Dogsong Page 4

  “Ha!” He snorted. “We are tough now, are we? When we smell the hot guts we are all tough.”

  The deer was heavy and he had to work hard to get her carcass loaded on the sled. When he had her on and tied in he put the liver and heart back in the open cavity, washed his hands in the snow and put mittens back on. As long as he’d been working on the deer her body heat had kept him warm, but now he realized that it was getting very cold and his hands had lost function in moments. They hurt as the mitts warmed them and he smiled with the cold-pain. He thought of cold not as an enemy but as many different kinds of friend, or a complicated ally.

  Cold brought the first ice to the sea, the first strong ice so they could get out and hunt seals. Cold brought the fattening up of game so it was good to eat. It brought snow and made everything clean, it made storing meat and fish easy.

  Cold could kill as well. But if treated fairly, if treated as a friend and if caution was taken, cold was good.

  Russel’s fingers took pain for a time from his friend the cold and he smiled with it, smiled with the deer on the sled and the cold and the dogs: the dogs out in front, coming around in a large curve, heading back for the village with the deer and the ptarmigan, the dogs moving in the dark silently with the hot lungs in their bellies and the joy on them from the kill, the dogs with their shoulders curving over and down with the weight of the deer and Russel pulling back against them as they fought up the hill, fought up with lunges and heaves to pull the sled over, over at last onto the crown of the ridge.

  In the distance he could see the lights of the village from the ridge height. It was about ten miles away, but the night was clear and cold now, and almost still. The wind was dying off with the cold and darkness.

  Knowing they would spend another night in their kennel the dogs picked up the speed, even with the weight of the deer, until they were moving in a steady easy lope that would cover the distance to the village in thirty minutes.

  Russel was full of the night and the dogs as they ran and he felt himself go out to the dogs, out ahead. At first he didn’t understand it, couldn’t define it enough to give it form. But in moments the feeling grew and in his mind he gave it words, moving words, dog words.

  Out before me they go

  taking me home.

  Out before me they go

  I am the dogs.

  He realized that it was part of a song, moving through the dark toward the village lights.

  He wondered if it was part of his song and decided that it might be. He would make it grow.

  Tonight in the village he would let it be known that he was a new person, not the old Russel, and he would tell the story to Oogruk and anybody who would listen, the story of how he took the deer with the arrow that flew across the dark.

  And the telling would become part of the song.

  4

  Those white men came a long time ago. The white men who talked with rocks in their mouths. They came and took and took it all. They used our men as beasts and they took our women for their own and left us with no meat. Left us starving. They took all the fur and then they left. That is what I was told when I was young and in those villages they still don’t like the white men who talk with rocks in their mouth.

  —Eskimo speaking about the early Russian fur hunters who came for pelts.

  Sea ice is not the same as fresh-water ice. The salt-water ice is stronger, more elastic, isn’t as slippery. Also the sea ice moves all the time, even when it is thick. Sometimes whole cakes of the ice will go out to sea, miles across, sliding out to sea and taking anybody on the cake with it.

  On the fourth day after taking the deer with the arrow Russel took the team out on the ice to find seals. Oogruk wanted oil for the lamp and he wanted some seal meat and fat to eat and he said these things in such a way that Russel felt it would be good to find a seal to take with the harpoon. It wasn’t that he actually asked, or told Russel to go for seal, but he talked about how it was to hunt in the old days.

  “Out on the edge of the ice, where it meets the sea but well back from the edge, sometimes there are seal holes. The seals come up through them and sit on the ice and if you are there when they come you can get the small harpoon point in them. That is the way it was done. Men would leave their dogs well back and pile a mound of snow in front of them and wait for the seal. Wait and wait.” Oogruk had scratched with his nails on the wall of the house. “When the seal starts to come there is a scratching sound and the hunter must be ready to put the point in then.”

  “How long must one wait?” Russel asked.

  “There is not a time. Waiting for seals is not something you measure. You get a seal, that is all. Some men go a whole winter and get none, some will get one right away. Hunting seals with the small point and the killing lance is part of the way to live.”

  So Russel went out on the ice. He took the team away in the daylight and was twenty miles out, working heavily through pressure ridges, when the storm came off the sea.

  He had seen many storms. In his years with the village, every winter brought violent storms off the sea, white walls of wind and driven snow. Twice he had been caught out on a snowmachine and had to run for the village ahead of the wall coming across the ice.

  But with a dog team you did not run ahead of the wall. As he was crossing a pressure ridge, pushing the dogs up and over the broken, jagged edges, he heaved up on the sled and looked out across the ice, out to sea, and a great boiling wall of white was rising to the sky. In seconds it was impossible to tell where the sky ended and the sea ice began and Russel knew he would have to hide before it hit. He fought the sled down the pressure ridge and brought the dogs around into a small hole under an overlapping ice ledge. There was barely room to pull his legs in.

  He tipped the sled over to make a rough door across the opening to block the wind and pulled the dogs in on top of him. Working as fast as he could he tried to pack snow into the slats of the sled bottom but before he could make any headway the wind roared into the pressure ridge.

  Russel drew the hood tight on his parka and huddled into the dogs, closing the small opening in the front of his hood by burying his face in dog fur.

  The dogs whined for a few moments, then squirmed into better positions, with their noses under their tails, and settled in to ride the storm out the same way dogs and wolves have ridden storms out forever—by sleeping and waiting.

  Russel felt a couple of small wind-leaks around the edge of his parka and he stopped them by pulling the drawstrings tighter at the parka’s bottom hem. When he had all air movement stopped he could feel the temperature coming up in his clothing and he listened to the wind as it tore at his shelter.

  In what seemed like moments but might have been an hour, the wind had piled a drift over his hold and he used a free arm to pack the snow away and clear the space around his body. The dogs remained still and quiet, their heat tight around Russel.

  After a time he dozed, and when he awakened it seemed that the wind had diminished to some degree. He used a mittened hand to clear away a hole and he saw that it was getting darker—the short day almost gone again—and that indeed the wind was dying.

  He stood, broke through the drift and shrugged the snow off. It was still cloudy but everything seemed to be lifting. The dogs were curled in small balls covered with snow, each of them completely covered except for a small blowhole where a breath had kept the snow melted. Each hole had a tiny bit of steam puffing up as the dogs exhaled and Russel was reluctant to make them stir. They looked so comfortable in their small houses.

  Still he had to get home.

  “Ha! Hay! Everybody up!” He grabbed the gangline and shook it. The leader stood up and shook his fur clean of snow and that brought the rest of them up. Slowly they stretched and three of them evacuated, showing they understood work. A good dog will always leave waste before going to work, to not carry extra on the run.

  In a minute he had them lined out, aimed for home—or where he thought the vi
llage was—and when he called them to run they went about thirty yards and stopped. It wasn’t abrupt. They were running and they slowed to a trot and then a walk and finally they just stopped.

  “What is it?” Russel snorted. “Are we still asleep in our houses? Hai! Get it up and go.”

  Again they started and went forty or so yards and stopped.

  Russel swore. “Get up! Run now or I will find a whip.”

  And after a time, hesitating still, they finally got moving. Slowly. At a trot first, then a fast walk, then back up to a trot, they headed across the ice fields.

  Russel nodded in satisfaction. He had not run dogs enough to know for certain what it meant when they didn’t want to run, but he supposed that it was because they had anticipated staying down for a longer time.

  But the man had to run the dogs. That’s what Oogruk had said to him. “You must be part of the dogs, but you must run them. If you do not tell them what to do and where to go they will go where they want. And where a dog wants to go is not always the same as where the man wants to go.”

  The wind had stopped almost as suddenly as it came, in the way of arctic storms, but before it died it seemed to have changed a bit. When it first came it was out of the west, straight in from the sea, but before it stopped Russel noted that it had moved around to the north, was coming down from the blue-black north, the cold places.

  Twice more the dogs tried to come to the right, but he made them go back and run his way. At last they lined out and went to work and Russel looked for the lights of the village. He had come out a way, but as the wind died he knew they should show, especially the light up on the hill near the fuel tanks.

  He saw nothing. The clouds were still thick and low so he couldn’t see the stars. He had nothing to help him tell his true direction.

  He ran for several hours, letting the dogs seek their own speed, and once he was sure he should have run into the village he called them down and set the snowhook.

  He was going the wrong way.

  What has happened, he thought, is that during the storm the ice has caked and turned. A whole, huge plate of ice with Russel and the dogs had rotated and changed all his directions. That’s why the dogs had hesitated, held back. They knew the way home and had wanted to head back to the house.

  He could have let them run and they would have taken him home. But now—now what would they do?

  More now, he thought. More is coming now. It was getting cold, colder than he’d ever seen it. He could feel the cold working into his clothing, see the white steam of the dogs’ breath coming back over their backs. His feet were starting to hurt. He was lost and the cold was working in and he did not know where to go.

  There were just the dogs—the dogs and the sled and him. And the ice, and the snow and the northern night. Nobody would come to look for him because they expected him to be out late—or didn’t expect anything at all. He had told nobody other than Oogruk that he was going out for seals and since he was staying at Oogruk’s house nobody else could know that he was gone. And Oogruk would not expect him back because Russel was hunting the old way.

  He was alone.

  And a part of him grew afraid. He had seen bad weather many times. But he’d always had the chance to get out of it. On a snowmachine, unless it broke down, you could ride to safety. But he would have to face the cold now.

  He debated what to do for three or four minutes. If he went down without a fire the cold would get bad later—maybe too bad. He had nothing to burn and there was no wood or fuel on the ice.

  And what had Oogruk said about that? He fought to remember the trance but nothing came. He knew about problems growing up in the cold, or during a storm, from other people. But Oogruk had said nothing about being lost on the ice.

  Lost on the ice.

  People died when they were lost on the ice. He had heard stories of people dying, of whole families lost. The ice moved out and away from land and the people had starved to death or drowned when the ice broke up beneath them, stories that came down in the long nights, sad stories.

  And now Russel. Now Russel lost on the ice with a dog team and sled.

  In the sled bag he had a small piece of meat left over from when he and Oogruk had cooked the deer. He could eat. That would help him stay warm. And then what?

  He could wait until the clouds cleared off and he could see stars and they would guide him home. But it might be many days. Sometimes the clouds stayed for weeks.

  “So.” He talked aloud to the dogs, saw a couple of tails wag in the darkness with his voice. “So there is some trouble. What should we do?”

  The leader looked around at him, although it was too dark for Russel to see his face. Still, there was something there, a desire to understand or to help. Russel smiled, a quick sign back in the fur of his dogs.

  The dogs.

  They were the answer. He could not trust himself, couldn’t see anything to help him, but he could trust the dogs. Or he thought he could. He would let them run and decide where to go.

  “Hai! Enough rest. It is time to take me home. Take me back to the village.”

  He squeaked with his lips and they got up and started off. At first they traveled in the direction Russel had forced them to go. But as they settled into their trot the leader moved them gently to the right, more and more to the right until he had them going where he had first started them off before Russel had corrected him.

  Russel nodded, let them run. They had a purpose in their backs, a pulling sense that he could believe in. He was learning about dogs, just in the few runs he’d taken. He was learning.

  And one thing he had to know was that in some ways they were smarter than men. Oogruk had said that to him.

  “Men and dogs are not alike, although some men try to make them so. White men.” Oogruk had laughed. “Because they try to make people out of dogs and in this way they make the dogs dumb. But to say that a dog is not smart because it is not as smart as a man is to say that snow is not smart. Dogs are not men. And as dogs, if they are allowed to be dogs, they are often smarter than men.”

  The problem, Russel knew, was learning when to recognize that dogs were smart. The dogs knew how to run in the dark and see with their heads, with their feet, with their hair and noses. They saw with everything.

  At last Russel knew that they were heading back for the village in the cold and dark, knew it because he felt it inside.

  But they were not home yet.

  Running in the dark, even in the tight dark of the north when there is no moon, it is possible to see out ahead a great distance. The snow-ice is white-blue in the dark and if there is no wind to blow the snow around, everything shows up against the white.

  Now, suddenly, there was a dark line ahead of the lead dog. A dark line followed by a black space on the snow, an opening of the ice. A lead of open water, so wide Russel could not see across.

  Open water. Steam rising into the cold. The ice was moving and he was moving with it.

  The team stopped. The lead dog whined and moved back and forth across the edge of the ice. The dogs hated open water, hated to get wet, but they knew that the way home was across the lead.

  For a few moments the leader continued to whine and pull back and forth. “Haw! We go left along the ice and see.”

  The leader slammed to the left gratefully, happy to be relieved of the responsibility.

  But the open lead was long. They ran mile after mile along the broken edge of the ice, in and out of the steam wraiths that came from the sea water. New ice was forming rapidly in the deep cold but it was not safe and would not be safe for several days, if then. Besides, it kept breaking away with the shifting of the cake that Russel was running on.

  Yet the fear was gone. The fear had come from the unknown, from not acting, and now that he had made a decision to act the fear had gone. He might not make it, he might die on the ice, but he would not die with fear. He would die working to not die.

  That was something he could t
ell Oogruk when he got back. If he got back. The thing with dying was to try to not die and make death take you with surprise.

  And with the end of the fear came a feeling of strength. The cold was less strong along the lead because the warmth from the sea water came up as steam. The steam froze on everything, on the gangline and the sled and the dogs. Soon everything glistened with ice, even the dogs looked like jewels running ahead of him in the dark with the ice frozen on their backs.

  It was a beauty he could not measure. As so much of running the dogs proved to be—so much of it had a beauty he saw and took into himself but could not explain.

  And while he was looking at the beauty he saw that the lead had narrowed. There was still open water, but there were large chunks floating in it and the idea came to him of bridging the open water with one of the chunks.

  He stopped the team.

  The leader whined. It is perhaps possible that Oogruk had done this, Russel thought, and the dog is scared because he’s done it before.

  Or it was possible that the dog was reading Russel’s mind and knew what they were going to do. Or it might be that the dog had figured out what had to be done on his own.

  Whatever the reason, the dog knew and he didn’t like it. Russel set the hook and took the harpoon with the line on it out of the sled. He walked to the edge of the lead, holding back to make sure he wouldn’t break off the edge and fall in. Death would come instantly with the water. With the weight of the parka and pants wet, he would go down like a stone.

  There were several chunks floating in the lead, which had now narrowed to thirty or so feet. Most of them were smaller than he could use, but one was about twenty feet long and four feet wide. It lay sideways, halfway across the opening.

  He lay the harpoon line on the ice, in a small loop, and held one end with his left hand. With his right he hefted the harpoon and with an easy toss threw it across the large chunk of ice.