Frost Burn by Craig Johnson:

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I frostbit my ear yesterday.

There was a combination of mechanical failures involving my old 8N tractor, and I found myself working out there where the little voices start talking to you, with nothing but a baseball cap covering my head. The NOAA radio said that a Canadian Clipper was going to be coming through with a hundred percent chance of snow and seventy-mile-an-hour gusts. Well, as I was hunched over the tractor-it did. I was working on the 6-volt generator side, the generator being the one my father told me years ago that I should replace with an alternator-this being the same man who, when he climbed into my manual transmission truck with the mechanical lock-in lock-out hubs, said, ‘Grow up,' and I got the old tractor started and pulled undercover before we got completely layered with snow and blown to Nebraska. I did that but not before I couldn't feel part of my head.

By the time I got back in the house, my wife leaned to one side and looked at me. "Your ear looks really white." This from the woman who, no matter the physical ailment, from hangnail to headache, always gives the advice that you should go sit on the toilet and it will feel better.

I went over to the fire to warm up. "Yeah, I think it got a little wind-burned."

After a few moments, it gradually started feeling like someone was poaching my ear while still attached to the side of my head. I stepped away from the fire-I figured maybe it was just that I was too close to the wood-burning stove, but the sensation did nothing but increase.

She watched me not touching it. "Do you think it's frostbitten?"

"No, it's just windburn."

"It looks funny."

"Well, now it matches the rest of me."

As I lay there on my left side last night, I thought about the sheriff and the physical trials I've put him through. Even through my tortured ear I could hear the dialogue between Lucian and Walt from The Cold Dish...

"I betcha they take that ear."

"Look old man, just because they cut parts off of you..."

"That's what they do best, take parts off."

I had to smile as I looked at my deformed ear that appeared to be a quarter-inch thick and the color of a New Mexican pepper and thought about the emails I get from readers asking me to take it easy on the sheriff. I love those emails; they tell me that Walt has worked his way into people's hearts, and that's about as high praise as any author could hope for. Generally, I don't do things to him that I haven't suffered myself, feeling that gratuitous literary violence perpetrated on my narrator should approximate the emotional and physical damage that I've done to myself so that I can convey it in a realistic and honest manner, but there is such a thing as taking things too far.

With the growing success of the books, this year's tour is pretty widespread, and I'm looking forward to seeing a lot more of all of you this summer.

I only ask one thing. Don't make fun of my ear.

Best,

Craig

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Craig Johnson

Kindness Goes Unpunished

Sherriff Walt Longmire

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Penguin Books

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