My girlfriend and I live in a house under a curse. Well, sort of a house; and sort of a curse. The spell turned our home small and charming and mobile: a horse-drawn gypsy cart, with Victorian gingerbread trim, like Mister Toad's (though not canary-colored; international orange). That part's fine with us; but the spell also compels our horse to pull it on & on, randomly... sort of randomly. Any way but south! So we wander the American West; but over months and years, the cart drifts relentlessly north. And that can't end well. The Rockies, the northern Plains states, the Canadian prairies, the great north woods...

A weird whitish sea ahead. The horse steps out onto it. Solid! Ice? Yet it's not cold. Are these floating slabs of pumice? We start across, passing hoodoos or tufa towers, like crumbling termite-skyscrapers.

I assume we've left the human lands and now we'll be alone. In a way I'm relieved, for it means whoever cursed us won't hear any news, and may assume we're dead--as they wanted! Now that we're out from under their eyes, we can at last experiment with breaking the spell. My research hints that a unicorn can do it.

At last, the far shore. An arctic wood--lean spikes of spruce. See a swift equine shape flash by. Unicorn? But when I get a better look through the trees, it's a woman on a galloping horse. Fast, a fine horse, but no horn.

Two girls jog by in blue and plum spandex tops & tights. Fast too. Looking fit. But not unicorns.

North. The woods open up. A sea, but pale blue this time. Surely the Arctic. Our horse skirts it, ambles along the shore, angling always north. Now what? I do realize I feel better alone with my girlfriend. Even that tufa sea wasn't bad. Sterile, but quiet, spacious & light. My only problem with the North is, well, freezing to death.

We cross a train track; surely the northernmost in Canada. And still our horse plods on... into the tundra.

Elbow room is nice. But winter is coming. If we want to live, we really need an arctic unicorn. Soon.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Spell makes us drift north: my habitual solitude. After work, I head north from a big busy library toward my lonely apartment.
• Wiggly path in the arctic: Today my sister said "As a kid, I froze when I hit this question on an IQ test: 'Go north one day. Turn left, go one day. Turn left, then right, then go two days. Which way are you facing?' They want you to just say west. But... if you FLY north, or even drive if you're in the northern US or Canada, a full day could put you in the Arctic; turn left and go three days, and you'll face southwest! Even at low latitudes, a car or plane going north a day, turning left and going three days in a straight line--a great circle, on a globe--will veer south of west--sometimes a lot!"
  I tried it on a globe, and she was right. I've experienced her paralysis, though--what do you say when a question has bad assumptions?
• Tufa and pumice sea: unsure. But those are volcanic rocks. Stuff erupting from deep...
• Spandex joggers: two girls I saw today in the gym. I have an undiagnosed chronic illness, so for me they meant health... or successful self-care.
• Arctic unicorn: unicorns in ancient times meant magic, wildness, healing and sex. I'm all for those! But it's an Old World myth. Why the Canadian Arctic?

FOUR DAYS LATER

At the library where I work, a new book catches my eye: Nancy Luenn's "Arctic Unicorn". An ecological fantasy--what if narwhals and unicorns are two life-stages of a single endangered species, like caterpillar and butterfly? Interesting. I take it home to read that night.

I'm bothered by one point. Kala, a girl on Baffin Island, must choose between shamanic magic and love--you can't possibly have both! The author's unicorn-lore is tinged by Catholic revisionism--the Church made unicorns a symbol of virginity. But Inuit shamans, unlike Catholic priests, need not be celibate; and pre-Christian unicorns meant magic and wildness and healing and love and sex.

If I'd read the book about unicorns in the Canadian arctic before my dream about unicorns in the Canadian arctic, no one would deny the dream critiques the book--specifically, Luenn's implication that magic/shamanism requires sacrificing love. Indeed my dream reverses that--saying only magic can CURE my illness and isolation.

But my dreams critiqued Luenn's book before I saw it. Making a second point. Magic is real. Less blatant than a spiral horn, but real. As Jung observed a century ago.

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