Manditory Writing (much thanks to my mother)

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It's amazing how motivating threats can be.
This is what my mother told me to write about, so I'm just obeying her. I suppose there'll be more at some point.
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The sun is coming up somewhere in the world, but here it is ten o’clock in the morning and looks like midnight. Or nearly. In the past five minutes I have noticed the slightest lightening of sky over the mountaintops to the east. They are suddenly blue-black, and the stars are fading into the backdrop of sky. I have been snowshoeing for two and a half hours already, through this dark mountain pass, and it is astonishingly peaceful to be so alone. I picture a camera zooming out from me, taking in the hundreds of miles of wilderness all around.
Gilles is somewhere not too far behind me, having stayed behind to boil water for the thermoses. He walks faster, and should be catching up quickly.
I am the happiest person in the world.
My knees ache, my ankle is sprained, and I hauled myself out of my snow-trench at five in the morning to spend a day from sunrise to sunset pulling a sled.
But it is beautiful here, and it is worth every second of pain and cold and discomfort.
A snowshoe hare races across the snow ahead of me, its too-large feet so much better than what I’ve got strapped to my moccasins that it just seems to float on the surface. It doesn’t so much as glance at me, and I don’t blame it – the rate I’m moving at the moment doesn’t make me much of a threat to it.
Morning, when it comes, is sudden. That pool of light slinks across the sky, and suddenly the mountains are pink and orange, and the ptarmigan in the shrubs around me are beginning to wake up, rustling their feathers and cackling loudly into the morning.
The sun never shines properly in the Ogilvie mountains in January. Over the next month, it will slowly creep higher in the sky, till we can see it and feel it on our faces. It will feel like our skin is drinking in light, like the return of a long-gone loved one. We will close our eyes and smile and tip our faces upwards to be kissed. For now, though, all we get is a gray sort of half-light, and the sight of sunlight on mountaintops far away.
Gilles is coming up behind me now. When he reaches my spot atop the ridge we stop for lunch, taking out the trail mix and dutifully passing the water bottle back and forth. Neither of us is really thirsty, but we know we should drink more. Snow melt is curiously metallic. It tastes like campfire smoke and the inside of the bottle. Chocolate and dried fruit and nuts taste like heaven.
“Did you see the sunrise?” I ask, although he must have.
He nods. “The camera froze after a few pictures, though.”
Our camera does not like the cold, and makes its objections plain by dying as soon as we expose it to the air. Only by holding it against the warmth of our stomachs and cradling the batteries in our hands is it possible to coax it back to life.
A few minutes of sitting is enough to numb our fingers and chill our faces, so we stand up, repack our sleds, and start on.
Gilles is soon out of sight along the trail, and the going is a little easier, following in his tracks.
We are several days from the Depmster Highway, but at this time of year there is nearly no traffic. One vehicle every few hours if you’re lucky, and if you’re not, a long stretch of snow-blown empty road as far as the eye can see.
Apart from the ptarmigan and snowshoe hares, we are very alone.