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He was not cold everywhere, not even everywhere where he was touching the ice. He was cold only in the places on which his mind was focused: his right cheek, his left palm, and a defined area two inches square halfway between his navel and sternum. He did not try to focus his mind away from these areas because he knew to do so would spread the pain to his whole body.
The ice was all around him for many miles, perhaps as much as a hundred miles in every direction. He knew or remembered that there was no break of water in the ice floe, or had not been when he fell here. But the ice was thin. If he attempted to stand he might shatter the entire ice floe and the image of the night sky it contained. So he did not move, although the coldness in his cheek, his palm and in that square of flesh on his bare belly was unbearable agony.
Shadows flitted in the black below the ice. Seals, maybe. Or angels having a swim before whisking his soul away to a warmer place.
When the agony was suddenly too great, without any thought or plan, he pushed with his left palm and this turned him onto his back. The pain eased. Now the sky filled his whole vision: black, but bright with stars. He felt he had escaped the ice, that he was floating among the constellations. But his small movement had been enough to set the ice cracking and the cracks lashed him back to the reality of where he was. A colder wind blew. Frost arose on the ice, whiting out the stars' reflection. His hair froze. His lips hardened. But after a long shiver deep in his core he was somehow warm, comfortable, and he knew this was the moment to try to stand.
The frost allowed him the grip his bare feet needed. But he was barely upright, his fingers crushing frost as he gently pushed himself into the position he felt he must achieve, when the ice floe shattered. Not his own doing, however. Whales were breaking to the surface. Different kinds of whales. A meeting of a multitude of whales, all punching through the ice at once, for maybe a hundred miles in every direction from this central point. They were showing off before each other, their tails fanning the shattering freeze to achieve inches of greater height in their brief absence from the sea. A great chiming song came from them, turning to a hollow whine as they rose together, fading then to a falling note which retained the power to jangle the shards of flying ice filled with starlight, before every great body began to fall back into the churned up slush of ice and water.
This was the great event of his life, a life only minutes old because he had no knowledge of anything previous to his sojourn on the ice floe, and as he tumbled in the chaos of cutting ice and flopping cetaceans, so aware of their eyes, their rubbery sheen, to freeze and drown in the silence of the cold black sea, his concentration remained on the moment the whales broke to the surface, its sound, triumph, violence, grace, and it delighted him.
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