Remo noticed the snow melt in his hand and he smiled. When you lost concentration, you lost it all. If he let the whole thing go, he would next feel chill in his body and then, out here in the freezing Minnesota snow, he would surrender his body to the elements and die. Cold was not a fixed point on a thermometer but the relationship between the body and its environment.

An old children's trick was putting one hand under hot running water and the other hand under cold water, and then plunging both hands into a bowl of lukewarm water. To the hand which had been hot, the lukewarm water felt cold. To the hand that had been cold, the lukewarm water felt hot. So too with temperature's effects on the body. Up to a certain point, it was not the temperature of the body, but the difference between the outside temperature and the body's temperature. And if the body temperature could be lowered, then a man could stand subfreezing weather in a light white sweater and white gym pants and white leather sneakers, and a man could hold a snow-flake in his hand and watch it not melt.

Remo felt the quiet of the snow and saw gusts of sparks come out of the chimney of the yellow-lit cabin far off.

Snow was very light water, water with more oxygen in it, and if you let your body into it, moving level with the ground and it was all around you and you were part of its whiteness, not an intrusion on top of it, but every portion of your body moving through it, then it became light water and you moved quickly, not breathing, but with fingers darting forward and flattened palms pushing back and the body going level and quickly toward where the cabin had last been seen above the snow.

Remo stopped and his knees automatically lowered, packing the snow beneath them. He lifted his head above the opaque whiteness and smelled the fresh burning hickory and the heavy, fatty odor of meat cooking.