LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles 
 over our house and whistling a wolf song under the 
 eaves.
 I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl
 the Browning poem, Childe Roland to the Dark 
 Tower Came.
 And her eyes had the haze of autumn hills and it was
 beautiful to her and she could not understand.
 A man is crossing a big prairie, says the poem, and
 nothing happens--and he goes on and on--and it's
 all lonesome and empty and nobody home.
 And he goes on and on--and nothing happens--and he
 comes on a horse's skull, dry bones of a dead horse--
 and you know more than ever it's all lonesome and
 empty and nobody home.
 And the man raises a horn to his lips and blows--he
 fixes a proud neck and forehead toward the empty
 sky and the empty land--and blows one last wonder-
 cry.
 And as the shuttling automatic memory of man clicks
 off its results willy-nilly and inevitable as the snick
 of a mouse-trap or the trajectory of a 42-centimetre
 projectile,
 I flash to the form of a man to his hips in snow drifts
 of Manitoba and Minnesota--in the sled derby run
 from Winnipeg to Minneapolis.
 He is beaten in the race the first day out of Winnipeg--
 the lead dog is eaten by four team mates--and the
 man goes on and on--running while the other racers
 ride, running while the other racers sleep--
 Lost in a blizzard twenty-four hours, repeating a circle
 of travel hour after hour--fighting the dogs who
 dig holes in the snow and whimper for sleep--
 pushing on--running and walking five hundred 
 miles to the end of the race--almost a winner--one
 toe frozen, feet blistered and frost-bitten.

 And I know why a thousand young men of the North-
 west meet him in the finishing miles and yell cheers
 --I know why judges of the race call him a winner
 and give him a special prize even though he is a 
 loser.
 I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding 
 heart amid the blizzards of five hundred miles that
 one last wonder-cry of Childe Roland--and I told 
 the six year old girl about it.
 And while the January wind was ripping at the shingles
 and whistling a wolf song under the eaves, her eyes
 had the haze of autumn hills and it was beautiful
 to her and she could not understand.