Was the bear gone yet? He didn’t hear any footsteps. Usually approaching bears were accompanied by footsteps.
So very sleepy.
If he did get eaten by a bear, perhaps it would be better to be asleep when it happened.
So tired. So cold.
He’d just sleep for a while. Only a little bit. A few minutes, if that. He deserved to get some rest. It had been a challenging week. An Eskimo would probably kill the bear anyway. He was in no danger.
Precious sleep. Sweet sleep. The world’s greatest gift.
Nathan let himself drift away…
Yukon Filly was not a great explorer. He knew this because of his astute sense of self-awareness, and also because everybody kept telling him. He didn’t care. Though he had failed to discover the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh, and the skeleton of Jack the Ripper, and the Lost River of the Amazon (he did find the river, but it turned out to be fairly well known in that area, with a thriving fishing community) he refused to give up his lifelong quest to find something great. Proof of ghosts, proof of aliens, the Fountain of Youth…it didn’t matter which of them he found.
Securing investors for his journeys was becoming more difficult as the failures continued to pile up. He was a very charismatic man and not above making certain sacrifices (such as changing his name) in order to continue his explorations. Nor was he above using a small amount of deception. For example, though he was up in the Frozen North seeking the Abominable Snowman, his investors and the other members of his party thought they were looking for gold.
“There’s no gold around here!” said Tyrone, his second-in-command, gesturing to all of the snow and ice.
“Watch your tongue!” Yukon warned. “I won’t have your unpleasant attitude spoiling this expedition for the rest of us!”
“But you don’t find gold in glaciers! We’ve been telling you that for the past six days!”
“Is that so? Tell me, Tyrone, have you ever found gold in a glacier?”
“No!”
“Then you’ve proven my point.”
“No, you’ve proven my point.”
“I’m sorry, but I have better things to do than engage in childish bickering over the ownership of points. We will find gold, lots of it, more gold than we can fit on the sleds! So much gold that we will be forever resentful about the enormous amount that we had to leave behind. You’ll wake up in the middle of the night wallowing in self pity about how you could have billions of coins instead of merely millions because we abandoned so much of the wealth.”
“You’re a drunkard.”
“I plan to melt down most of my gold into a statue, but it will be a statue of an insignificant historical figure. That way, people will say ‘My word, if he can afford to make a solid-gold statue depicting somebody who barely deserves a stone one, he must have more riches than an Egyptian Pharoah!’”
“Not that you’d know, because you’ve never found—”
“Enough. You look over there, and I’ll look over here. Everybody split up and start looking.”
The other five members of the expedition walked around on the ice, searching.
Where was the Abominable Snowman? Yukon hadn’t expected to just walk out onto a patch of ice and find it waiting there, but they’d been out here almost a week and they hadn’t even found the gnawed bones of its prey.
“Sir! We’ve found something odd!”
Yukon hurried over to where his fifth-in-command man knelt, digging through the snow. “When I walked over here, I had this strange feeling like I was stepping on somebody’s nose. And look!”
He brushed away some more snow, exposing the face of a young boy, enclosed in a block of ice. All of the men gasped.
“We’ve done it, gentlemen!” Yukon declared. “We’ve found the Abominable Snowman!”
“He’s not a yeti,” said Tyrone. “He’s a little boy.”
“He’s a prepubescent shaved yeti,” Yukon corrected. “What a find! We’ll be rich! We’ll be famous!”
“Don’t you mean we’ll be rich and famous?” Tyrone asked.
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“You said you’ll be rich and famous.”
“No, I didn’t. I clearly remember the three instances in my life where I tried to steal credit or money, and this was not one of them. The fame and wealth will be equally divided amongst us.”
“Oh. Sorry, I misheard. We assumed that you’d noticed the loophole in the contract that allows you to claim full ownership of all non-gold discoveries.”
“Well, I knew about that, of course, but had no plans to enforce it. We’re all in this together.”
The men continued to brush away the snow until Nathan’s body had been fully exposed. He was completely enclosed in a block of ice.
“Incredible,” said one of the men. “Do you think we’ve found a specimen of prehistoric man?”
Yukon shook his head. “His contemporary clothing would indicate otherwise.”
“That’s not contemporary,” said Tyrone, running his index finger along the ice. “A shirt like that hasn’t been fashionable in nearly…it stuns me to even say it…eleven years.”
“Eleven years? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Though this boy may seem to be seven or eight years old, he is actually eighteen or nineteen.”
“Incredible!”
“Do you think he has any gold?” asked one of the other men.
It had indeed been eleven years since Nathan buried himself in the snow to evade the bear, which, ironically, had gorged itself on so many seals earlier in the day that the mere thought of eating Nathan made it queasy. He lay there, skin blue and eyes frozen shut, in a decade-long dreamless sleep.
After a close vote, they’d decided not to use flamethrowers to melt the ice, and instead, after much effort, carved out a rectangular block of ice and dragged it back to town.
Reporters from all over the world showed up. Hundreds of pictures were taken. For nearly three minutes, the news was dominated by the story of The Astounding Frozen Boy.
“Every scientist in the world wants to study him!” Yukon said to the group of men, who were each in the same number of pictures and received equal airtime on the television stations.
“Even botanists?” asked Tyrone.
“Especially botanists! Well, not especially botanists, but they feel there may be some interesting plant life frozen in there with him, perhaps between his toes, and they’d love the opportunity to study it.”
“Are we going to let them? I think if we sliced carefully, we could get at least eight hundred strips out of him, and if we auctioned each strip to the highest bidder, we’d make a fortune!”
Yukon shook his head. “Slicing a body like that is not as easy as you would think. But I’m pleased to inform all of you that we have a private individual who wishes to purchase The Astounding Frozen Boy, and he is offering an amount so large that you will call me a liar when I reveal it.”
They did call him a liar, several times, but after Yukon produced the paperwork they apologized and rubbed their hands together with glee. The purchaser was scheduled to pick up Nathan’s body first thing in the morning. This led to a sudden lack of trust between the men, and after a long dark night of paranoia and double-crosses they all lay dead except for Yukon.
The block of ice with Nathan in it was sold to an heiress named Monika Truant, who loved the idea of the scientific community clamoring for an artifact that she planned only to display to servants who used her walk-in freezer.
Nathan stayed in the freezer for about two months, completely unaware of his fate or even the smiley face that a prankster carved into the ice. Then, one night, Monika woke a servant up out of a sound sleep in order to fetch her a chocolate bar, slightly chilled. The bleary-eyed servant, Candice, left the chocolate in the freezer for a moment, and forgot to close the door after she retrieved it and delivered it to Monika, who instructed her to go outside, find a vagrant, and slowly eat it in front of him.