SIBERIA

We get the best visitors up here on the mountain.

Siberia came for a visit last night, her storm of black stallions stampeding through the reaches of darkness, the wind of their passage roiling the trees, their labored breath frosting the windows, chunks of ice falling from their bodies and rumbling down along the roof above where I lay listening to the great wild herd as it roared by in the dark, keeping me awake or half-dreaming of riding cloud-high horses galloping their way over the rugged terrain of the night, I don't know where they stop and graze at last or why they begin these vast migrations, just that they are matters of crucial balance in the daytime world...

When I rose in the morning calm, after my long night's ride, Siberia was waiting outside in her robes of white, but all her horses had galloped on.