Christmas 1915

by Zach Neal

Joy to the world. The words echo in my head, a mockery of the vista that greeted my eyes. 

Already the cold had soaked into my very soul, into every pore, every cell, muscle fibre and bone.

Christmas 1915. Have you ever spent Christmas underground? Or in a trench, gazing out at midnight over No Man’s Land? When the only Christmas illumination is a flare, hanging in the sky for a brief moment, throwing into sharp relief every pimple, every pus-filled wound in the bosom of the Earth?

I was glad to be on guard duty. Christmas Eve, it was so much easier to take than sitting in our cold, smoke-filled dugout where everything, every little piece of garbage and trash ended up in our home-made stove. Where everyone smoked all the time, from dawn to dusk. Where your eyes literally stung all the time.

Where everyone took turns to read a letter from home, except me.

Where every one tried so hard to cheer everyone up. Where fake smiles tried to tell lies that the eyes could not conceal.

She gave us smokes, nice little tins. The Queen Mother. Embossed, stamped with a design, a gift from the monarch to her humblest servants. You know: Georgie Porgie’s mum.

Smoking keeps up your morale, it’s warm, familiar, and you control when you smoke.

No one can tell you not to smoke when you advance at twelve paces to the minute.

No one is there to tell you not to smoke as you huddle in a hole, wondering where the rest of the company might be.

Is there a company left? Are you the only one? Is the enemy going to use gas again this time? When will we be able to smoke again? Only living people can smoke, and so we smoke as a reminder that we are not dead yet.

Who is that?

Just a friend, going to use the latrine, our concession to “sanitation.” It only works a certain times -- no rain, for example; or no recent bombardments. “Cold, eh?”

“Tough shit,” he replies without a trace of humour or “good cheer,” yet neither is there any rancour. It is simply a fact.

“Tough shit,” I agree. May as well skip the small talk.

The moon is out. Clouds scud by, and shadows creep across the land.

On the one hand, I like to keep my head down. German snipers don’t take Christmas off. A guy in the next company found out the hard way this morning.

He was drunk. He stood up carelessly, thoughtlessly. That’s all it takes. Now he is dead.

There is somebody out there, yet the nature of the noises they make tells me it is a Boche stretcher party. Sometimes I wish I dared to go out there and talk to them.

“Take your time,” I would tell them.

“I won’t start anything.” It would be appreciated, by the German stretcher party, I’m sure. It must be nerve wracking to wonder who’s on the parapet tonight and what kind of a mood they might be in.

They are brave men, undoubtedly frightened men. They try to get their comrades out of the muck, and to bring them back, alive, wounded; or dead.

They wish to give the dead a decent Christian burial. That’s right; the Huns are Christians too, just like us. Just exactly like us…don’t tell anyone I said that.

There is no such thing as a “Christian” burial out here, but they try.

I don’t understand people some times. Well, they try hard.

Several days ago I saw a cemetery that had suffered during a bombardment. Not a pretty sight, for most of the corpses were recently buried…”and the dead shall rise again.”

Who would have thunk it?

Will angels fly over the battlefield tonight? Will my mail come someday? Will I get shot? How about a nice little leg wound? That would be nice, take me out of here. Any goddamned place. Any place at all, except a prisoner of war camp. I have too much hate for that. I doubt if I could swallow it all and survive in there. Who would want to?

I squat down for a smoke. You can see a man smoking for miles, under certain conditions, I have shot at the most indirect little glow a hundred yards away. It reminds them.  Be careful. I ain’t always so nice. God, let me out of here. Any fucking way…

You can’ t be too careful around here. Even the smell of tobacco can help a man who wants to kill you. I never pop my head up over the same look-out spot twice.

Fuck, it is cold. Luckily for us. The crap in the bottom of the trench freezes, it is easier to lay the duckboards. Things around here smell better. Not much, but better.

Christmas. Jesus. Where was I a year ago? I thought I was lonely then. Now I’m lonely.

Scared, too. Not many guys are going to live through this one. The numbers don’t lie. Ten percent casualties…that’s a lot. Especially once or twice a week…how long can it go on? Twenty per cent casualties? Once a month? How long can it go on?

A major campaign is coming up. Casualties of 50% in some units are expected? How long can it go on? Don’t ask me. I know I will not be there to see the end of it all.

Some guy, I can’t remember his name told me to think like that. It is easier, and he was right.

He died soon after of some flux or pneumonia thing. I am not a doctor, so there you go.

The hours pass, and I just keep moving. Exhaustion is a constant companion. The enemy knows we need to sleep. We know he needs to sleep. The artillery rounds go back and forth, messengers of hate. Somewhere they have it written down, the policy on shelling.

“Strategy is when you never let the enemy know you are out of ammunition, but keep on firing,” it’s probably in the “General’s Handbook.” I like that one, I’ll tell it to Pete later. Anyone else who’s awake. It seems genuinely funny. Not good to be seen or heard giggling out here, your friends have enough worries.

Never let them see you low on shells. How do you do that? Never let them see you stop firing. And they played by the same rule. Lots and lots of bombs and shells sitting around in the rain, snow and sleet, gathering rust, no good to anyone that way.

That’s something I can tell you for sure about our enemy. They have enough shells on hand to “waste” several an hour. Our boys send back several an hour. Plenty of shells for everyone, no need to panic, you’ll get yours. Just be patient. Sign up early, avoid the June rush, as some wag had said, once upon a time.

We know they’re still there. Haven’t run away in the night. Haven’t gone home to be with their families for Christmas.

I wonder what mom is doing, my dad, where is he right now. My brothers will be with Mom, I hope, no way to know for sure. My mail isn’t getting through, most of the other men have been getting theirs , but several of us are in the same  boat. “Up shit creek without a paddle,” as the boys used to say when we smoked in the woods beside the school house at our lunch hour. Don’t get caught boys; there are snipers out here now.

Did I run away from home to escape something? What about my Uncle Ed? When his dad died, he was quite a young man. My grandpa died, Uncle Ed was seventeen. He took over the little family business, the family tombstone business, that seems fucking ironic, here in northern end of the battle line. He looked after his mother, (my Grandma) helped her to raise his younger brothers and sisters and now Uncle Ed helped look after my mom. My brothers and our little piss-pot of a farm.

Ed never got married, never had a home of his own. Never even changed the name of the business; it still had grandpa’s name up there. Never moved the location, never even got rid of the old wagon or bought any new tools.

He just picked up where Grandpa had left off and got on with it.

Did Ed ever think of “running away?”

Did Ed think of “joining up” and going off to war? I bet he did, I thought with a curious, silly grin.

No one can tell you the truth if you don’t want to listen.

My old man, when I went to see him in Richmond, at the farm equipment dealership where he was the sales manager and part owner; he told me, “Don’t be a fool.”

“They’ll ask for you when they need you,” (he was right about that.)

All my friends were signed up, were about to sign up, or hoped to obtain parents permission to sign up, or had devised; or where in the process of devising; all sorts of stratagems to get past any block or hindrance to signing up.

There is a momentary sucking sound, about fifty yards in front of me. It stops, starts, stops, starts, then fades away. Sounds like the German stretcher party found yet another one. Good for you, take him home to where he belongs…no one who has seen it considers that any man should have to bear this, yet bear it we must.

There is only one way to go home, for most of us here.

Every so often I move to another position, wondering if this is the time when some cagey bastard will have his sights lined up on this particular notch in the indistinct wall of sand bags, tree trunks, and earth, earth, earth.

I smoke about eight cigarettes for every four hours on guard.  I don’t smoke at half-hour intervals. I might smoke one now, one in fifteen minutes…or better still, seventeen minutes, then another in forty-two minutes.

You know me, “Always thinking.”

I listen well. Indistinct as a sound may be, if you carefully and quietly move your position, maybe you can hear it some more, and triangulate the source.

If it gets too close, then worry. What if a flare pops off behind my head, and silhouettes me against the sky? Your ears are very important, more than some will ever know. I worked one summer in a sawmill. I wore ear plugs. Most of the guys didn’t. Most men are fools, aren’t they? I have noticed that. Don’t get me wrong: it’s all just a part of the grand spectacle of life. I love them just the same, in spite of all the trouble they have caused me and sometimes you have to kill some of them. That’s just the way it is. There is no morality anymore, and why pretend otherwise?

So don’t try to fucking lie to me. Lie to someone else. But not me.

Always aware. My heart pounds, and I try not too breathe too loudly. Someone might hear.

My very breath can give me away. If an enemy raiding party is out there, they are being  damned quiet about it.

I relax and move on somewhere. It is not a game, I do not do it to pass the time or keep warm. Our very lives depend on it. I know too well, from experience, just how a trench raid is conducted. Oh no, it is not a pretty thing. Carried out in a quiet and efficient manner, it is short, sharp and brutal.

You don’t need guns if you get up close. A rifle is useless at night in close quarters, unless a man really knows what he is about. A shovel is best…a shovel, sharpened like an axe. In the trenches, the shovel is man’s best friend, not the dog, not the pipe, not the rifle, that’s for sure.

A rifle is not much use against the enemy artillery, or our own, for that matter. Only the shovel can save us.

We read the “Merchant of Venice” in school. Shylock, he couldn’t get justice, because the magistrate ruled, that he did not have a right to spill a drop of blood in the taking of it. Even though the magistrate admitted Shylock was entitled to the “pound of flesh.”

The teacher taught us; “you can’t get your pound of flesh without spilling a drop of blood,” i.e. revenge is bad. Well, tell me something I don’t know.

Did she miss the point? What is justice? A man is arrested for burglary…he is sent to jail. Maybe he did it, let’s say.

Now his wife and kids have to go hungry. There’s your drop of blood, Your Honour.

There’s your drop of blood. And why did he have to steal in the first place? Is it because he couldn’t feed his wife and kids? Every crime is a political statement. Even Jack the Ripper knew that. Shakespeare knew it too.

There is no justice, that is the truth. And that is why wars happen.

Without looking, without counting, I would bet there are ten thousand guys out here all within a half dozen miles each way. Yet the night is deadly still, as I feel the tiny lick of snowflakes on my face, up around my eyes which are the only things exposed.

And not one of them had any choice in the matter.

Right here, right now, I am the only justice, I am the only God. And I choose…to hold my fire. I think I’ve seen that fat-faced mutt before, he was kicked in the butt by a “Fritzie” corporal one day. I almost feel like that one’s a buddy.

The moon has gone again. You ought to be more careful, fat-faced man.

The enemy stretcher party has moved away, and now would be the time for a raid; they probably co-ordinate things like that, it only makes sense. But I hear nothing.

The sergeant passes by. He never talks to me out here, but he has to check on some of the men, and it is his duty after all. He would prefer not to have to, no doubt. Sarge isn’t such a bad guy once you get to know him. He has a wife and three kids…and would like to see them again.

My watch, it tells me there is one hour to go, then I can sleep for a while, and thank God for that.

Sleep is the last refuge of the truly unhappy.

I wonder when my mail will come. Maybe never.

Fuck.

They say – I think it was St. John of the Cross, “Salvation can be gained through suffering.”

Are you sure? Times like this a man would welcome a transfer to submarines…it would be warmer and drier. A transfer? Where would I go? Out of the frying pan and into the fire…right? Who knows. It just might be worth it, to be warm and dry for a while.

Even if it’s just for a little while.

END

A Sickly, Yellowish Cloud.

Second Battle of Ypres, Richard Jack.

by Zach Neal

Ultimately heroes are not born, not made, but manufactured. I won the Military Medal at Ypres. April 22, 1915. I was one of the few left standing with a rifle in my hand when

relieved. Almost everyone else was dead, wounded, missing, gone insane, or had run away.

Can’t say as I blamed them, wish I had run myself.

I recall standing on the parapet, looking through our set of  periscope binoculars.

The horror sticks in your mind forever, it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Having joined the Royal Army, and then finally transferred back into the Canadian Army, having luckily gotten into a good unit, the strange thing is that I had become somehow comfortable.

The Brits are all right, don’t get me wrong, but it was good to be back with Canadians.

We had a different outlook, there wasn’t such a great gulf, neither social nor intellectual, between officer and enlisted men. Having discovered incompetent officers in every army, ultimately, what difference does it make? A truly competent officer is a rarity.

My platoon was fortunate enough to occupy a very small rise in the earth. We were close to the French Colonial troops; when we heard yelling and looked to see what was what.

And there it was, the first gas attack in history.

A sickly, yellowish cloud, a hundred yards high, and a half a mile long, was being slowly pushed by the light breeze towards us. The Germans had waited a long time for the wind to be just right, but at first, there was only an uneasy feeling. It just seemed to spring up out of the ground over at the enemy side of the lines; long, thin streamers merging into one hellish, foul, fog.

While it was certainly far from benevolent looking, there was a little sense of dread.

But we also wondered, “What’s the big deal? Smoke is just smoke.”

Dread, fear of the unknown, a queasy, sinking feeling in the guts. A watery, gassy feeling in the guts…

Firing reached a crescendo as the rising cloud of bilious, horrid gas rolled over the French, and the Canadians on our left.

We could see the tops of heads bobbing along in a traverse behind us and off to our left.

“Where the fuck are they going?” someone asked even as the sound of shouting, screaming, yelling came to us; and more of that terrifying cloud obscured our view.

Darker now, blocking out the sky, cutting off the light. Behind us.

Confusion. Had they been ordered to retreat? What were our orders? We began to shoot into the front of the cloud as it rolled onwards, coming inexorably towards us.

A faint smell…like a public swimming pool? Household cleaner? Horrible recognition, that we are all about to die. Like a hammer in the guts. Heart pounds, out of control. A smell like really bad medicine.

The sounds of rifle and machine gun fire beside us reached a peak, then rapidly began to drop. Nowadays, just doing a little house-cleaning can bring back that day in a strange, fragmented clarity.

There was a huge, great silence to our left, as our own fire slackened…

Whoever was retreating along that trench, they were screaming in mad panic now.

A sense of dread. Hell is upon us.

Fifty yards.

Certain death looms before us, we know that now.

The man beside me dropped his rifle,  the was shooting quite far away, on our left.

He got up, and tore at his straps, the nearest escape trench only five yards away.

He took off down the trench, and I stared at his back, bemused by this strange and bizarre sight. Coughing, off to the left. A half a dozen black troops, in their colourful kepi or fez hats, the bright uniforms, staggering along, clutching, tearing at their throats.

They shouldn’t have come this far into our area…were they lost? I remember that thought.

A couple of more guys got up and ran, but took their guns with them. The black men were falling down in the trench twenty yards from my position, eyes bugging out, choking, coughing, retching, and the smell was stronger. A wisp of foggy, dense vapour. The view to the left was blocked, and thank God.

In those few short seconds, I saw more than enough to last me a lifetime. A lifetime of nightmares.

I could hear our Colonel shouting something incoherent.

Don’t remember going there, but I found myself and a half a dozen other men in a field, shooting into the flank of the German advance. Huge clogs, bulky gobs of mud made it hard to run. My feet felt like lead, my heart pounded in my throat. It was hard to get enough air…fear almost overwhelmed me.

The sheer horror of the unknown.

This is when I learned that fear turns a man’s guts into a liquid.

I have no idea how I survived that day. The gas must have been thinner, for I only gagged once or twice, feeling the sharp tang in my throat. Holding my breath, I just tried to sidestep around the wispy patches as they passed around our little clump of men, busy loading and firing, loading and firing. Some guy beside me, hoarse with fear…

A man I had never seen before, but wearing my unit’s patches, falling down.

Writhing in agony, again the tearing at the throat.

The look, as he stares in my eyes, he wants me to help him, help him, and there is nothing I can do, just load and fire, load and fire. A cloud envelopes me, and I stagger out of it, eyes running with tears, nose and mouth burning…I puked up, it was all over me; I don’t think it was much gas, I think it was sheer horror, fear, the fear of breathing.

I have never known anything like it, before or since.

Cursing, quavering, quacking in sheer terror, stuttering and stammering out defiance and loathing, as my shaking hand rams another clip into place…my left arm so tired the rifle kept lowering itself against my will. Puking and crying and trying to stay upright.

Firing down into Germans…must have been another little piece of high ground, this time about twenty of us, load and fire, load and fire…the Boche scream and shout and we just ignore the pleas and keep on firing…

I have no idea of how I survived that day.

I have no idea why they gave me that fucking medal.

But I will say this: Don’t use our pain to justify your degeneracy, don’t defile our graves with your lousy posturing, and don’t use our sacrifice to back up your mealy-mouthed fucking hypocrisy.

I heard a man say once, “The press takes a photo of a burning village, and it gives ‘destroy’ a bad name…”

The press is not entirely useless, it seems.

Someone, some men led me to a rear area.They pried the gun out of my hands.

They cut my clothes from my body, led me to a field shower, and scrubbed me with rough brushes in the bitterly cold water. There was some pain as the dried shit pulled some of the hair off my legs. And then they put me on a stretcher.

Someone gave me an injection.

I was asleep in about four seconds.

I think I’d had enough, for one day.

END

Paddling Under the Aurora Borealis.

A.Y. Jackson.

The first time I ever saw the Aurora Borealis was many years ago. My buddy and I were going to Algonquin Park. 

Somewhere north of Huntsville, Ontario, we pulled over briefly at three a.m. for a call of nature.

“Whoa! Look at that, Willy!”

“What is it?” he asked.

It took a minute to click in, as he’d never seen it before.

This was a full-color array. It was surprising how fast the darting swirls of bluish-green, yellow and red light started up, moved around, and faded. We’ve all seen pictures, but the speed of it was impressive—the way the bands of light seemed to dance to some music of the cosmos, heard only by themselves.

Now, the first night paddle we did, we set up a flashing yellow light on the beach at the south end of Opeongo Island. This is in the north arm of Algonquin Park’s Opeongo Lake. We paddled due south, with a diaphanous, ghostly-white moon ahead.

The water was flat, with little lacy bits of froth, from all the soap people use; the south shore clearly visible in the moonlight. It was easy to navigate. Never losing sight of the beacon, after an hour’s circuit, we safely returned, flushed with a unique experience. On another occasion, Willy and I went for a night paddle on Cedar Lake, also in Algonquin Park. With a few drinks, overcast skies, warm night, exhaustion, and the gentle swell, the floating sensation; Willy became disoriented, and said he had nausea, or vertigo. So we went back to shore.

Years later, my brother and I went up to Aura Lee Lake, connected to the west end of Cedar Lake. I often go down to the shore, away from the fire at night. It’s worth it; I once saw the most awesome meteor at four bloody a.m., and my brother was snoring in the tent! No one to tell it to…anyhow, this time I was completely stunned by what I saw.

So I nipped back to the fire, grabbed up my lifejacket and smokes.

I suggested a night paddle, and he jumped at it. My brother had never seen anything like that in his entire life. It’s impossible to describe, there were beams shooting up out of the horizon. Quite narrow at the base, they were veritable sword points in the heavens. And they slid around the horizon, left and right, even as swirls, whorls, and vortexes floated around in the centre of the sky. Throw in a few stars, Jupiter and Mars, a tiny sliver of the moon down low in the west.

It was pretty sublime, maybe even surreal, to drift around looking up at it. There was even a meteor or two for good measure. Sometimes it seems like God is talking to you.

I haven’t been up there in a few years. Once we pretty much had our fill, but still one night all paid up. My brother talked me into going to Wendigo Lake. This is a long, skinny lake oriented cross-wise to the generally prevailing summer winds. We motored about some, with my 1.2 horse-power motor on the back of the canoe and then went south down the lake to find a campsite.

A ‘Wendigo’ is a person possessed by demons in ancient Algonquian folklore. The demon often possesses them in a dream. Once taken over, they become obsessed with eating human flesh. The best-known way to get rid of the demon was to perform the wiindogookaanzhimowin, which was a highly-satirical dance which involved wearing a hideous-hilarious mask and dancing about the drum backwards.

People who understood that they were possessed would often request that they be put to death before they could do harm to others, including their own families and friends.

True Wendigoes were gaunt, emaciated creatures, with their pallid skin tightly-stretched over their bones, sunken eyes and an ‘ash-grey’ complexion. It was believed that those who had consumed human flesh were in danger of becoming Wendigoes themselves.

This taboo is perfectly understandable in terms of any hunter-gatherer culture where seasonal famine was all too well known. The Wendigo myth is like all stories of its kind, a sort of moral lesson, where symbolism takes the place of factual, historical material.

Speaking of the consumption of human flesh and blood; as we cooked and gathered firewood, it became clear we were in a bad mosquito zone. The smoke from the fire didn’t help. The breeze died at sunset. We used all our repellent. About ten o’clock at night the zipper on the tent broke after a dash to the bushes for a nature break..

We were in trouble. It was truly amazing. There were hundreds of mosquitoes on us, maybe thousands. It was bad. I don’t know how the couriers de bois did it, or how early peoples could stand it. We tore down the tent, chucked everything in the boat and paddled out a hundred yards.

It was really dark. Overcast. No lights anywhere on shore, the perimeter of the lake pitch black. The water was crystal clear, surface almost invisible, as I held the flashlight.

Steve got the motor on the mount, fueled it, and luckily for us, it ran first pop.

It was disorienting. He put his little light on the floor ahead of him. I held my light over the side, pointing down and ahead in the water—sometimes in the middle of the lake a submerged rock rises up within inches of the surface. And I didn’t want to sit on one all night, holding on to a broken boat, and wait for an early fisherman. Over time, our eyes adjusted, but only the overcast had any lightness of color.

The car was across the lake, and north two or three kilometers. After twenty minutes we found the opposite side and followed the pale glimmer of the boulders on shore.

“Go dead slow,” I told Steve. “Keep your feet in the center of the boat, relax your hips, don’t grab the gunwales under any circumstances…look straight ahead, focus on the rocks along the shore.”

After a trip of about an hour, it seemed forever, my light picked out a reflector from a vehicle. The boat launch! Thank God. And my navigation. It’s always an adventure to travel in Algonquin Park. It has its allure—its dangers can be seductive. The decision to go to Wendigo Lake was made in haste. The tent door was ripped in haste. Jumping in the boat was done in haste. In a situation like that, have your life jacket fastened tightly.

The key is to relax, and think about what you’re doing.

Know your limitations. And don’t do anything stupid.

Night paddling is for experienced paddlers using proper equipment and not under the influence of alcohol.

The Wolves of Kioshkokwi.

Wild and beautiful.

Kioshkokwi Lake lies on the Amable Du Fond River, one of half a dozen major watersheds draining the Algonquin dome. The river goes north to the Mattawa River, and hence to the Ottawa. This part of the Du Fond is navigable by canoes and kayaks.

The Du Fond brothers, Francis and Ignace, operated a depot farm at the east end of Manitou Lake in the 1880’s. Now it’s just a grassy clearing, with a few clumps of trees, and the trail going through. It is historic country, in the ancient homeland of the Nipissings, a nation of the Algonquian linguistic stock.

Kioshkokwi means “Lake of many gulls.” The plaintive cries of the birds, glowing white dots on the calm glassy expanse of the water, can be haunting indeed. They can be seen and heard for miles. My brother and I set out at dawn on a foggy morning. The dark pines became ghostly shapes in the mist. They rapidly disappeared, yet up is up and down is down, in the weird half-light of early morning. With the compass to guide us, it was windless, the water dark and quiet. It was the start of another warm and humid summer’s day. In the centre of the lake, the sky cleared. Looking back, a billowing mass of white cotton shrouded the shore, a blanket of trees hugging the soft curves of the earth mother.

It looked like the nap of an old, much washed sweater; and it was good.

After an unsuccessful search for the ruins of an old ranger cabin on Wolfe Bay, we turned our prow southeast, rounding the west end of the lake, setting up for the southwest run to the river mouth. We hiked up and looked at the waterfall, and talked for a while with some people up there.

We found a campsite back on Wolfe Bay. Next morning, we set out for the northeast corner of the lake. That little bay has a couple of islands. We grabbed the southernmost one. This island was not large, but shallows dotted with sandy patches and clumps of grass, and the nearby shoreline; meant firewood was nearby. A short, easy canoe ride after dinner usually takes care of all our firewood needs. On the “front” of the island, a nice sandy beach, probably fifty metres long.

A holiday, we watched canoe parties go by as the day wore on. They were coming from two directions—some people came out of Lauder Lake, and parties were obviously coming up from the portage at Mink Lake, going home after the long weekend.

They headed for the boat launch and store on Kioshkokwi’s north side. By ten o’clock on that August night, it became very quiet. In the old days, we used to sit with our rum-laced coffee and listen. The tracks are gone now, but it was quite a thrill to hear a train coming up the valley. In the distance, the vague suggestion of a noise, more felt than heard.

A faint glimmer on a hillside, then another hillside lit up. As the train made its way, the blast of its horn, the rumble of its wheels were amplified, reflected by sheer rock faces and the parabolic curves of the cuttings it ran in. You could hear it fifteen kilometres away. And then as the ground quivered and shook under your butts, the pounding, shuffling monster would light up half the lake as it went by, thudding and roaring and making sparks fly from its wheels.

It gets real quiet after the train goes by, then the forest lets out its breath and the normal routine begins anew. We heard something die out there that night. We had no idea what it was. Perhaps a rabbit caught by a skulking, silent flying owl, maybe a beaver surprised in the act of tree-cutting by a bobcat, who knows? It sure makes the hair stand up on the back of the neck, sure makes the old goose pimples rise on arms and legs.

Makes you think. Animals are truly innocent of any guilt or sin. Life is such a fragile, and therefore precious thing. It is always a tragedy to die.

At some point the wolves began to howl.

“Holy crap! What the heck is that?” asked my brother, round-eyed in wonder.

The weirdest, un-holiest, loneliest, most mournful sound you ever want to hear. 

Mariomassone, Denali NPS.

“That’s just the moose,” I told him. “They get a little uptight. Another month or so and the rut begins. They call out to each other, let each other know whose turf it is.”

He accepted my explanation, and after swallowing the dregs of his coffee, went to bed. I like the sound of wolves, and have no real fear of them. Bears are so much more silent, don’t you agree? Much more unpredictable. A wolf won’t eat out of a garbage dump. It doesn’t smell good, to a wolf. Bears are omnivorous, the wolf is a pure carnivore. They might nibble grass, the vegetable portion of their diet comes exclusively from the stomach contents of their quarry. An animal of the chase, creatures of the pack.

Letting the fire die down, I laid there quietly on my little tarp. A clear, starry night.

I listened for a long time to the snoring of my brother, and the calls of the wolves of Kioshkokw, for they are also our brothers.

End

Selling Stock Photos: Doing it or Just Talking About It?

Unusual in a world of clones.

Years ago a buddy bought a $110.00 market guide, issued yearly, for professional photography. 

It cost money for film and developing, a darkroom took up space, and he never shot a photo because he thought he always had to have that award-winning shot. Otherwise it just wasn't worth his while.

This same guy, a nice enough guy, went to the annual photography show at the local arena. It was put on once a year by the members of the local photography club, a group that included many professional photographers, people who owned studios and camera shops and had photos in contests all over the place. 

They would tell you, “This picture won twenty-five bucks at the fair,” and “This one won a hundred dollars in the Fictitious Contest…”

There were people who had learned to make money with photography.

My buddy signed up for courses at the local college, where he studied boudoir photography, much to my own envy of course, as he had all those relatively beautiful live models to work with.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, live models. You see, these young women had the dream of modeling, which they thought would be a good career, right? They were acting on their dreams.

So my buddy took photos of the girls, in the studio, in their homes and apartments and out in remote locations. As I recall, the shots involved a lot of girls with lifted arms and hair streaming in the wind, and ninety-nine percent of the time, pretty much fully dressed.

Everyone was all very naive and not very rich, and not all that good-looking in some cases. In any case, they all knew what my buddy was really after!

I’ve only met one or two guys like that in my entire life. For the most part it’s all talk, but this guy was a bit of a grabber. The girls knew that too.

But the point is that none of it actually went anywhere. He was poor, and so were we all. And it takes practice to get good—I mean, really, really fucking good where you stand any chance at all of making a sale, or being able to organize a show, like the pros in the photo club, none of whom were internationally known, none of whom were rich or anything like that.

It takes a lot of practice to get good.

Now, today that guy is in a remarkably different position—if he wants to be. Because now, with a digital camera, some live models, some remote locations, some props and costumes, that very same guy, who has had the last thirty years to get good—and I mean, really, really fuckin’ good—well now that guy can upload his pictures to a hundred stock photo sites, and if his photos even approach the kind of talented amateur and professional art on places like DeviantArt, then he stands a real chance of making a sale.

That’s why be bought that $110.00 photo market guide in the first place—because he  dreamed, and because he did act. He wanted to be a professional photographer. He didn’t act enough. He didn’t do the right things—like get a counter job at a photo shop where he would have fit right in, learned a lot about the business, and made himself two or three hundred a week while doing all of that, and have professional equipment available to him for the first time in his life.

This has relevance for me, ladies and gentlemen, because at the time, I was making all sorts of amateur videos, with borrowed cameras, some from the college, and as I recall, I borrowed Sony ‘brick’ cams from my Uncle Steve, and some other guy who shall remain nameless. I made duplicate tapes, audio and VHS, for a buck each back then, mixtapes, motivational speakers on tape for the car and such. People would pay hundreds of dollars for a set of tapes and then they were so precious they didn’t want to leave it in the car, right? It wasn’t for resale or redistribution, just for the record.

Those little films were fun to make. I used home VCRs for editing more than once, with all of their short-comings. I did all that stuff before Wes Stroud and Mantracker, I know they’re good guys and everything, but at one time I wanted to ‘do something’ with film-making. True story, ladies and gentlemen; I wanted to make wildlife films. But the idea that someone will come along with a pocketful of money and grab one of my books as ‘a film that I simply must make’ is pretty ludicrous if I’m not doing anything to make that happen.

And there are ways to make it happen. You would have to want it bad enough, to do it yourself, go that extra mile, shake a lot of hands and make that deal, whether it’s with rented or borrowed equipment, or with cultural grants, or even that most unlikely of happenings, private investors.

What do I know about film-making? Not much, in my humble opinion.

Ultimately that other guy fell by the wayside and that’s just how life is.

Add caption

So, my conclusion is a simple one. What I need to do, is to set aside a weekend, put a few images in a folder clearly labelled ‘pro pics’ and sign up for a marketplace or two—a stock photo company, and just see if I can make a sale with some of the more esthetically-pleasing landscapes I’ve been doing lately.

Over the last year, I have browsed any number of stock photo sites, where I viewed something on the order of 150,000 or more images. There are some surprising shots in there, and one wonders why anyone would ever load it up. Yet at the same time, it is entirely possible that someone with very specific requirements would want that photo—it’s that unique in its category.

I was looking for something specific, and when I came to something I loved but couldn’t immediately use, I sort of remembered that and went looking for it and similar shots later.

As to whether there is a market for digital landscapes, it’s hard to say, but when someone does want one, and if your stuff is any good, then your chances are as good as anybody else’s.

Unless of course they’re not signed up—in which case their chances are nil.

Here are three links from my first search:

Sign up to Contribute to iStockPhoto

http://www.istockphoto.com/sell-stock-photos.php

Shutterstock Become a Contributor

http://submit.shutterstock.com/?language=en

Sell Your Images BigStockPhoto

http://www.bigstockphoto.com/sell-your-images.html

Note: always read the terms of service.

How to Open Shortened URLs, and Analysing Blog Traffic.

George Boole, artist unknown. (Wiki.)

There are a number of free and handy tools for independent online publishers.

When analyzing web traffic on my Blogger blog, I see some shortened URLs. I’ve been blogging along for three or four years now without paying much attention to them, but it would be kind of nice to know who that is, right?

If a story gets fifty hits and half of them come from a shortened URL, then that’s half your readership, and mostly likely a social networking site where the author posted, or it was automatically fed, or where someone else had reposted or retweeted the author’s post.

Otherwise it represents search engine traffic, which is an automated search by categories and key words by someone looking for something specific, and for whatever reason your name or your content came up. This happens if someone uses the same key words in your search as you put in your tags, the title, the author name, and of course the content of your post. Every site and blog has a ranking, and you want to be ranked as high as possible because few people will ever go past the first or second page of links on any given search.

An example of this is if a site is about carpentry and some carpenter is looking for work—he might type in ‘carpenters’ (or contractors, home-builders, etc) when searching for a job opening. Some list of names comes up, and most likely he makes his own list of addresses and phone numbers, and it’s helpful in his job search.

Now, if the author only had a hundred and fifty connections on that site, or friends, or followers, then this demographic group might bear some closer attention. In comparison with a social site where the author has two thousand ‘friends’ and where the author got maybe two or three hits on the same story, this is a good group because they are interested in your particular content.

If you are developing a website or a blog for its own sake, say you want to run a magazine or something, a newsletter or website, possibly as an adjunct to sales or promotion, then content is king.

Not all sites and blogs are created equal, and so they don’t have equal appeal to any given demographic group. (Your site can be tightly focused on one small niche or with wider content; it may appeal to a wider audience or readership.)

Facebook might be more popular with one age group, and a website like Instagram might attract a much younger crowd. Twitter followers are different than Pinterest users, and each of them represents a different set of opportunies and pitfalls.

There is a tool for opening short URLs. It’s a URL ‘opener’ and it traces the link back to its original destination and tells you who they are and displays the URL in question.

Now you know if the bulk of your traffic is coming from Stumbleupon, Tumblr, Twitter, Wattpad, Facebook, et cetera..

If you have two thousand connections on LinkedIn and get maybe one percent of your traffic from there, then building up your list on the platform is less effective than adding forty or fifty people on another site, where the exact same story got twenty-five hits or reads.

Also, some platforms may have peak hours, and different readers may be all over the world, where the time zones are different, and I bring that up because I just noticed traffic from the U.S., but then there was traffic from China, half the world away. There are something like a hundred million English speakers in China, so that is something to think about. 

(That traffic was on another blog, as you can see by the content this one is relatively new.)

And now you're analysing me. That's not so hard, eh?

http://www.untiny.com/

Here is a link to a page with two or three other link opening services. There is also a service where an author or webmaster can get their own shortened URL, in case yours is unusually long, or if you have something really cool in mind.

http://qwertyweb.blogspot.ca/2009/08/view-real-url-behind-short-url.html

***

The Art of Analysis

There are several stories on my blog that come up regularly in the stats, even though I haven’t posted them anywhere recently, sometimes possibly even not in months or years.

Certain stories come up all the time. If a story is getting twenty or thirty hits a month for no effort on the author’s part, and if that traffic is sort of building, then the author or webmaster is doing something right.

In this particular case it would be the subject matter, it would be the key words, but more than that—and this is important when gaming those all-important human algorithms, is that people are interesting in this particular content, and more than that, with this one particular tool I can now find out where those people are finding that content.

Then I can do several things at once.

What I can do is to build up that ‘audience’ and post more of that particular content. Not only that, but we can go looking for other social platforms where more of that particular demographic group seems to hang out.

It’s all done on an experimental basis, and of course that takes time. But over time the author builds the network, his presence on different social networks, and over time the readership grows.

Right? None of this might get quick results in the short term, but in the longer game it does seem to work.

Using a few simple ideas, I took another blog from 5,900 hits total in about June of 2012, and about a year and a half later, within the next twenty-four hours I will have my 100,000^th hit on that particular blog. What can be done with one blog or website can be done with another, each targeted to different groups, whether by ages or interests, needs, aspirations, hobbies, consumer categories or whatever.

I can predict that with some accuracy, ladies and gentlemen. 

I have more questions and no doubt the average reader will too. Let’s face it: there might be a hundred things I haven’t thought of yet, and if I was doing a bit of a better job on some of those unknowns, maybe I’d have a million hits by now.

I should point out that it is purely an assumption that blogging or having a website helps to sell a book or anything else, although conventional wisdom is that it is an important aspect of an author marketing themselves and their works. Conventional wisdom isn't always wrong, but perhaps it is more a question of doing it well.

It’s definitely experimental, but an experiment is designed to get data. It gets you a new fact, maybe even more than one. Maybe you get two facts. I’m just sayin’.

A blog, on its first post, with no network or readership built, would be lucky to get a half a dozen reads from friends and family. Even a simple blog has the potential to get hundreds of thousands or even millions of hits in a year. A couple of days ago I got 341 hits, and today only 166. That’s a lot better than six hits in a day or a week.

That much is obvious, but it took me three or four years to figure it out and to get it this far.

Simply put, a well put-together package, over time, will do better than something with no thought and no foresight put into the actual content, (and the readers are who you want to reach with your blog or website, right?)  And there is also some timing, analysis, et cetera.

***

Here’s George Boole, who is really cool, and he is credited with laying the mathematical groundwork for the computer revolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole

Killing off a Pen-Name?

Photo by Lothar Spurzem.

I have a pen-name with a couple of titles. He’s never sold a book although he has given a few away and ‘sold’ books with Smashwords coupons. These actually do count as sales, an important factor to consider in ‘gaming the algorithms,’ but only on the Smashwords site, (and that’s just guesswork.)

But to kill off this particular author might be a wise idea. He’s not generating any heat, any traction, and the longer he sits there the colder those books get. I don’t have any real plans to write anything more for him. 

It’s kind of a vicious circle. If I could keep feeding him material, and keep blogging along on some subject of interest, he might still make a go of it. It’s a bit of work for a guy who’s not selling any books…there is that.

Those books need new marketing images anyway. I’ve known that for quite some time.

If I took those books over, one crime novella and one thriller novel, it’s not that far out of my known genres. 

I already have a couple of mystery novels. Those readers are somewhat likely to cross over into another crime story; or a thriller, because the mysteries are also historical. They’re already halfway there. I’ve been thinking about it for months, and Christmas is coming…thought processes just sort of revolve around in my head. But I need a sequential sort of list before I really do anything about it.

My books have at least some sales, and carry some minor weight in the ‘product presentation algorithms’ that govern what a given customer might be presented with in the automated bookshelves we’re all familiar with on Amazon, iTunes, etc. The books at least have some readers, and those readers are more likely to be presented with one of my books because they have already bought or downloaded a free one.

So this is how my mind works.

I would add two more really nice products to my own list. The kid could still live—an option is to sign him up for an affiliate marketing program such as the one at Smashwords. All he has to do—all I have to do, is when I read a book, do a quick 350-word book review on his blog, attach his affiliate code onto the end of the book’s buy link code, and voila! The kid has reviewed a book, made his recommendation, and who knows, he might even make more sales with other people’s books than he has made on his own. (I have virtually no thoughts on affiliate marketing or how to go about it.)

The process of re-branding might be more complex than it sounds. All I have to do is put my name on it, right? But the metadata is important. Three years ago, when I published my first two titles, I practically ignored it, but it’s important because it’s attached to the ISBN number. I don’t really know how it works, behind the scenes electronically*, but essentially you have to change that data. For obvious reasons, this must match all the way around. The name on the cover, inside the book, the bio, the name listed on various platforms, and the ISBN number listed for example at Collections Canada ISBN service, Bowker’s, or places that assign free ISBNs such as Smashwords. I don’t know what sort of problems that might engender.

The books are in Smashword’s Premium Catalogue, and I would hate to mess that up over the long haul…sometimes you just don’t know what to do and the obvious answer is to procrastinate.

***

What I am finding, certainly for this vintage-racing/plot to kill the Pope in 1938 sort of story, is that night-time racing shots, with a handsome driver’s face in the right sort of car and environment are hard to find. So now we look at alternatives. What about a girl with a gun? What about a couple of German WW II snipers on the roof of the Vatican? Some images are easier to find than others, and many of the readers are sophisticated enough in terms of historical knowledge that they can tell the difference between a Schmeisser and a Thompson. They know what a Wehrmacht uniform looks like, and they know what a U.S. Ranger from 1968 ought to look like.

This leads me to my next question, for surely these are all questions, no matter how inelegantly phrased.

Can I possibly re-title the book? Yeah—obviously, but if so, then what? I mean, what? Without any ideas, there is essentially no image to look for because I can’t quite visualize it in my head.

I need key words to search with and a stock photo provider with an appropriate image. I’ve already looked at over three thousand and it doesn’t look easy so far. I’ve saved exactly two links in a .doc file I use for the purpose.

(You’ve got to have a system, ladies and gentlemen.)

I could visualize that racing driver and his mechanic racing down some twisted cobbled road at eighty miles an hour in the dead of night just fine. I have not found any really good images so far.

Re-branding a couple of titles isn’t going to be the work of a moment, but in terms of one of my other pen-name's books, well…there might be a couple more out by Christmas.

There is definitely some thought involved, and the whole thing would be a process. What I am looking for is a logical sequence of events, and for right now, the marketing image/title is a stumbling block. It is a major hurdle, ah, ‘when ya got no money.’

I could still go with the ‘girl with a gun on the cover.’ There is a girl or two in the book. They have guns too, (and they know how to use them) but the racing driver is the real character study in that he is politically and somewhat morally oblivious—in Europe, in 1938. (There has just been the Anschluss between Austria and Germany, and everybody but our racing driver knows Czecholslovakia is next.) I wrote the book about him more than anything. Everything else is just window dressing to make it fun for the readers. I’ll be honest with you, it’s not that profound.

Basically, all he wants to do is race and has given up everything else to do it, including the heroine.

So why not a guy with a gun? If the book is pitched at males, an action shot, a guy with a gun and a hot babe might be just the thing. A simple portrait of a male figure with a gun…it had better be pretty iconic, and who knows, maybe there is an image out there that would work.

The real problem is that the focus of the book is on a racing driver.

This doesn’t necessarily rule out women readers, although a really good picture of an intelligent looking woman, one with real class might intrigue them. The picture had better be good and the blurb even better, (something I’m not particularly known for.)

I might play down some aspects of the book in the blurb. The product description is not carved in stone. I would simply play up the girl rather than the racing driver with a whole new blurb. You can only go so far with that without being ‘overly misleading’ about the book.

Obviously this isn’t going to happen all at once, and luckily, it’s only two titles. The novella also might require quite the unique little image.

It’s an interesting challenge if you don’t know what you’re doing!

*That pesky asterisk. Smashwords knows instantly if you’ve pooched your ISBN number, which implies some connectivity with ISBN providers of an official nature such as Collections Canada.