Dogsong Read online

  When the short day was gone the dogs didn’t seem to want to stop. He let them run. There was no place to camp anyway and his mind looked now to the run.

  He had come north a long way but was not sure how long. In the dark they kept up the pace, increased it, and they could cover many more miles before he had to rest them again, running on fresh meat as they were.

  He sensed in the night that he was passing a large herd of deer and the dogs started for them but he had meat and called them back to the north. They obeyed instantly and he felt good.

  They were his now. They were his dogs and they would run to him. He made the meat for them and they would run to him—just as the dogs in the dream ran to the man. Just as they ran, his dogs would run.

  Out into the night he ran, and through the other side of darkness.

  It was coming into first light when he saw the snowmachine tracks.

  They started as if by magic. Suddenly the snow bore the small ridges that come from a snowmachine.

  They headed off to the north.

  * * *

  The dogs dropped into the line of the tracks easily, as they dropped into any trail, which surprised Russel. Given a chance they seemed to follow the path of least resistance as if they expected something.

  Russel let them run and thought for a time. He knew quite an area, had once flown to a northern settlement, a village three hundred miles up the coast from his own.

  But he could not think of a settlement that fit with the tracks. There was nothing straight north. If the tracks were a hunting party from the village, it was way out of the normal hunting territory—and besides, Russel thought, anybody hunting now would be working the sea ice for seals.

  He did not want to see anybody, especially somebody on a snowmachine. The idea of a snowmachine was out of place, opposite, wrong.

  But.

  It was possible that whoever it was might have an extra pot or can he could use. He sorely missed having a way to boil meat or make water from snow and his lips were starting to crack and bleed from the snow’s sharpness. If he did not find a way to melt snow his lips would soon go to sores.

  Oogruk had talked of using stone bowls to melt snow but Russel couldn’t find the right kind of soft stone and so he hoped to find a pot or a can.

  And there was the other thing. He was starting to notice the dogs, notice that they seemed to be an extension of his thoughts. Now they ran to the trail and perhaps that was because he wanted them to run to the trail.

  Perhaps he wanted to see whoever it was, see where the tracks led. So he let them run the snowmachine trail and they lasted through that day and into the night and still he ran. Then tracks led steadily to the north, the line moving out to the rim of the white saucer into dark and then out of sight into the blackness.

  Always north.

  He let the dogs run, stopping in the cold dawn to feed them some meat, taking a cold mouthful for himself, then eating some snow, wincing in pain from his cracked lips, and moving them on.

  He saw no game that day, no other sign but the snowmachine tracks with the slight dusting of snow on the edges, filling in as the wind blew, and he debated stopping.

  But the dogs wanted to run and he let them.

  They ran the second night, and he did not sleep but his mind circled and slipped down as he rode the runners, tired but not tired. He quit thinking, quit being anything but part of the sled, part of the dogs. At one time he began to hallucinate and thought somebody was riding the sled in front of him, sitting in the basket. A blurred idea of someone.

  But then the hallucination was gone and another one came; he saw lights on all the dogs’ feet, small lights, and then they disappeared and he felt somehow that the opening of his parka hood was a mirror and everything he saw in front of him was somehow in back of him, and then, driving on into the night, the mirror vanished and he had the dream.

  The dream again.

  But darker.

  11

  The Dream

  The man was no longer in the settlement on the edge of the sea, fat with walrus and seal oil, among fat puppies and round dogs and round faces.

  Now there was not a fog, but a slashing gray storm that took everything.

  He was trying to drive his dogs in the storm and there was an air of madness to it. The wind tore at them, lifted their hair and drove the snow underneath it to freeze on their skin until the dogs were coated in ice. Icedogs. They shone through the snow as they tried to drive forward.

  But the wind tore at them. The dogs were blown sideways so hard that they leaned to stand and when they hit patches of ice or frozen snow they went down, staggering.

  Yet the man drove them.

  He stood on the runners, screamed blindly at them, let the long whip go out to tear at their flanks. His will flew along the line to the dogs, pushing them fiercely into the roaring storm.

  Russel could make no sense to it. The sled was full of the red meat, the man could stop and make a shelter and eat and feed the dogs and wait for the storm.

  But there was a terrible worry in the man, fear and worry that Russel could feel, up from the dream into his mind, into his soul, and when he let his mind go into the dream, into the man, he knew the reason.

  He had stayed long at the village with the fat of seal and walrus. Perhaps too long. And now the journey home was taking too long, too long for the family that waited back in the skin tent for the red meat and fat.

  The storm was stopping him. He could fight and fight, whip the dogs until they ran red with blood, but the storm was stopping him.

  It was too fierce. Now it blew the dogs sideways, and now it blew them backward and they felt the frustration of the man and it became anger and they fought among themselves, tearing and slashing.

  The man used his whip handle like a club and beat them apart and settled them and admitted defeat, fell in the wind, fell next to the sled and huddled in his parka as gray blasts of snow took him down and down …

  The wind took the dream with snow as the fog had once taken it, closed on it. But now the dream wasn’t finished …

  From Russel’s mind came the tent with the woman and the two children. But now they were not the same … Now the lamp flickers with the last of the oil and the faces are thin. Worse than thin, the children’s faces have the deep lines and dark shades that come from starvation.

  Both children lie quietly on the sleeping bench, end to end, their heads together. They are very weak, weak perhaps beyond coming back.

  The mother sits by the lamp, fingering the strangulation cord. There are no skins left. They have eaten them all. They have eaten all the skin clothing and the soles from their mukluks and the leather lines cut to use for tying dogs.

  They have cut the mittens into small squares to chew on the skin, spitting the hair out, and now those are gone.

  Everything is gone.

  And outside, the storm still tears and rips the earth, drives the snow sideways, guts the land.

  She would eat the skin of the tent but that is the same as dying. With the tent gone the wind and cold would have them. They have no clothing left, will have no oil left when the lamp goes out.

  Nothing.

  The mother is weaker than the children but she takes a finger now and wipes it in the small bit of rancid oil in the lamp and wipes the finger across the lips of each child, leaving a thin film of grease on each lip.

  One child licks the grease off.

  The other does not.

  And outside, the wind slashes and looks for their lives.

  The hungry wind.

  12

  The Run

  He came upon the snowmachine in the flat white light of the arctic dawn. It was sitting on its skis, just squatting in the middle of the great sweeps.

  Nobody was near it. Russel stopped when the dogs were next to it and set his hook. On the back of the seat was a box and he opened it, hoping to find a coffee can or pot but there was nothing but an empty plastic gas jug.
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br />   He felt the engine with a bare hand. It was cold, still cold, dead cold.

  It was a fairly new machine and while it was true that snowmachines broke down, the newer ones tended to last a bit longer. He opened the gas tank and found it bone dry.

  A smile cut his lips and made them bleed.

  “They are not of the land,” he said to the dogs. “They need fuel that is not part of the land. They cannot run on fat and meat.”

  A small set of footprints led off ahead of the machine but there were also snowmachine tracks. It was as if another snowmachine had gone ahead, but left the person to walk. It made no sense.

  Or. Perhaps the snowmachine had come out this way and the rider was headed back when the machine ran out of gas.

  That made more sense to Russel, considering the tracks.

  But there was nothing, no village, where the footprints were leading. Nothing that Russel knew about at any rate, and if whoever left the tracks was heading for help on foot he had almost no chance of getting anywhere. There were no settlements within walking distance of the snowmachine.

  And the tracks were small enough to belong to a child. Or a girl.

  He pulled the hook and the team started off silently. They had run steadily now for two days and needed rest. They could sleep running, a doze-sleep, but they needed real rest after the hard work of a long run.

  But with the full light Russel could see the high wisps of clouds that meant a storm was coming.

  He wanted to try to catch whoever was ahead before the storm hit. On foot he could not be carrying much of a shelter, nor could he be carrying much food. And if it was a child he would probably not survive a bad storm.

  Russel let the dogs adopt a slower trot, but he kept them going steadily, watching the tracks ahead.

  At first they didn’t seem very fresh. The rising wind had blown them in so that some of them were filled completely. But as the hours passed they seemed to be getting cleaner, newer. Now and then the lead dog dropped his nose to smell them, looking for scent, and Russel could see his ears jerk forward whenever he got a bit.

  And when the darkness came again the leader started to run with his nose down all the time, following the smell of the trail that must be fresh, Russel knew, to hold for the dogs.

  But now there was wind and more wind. Not as bad as the dreamwind, but getting worse all the time so that the dogs had to lean slightly left into it to keep their balance. And snow.

  There was a driving sharp snow with the wind. Not heavy snow, but small and mean and it worked with the force of the wind to get inside clothing, in the eyes, even blow up into the nostrils.

  And finally, when he could no longer see the trail, no longer see the front end of the team, could barely make out the two wheel-dogs directly in front of the sled, finally he came to that time when he should stop and hole up in the storm.

  And he did not.

  He drove them on. They wanted to stop, twice the leader did stop, but Russel used words as a whip and drove them.

  The leader was all important now. The trail was gone, wiped away by the wind and snow in the dark, but the dog sensed with his nose and his feet where the tracks lay and he followed them. Russel almost did not believe the dog could do this—almost, but not quite. Had it happened earlier, when he first started to run the team, back at Oogruk’s, he would not have believed. But now he understood more of the dogs, knew that they had understanding he did not have. Yet.

  And he believed in the dogs.

  The only advantage they had was that the storm was almost straight out of the north. They could fight dead against the wind and that was a bit easier than going side-on where the team would have been blown over.

  But it was hard. And the storm, it seemed, worsened by the minute. At length Russel sensed that they were going up a slight incline, not a hill so much as a gradual upgrade, and at the top the dogs stopped dead in the wind.

  He yelled at them, swore at them, finally began slamming the sled with his mittened hand and threatened to come up to the unseen dogs and beat them into submission.

  But they would not move.

  So they are done, he thought. He would have to make a shelter and ride the storm out. But first he would walk to the front of the team and bring the leader back around and use the dogs to form a part of a shelter.

  He staggered against the wind to the front of the line and as he reached down for the collar on the lead dog he tripped and fell on something in the trail.

  When he recovered he saw that it was a booted foot, attached to a leg, and by moving up along the leg he found a person with a parka lying curled up, face away from the wind, extremely still.

  He shook the figure with his hand but there was no response and he thought the person must be dead.

  So much death, he thought. Oogruk and now this person. So much death given in this hard place.

  But as he turned away he saw the arm move, or thought he saw some movement, and when he looked back he was sure of it—the bulky form had some life. Somewhere inside the round shape huddled on the trail there was a living person.

  There was little time now. Whoever it was, the life was almost gone. There had to be a place to live now, a warm place, and Russel worked as fast as he could without sweating. Sweat, of all things, could kill. Steadily, evenly, he brought the dogs around and placed them down with his hands in a living screen across the face of the wind. They would soon be covered with snow and warm in their small igloos.

  Then he took the skins from the sled and using the sled basket as one wall made a tent lean-to of two skins, folding one with the hair in to make a floor. The wind took the tent down twice, pulling the skins out and away so that he had to fight hard to keep them. But at last, using some bits of cord from the sled bag, he tied the skins down at the corners to the sled and packed snow around them and they held. The wind would blow more snow in and pack them still further.

  Then he put the lamp and a partial carcass into the lean-to and went back for the figure in the snow. It took much heaving, pulling on the feet, to get the unconscious person into the lean-to and reclose the flap so the wind wouldn’t tear it open. But he succeeded at last and fumbled with matches to get the lamp going. It started slowly, casting only a tiny flicker of light, until the fat around the wick began to melt and when it was going at last and he could feel some heat coming from it he turned to his companion.

  When he pushed the hood back he was stunned to see that it was a girl. Woman, he thought—girl-woman. She had a round face with the white spots that come from freezing, and pitch-black thick hair pulled back in a bun and held with a leather thong.

  He rubbed the cheeks but there was no response and yet he could see that she was breathing. Small spurts of steam came up in the cold yellow air in the lean-to. There was life inside the frozen shell.

  He tore off her outerparka. Really it was a light anorak made of canvas, and underneath she had on a vest. When the parka was off he realized that she was not only a young woman but that she was pregnant.

  This realization stopped him and he settled back on his haunches to think of it. There were so many strange things here. She was where she couldn’t possibly be, riding a snowmachine that had run out of gas, with no supplies, coming from nowhere and going nowhere.

  She couldn’t be.

  And yet she was.

  And she was pregnant and nearly dead.

  He chipped some pieces of fat off the deer carcass and added them to the lamp. He did it several times while he thought on what to do. Soon the lamp was full of fat and he remembered the dream, remembered the woman trying to save the children from starvation.

  He took his finger and dipped it in the fat of the lamp and wiped it across the blue lips. There was no indication from the woman-girl at all. He did it again, and again, until some of the fat had worked into her mouth and then he saw the jaw move. Not a swallowing, not a chewing, but a ripple in the jaw muscle.

  She was coming back.

  Soo
n the pain would hit her. When somebody has gotten close to death by freezing and he comes back, Russel knew, there is terrible pain. Sometimes it was possible to relieve the pain by rubbing snow on the frozen parts but when it was the whole body nothing helped.

  The pain had to be. It was considered by some—by Oogruk—to be the same pain as birth. To have been close to death and come back could not be done without the pain of birth.

  Russel sat back again, then cut some meat and held it over the flame. After the pain would come hunger. She would want to eat. As he wanted to eat.

  The meat softened with the flame and when it had taken on some warmth he ate part of it. Doing so made him think of the dogs and he considered cutting them food but decided to let them sleep for a time first. They had run long and were probably too tired to eat.

  Instead he ate some more meat and watched the woman-girl he had rescued. He did not think anything, left his mind blank. There was nothing to think. Just the storm outside and the girl-woman who had almost died but who had come back.

  He was extremely tired and as soon as the shelter—drummed into noise by the wind and blown snow—had warned and the meat had reached his stomach he couldn’t hold his eyes open.

  He slept sitting up—or didn’t sleep so much as close his eyes—and ceased to be in the tent.

  His mind slid sideways into the dream.

  13

  The Dream

  The storm had cleared but it had taken days, many days. Too many days.

  The man got the dogs up, up out of stiffness and the frozen positions they had taken in ice. One got up and fell over, too far gone to live. The man used his spear and the quick thrust to the back of the head to kill the dog. Its feet were frozen and it would have been in agony if he had tried to keep it alive. When it was dead he threw the carcass on the sled to feed the other dogs later.

  Then he made them go. They did not want to leave, they were stiff with cold, but he whipped them and made them go.

  Across the strange dreamgrass and dreamsnow they moved, the bone and ivory sled starting slow and pulling hard. He stopped and urinated on the runners, using a piece of hide with hair on it to smooth the new ice, and the sled pulled much easier.