SANTA'S FISH SUPPER

A woodcutter gets trapped in the freezing arctic....

The woodcutter was lost on a snow-white desert, broken only now and then by the odd whitened and stunted tree. Overhead the sky was that iron-grey monochrome that always tells of more snow to come. He paused on his struggle, and stared desperately at the heavens. He felt colder than he could remember ever having felt before, and he didn't like it.

Please don't snow any more.. he begged of the skies, please don't...

And, in defiance, first one and then a second and a third gigantic fluffy flake of purest white drifted down. One of them landed pertly on his nose and melted, running down his chin before it eventually dripped onto the white world. Then they were joined by a blinding multitude of others until he could barely see his hand in front of his face.

The woodcutter sighed, and rested his weary back against one of the sparse white trees that dotted the landscape.

I need warmth, he sighed, and pulled his axe from a bulky pack on his back.

Using all of his strength, he struck the blade against the white tree trunk. The tree juddered and shivered and showered him with dislodged snow and ice.

He struck again, and little chippings of wood, dark against the snow, flew out. This encouraged him, and in addition he knew one very important thing: chopping wood warms you twice, he thought, it warms you when you chop it and it warms you when you burn it.

With that thought on his mind he set to with a will, his axe flying backwards and forwards and the pile of chippings growing into quite a mound. It took ages, though, before the tree started creaking and slowly began falling away from him. In wonderful slow motion its spartan crown began moving against the monochrome of the vicious sky.

And then, accelerating, it crashed down.

It didn't take long for him to gather an armful of branches and chippings and pile them sensibly in a clearing quite some way from where the tree had been growing. He then struck a light from his ancient tinder-box and carefully encouraged a feeble flame to flicker from a few fragments of dried wood.

The feeble flame gained strength, slowly.

It became a thing of beauty, out there in the snowy desert miles from anywhere. It's tongues of flame danced in front of the woodcutter, and he held his hands towards them, and felt the heat slowly thaw his numb fingers.

I'm saved... he thought.

The dancing flames cast their heat upon him, and warmed him all over. He felt glorious, in much the same way as a drowning man might feel glorious when he unexpectedly finds himself standing on dry land.

And then the worst possible thing happened, and the ground his fire was standing on very slowly gave way.

“No!” he cried, despairingly.

But the white ground altered, in ultra slow-motion, from brilliant-white desert into a fractured sheet of ice, and slowly slipped down into a dark and unwholesome slushy underworld of water.

What's going on? he thought. Then it dawned on him: I've lit my fire on a frozen lake!

And as his flaming fire slowly slid down, there came a hissing and a spitting, and the flames went out. In a brief moment they were all dead and where they had burnt was a mess of blackened wood slowly sliding away, dragged, no doubt, by an underground current.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” came a voice from behind him.

He spun round, furious that anyone should witness his ignominy, and saw a very fat man standing there.

“Ho, ho, ho,” repeated the very fat man.

“Who do you think you are?” demanded the woodcutter, waving his axe ferociously inches away from the fat man's face.

“I,” boasted the very fat man, “am Santa Claus.”

“But you're not dressed in red, trimmed by white fur, and your beard is a dirty grey!” protested the woodcutter.

“I'm in mufti,” grinned the very fat man. “I only wear my uniform when I'm at work, which is just the one night every year. The rest of the time I dress in mufti so that people don't recognise me. You've no idea how mind-warpingly boring it is having sprogs and brats running up to you all the time and grabbing hold of your hands and telling you that they love you and then telling you what absurdly expensive gifts they want for Christmas! It's the worst thing in the world! It makes you want to murder the little horrors, but if you did that think of what the papers would have to say. The headlines would be unbearable! So instead of committing multiple murders I dress in mufti, and nobody knows who I am.”

“Except me,” pointed out the woodcutter.

“Oh, you don't count!” boomed Santa Claus in mufti, “because you and I are going to catch a nice juicy fish in that hole you've made in the snow with your fire, and then I'm going to take you with me on my sledge back to my Ice Castle and we'll get Mother Christmas to cook it! Then we'll have a nice fish supper together, just you and me. And if you play your cards right I'll open a bottle of my best Tall Trees Mixed Fruit wine, and we'll get gently sloshed together whilst my beautiful wife does the dance of the seven veils in front of us.

“You can't say better than that, can you?”

No, thought the freezing woodcutter, you can't….

Reviews

[Leon C]

A lovely piece of whimsy