Dogsong (10 page)

The man fell to the floor exhausted and they left him there, at the side, while somebody else rose to dance his song of a kayak
and a walrus and near-death in the water.

And when he was done another got up, and then another, and so the songs soared on and on through day and night as the dream folded back into the fog.

W
hen the storm hit his shelter it awakened him and he listened for a time. But he was secure and had fat for the lamp and he went back to sleep—the best way to ride storms out in the arctic.

When he awakened the next time—perhaps twenty hours later—he was ravenous and thirsty, and outside it was still. He looked from the shelter and saw that the dogs were still sleeping, resting, and would remain so until he called them up. He was learning. If they worked hard they might sleep for three days, getting up just to relieve themselves and change position—not even that if the wind was bad and they
had good snow caves made for shelter.

Russel took snow in and ate from it, mourning once more his lack of a pot for cooking and boiling and making water from the snow. He fashioned a ladle from a leg bone but got only sips for his work.

He added fat chips to the lamp, which was halfway empty, and they melted and he found that by pushing the wick further into the fluid fat the flame rose.

He used the expanded flame to heat a piece of loin from the deer and when it was warm ate it in large mouthfuls.

It didn't fill him and he ate some warm fat, then more meat and yet more fat until his stomach bulged and he was again full.

But this time sleep didn't come. He had slept the better part of two days now and no part of his body was tired enough to sleep more.

He looked out of the tent again and saw that daylight was coming.

He shrugged away the camp as he would shrug away light snow. It was time to leave, time to head north again to see the father of ice. He brought his parka in, brushed off the frozen sweat and put it on. Then he pinched the flame out with his fingers and slid his mukluks on and stepped into the darkness. It took him just a few moments to take down the skins, softened now from the heat of the lamp, and fold them in the sled bottom, then the lamp in the sled bag, and finally the rest
of the meat on top of the skins and, lastly, his weapons: the lance and harpoon shafts on top of the skins, then his bow and the quiver of arrows. None of the deer had broken arrows when they fell and he had cleaned the points of the bubbled blood that comes from a kill and put them back in the quiver.

Still the dogs weren't moving.

When everything was lashed down to the sled, Russel went up the line and jerked the team out of the snow.

Two of them growled and he slapped them with a mitten across their noses to get their attention.

When they were all up and standing he got on the sled and called them up.

They started slowly, two of them holding back until he yelled at them again. Then they went to work and headed away from the camp.

Light came gently, but the sky was clear and cold and clean and he let the dogs seek their own pace. Once they had shaken out their legs they began an easy lope that covered miles at a fierce clip.

They ran into light, then all through the day, easily pulling the sled on the fast snow, grabbing a mouthful when they got thirsty, and Russel watched the new country come.

There were few hills now. The land was very flat, and there were no trees of any kind. If he kept going this way for a long
time—he was not sure how long it would take with dogs but it took all day with an airplane—he would come to mountains. He thought.

But before the mountains he believed the sea came back in again. In the school he had seen a map that showed the sea coming back into the land but he was not sure if that was straight north or north and west and he was not sure how long it would take to get to the sea by dog sled. He did not know how far dogs traveled in a day.

Yet it didn't matter.

Oogruk had said, “It isn't the destination that counts. It is the journey. That is what life is. A journey. Make it the right way and you will fill it correctly with days. Pay attention to the journey.”

So Russel ran the team and now the land was so flat that it seemed to rise around him like a great lamp bowl sloping up to the sky.

Looking ahead, he could feel a small grit coming to his eyes, sensed the first stages of snow blindness—caused when the light comes from all directions, from the white snow and the flat blue sky. When it is very bad it's as if someone has poured sand in the eyes and it's impossible to open them to see. More often snow blindness just irritates.

Russel rubbed his eyes. He knew if he had wood he could make a pair of snow goggles, with small slits to cut out the light from
the sides. But he didn't have wood, so he rubbed his eyes now and then and pulled his hood tighter.

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.

T
he 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.

H
e 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.

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.