Dogsong (12 page)

And she was the same woman as the woman in the dream. The same round face of the girl-woman in the dream, the same hair, the same even mouth of the dream-woman-girl, with the same wide nose and clear eyes staring at him through the flamelight.

The dreamflame.

From the dreamlamp.

A
t the other end of the dreamrun nothing was the same as when he started. At the other end. Russel was no longer young but he wasn't old, either. He wasn't afraid, but he wasn't brave. He wasn't smart, but he wasn't a fool. He wasn't as strong as he would be, but he wasn't ever going to be as weak as he was.

When he thought of what happened, later, when he wasn't what he would be but wasn't what he had been, he thought that in some mysterious way a great folding had happened.

The dream had folded into his life and his life had folded back into the dream so many times that it was not possible for him
to find which was real and which was dream.

Nor did he feel that it was important to decide. In its way the dream was more real than the run, than his life.

These things happened. Either in the dream or the run, either in one fold or another fold, these things happened:

He came to know the woman-girl. She was named Nancy. She had become pregnant without meaning to, without being married, and because the missionaries had told her that it was a sin she had been driven by her mind, driven out into the tundra to die on the snowmachine.

But fear had taken her. She had been afraid to die and she had turned to go back—she did not know how far she had come—and she had run out of gas. She had started to walk, had gone down with the cold, was going to die and Russel saved her.

She had gone first out to sea and then turned inland so they would think she'd gone through the ice and would not look for her inland. She did not have parents to worry for her. Her baby was not due for four months but she had pain in the tent that first night and Russel worried, though there was nothing he could do for her.

They could not leave. The storm was too strong for them to leave. He fed her meat and fat from a caribou carcass, watching her
eat and talk between mouthfuls, heating the pieces of meat and putting them in her mouth, holding back when she winced with pain as she came back from freezing, handing her the next piece when she was ready for it. He let her talk and talk, now that he was rested.

When at last she had settled and had stopped talking about herself she stared at him.

“What is the matter?” Russel asked. “Have you never seen people before?”

Nancy looked down, suddenly shy. “It isn't that. It just came to me that you were out here with a dog team. There is nothing out here. How did you come to be here?”

Russel thought of telling her of Oogruk, of the dream, of the run, but held back. That was part of his song and it wouldn't be good to talk about it before it was ready to sing.

Then he thought he might tell her of the lamp, but decided against that for the same reason. Finally he shrugged. “I am a person who is running north and came upon your machine. That is all.” He did not tell her about following the tracks for so long.

“How far north?”

It was an impertinent question but he ignored the discourtesy. “Until I run to the end of where I am going.”

And then she did a strange thing. She nodded, almost wisely. “I understand. But
tell me, is it possible for a person to be with you when you run north to the end?”

It was a hard question to answer. In this run, Russel thought, in this run I thought I would be alone but it was perhaps not supposed to be so. It may be that is what the dream is telling me. That I am not supposed to be alone. If the dream is telling me anything.

Or another way of thinking: Is it possible to leave her out here? No. And still a third way: Would it be possible to take her home?

“There is nothing for me there,” she said, shaking her head when he asked. “I have done wrong. There is not a way to live there. I will stay out here.”

“And die,” Russel finished for her.

“Yes.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You tried that and it didn't work. You became afraid and tried to get home.”

“Not home,” she corrected. “Back. I have no home.”

“So.”

“So.”

“What am I to do?”

“Take me with you. I will earn my way. I can scrape the skins and sew them. I can make camp. I can feed dogs.”

“Do you know dogs?”

“No. There were none left in my village. But I can learn.”

And in that way she came to be with him when his life folded into the dream and the dream folded into his life.

In that way she came to be with him on the run.

Again during that long storm-night she slept and he dozed, but did not dream, and when he awakened this time there was light outside the tent and the wind had stopped. He reached outside and brought his parka in, scraped the ice off, slid it over his under-parka and stood outside. He was stiff, worse than he'd ever been, so he stretched, felt his bones crack and creak.

The woman-girl put her anorak on and came out.

“It is cold,” she said.

“Cold is our friend.”

“I know. But I am not dressed as you. I feel it more.”

“We will wrap you in skins in the sled. You will be all right.”

She said nothing but nodded and began taking the tent down while he hacked meat off the carcass for the dogs. She put one skin on the bottom of the sled, curved up on the sides, with the hair in. The other three she put on top as a kind of blanket, with the fur inside. When it came time to go—after he had fed and brought the dogs up—she got in between the hides.

“There is comfort here.”

He misunderstood. “I have never hauled anybody who is going to have a baby.”

“I meant it is warm. There is nothing comfortable about having a baby.”

“Ahh. I see.”

The dogs were rested but stiff and it took them a mile or so to loosen up. But they settled into the routine of running; the leader knew that Russel wanted to cover distance and they ran.

The land was new. White-new with snow from the storm and drifts from the wind and after a time the dogs were running up the sides of a white saucer into the light, running out and out until their legs vanished in light and the steam came back to Russel across their backs and turned them into part of the wind, turned them into ghost-dogs.

He stood the sled loosely, proud of the team, and he could tell that the woman-girl thought highly of them.

Out, he thought. Out before me they go. Out before me I go, they go …

They ran north, now two where there was one, ran north for the mother of wind and the father of ice.

And these things happened when Russel's life folded into the dream and the dream folded into his life:

It came that they ran past their food.

It was true that he perhaps fed the dogs
a bit too much, but they were working hard and it took meat and fat to drive them. Three, four, seven more days of running north, stopping at night in the skins with the lamp and the chips of fat and the yellow glow while they ate much and talked little; sat in their own minds until they dozed and he came to know the woman-girl—eight, nine, ten days and nights they ran north toward the mother of wind, and they ran past their food.

The first and second day without food there was no trouble. The dogs grew weak, but when they didn't get fed they went back to work and began to use of the stored fat and meat of their bodies.

“They will run to death,” Oogruk had said. “You must not let them.”

At the end of the second day Russel's stomach demanded food and when he didn't feed it and ignored it his body finally quit asking for food and he went to work and began using the meat and fat of his body.

The woman-girl grew weak rapidly because her body fed the baby within. Russel saved the last of the food for her and when that was gone and it was obvious that the dogs could not go much further he stopped.

There had been no game. No sign. They had seen nothing and he was worried. No, more than worried—he had been worried
when the first two days with no game sighted had come. Now he was afraid.

He had to make meat.

“I will leave you in the tent and take the team for meat. They will run lighter with only one person.”

Nancy agreed, nodding. She got slowly out of the sled and pulled the skins out to make the shelter. They were near the side of a cut bank where a creek had long ago run. They used the dirt bank for one wall and made a lean-to.

There were some chips for the lamp, and a long strip of fat that he had been saving for fuel—pictures from the dream haunted him and he did not want to leave her without heat.

When the shelter was up he returned to the sled. “I'll be back.”

It was as close as he would come to a goodbye and he made the dogs leave. They did not want to go. They thought they should sleep in camp and eat and saw no reason to go out again. But he forced them and when they were away from camp he made them run to the east, up the old creekbed. If there is game, he thought, it will be up the creek run.

But they went all of that day into the dark and he saw nothing. No hare, no ptarmigan, no tracks of anything.

With dark he stopped and lay on the sled in his parka. There was light wind, but
not the vicious cold of the previous days of running. He tried to sleep but it did not come.

Instead he lay awake all night thinking of the woman-girl back in the tent. If he did not find game she would die.

She would die.

He would die.

The dogs would die.

Perhaps I ought to run back to her and kill and eat the dogs, he thought, over and over. If he kept running away from the shelter until the dogs went down he would not get back to her. If there was not game out ahead of him he would not get back to her. If he saw game but his mind was not true and the arrow flew wrong he would not get back. She would die.

She would die.

He would die.

The dogs would die.

But if he went back and they ate the dogs they would not be able to leave and they would die anyway.

And now when he thought, there was nothing from the ghost of Oogruk. No help. Nothing. Nothing from the trance or the time when they turned to yellow smoke.

Whatever decision he made, when the light came back, it was
his
decision, just as going back to live the old way must have been
his
decision.

And when the light came across the snow he made the decision to go ahead to find game, knowing that if he was wrong they would all be wrong, the woman-girl, the dogs and all would be wrong and gone. Gone and gone.

In the second day he found nothing. Nor did he on the third day and now they had gone six days without eating and he felt weak. His eyes worked poorly and he ate snow so often that his lips were sore. Twice, then several more times, he thought he saw deer but when he got to where they had been there was nothing. Never had been anything. It was the hunger in his eyes, he found, that made him see things.

Finally the dogs stopped. They could pull no more, or so they thought. But now he remembered one more thing from Oogruk.

“The dogs run because they want to run,” the old man had told him, “or because they
think
they want to run, or because you
make
them think they want to run. That is how to drive dogs.”

And so now Russel drove them. He cut a whip from some willows in the old streambed and he laid it on their backs and they ran for him but it was wrong, wrong to drive them down that way and he knew that when he had whipped them and made them run and they went down there would be nothing left.

He would not get back to Nancy. His mind took that and made it part of him—he was failing. He would not get back. As in the dream, he would not get back and there would be only two bones left by the foxes.

Two bones.

And so he drove the dogs down, drove them the way the man in the dream had driven them and when his mind was gone, when there was nothing left of his thinking and nothing left of the dogs, he came around a bend in the old streambed and saw tracks.

At first he didn't believe them. They came off the left side of the bank and tore down into the snow at the bottom, breaking through the hard pack that had held the dogs and sled. He thought they were from the hunger in his eyes but when he got closer they did not go away.

They were huge.

And when he got still closer he saw that they were tracks of a great polar bear and that he did not believe, either, because the bear were hunted out for their white fur. Men used snowmachines and hunted them out and there were no bears.

But there were the tracks. And they were tracks of a great bear. And they had to be real because now the dogs caught the smell and took excitement. They increased speed but he knew that they could not last now.

And how to kill a bear?

Oogruk had said nothing.

The arrow would not be enough. He had the killing lance on the sled and he would have to use that somehow. He would have to catch the bear and use the lance to kill it.

A polar bear that was bigger than he, the team, the sled, the woman-girl and the tent combined—he had to take it with the small killing lance in the old way that nobody had used for so long that he didn't think there was a memory of it. Oogruk had never done it, or he would have told him.

The dogs went faster still and he was afraid that he would burn them out. He stopped them and let the right point dog loose—the one just in back of the leader on the right. He seemed to be the strongest dog and the most excited by the smell of the bear tracks. Perhaps he would catch the bear and keep it busy until Russel could get there and bring it down. Or try.

There was much doubt in him now about the bear, some fear, and more doubt. But the dog tore away up the streambed and Russel took the killing lance from the tie-down on the sled and loosened the bow case and quiver.