hear it in the moonlight, the weather for the last eight days, a storm for the next three, feel it on the air fifty miles away, it comes like adolescent boys freed for summer break.

I fall on a bank of snow to watch the night, a child again. I wave my arms and shake my legs to make another snow angel. The snow is careful and fine. It presses my body like the wind or a womb, but inside my head something distracts me. It is my eyes.

Somewhere a disturbing twinkle irritates me. I look around but it will not leave. I shut my eyes but cannot forget. Straight ahead I stare, I will not move to find it, I will let it lead me. I focus on a clear blackness somewhere in the center of the Milky Way, unraveling my focus slowly until I see it: the constellation Pleiades.

A cold breeze lifts me to look at the meadow. Her face moves under the wind like ripe wheat. A mountain no longer nameless urges me to stand. I see her in the face on the meadow near the mountain by the stream - Merope, the fallen star, the missing Pleiades - cast out because of her love for a mortal man. She had fallen to my meadow. She has fallen for me.

On the meadow quiet light fills her eyes, seductive mysterious eyes, shadowed by the moon and coloured by the rainbow river in the sky. A brilliant shape lifts from the snow, a face at once intoxicating and familiar. The wind skin of the meadow shifts over the scattered pelts.

I jump on my snowmobile to catch her. I hold her eye. I will not break my gaze; I hold it fiercely, with great chains, with law and trust, with the crepe paper of my soul. I race on my snow machine toward her wind-devoured face in a shrieking cosmic howl, the engine stretched taut and high, driving me to my friend, the uneven ground hammering the snowmobile until the left ski dipped and slid beneath the snow into a boulder. I am lifted into the air and suspended, as if I had become light, and then thrown to the earth in a cruel ball, spinning toward my meadow. For one moment I beheld her face. She is gone now of course, but I have her somewhere I shouldn't and I am sad because I just want her to be there forever.

Today will be her birthday and her crucifixion and I will be her lover and her priest. The altar of her face is blown flat by the coming storm. All that remains in the snow are footprints, the crepe paper trails of a thousand former foxes.