Free A Christmas Blizzard by Garrison Keillor

Lindbergh, flying the Atlantic solo in his little plane, was terrified of women. Genghis Khan rode horseback because he had a well-documented ant phobia. So he, James Sparrow, had benefited by this silly obsession that he had struggled manfully to overcome and consulted specialists about—psychiatrists, hypnotists, a nose-throat-and-tongue man at the Mayo, a yogi, hydraulic engineers, and so forth—but in fact his “pump problem” was a sort of magic that kept worse phobias at bay. He had never been a hypochondriac, never worried about business failure, never agonized over the lack of purpose in his life. Be thankful for your afflictions. Some of them may be assets in disguise. Soon his nose was running and he felt an ache in his chest from the cold air. Breathe through your nose, not your mouth , said Mother. So lovely was the night, he kept right on walking out past Floyd’s fish house toward the other shore. Quite a day , he thought. You start out on the 55th floor of the Wabash Tower thinking you’re going to take a trip to Hawaii and you wind up in an old wooden shack on a frozen lake in North Dakota. The snow descended in a steady silent sound, a sort of continual hush. He walked almost to the bushy shore and then sensed something moving in the underbrush and a chill panic touched his heart. He turned around and walked, walked, walked—resisting the urge to run—to the shack with the Christmas star and opened the door and went in. A small dim room, plywood floor, two holes to fish through. A stove, a chair, a table, a broad shelf on one side to lie down on and beneath it, a cupboard. There was a hook on the door and he hooked it shut. He balled up some newspaper from a stack and stuffed it in the stove and lit it and got some kindling going and put in a couple birch logs and the place warmed right up. He got a little tin pot out of the cupboard and filled it with snow to melt to make tea in the morning. The fish house was quite cozy. He dug into the cupboard and found a half-full quart bottle of Paul Bunyan bourbon and a pint of peppermint schnapps, a few old Playboys (“lissome lonesome Kelly Jo, 23, lounges by the pool, sipping a cool limeade. ‘Though it was my first time, I was quite relaxed about posing nude, having always felt that the body is a thing of beauty’ ”), a copy of a John Sandford novel, Lamprey (“the tall angry man hurtled past the line of patrons at the coffeeshop including a child of three or four years old like a cougar going for a snow rabbit and snarled, ‘Gimme a java, toots,’ at the startled barista, an attractive woman of perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five, and when an older woman behind him said, ‘Uh, there is a line here, sir,’ he turned and shrieked, ‘You dumbheads can eat weasel poop for all I care,’ and pulled out what appeared to be a .45 caliber pistol and fired two shots bam bam through the woman’s left breast which flopped bleeding from her blouse like a small wounded animal such as a weasel or pocket gopher”), which he tossed in the fire, which flared up, and he dug out an old sleeping bag and laid it across the cupboard to sleep on and was about to crawl in when he heard snuffling outdoors and opened the door and walked out and looked around and turned to go back in the shack and there, sitting motionless beside the shack was a gray wolf in the light of the blue moon. His eyes were greenish-yellow and unblinking. His ears perked, his forelegs braced, his fur rippled. His tail lay curled and quite still. James stopped. A shock to see but deep in his brain his old Scoutmaster Elmer told him that, faced with a hostile dog (or, in this case, wolf) you must face him squarely and not attempt to run. No panic, no sudden moves. Square your shoulders and plant your feet and calmly look over the wolf’s head as if observing something beyond. The animal had been waiting for James to come. That was his take on the situation. This was not happenstance. This was a