Tag: Night

Caravan Draft Chapter Six

PazloLeave a comment

Chapter Six
Two Fools

 

When Rol stopped the sled, Anchu’s senses awoke. Hitherto, endless eyes-closed plodding into blackness had become hypnotic. One step after another, then another. Any change from the monotony was noticeable, and none more so than halting the sled.
He began to sense the troubles in the party. Tun approached with the reindeer-driven racing sled, while suddenly Rol was driving the dog team. Tun could barely move, walked with a frozen stiffness, and could not bend down. Then Anchu saw Rol collapse and fall to the ice in a heap. The night grew ever colder, and the team moved ever slower with each step, into the barrage of wind-driven snow and ice. Finally, Tun unhitched the team and pitched a tiny shelter in the midst of the frozen plain.
Dogs were whimpering, limping as they nearly crawled their way to the makeshift windbreak. Tongues and lips grew pale as the dogs’ thirst went unquenched, and brutal air constricted capillaries at the surface of the skin to conserve body heat.
When Rol remained unconscious and Tun curled beside him shivering, Anchu suddenly recognized the imminent danger. Thoughts flooded his senses with the clarity born of life and death circumstances. When an old dog knows his time has come, he would curl up the way Rol and Tun had, to close the circle, to face the end of the trail.
“We need a runner.” he thought. Someone to forge on to the caravan ahead, to fetch help for Tun’s beleaguered party. “I’m the fastest.” he concluded his thought, and began to rise through the dogs piled atop him. He breached the flap that held the vicious wind at bay, several dogs stirring at the disruption.    He sneaked his way out into the howling, sub-freezing night. The wind blew so hard it pushed him, caused him to stumble and misstep. He turned to take a long look at the group before leaving them behind, then turned seaward, smelling for the scent of the trail.
“What are you doing?” A voice called to him from the edge of the dog pile. It was Larik, who now took several steps into the raging blackness to stand beside Anchu.
“I’m going for help.” Anchu shouted, to be heard above the wailing storm, “To catch up to the rest and bring people to help us.”
“It’s deadly out there, little brother.” Larik spoke, his face nearly pressed to Anchu’s. “And we have no idea how far away they are. If you just start walking you could freeze to death and die without a pack to keep you warm.”
“If I stay here, we’ll freeze to death and die anyway.”
They both stood, facing away from the wind, and held a long gaze into one another’s eyes. There was an inescapable truth to both their statements. The choices seemed to be winnowed to two: stay here and die for certain, or strike out into the featureless black, an act which held their only hope, yet did not guarantee survival.
“I’ll go.” Larik said, as he faced seaward, staring into the darkness.
“I’m the fastest.” Anchu replied.
“But I’m rested.” Larik continued. “You’ve been hitched to the team and pulling the sled since the afternoon.”
“So have you.” Anchu answered, as he, too, now faced seaward, and took an extra step to be further from the shelter than Larik.
“I wasn’t on the team,” Larik shouted as he took two steps to be more seaward than the youngster, “I was at the rear. I’m fit and rested.”
“But I’m the fastest!” Anchu insisted.
“I don’t think you understand what you’re talking about. What is this, your first winter? Your second? You have no idea what awaits you out on the tundra. I’ve been there. I’m older.”
“But I’m faster.” Anchu repeated. “Watch.”
With that, he burst into his fastest sprint, and disappeared immediately.
“No! No! Wait! What will your sister do if you never come back? Come on! You have family…”
Only the growling wind answered Larik’s calls.
“Anchu!” he barked as loudly as he could, walking toward the place he’d last seen the young dog. “Anchu!”
The unrelenting wind and cold berated Larik, compelled him back to the relief of the shelter. He stood, blasted by ice shards, struggling to open his eyes to look for Anchu.
“Sure! Go kill yourself!” he shouted into the void, “Make your sister cry!” He listened for a response. “That should make him think.” He waited for Anchu to come back out of the nothingness, to defer to his elder teammate.
A strange feeling overcame Larik. A new and unfamiliar sense. His stomach turned, though not from hunger, and despite the onslaught of the storm he could not tear himself away from his watchful stance. It would be normal for Larik to leave someone to their own devices, to seek comfort for himself. To write off such a foolhardy plan and the fool who created it. But his mind kept a vision of Anchu, alone and far from his pack, as he lay freezing on the tundra ice.
“Anchu!” he called again into the dark, and felt a lump climb into his throat. “Anchu!”
Larik thought of the innocent young dog and his beautiful sister. How could a world take such youth and beauty when here he remained, healthy and strong? This embittered and cantankerous old dog, who so recently craved escape from all of this. The world of man, the pressures, duties and responsibilities of a pack member. The inescapable heartbreak, the price to be paid for letting someone into your life.
“Anchu!” he called again, with frightened desperation in his voice. The new and strange feeling gripped Larik. He could not will himself to return to the safety and comfort of the windbreak. He could not take his mind from the fact that Anchu was in peril, and his stomach flipped again thinking of it.
“I can’t go after him.” He thought to himself. “Only a fool follows a fool, I say.” He tried to remind himself how often he’d thought he’d be content living as one alone. “Besides, then we’d just have two dead bodies out on the ice instead of one.”
He then realized that, instead of pacing back and forth while his thoughts raced, he’d paced in a straight line; seaward.
“Well, I probably don’t want him to get too far.” He quickened his pace to a trot, ignoring the blinding spray of ice and shale against his face. “When I get hold of him…” he growled.
He broke into a brisk gallop.

Larik’s fragile heart shielded itself as best it could from pains. Keeping to one’s self was the simplest course. If something got too close, Heart would paint the scene with a disguise of selfish emotions.
Scene One was Ridicule, and had played out. The fool followed the fool off stage.
Scene Two, Selfish Logic, had also crossed the footlights.
“Return to the shelter!” said one character.
“Two bodies instead of one? Posh!” said another.
Scene Three, Annoyance, sang its coloratura to the tunes of sarcasm.
“What good is youth and beauty, wasted on the young and foolhardy?”
“There are old dogs, and there are bold dogs. But there are no old bold dogs.” Said the hardscrabble veteran of a decade on the Arctic Tundra.
Scene Four, Anger, was unfolding.
“This is just what we need. As if we don’t have troubles enough.”
“Why must he run so fast?”
Larik’s gait broke into the fastest sprint he could muster. The strong and hearty wheel dog, liberated from sled work for days now, dashed off stage as the curtain fell.
Scene Five opens. The stage is dark. The orchestra fills the air with the sound of Nature’s fury, gusting crescendos.
A tiny spot slowly fades up, centered in the air mid-stage. Fading in is an image of Larik. Time is slowed, and we watch the sleek animal stretch eager forelegs to their fullest. Rear feet plant, haunches tighten, we see the rippling muscles of this graceful and powerful being, as every ounce of energy and passion propel his flight, headlong into the roaring darkness.
The image and the light fade into blackness. We hear the clickety-clack of claws on ice.
“Anchu!” the call stretches and reverberates, competing with the shouting wind, it echoes off the distant mountains and fills the air. We hear the slightest quiver in the voice. “Here I am! Anchu!”
The voice repeats as it, the clickety-clack, and the orchestral wind fade, bringing down the curtain on Act One.
“Anchu!”

Caravan Draft Chapter Five

PazloLeave a comment

Chapter Five
Good Things

 

   “And how many good things do you have?” Mother asked Sasha warmly, engaged in the rapt, attentive bathing of her sibling.
Brothers Anchu and Splotch had taken the bone she considered hers, despite her protests, and she now sought Mother’s intervention. Breathless from her frantic flight from the scene of the purloining, she repeated her testimony in anxious and clunky sentences, punctuated by frequent looks at the accused and the rapidly disappearing item in question.
“So I understand.” Mother answered, and repeated, “And how many good things do you have?”
“I don’t know. But my bone!”
Mother addressed her as a teacher would a student, a question to provoke thinking and a reasoned answer, “Don’t you have another bone somewhere?”
“But that was mine and they took it!” Sasha answered without looking to Mother, her eyes fixed on Splotch as he crunched down the last bit of evidence. He and Anchu trotted off between the dogs’ houses, looking for further opportunities this sunny late winter day.
Now, after six moons, Sasha and her litter mates were nearing full size. Alas, they were still very young, still learning to navigate in the context of a social world; elders, leaders, siblings, people, the cat. They had yet to witness babies, puppies, living beings newer than themselves. They had yet to encounter the Great Wide World, with rules of conduct and safety piled atop the rules of civility, and its own complex and fluid laws of territorial and property rights.
Sasha flopped to the ground, hopes extinguished, and heaved a huffy sigh.
“So,” Mother continued, “you say it belonged to you, and you are vexed that you don’t have it.” she restated the facts.
“And Splotch and Anch’ took it and that’s not fair!”
“Okay. So lastly we add injustice to your grievance. Or is it vengeance you desire?”
“No, no!” Sasha sat squarely and looked directly into Mother’s eyes. Despite the current squabble, Sasha’s heart was true, as were her siblings’. “They’re my brothers. I wouldn’t wish anything bad on them.”
Mother’s lips curled into the slightest smile at this, and she went on with her lesson. “So you think there was something the universe made just for you. Specifically and personally, like your teeth or your tail.”
Sasha felt she was in no mood for conversation. Certainly no mood for lessons. Her focus was on the fact that the bone was already gone. She felt a sense of loss. A sense there was something she could have had, and now can never regain. She answered Mother’s question without any thought about its meaning, or what the intent of the lesson might be. She drolled in a conciliatory tone of reluctant and indignant surrender. “I know the universe didn’t make the bone just for me.”
“Only your heart belongs to you, precious one,” Mother cooed, as she looked to her daughter with a warm, knowing smile, “and even that can be stolen from you.”
“What?!” Sasha leaped to her feet, wide-eyed, stricken with fear, “I’ll die!”
“No, no.” Mother calmed her, “That’s just a saying. It means we don’t really control who it is we love. Love happens on its own. It’s not something you can make up and decide for yourself.”
“How does that help me with the bone theft?”
“We don’t really own anything outside of our own bodies. Everything else is part of the world.”
“Then why is it called ‘mine’? What about my rag ball? It’s not mine?” Sasha whined, feeling like she was losing more things. Feeling like she was being compelled to let her siblings help themselves to things she’d become accustomed to, attached to. She whimpered, on the verge of tears.
“Now, now. We’ll call your ball ‘yours’, and you can keep it for yourself. Just because things are part of the world doesn’t mean they can’t be a part of our lives, and sources of joy or solace. But things pass into and out of our lives as easily as the wind.”
“My bone sure did.” Sasha replied. She watched Splotch and Anchu approach Kotka’s dish. He lunged toward them and blasted them with a deafening, growling bark. Both the youngsters yelped and spun, Anchu knocking down Splotch and running right over him in his haste to escape the huge Husky. Kotka turned to hide his face and chuckled. He caught Sasha’s eye and winked at her.

   Sasha giggled out loud, the sound decidedly foreign in the roaring, freezing, endless Arctic night. The dogs in the pile closest to her did not respond, did not want to risk any movement that might allow in the frigid air. There totaled about thirty dogs huddled behind Tun’s windbreak, some inside the tiny hide shelter, the rest mounded on and around it.
She was just inside the tent, beside Rol. From where she lay, a tiny gap opened onto the world outside. As small as her own eye, it revealed glimpses of horizontally-passing snowflakes and ice shards. An ear or a tail would shift into or out of view as the dogs continually sought respite from the storm in the heaping pile of fur balls.
“And how many good things do you have?” Mother’s voice repeated the question, like an echo that had taken so long to course its way up the canyon and back. Remembering this lesson was where this started. Frozen and scared and in pain, in the depth of the black gale, Sasha had begun to enumerate her woes. Her desperate thirst, her persistent hunger, the pain in her paws, the fierce cold, the biting wind.

“Okay.” Mother summed up the lesson as she released the sibling from bath duty, and moved on directly to Sasha. She started with the ears and face. “You can look around you any time and count the good things you have. Family and friends. A good home. Your heart and mind. Your body. Even your breath and your life.” She finished with the ears and paused to look her daughter in the eye. “Or you’re free to go on worrying about something that doesn’t exist anymore and didn’t belong to you in the first place.”
Still moping, a short while later Sasha made her way to Kotka’s doghouse. She related the whole tale, from the felonious misdeeds of her brothers to Mother’s lesson.
“I don’t understand. How can I count good things when they are being taken from me?” she posited.
“I don’t really know much about this.” Kotka said rather solemnly. “I don’t even remember having a mother, or brothers, and I never really had anything. Excepting my breath and life as your mother said.”    His eyes wandered across the homestead slowly, and his head cocked a little. “Well, until I got here. I’ve come to have family, and friends. Comforts and caring. I have caring. And peace. Now that I think of it…”
“If everything is part of the world and nothing belongs to me,” Sasha rambled, interrupting her friend, “I guess I’ll never have anything either.”
“Oh, I didn’t say I have nothing.”
“That’s what you just said!”
“No. I said I’d never had anything besides my breath and life.”
“But everybody has those things. It’s a given.”
“Not so fast, young lady.” Kotka shifted his weight off his bad leg, “What about Iluk?” he asked, referring to the dog that had died just weeks ago, from unknown and presumably natural causes.
“But he’s dead!”
“Exactly.” He sat, staring at Sasha.
“Okay, so I have my breath and life. There. Two things everyone else…I mean…every living being has. How does that help me?”
“Well, you wouldn’t be able to talk about it if you weren’t alive. There’s that.”
“Great. So I have being alive and agony.” she fumed.
“So how many were there?” Kotka asked.
“What?”
“How many good things did you count?” he queried, turning to chase a bird from his dish.
“I don’t know.” Sasha pouted, “I didn’t count.”
“Well, isn’t that silly? You say you have only three things but haven’t counted?”
“What’s to count?” Frustrated and annoyed, she threw herself down. “All I have is a ball.”
“How about family?” Kotka countered, “You have siblings.”
“Oh yeah, and brothers who steal from me.”
Kotka was looking around the homestead again, enumerating all he saw from his perspective. “You have Bek and Nina. And Jiak.”
“Well, yeah, Jiak.” Sasha conceded briefly, “But I don’t own Jiak!”
He leaned closer and insisted. “But you have Jiak in your life.”
“Yes. That’s a good thing I guess.”
“And your bed. And supper. You never are cold or hungry.” The mentor continued, remembering times when this was not always so for him. He took notice of one precious thing after another that had been missing from his life before Bek brought him home that fateful day. It was easy to see the bounty from his perspective.
“Yes, that’s true too. I am grateful.”
“There, you have gratitude. And friends. How about me? Am I really nothing to you?”
“Oh, no! No!” Sasha ran to him and pressed her snout against his, “I treasure you most.”
“And you have your mother.” Kotka sounded a little sad as he said this. Taken from his own mother earlier than he should have been, watching Mother tend to her brood was the most magnificent and valued reward he had come to know at the homestead.
A tear welled in Sasha’s eye as she sat looking toward the yard.
“So you still feel you have nothing?” Kotka offered.
She was frozen still, her gaze fixed.
“I’m counting.” she replied.

Here in this shivering camp Sasha wondered where Splotch was now. And her other litter mates, Anchu being the only one still with her. She thought of her dear friend Kotka, whom she hadn’t seen since she’d joined the sled team on the mountain ascent. She poked her head up and out of the pile between one dog’s head and another’s butt, and called his name. She discovered immediately the futility of trying to out-roar the storm.
Then she realized that the objects in the tiny gap were becoming brighter. Day was dawning. At first light she would gather up her brother, and they would seek out Kotka. And Stone and Dak, Umka and Alexei and Larik.
She added these now to an account, an inventory of all the good things she was grateful to have.
An account which began, first and foremost, with her breath and life.

Caravan Draft Chapter Two

Pazlo2 Comments

Chapter Two
Dark March

 

At the lead, Dak held his eyes tightly closed, marching blindly at a plodding pace in the brutal Arctic night. The tornadic wind shoved menacingly at his chest, resisting his efforts, and hurled a never-ending onslaught of tiny frozen particles at him. Even if daylight, he would be unable to keep his eyes open.

Behind him, thirteen weary dogs shared the burden of the heavily laden cargo sled, similarly holding eyes closed, ears folded down, the bitter cold biting at their feet, their noses, their thinly-coated bellies.

Stone was behind Dak, so drained and tired that his closed eyes often convinced him he was asleep, and he would nod off while walking. He’d awaken to the harsh reality of the merciless night, suddenly feeling the frigid air and the relentless wind. Again he would remind himself that he’d seen worse. This malevolent storm still did not equal the pain felt the time he fell through the ice into the nearly-frozen water of the river.

Never before had he been rendered helpless. The water, a fraction of a degree above solid ice, almost instantly numbed muscles and arrested their motion, stabbed at every inch of skin like a thousand knives, drove the very breath from his lungs. A strong swimmer, he now found all four legs unresponsive, and they made just the slightest ellipses despite his greatest urging. He watched the water rise to consume him, to flood his open eyes and wash in agonizing waves into his ears.

He stopped breathing. His next breath would be his last, he knew. He was scared and saddened, but ready to escape the unendurable pain. He ceased his efforts to fight, and surrendered. A strange calm enveloped him, and he was surprised to find himself admiring the beauty of the sunlight as it danced on the crystal ceiling of ice above him.

It was not Stone’s time, however, and a force that seemed as mighty as the gods themselves clenched a great talon onto his vertebrate lifeline, catching at the last possible moment the last talonful of tail. Swords of pain shot up his back and up his neck as his entire body weight was hauled by this delicate appendage, against the current of the river and carrying the added weight of saturated fur. The agony of his spine rivaled that of being frozen alive, and with this he said goodbye to this life, and exhaled.

Instantly, his pain subsided, and for a moment, everything became brighter. Then he was running to his favorite thing in the world, Tun’s open arms. Then, as quickly as it came, the light faded.

Excruciating pain rapidly returned to Stone’s world when he awoke to find himself inches from the coals of a hot fire. It was not the heat that caused his suffering, but the return of warm blood to partly-frozen extremities. He couldn’t move, and saw with horror that his coat was solid ice as if it had been painted on layer by layer. It clad him like a suit of armor, prevented his movement, and laid on him like a ton of rock.

Stone stumbled and awoke again on the desolate tundra behind Dak, walking through the frozen night. His ears felt as if they were on fire, and he again recalled how this minor discomfort paled in comparison to the worst he’d felt.

Every dog, and Rol, maybe his reindeer, too, wondered how long they would continue. Some, perhaps, wondered how long they could continue without dropping from exhaustion. Mile by mile the world grew colder and the gale grew greater. Barely walking now, they moved slowly, step by step ever eastward into the withering wind, and there was no sign of stopping. More than one dog began to limp, hold up a paw occasionally, hopping along on three.

Anchu’s regular place was fourth in line, right behind his sister. On the East Woods Trail he first thought they were simply bound for another adventure. Still in his first year, he was slow to sense the fear in the air. Running to escape looks a lot like running a race on the surface of it. The clues slowly revealed themselves to the young dog. A lack of encouraging calls from humans, or rallying cries from teammates. No jovial exchanges between the people, or sidebar challenges between canine athletes. No one was talking, no one was laughing. No one was smiling.

Then Anchu saw the hue of trepidation and anxiousness, smelled the apprehension and dismay. Now the fear reached him and flooded over him. He was afraid, and didn’t even understand the reason to be fearful. Afraid of the fear itself. Now he trudged through the coldest, windiest, blackest night he’d ever experienced. In a place he was sure he’d never been, even further from his peaceful home on the moraine than he had been at Tun’s mountaintop Lodge.

He called to his sister, barely a dog’s length away, and could hardly hear his own voice above the hurricane. He tried again, but gulping the loads of frozen air required for barking brought sharp pains. He abandoned the effort. He was thirsty, but the windswept tundra was as clean as a kitchen floor. No snow to eat. Nothing but rock hard ice with bits of shale in it. He wished they’d pitch camp. Wished there was a fire and a hot meal. Wished he could talk to his brave sister, who always made him feel safe and protected. He wished they were Home, and this thought caused him to begin a whimpering that would continue through the night, unheard by any but the Ice Queen.

Behind Anchu walked people-loving Umka. After a separation from Tun, he was overjoyed they were together again, and eagerly anticipated the time they would go back to their regular, adventurous and fun lives. Following Tun as he puttered and worked. Curled beside his bedroll at a trail camp, or winning a race for him at Summer Festival. Umka thought of the innumerable evenings on the porch of the dogs’ house at The Lodge, Tun singing his songs, patting and petting his dogs as each drifted off to sleep. He dwelled on this vision, and despite the bitter cold, felt warm within.

Alexei was equally grateful for having reunited with his brother Larik, after Larik quit the team to stay behind in the smoking ruins of Tunkan. After the grueling round-trip to Bek’s, and Rol continuing without a break, he refused to stand and return to the trail. The pack would not accept this, and returned to retrieve him after their duties were fulfilled, delivering Rol safely home. Alexei vowed he would never be apart from Larik again. He would stick beside him through anything, even face death itself by his side.

Umka, too, would make such a silent pledge. Once together again, he swore never to separate himself from the smiling giant.

Behind Rol’s sled, out of view of Tun and the team, Larik followed amidst several orphan dogs who had attached themselves to their fellow emigrants. The hasty nature of their meetings, without introductions, left them unaware of one another’s names. The subsequent race up the mountain then into the storm perpetuated this condition, and the insistent wind extinguished any possibility of conversation.

His thoughts argued with themselves, alternately seeking to justify or curse his presence here on this pitiless plain. He should have stayed in Tunkan, where he’d decided he would separate from the team, live independently, emancipate himself from the harness and the sled and the life of a working dog. The vision of living free in the wild expanse of the Chukchi Peninsula called to him. He was ready to get on with it when his brother returned, and Alexei was keen to do anything for Larik, to be together as they had since birth. Apart barely a day, Alexei could see no light in his world without his ever-present brother, and went to find him. He made no consideration of what he would leave behind, and without knowledge of what the future would bring, it was then Alexei vowed that it was life with Larik, or he’d as soon have no life at all.

Now Larik thought of that day, when the rest of the pack came to find him and Alexei. How they decided democratically that as long as they were separated from Tun and at a loss as to his whereabouts, they would join Larik and form their own wild dog pack together. That mild morning was like a dream, and the happiness, joy and revelry of the day was Larik’s fondest memory.

Still, he was thankful and glad to be running with Tun, now that they’d found one another again. He hadn’t realized until he saw him again just how much he loved him.

“Great.” came the response from the other side of Larik’s thoughts, “so now we’re out here and not even with the pack. Surrounded by dogs we don’t even know. Freezing. This is the worst storm I’ve ever tried to mush through, and the people aren’t stopping to camp.” He thought again of the dream, striking out on his own if need be, to live the wild and free life. “I could start right now I suppose.” The debates continued in his head. “I could pitch my own camp and make a bed right here. Well, if there was anything to make a bed in. Can’t just sleep on the ice on the open tundra, you’d just freeze solid.”

He continued to walk as he argued with himself, occasionally opening one eye as best he could against the stinging ice pellets. He’d look to assess the dogs around him, maybe recruit them for his wild dog pack. Sometimes he’d try to look ahead, to see his brother, Tun, Stone or Willow.

This thought startled him, as he remembered Willow, the pack mother that partly raised him, had died last winter in a bear encounter. It was Sasha now. Sasha was now their pack mother.

Sharp pains flashed up his left foreleg as the sub-freezing miles wore on. He could see nothing ahead, not even Rol’s back, darkness and wind-driven snow unyielding.

Now he felt he wished he had reported for duty in answer to Tun’s call. At least he would be near them. Behind Stone and Mother, and Tun right behind him. He longed to be with them now, and tried to move through the train to catch up to them, but the pain in his leg was amplified by the effort, and he could make no gains.

Larik saw the dog beside him begin to lift the same paw. He drew closer to him to be heard above the raging storm.

“I’m Larik.” He shouted into the dog’s ear. The other leaned in, “Omok.” he replied.

They each opened ever-so-slightly the eye facing the other. The blistering wind and stinging snow seemed to subside a bit, seemed more bearable now, to facilitate this meeting. They held this look for a moment. This was not an ordinary introduction. This was the kind of instant bond born of shared calamity.

To be vexed by life’s ills and difficulties is unavoidable. To face them alone is unimaginable. Larik and Omok, who had each felt the isolation of this desperate flight, muzzled by the roaring winds, now felt some kinship.

Kindred in the face of their foe, the mighty Ice Queen. Each thinking that now they felt less alone as they began to wonder if they had pressed too hard, gone too far.

As they began to wonder if this is the place they would die.