Dead and dead and dead again and again—the dream keeps coming at him in confusion with no acknowledgement of sheets and blankets wrapped actually tight around him; the thermostat set too high to come on. In sleep, he nearly dies from a lightning strike, he nearly dies from the attack of some incomplete animal, large and with huge jaws. Again and again, drowning and suffocating, the dream attacks him. Though some simulated wall of reality he see through to experience three months passing and yet he does not possess the reason to know that there is no business for his being in the Yukon—a place he only supposes because in between attacks from Nature he also knows that he is sending periodic postcards from his far-off outpost. With no understanding of where he is; with no understanding of why he is there, he pens communication only to then be attacked again by cold, snow, relentless vistas of stone, snow and thin prickly trees. And was it the Yukon? Some deep sense told him that he was lost. Surely this place of cold whispering could be anywhere. It does not matter. Where he walks, lightning tears apart a tree only feet from him, the sound stunning him, shocking him, turning his head, only to witness immense flame from the tree and the blast of light ripping away back into a cloudy sky; a flash-bolt arriving from the sky disappearing into what already seemed a familiar scape. A scape undifferentiated from the cold, cold ground that his boots relentlessly trudge through. One step follows another when there does not seem to be to him anywhere to go.

When he awakens, in his bed, it feels as though three months or more has gone by. It takes the alarm clock only seconds to awaken him, but it takes his mind several minutes to calculate, compensate, and regroup around the simple fact that nowhen of that period of time was real. Yesterday was marked on the computer and the date had not really changed. There was no beast, there were no lightning bolts; only a sense of wonder as to why the day he now faced was not so dangerous as he had come to anticipate and perhaps desire—that days passed had possessed no real threats; that threats mattered even in his isolated bungalow of monitors, calculations, estimates, and predictions. A predictable world or a wolf? He rolls out of bed, his sheets spotted with sweat—caused by having forgotten to turn down the conservative thermostat temperature from earlier the previous day—to stretch, shower and head in to the office.