We took to the construct - raw, playful, fanciful.

Increasingly vanquished, the desire to break the wooden effigy took hold of his imagination. There, before him it stood. Staring him down, its drawn features carved out of solid rock. Arms hewn from ancient oaks and its torso, a thicket of nasty brambles replenished seasonally, for near on a millennia, by the inhabitants who adored, cared for and protected the silent menace.

Were it not for these people, their icon of resilience would have perished in the storm of history, destroyed by the hordes of barbarians that have lain to waste the lands, waters and air for the generations to come, unaware of the species they would undoubtedly awaken to endure, fine or perhaps placate.

And there it stands, an impossible construction of weed, wood and stone, a farce to the modern eye as if fashioned by children with the chafed hands of a stone mason with hearts cast from iron, its centre still aflame with the fury of its makers. But they are not children, and nor are their off-spring - the child had all but perished in the days of rape, blood and mayhem. Their idol, a sign-post, an earth-bound satellite created by primitive cartographers that the people would know who they are, and to whom they would ultimately succumb to.

It went on like this for eons - a committed cycle of myth and sorcery. Stone had become the face of these people for whom the still, charcoal black waters of the Lake had become their god - it took and spared those that would tend their defiant, stoic, single-eyed savior - its will, its weathered will and reckless construct that of its people, its servants - survivors of all that had claimed people not unlike themselves - across the harsh, frozen plains of this hardy, isolated country where thorn-like grasses share a rare hint of green, amidst the bloody leaves of the rampaging brambles the people endure in their passage to the Lake.

The Lake is the silent doorway to the hell their new born are surrendered to. Those that survive its un-holly sub-zeros will walk this land. They will not forget their icy rite of passage. Year after year they return to the Lake to test the will of their god. When they willingly enter its darkness and return safely to its shores, only then will their endurance be rewarded with a life reverent of its origins and masterful in survival - its men and women sharing equal burden the fate their forefathers and mothers had carved out of the viscous dark of histories past.

10.2000