Even though the temperature befitted an Ice Age day, I needed my daily dose of fresh air and exercise, and so into a nature preserve I ventured and began walking along a snowy and icy trail. My mind began to wander, daydreaming like I tend to do, and then I realized I’d gotten turned around and wasn’t sure which trail I was on or direction headed. I experienced this weird sensation of a time-bending phenomenon and a spatial jump into an unknown. I had to have been hallucinating or dissociating because suddenly I was on a frozen tundra face to face with a mother mastodon and her cub. She let out a threatening trumpet and lowered her head. Her tusks pointed at me like two drawn swords. I held up my hands in a gesture of peace and surrender and said, easy girl, easy now, I am friend not foe. Despite my trembling hands I managed to snap this photo, and then I took one careful step backward and then another and the mastodon let out a snort that sounded like an avalanche, and I said the fuck with slowly backing away, I turned and sprinted through the ice and snow and into a thick stand of trees where the mastodon was too big to give chase. I zigged left and zagged right and the world reassembled and I was back on the trail and safe again. It’s so nice to take a walk in nature, even on the coldest of days.
