Dogsong (11 page)

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.

Soon 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.

T
he 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.

And now, where the land had been open and barren, there was much game for the man. He passed herds of caribou, once another mammoth which had died and was frozen, with giant wolves tearing at it.

The wolves watched him pass. Two of them made a small sweep toward the sled and the man—there were times when they would have killed and eaten both the man and the dogs—but there was much easy meat on the mammoth. They turned away without making an open threat but it wouldn't have mattered.

The man almost did not see them. He had one purpose now, driving the lined-out team in front of him. Down to four stiff dogs, but loosening by the mile, he ran them out. The whip cracked and cracked again, reaching out to flick meat from their backs, meat and tufts of hair that flew into the cold, and they ran for him.

They ran for home.

Across the white land they ran, across the whiteness that was so bright in the dream it turned at last into light. Whitelight with the dogs churning through the brightness, legs slamming forward and down, feet
kicking up snow, day into night into day into night into day …

The dreamdogs ran in the dreamworld across the whitelight until finally in the great distance they disappeared and out in front of what they were, what they had become, Russel could see the space where the tent was in the dream.

But it was the tent space only.

Torn leather, ripped skins that flew and flapped, tattered banners in the never-ending arctic dreamwind.

Where there had been a place of life, a place of laughter and round fat faces, where there had been a place of things that meant home and living, there was only the bleak shreds of flapping leather and the signs of death.

An end to things.

No, Russel thought—out of the dream but still in it in some way he did not understand. No, that cannot be.

But it was. In the dream it was. There was an end that came in the north, an end that came to all things, the same end that came to Oogruk. The wolves had come, and when they were done, the small white foxes had come, and where there had been a woman and two children, where they had ended their lives, there was nothing.

Two bones.

Neither of them was identifiable except
as bones, but they were human because they had not been cracked for the marrow and if they had been left from meat the woman would have cracked them to eat of the marrow—one small and the other large and long.

Two bones.

They were in the space that used to be tent but they were all. Everything else, every little thing that would have meant life and home was gone.

Even the lamp.

But only a small distance to the north, under an overhanging ledge, the lamp lay. Russel saw it. A fox had taken it there; drawn by the smell of fat that for years had soaked into the stone, it had taken the lamp under the ledge to get away from the other foxes and had licked the fat-smell until even that smell was gone.

Then it had left the lamp and trotted away.

It was a shallow stone lamp, with a flat bottom and a groove in the edge where the moss wick would lie.

The dreamlamp lay where the fox had dropped it, lay until the blowing wind would cover it with snow and the snow would make grass and the grass would cover it still more, and then the snow and grass would, each after the other, time after time, mat the lamp down where it would lie forever. Or until somebody came to move it.

The lamp, Russel dreamthought. Not all that was left …

Another shift came; the dream moved sideways once more and he saw the man. Into the night and back to day the man had driven the sled until the dogs were staggering, falling. They were run down so far they would die surely. There would not be a team when the man was done—there would be only dead dogs.

Nothing but the man would be left.

They had run through the light, through the dreamlight the dreamdogs had run until they were no more.

Until there was only the man and the sled and where the tent had been flapping in the wind, only tattered pieces of tent.

And the man was Russel and Russel was the man. He knew that the woman and two children were no more and that the dogs would be no more and that's when Russel awakened in his own tent and saw the lamp.

Saw the flickering lamp and felt himself bathed in the stink-sweat of fear and knew, knew in his center, that it was the same lamp and that it was all there was left of what had been.

That's when Russel awakened in his own tent and knew that there was not a line any longer between the dream and the run.

That's when Russel awakened in his own tent stinking of fear and sweat, knowing that
the dream had become his life and his life and the run had become the dream and the woman was looking at him.

The woman-girl, girl-woman sat staring at him past the flickering yellow of the lamp.