Tag: Stone

Caravan Draft Chapter Twelve

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Dark Horizon

Sasha and the caravan moved for an immeasurable period of time, ever eastward. Her life became a routine of rising, hitching up, and pulling Tun’s sled as the village-sized entourage followed, at the speed of reindeer, the great herds with which they traveled. They would trek through the shortening day and lengthening night when weather was fair, with few breaks for rest or water. When stopped, camps would be assembled hastily and modestly, with an eye toward preparedness to strike them and resume the march.

With hundreds of dogs in the group, they were invariably kept leashed to maintain order. This eliminated any possibilities for Sasha to search through the great camp for her loved ones. She kept their faces and voices in her mind’s eye through the monotonous journey. Those of Mother and Jiak, Bek and Nina, and of her lifelong friend Kotka. The latter’s absence weighed heavily on the little girl dog’s heart. She had lost track of him in the tumult of exodus, and he vanished during the most fearful and deadly time of their odyssey. She vowed she would see all of her loved ones again, inquired after them of every dog they passed. She counted their love daily as the thing for which she was the most grateful. Occasionally, during the long, dark, plodding night, heavy thoughts would enter in. Suppose she might never see any of them again? Suppose they are all dead already, from the soldiers or The Ice Queen, or perhaps simply from the heartbreak of being lost each from the other?
“No!” she would call out into the bitter darkness, “I will never give up. Not until the day I die.”, as she battled these demons across the stark plains of ice and snow. All of her working hours were spent walking, pulling the sled, and her brief rests were spent sleeping deeply, drugged with exhaustion. There was little by way of conversation among the teammates in the time spent together eating or bedding down. Each day brought the same dark nothingness of which to speak, and sleep soon overwhelmed each rapidly when they retired.

On an otherwise unremarkable passage through the endless night, beneath a pitch black sky studded with a million brilliant beacons, Sasha came to a sudden realization that shook her from her doldrums. Immediately she called out to Dak ahead of her on the tandem line, her voice cracking with drought and breathlessness.
“This is the night without day, isn’t it? I haven’t seen the sun in a long time.”
Dak turned his head in a slow, odd rotating motion, like an owl, swiveling at the neck. He looked her right in the eye but made no sign of acknowledgement or recognition. Indeed, his eyes looked as if he were asleep or wild with the lockjaw, and this startled Sasha. Dak turned his head back to face forward without any hint of reaction or response. Sasha felt confused and overwhelmed by the shock of the moment, and seemed to sense she was not thinking clearly. She could not seem to understand how to address the situation.

Before she could collect her thoughts, the still night air began to stir. A backward wind, reversing from the tailwind that had ushered the group along, sometimes with harsh insistence. This was a new wind, and unlike that which blew from the polar ice cap smelling of ice and snow. This wind was filled with an aroma of teeming life. It was an earthy-salty smell, rich with newfound variety, and all the dogs lifted their snouts at its arrival.
“The sea. I smell the sea.” Sasha heard Stone’s thoughts spoken aloud.
Her nostrils filled with the scents on the breeze which seemed warmer than the Arctic night they were leaving behind them. She recalled many tales told by Kotka and Stone, Spring and Lema, of their sojourns to the sea.

The stories seemed like fantasies and imagined things: animals that look like otters but are as big as three reindeer, called walruses; and some bigger than a dog, called seals. There were people of the seacoast who called themselves An’kalyn, and lived strange lives without yarangas, without reindeer herds or traplines. They paddled giant canoes they called baidarkas, big enough for six men, and hunted after the giant otters for meat and oil and bones. The sea itself was unique. It was like water, yet different. It was laden with salt and had a smell that was indescribably vibrant and rich. It was the largest lake one would ever see in a lifetime. So large, its edges stretched to the end of the Earth where they fall off into the sky.

The breeze and the recollections and the smell of the ocean awoke Sasha from the mind and body-numbing trot at which she’d been moving for longer than a moon phase. A hundred questions were rising within her at the prospect of seeing this incredible, mysterious, magical place she had only half-believed in. She wished it was summer, and daylight, so she could see all of these amazing things upon her arrival. Who knows how distant it may be? Perhaps there will be light.

“It’s been a while.” brother Anchu called out from behind her. “The darkness.”
His voice shattered the night, silent but for the sounds of the caravan walking across the top of the world. Sasha realized again how deep was the black of the space above them, how empty her entire world seemed out here, past the end of nowhere on the darkest and coldest night of her short life.
“This is the time into which I was born.” she spoke casually into the ether, as if sitting on the porch of the Dogs’ House at the Lodge, lingering over jukkola. “I see it now. Then will come the time when the sun returns, and I will be getting older.”
She gazed up at the starfield that pierced the black veil, the shining lights of all the spirits gone before. Their whispered calls entered Sasha’s mind; “We are all of us a pack.”
“And a pack is a forever love.” she called back to the frigid sky.

Dak turned at this and stopped, stock still in his traces. Sasha’s chest and harness slammed into his backside and she folded up behind him. Anchu was stepping over her with nowhere to go when his neck line pulled him down onto his sister. Tun awoke with a start from the mindless stupor of night travel, and jammed both feet on the claw brake as Stone, in a rotation behind Anchu, added to the pile at Dak’s feet.

Dak stood like a statue, unmoved by the calamity he had caused. He looked at Sasha. Rather, he seemed to look inside of her, as if her eyes were portals to another time, another world, another life. A smile came to him briefly as he muttered a single word: “Mother?”.
His gaze lost focus. His eyelids looked as if they were frozen open.

Then he fell to the ice.

Caravan Draft Chapter Eight

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Cold Light Of Day

Sasha’s eyes opened. It seemed just a moment ago they had closed as she awaited the approaching dawn. Now she could see, through her tiny eye-sized portal to the outside world, the sun had risen above the storm, and it washed the dusty grey sky with a strange pink-orange radiance. She was eager to find her brother, and the rest of her pack, her family. Strife and danger always seem to elicit this response. A compelling need to seek out those we love and who love us. The trusted few. “We find that together we can face that which we could not face alone.” Mother had taught her.

Buried beneath a mountain of dogs, she began to worm her way up and out into the frigid Arctic world. She pressed against the bottom edge of the hide that formed their shelter but found it frozen fast to the ground. She pressed her snout along the surface until she found the place where two hides overlapped, and they parted. Bitter cold bit the end of her nose, and the brutal wind howled insatiably. She was alone in her movement. All the others seemed frozen solid. A mound of dogs were heaped against the hide tent and were covered with a dusting of snow like so much cordwood.

All around in every direction was a sense of vast emptiness. The sun’s light would brighten here or there, and wherever it did it revealed the same nothingness. Flat, windswept ice as far as one could see. It was a surreal scene, this one amassed pile of life a solitary island in a sea of frozen wasteland.

Sasha began to search for Anchu’s scent, or that of the other pack members. She sniffed at the ice and carefully stepped around the edges of two mounds of dogs. Umka was the first she found, curled at the outer edge of the first furball pile. He rose and looked to her, but said nothing as he came to stand by her side. She resumed the hunt, and now Umka joined her, their mission telepathically understood. Next they found Dak, who slowly crawled out of the pile to join his packmates, a noticeable limp in his step. He began right away to inquire as to which dogs Sasha and Umka had found, and how the two had fared in the night. The conversations attracted the attention of Stone, next to emerge from the huddled group. The oldest of the team, he moved slowly and stiffly, and his pains revealed themselves in his face and voice. He asked as Dak had, how many packmates had been accounted for, his speech raspy and weak. He curled again at the edge of the shelter, shivering a little.

The other three continued their quest until Alexei was found, still within the tiny tent. He immediately asked if the group had yet found Larik. He related how he’d seen Larik rise and walk out into the fierce storm, how he heard him speaking with someone, but had not seen him return from the black night. Now the group began to call his name as they continued to seek his scent. On hearing this, Omok scrambled his way out of the pile to address the others. They crowded close together to be heard above the relentless, cacophonous wind.

“Were you guys with Larik?” Omok asked.

“We’re his pack.” Sasha answered, and introduced herself and the other dogs.

“What do you mean ‘were with Larik’?” Dak barked hastily.

“He went out with the little guy and I haven’t seen them since.”

“Went out?” Sasha exclaimed.

“What?” Dak interjected, “When?”

“Went where?” Alexei was panicked by the news, “Which direction?”

Stone had slowly made his way to the percolating group.

“What’s all the excitement?” he asked.

“Larik’s gone!” Alexei responded, visibly shaken, “He left in the night.”

“The fool.” Stone replied as he shook his head. “Bound and determined to live in the wild, I guess. This is no place to set out on your own.” He shook his head again, looking at the ground, as if he knew already Larik’s fate.

“He went with someone else.” Alexei babbled with a certain numbness, as much from shock as the penetrating cold air, “Out into the storm.” He turned his head and looked outward onto the empty ice, and scanned his field of view as if he might miraculously find his brother standing a stone’s throw away. No such vision met his eyes, and he began to whimper.

“He’ll be okay.” Sasha soothed. “He’s one tough old brute.”

“Who could live out there in this?” Dak blurted out, somewhere between worry and anger. “Why would he do such a thing? Why now?” He turned from the group, seemingly fuming, and scanned the empty tundra as Alexei had.

“Shut up!” Alexei spun and pressed his face to Dak’s, “Shut up! He’s not dead!” A sudden quaking sob burst from him. “You’ve finally driven him away!” he continued through tears, an eruption of angry words. “Nothing he did was good enough for you. Every idea he had you had to kick to pieces. All his dreams and hopes of freedom and happiness, and you guys treated them like worthless scraps.” He turned his railing, crumpled face to each as he accused them of alienating his brother. “It wasn’t enough that he fought a bear for you. That he would rather have died to save Willow and Rika. It wasn’t enough that he invited you exclusively to join his wild dog pack. It was never enough. Nothing was ever good enough, was it? Now he’s gone!” Tears were freezing at the edges of Alexei’s eyes as he looked upon the remains of the pack. These who he loved and trusted, though now it seemed those bonds were to be tested. 

To love someone and be indefatigably angry with them at the same time was a complex, vexing and painful dichotomy. The thought raced into Alexei’s mind to yell out ‘I hate you!’, but his heart arrested this before it reached his tongue. No matter his rage, he knew this could never be true. He howled with heartache, and fell to his belly on the ice. “You killed him!” he sobbed. “You killed him! You killed him!”

“He killed himself!” Dak responded in the heat of the moment.

“Stop now!” Sasha raised her voice, “Stop. You don’t know what you’re saying. This is our own Larik we’re talking about.”

“Why don’t we go look for him?” Umka added.

Stone interrupted with the calming voice of the elder, though it croaked a bit. “Hey, hey. Calm down. No one knows Larik to be dead. Let’s don’t get ahead of ourselves. He may even be right here under the dog pile for all we know. Anyway, we won’t help anything by turning on one another.”

Dak reined in his emotions, still hurt by Alexei’s accusations, but more so empathetic to his troubles. “I’m sorry Lexi.” He said, shifting his weight between paws, “We’ll find Larik.”

“Sure we will!” Umka encouraged.

With this, Alexei’s sobbing subsided, and the others stood close, nudged him from time to time, until he could again feel their love. The love of a pack. It is a forever love. Omok held close to the group, and lent his own thoughts, “They’ll be okay.”

Sasha looked up from Alexei, and counted the faces in the circle of hope that surrounded him. An exhilarating rush of true joy raced through her veins, and she vowed to add this moment, this feeling, to her account of good things for which she was grateful. She counted again. She looked behind her, and suddenly her head was spinning like an owl’s. She began to walk, then trot, all around the windbreak and the reindeer and the tent and two heaping piles of freezing dogs.

Her heart sank and pounded against her rib cage. She could barely speak, and kept moving even as she started feeling dizzy and lightheaded. It took will to call out, fearing the answer, the telling silence that might follow.

“Anchu!” she barked, “Anchu!”

Caravan Draft Chapter Two

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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.