Dogsong

by Gary Paulsen

  They did not answer.

  Twice he looked back but saw nothing and after that he didn’t look to the rear again. Out ahead was everything, out ahead was where they were going and he let the dogs decide because that was the same as his deciding.

  The snow was right for speed, didn’t have the cold-weather scrubbing sound it sometimes did which pulled at the runners, and they ran the daylight out without losing pace.

  For five, maybe six, hours he let them run and as the gray dusk was gathering before dark he saw off to the right a small valley between two hills where there was some brush which might make a fire.

  He said nothing to the team but they knew and they curved off to the right to head for the valley. There was still light as they came to it. He stopped them near some dried brush, dead in the wind and snow, but the dogs kept pulling forward and he let them go again. Further up there was an overhanging ledge of stone, a shelf, with a place under it to make a shelter. The dogs stopped when they reached the overhang.

  He used one skin to shield the opening and scraped enough snow to secure it to the ledge. Then he cut a set of front shoulders up and threw the pieces to the dogs and pulled a second carcass into the lean-to. With the other skins he fashioned a bed and went out and collected bits of brushwood until he had enough to last the night and a little extra.

  It was a perfect camp.

  He brought the wood into the shelter and pulled the flap down. Using a bit of moss he started a small fire and in moments it was warm inside the shelter. He took his parka off and turned it inside out and put it back outside to freeze.

  He heard the dogs growl, but they settled the problem immediately and he turned to warming meat to eat. Using the point of his knife he pried a tenderloin off the middle back of the carcass and held it over the small flame. The smoke was bad at first but he opened a hole at the top of the lean-to and the smoke was quickly sucked out by the wind.

  The meat thawed in the flame and was soon warm enough to eat and he put the piece in his mouth and cut it off by his lips.

  He was thirsty and he ate more snow with the meat, alternately chewing meat and eating snow until his stomach started to bulge.

  He could eat no more yet he was hungry still. He thought of the red coarse meat of the dream, of the rich yellow fat and he closed his eyes.

  But there was not sleep at first. Instead he thought of the day’s run, then thought of Oogruk asking if they ran for him. It was a pleasant thought and Russel lay back on the hide to rest—but there was a lump beneath his shoulder. He was about to ignore it, to leave it there, but it was such a perfect camp that he wanted the bed to be perfect as well and he folded the skin back to see what the lump was. There was a stone there, a curved piece of stone, and when he pulled at it, it wiggled a bit.

  He took his knife and dug around the edge, pulled at it, loosened it more, then dug again. Finally it came free and when it was in his hand he saw that it was more than a stone. It was a stone that had been worked by hand.

  It was round, a disc about ten inches in diameter, and smoothly polished. On one side it was completely flat, but on the other it had been hollowed out to form a six-inch dish, one edge of which had a small groove in it.

  It was an old stone lamp. Older, much older than Oogruk’s. Older than the lamps in the museums he had seen that were dug by the college people from the old village up north. Somebody had camped here many years before and either left the lamp or had come upon a disaster which ended what they had been. Only the lamp was left, and Russel held it and wondered at the shiny smoothness of it, the polished beauty.

  “See what a man has been given,” he said. “By the dogs who brought me. By the night. See what a man has been given.” He had dropped into the third person usage without thinking, though it was no longer used very much. He had heard the old people talk that way sometimes out of politeness.

  He used the back of his knife to scrape the last of the dirt off the lamp and set it aside. He needed some fat to light it and he went outside once more to the caribou carcass to get stomach fat.

  “The best fat to eat is the best fat to burn,” Oogruk had said. “Save the best for the flame and you will never be cold. It is a good lesson for a man. Save the best for the flame.”

  Russel took the stomach fat, pried it off with his knife—it was still frozen—and cut it in chips for the lamp bowl. When he had a small mound of chips he found some moss near the ledge and fashioned a wick. Then he took a burning stick from the fire and tried to light the lamp.

  It was necessary to melt the fat into a puddle in the lamp so that as a liquid it could be wicked-up into the moss for burning.

  After a good hour of moving the chips around and becoming frustrated he was ready to give up. But he tried once more and was rewarded when the chips of white fat suddenly became fluid and soaked into the moss. Smiling, he lit the wick and set the lamp on a small dirt ledge to the side of the shelter.

  The fire died to embers but the lamp glow remained and the sweet yellow of the burning fat kept the night away, kept him warm. The fat was poor, he knew, compared to walrus fat or seal oil. And it burned with some smoke, though much less than the wood fire. But he did not need wood now, as long as he had deer for the fat. And there were many deer.

  He could get everything from the deer.

  He was sleepy now, again full and round with heat and food. But he didn’t know how long the fat would last, or the wick, so he went outside and spent some time getting more fat from the same carcass. When he had a fair small pile of it, cut in chips, he found some more moss and twisted it into wick for later.

  He added some chips to the liquid in the bowl and they melted and he saw that it was easy now to keep the level of the liquid up to the edge. Small crackles of rendered fat floated there and with quick fingers he dipped them out and ate them as they cooled.

  He took a thin piece of wood and made a scrape-tool to keep the wick even. Then he lay back on the skins as the storm came up and looked to all he had done and knew Oogruk would have liked it. Where there had been nothing he now had shelter and food and heat and comfort. Where there had been nothing he had become something.

  The dogs were fed and down for rest, fed on meat and fat, fed on running and cold, fed and down.

  He could sleep now. He would awaken in the night at intervals to add chips of fat to the lamp or to trim the wick, or perhaps to warm and eat a piece of meat or open a leg bone to get at the marrow, which tasted like the butter at the village store, or swallow a bit of snow when thirst took him.

  He could sleep now.

  And dream.

  9

  The Dream

  Here now was a village.

  The man drove his dogs out of the fog, the great gray dogs out of the gray fog, as if the dogs were not animals but fog that had come alive. Out they came onto a clearing on top of a bluff overlooking a coastal village, and the man set his bone snowhook.

  There were many skin tents along the beach-ice, each tent by a meat rack filled with black blood-meat from walrus and seal. Steam from the heat was coming from the breathing holes on the tents, and though it was dim he saw children playing with puppies near the tents. It was a good camp. All the puppies were fat, and the dogs had good hair and were fat.

  In the dream Russel could see over the man, could see how his mind was working and he knew that the man was holding back above the village out of sadness.

  The camp was nothing he knew but the playing children and the sounds of women calling to each other through the tent walls made him think of the family he had left when he’d gone to hunt.

  He was in a new land but the people were known to him as all people are known to all other people and their words made him think of his own family and he missed them, and for a moment Russel thought he might turn the team and head for home with the red meat and yellow fat.

  But the dogs were excited and they jerked the snowhook free and tore down the hill with the ivory and bone sled flying beh
ind like a feather in the wind. They wanted to meet the new dogs and perhaps fight and breed and eat and rest and they pulled the man down into the settlement on the beach.

  Everybody came running out of the tents, half-dressed, yelling at the dogs to stop them from fighting, for the man’s dogs were among the loose village dogs, snapping and barking, the sled behind them. After much whipping and yelling the dogs were separated.

  There was great joy in the village. Visitors came very seldom and strangers almost never. The man had come from far away—they knew that from his dogs which were of a strange bloodline—and he was surely a mighty hunter because his sled was full of meat and his dogs were sleek and well fed even though they had come a long distance.

  The new man would have stories to tell, wonderful stories of taking the large beast and traveling through strange lands. They would show the stranger their hospitality by feeding him much fat meat and feeding his dogs until they threw the meat up to eat it again.

  Then they would take him into the main tent and they would talk and talk and perhaps later they would sing and dance to the drum and make up songs. Perhaps the stranger would sing his song.

  It would be a night to last many days, with eating and eating until nothing more could be put down. A great time.

  A new folding.

  When it cleared Russel was inside a great tent. There were many people in the tent, sitting around the outside in a circle with the women back on a ledge.

  There were a dozen or so lamps burning so that their light made the tent bright, hot-yellow with hazy smoke, and in the middle of the tent with his back to Russel stood the man who had come on the sled with the great gray dogs.

  He wore only a breechclout held by a thin leather thong and Russel could see the knotted muscles in his back and down his legs, cords of power. His skin shone with sweat and grease from rubbing his hands on his body to clean them while he ate and his hair hung down in straight lines, heavy with grease.

  He is not a man standing on the ground, Russel thought—he is growing up from the ground. His legs are the earth and they take strength from it, up through his ankles and into his muscles so that he grows with what he takes from it. More than strength, more than substance—all that the man would be is growing up from the earth through his legs and into his body.

  Strong.

  Strong beyond what he was merely, the man had grown strong from the dogs and the wind and the winter and strong from the people around in a circle who watched now, watched and waited.

  The man kept his back to Russel but Russel knew why and didn’t care. He knew that he was the man, knew it and let that knowledge carry him into the man.

  And now the man started to move.

  His legs shuffled and his head swung from side to side and his hair moved with his body and he was not a man anymore.

  He was the mammoth. It was more than a dance, more than a story, he became the mammoth, down to the smell, the foul smell that came from the beast.

  The man moved and the mammoth moved and the people swept back to avoid being trampled, moved back in fear and some children who had no manners cried out in fear that the beast would see them.

  But there was sadness here. For the mammoth knew that he must die, knew that he must furnish meat for the man. And so he knew he must run down the lance and give his death for food. There was sadness in his dance. In his movement.

  The man sang and Russel could not understand the words but he knew their meaning: it was the song of the beast, the mammoth’s song as he moved to his death at the hands of the puny man with the dogs. It was a noble song, a song to proclaim that he did not really have to die but chose to because it was his time and he would die with rightness, die correctly.

  Sadness.

  A rich sadness that took the man and made everybody watching feel deeply for the plight of the mammoth, cursed to death to make meat.

  But now there was something new.

  Now the mammoth grew, took strength and rage. Around the circle the man moved-danced, his voice growing through the song of the mammoth as it first saw the dogs and man.

  And in the way of such things it had to attack. There was no sense to it because the mammoth could have kept going away. But the beast turned. In rage it attacked the dogs and turned its head to hit them and ran upon the lance.

  Sometimes a man would be wrong and the lance would miss or hit the shoulder and slide off to the side and the man would die, would be trampled to death. Then it was not the time for the mammoth to die but time for the man to die and Russel knew this, knew all of this because of the movements of the man in the dream.

  Now he changed again and now he was himself, the man, dancing and moving to kill the mammoth.

  And now the beast charged.

  And now he ran on the lance.

  And now he died.

  And it was all in the man and all in the people who watched and all in the small space in the council tent, all of it.

  When the song was done the children screamed for joy and hunger at the meat he had brought and the men nodded and grunted approval at his mighty hunting and the women moved for him to attract his eye, because he was a hunter of such stature.

  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.

  10

  The Run

  When 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.