On the Edge – Continued!

“Morning comes early in northern Greenland. The bright sun made the igloo walls glow with inner light. The howling wind had abated. I had survived the arctic storm.”

“I pressed on the snow door plug, but it failed to move. I was frozen in. The storm had formed a layer of ice on the igloo protecting me but imprisoning me as well. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. You simply chopped a new hole in the ice wall and crawled out. I reached for my smatchet, knowing the heavy blade would make fast work of this problem. It wasn’t in my sheath. It wasn’t in my sleep bag. It wasn’t loose on the floor. “

“I saw it in my mind’s eye. I had placed it under supplies on the sled last night so I wouldn’t lose it in the darkness. I had intended to slip it back in my sheath before I pulled the snow cork in behind myself. It was still outside.”

“I was trapped. I had no way out.”

Sven paused to let the enormity and irony roll over us. He was trapped in the classic locked room with no way out, but clearly he had escaped.

After a few moments, I was about to break the silence when Rodger spoke up.

“Are you telling us you’re dead? You look very much alive to me.”

“I thought you would immediately see how I escaped my predicament. I needed a knife and didn’t have a knife, so I improvised.”

It must have been clear from our faces we had no idea what he did.

“The solution,” Sven said “was alimentary. I dropped my trousers, had a bowel movement and shaped the still warm excrement into a stout, knife-shaped form. It soon froze and hardened and I chopped a hole big enough to wiggle through. I found my knife where I put it, recovered my gear and freed the dogs from their ice covered dens.”

“The rest of the trip was uneventful.”

Sven went back to his paper and the knot drifted apart. I waited until everyone had left before I leaned over and partially pulled his newspaper down.

“So, how does a turd knife lay claim to the expression of ‘two is one and one is none?”

“It doesn’t. But when I returned to camp, I requisitioned a second knife. The quartermaster wanted to know what happened to the first one and I explained that two is one …”

“I supposed,” I interrupted him, “he gave you one.”

“He was a very intelligent man and immediately saw the sound logic in it.”

Having satisfied my question, Sven sat back to finish his paper, but not before snagging my untouched spare brandy.

I was about to comment on the theft when from behind the newspaper came, “After all, two is one…”