Arctic Mermaids

It’s been fifty-three years now since I discovered her. The ice on the lake was thick that winter. I always liked to go out there before the younger boys would take over and play hockey. I had been doing research across the lake – or as much research as someone could do at fifteen in a small town - collecting plant samples or some nonsense. This particular day, though, my foot fell straight through a fisherman’s ice hole. I remember rushing to ring my pant leg out and feeling panicked that I would lose my foot to frostbite when I looked over at the hole and saw the most beautiful creature staring at me. Her eyes were pale blue and her opalescent skin was a milky aqua, the same color of the ice she hid against. We stared at one and other for what felt like centuries before she ducked back under the ice.

It was that moment that sparked the next lifetime of research for me. It took fourteen years to spot her again. I had all of my equipment; I’d gone through submersibles and ice cutting and underwater cameras. The next time I found her though, I was in my cold water scuba gear. It was January I believe. The sun shone through the patches of snow and ice in these remarkable, cascading rays, it was heavenly. She was childlike, not much bigger than my youngest daughter at the time, and there were others. A small school of them swimming, playing, and dancing with grace and ease. Their fins aren’t like all of the depictions you see in folklore. Their arms and tail fins looked much closer to that of a sea lion’s fins if they were slightly stunted and translucent. She reached out to me, as if she remembered, but rushed off when a handful of these battle weary males squabbled over another female.

Three years after that, of practically living in my lake in the winter, I discovered their eggs. I’ve come to determine it’s in the early spring, when the weather grows warm and the ice melts that they lay them. They bury themselves and their eggs real deep under the soil in the deepest parts of the lake to hibernate through summer. Two years in a row I dug handfuls of their eggs up, and once I even pulled out a creature, but they don’t last. The warm waters make them sickly, so I stopped digging them up. When the weather gets frigid, the snow starts up, and all the swimmers and boats have long since disappeared, that’s when they hatch, under the safety of the these thin new layers of fresh ice. They dig themselves up out of their slumber and emerge into the frigid lakes that no one ever bothers to look through. And they’re gone again with the spring flowers, no one is ever the wiser.