Black Star, Bright Dawn

by Scott O'dell

  My friends touched me as I went by. My schoolmates shouted my name. Amalia Yux and Sadie Tellon ran out and kissed me.

  At the end of the tunnel Mr. Weiss and Mr. Gibson were waiting. They stretched out their arms, but before I reached them my father rushed out. He lifted me off the sleigh and hugged me until I could scarcely breathe.

  My mother waited behind him. She was crying with happiness. Tears ran down her red cheeks. She had been cooking for a long time, getting food ready for me.

  The town had built a platform in front of the Empire Café and draped it with flags and clusters of balloons. The school band was playing "God Bless America" with all its might. Mr. Weiss and Mr. Gibson stepped up on the platform with their wives, who wore ribbons across their chests that read BRIGHT DAWN in large letters.

  I was too tired to enjoy the excitement. I almost forgot to check in. My father helped me up the platform ladder and went off to see about the dogs.

  I needed to lie down and sleep, but Mr. Weiss gave a speech and I had to listen, or at least to look as though I were listening. Then he asked me to give a speech. I don't remember the speech. I believe I said "Thanks" several times and that was my speech.

  A crowd had gathered around the sled. They were petting the dogs, feeding them hamburgers and candy. The crowd followed me home, running along and singing beside the sled.

  My mother had cooked a huge meal of fish soup and roast turkey, ptarmigan, and sourdough bread. I ate some of it just to please her, then I fell into bed and slept for three hours and dreamed that I was back in the cave with the wolves. When I woke up, Mr. Gibson and Mr. Weiss were talking to my father.

  "She has only seven dogs left," my father said.

  "Bad," Frank Gibson said. "Bad."

  "And Blizzard has a crack in one of his forepaws. He can drop out anytime," my father said.

  Mr. Weiss was troubled. "With a long way to go."

  Frank Gibson was pacing the floor, pulling at his pointed beard. "The crack is an inch long," he said. "The dog won't last another day."

  I was not troubled about Blizzard. He was a loafer, but tough. He would never give up. I drifted back to sleep.

  The wind woke me up. It was thrashing against the house, making weird sounds in the trees. It had blown the snow from the window and I could see Mr. Gibson and Mr. Weiss outside, walking among the dogs.

  My mother said, "It is foolish for you to go in this storm. Not one driver has gone. I have watched."

  My father got me on my feet. "Now is the time. Like your mother said, not one driver has left town. Not even the leader, as far as I know, has left. They're asleep and will sleep until daybreak. By then you'll be far out on the trail."

  Mr. Weiss and Mr. Gibson had come in and were warming themselves at the stove. They were covered with sleet.

  "I agree with your father," Mr. Weiss said. "Now is the time to go."

  "This is the break," Frank Gibson said.

  "A big break," my father said.

  My mother was making thick caribou sandwiches for me to take.

  Mr. Weiss said, "How do you feel, my girl?" He laughed and was very happy. Frank Gibson had quit pulling at his pointed beard. He was happy, too. "You look fine," Mr. Weiss said. "How do you feel?"

  I was still asleep. "Fine," I said. My voice sounded like someone else's voice.

  "The team is ready to go," Frank Gibson said. "We fed them fish snacks. Looked at their boots. Put salve on Blizzard's paw and wrapped it up."

  "They're rarin' to go," Mr. Weiss said.

  This wasn't true. When I pulled up the snow anchor, straddled the runners, and shouted "Hike!" Black Star was slow to move. He turned his head against the driving wind and started off crabwise.

  The sky was black. The wind blew hard and steady. I went against it, zigzagging down Main Street, which was deserted. But there was something odd about the way the team pulled.

  I stopped the team and went out along the towline. Nothing was wrong with Black Star. He just didn't like the wind. I patted Blizzard on the head and rumpled his ears. He was all right. Moon was all right, too. But next to her was a new dog.

  The dog's body was white and it had dark spots on its face. I recognized it as a dog that belonged to Frank Gibson. He had put my team number on it and painted a slash mark on its back. The dog was meant to be a substitute for Blizzard if Blizzard had to quit the race.

  A fresh dog would be a big help, now that I was down to seven and one of them lame. But i didn't wrestle with my conscience. To add a dog to a team anywhere on the trail was against the rules.

  It took me a long time to get Frank Gibson's dog unhitched and tied to the door of the Empire Café. The blizzard was blowing stronger than before. It was hard to see. A woman ran out of her house and gave me a sack of food. I didn't know who she was.

  "Good luck," she called out.

  I was tempted to go home and wait for daylight.

  At the checkpoint, the race judge advised me not to leave. "You'll not get far," he said. "It's twenty below here at the cabin and the wind's blowing at ten. That makes the temperature somewhere close to thirty below."

  "It was much colder at Kaltag," I said.

  "You can lose a finger or two or a hand, a foot, and maybe your life," the judge said. He was doing his best to discourage me.

  "I used to live near here, at Womengo. I know the country."

  "If you can't see it, how will you know where you are?

  "My lead dog will know," I said.

  We headed into the storm. Black Star would go a few steps and stop. I got off the runners and walked beside him, but he didn't want to go faster. Finally, I went out in front of him. Traveling this way, we made only two miles in an hour, which was very slow. My breath froze as soon as it left my lips.

  Before dawn I stopped and fed the dogs a hot meal from the cooker. I ate three of the sandwiches my mother had made and some of the bag of peep-se, the dried fish that the woman who ran out in the storm had given me.

  I needed to sleep, at least for an hour, as did the dogs. We were blocking the trail, and though there was little chance that any of the drivers would come along before daylight, I thought it best to camp.

  By chance I found a path that led off the trail. It was marked by fresh tracks, so many and so mixed up that I wasn't sure what animals had made them. They could be the tracks of fox or wolverines or even wolves.

  At the end of the path was a deserted cabin. Its walls stood, but the roof had fallen in. Over the door hung the locked horns of two caribou bulls that had fought and died in battle. In my headlamp they showed a ghostly white.

  I staked the dogs close to the porch and made a fire in a rusty iron drum out of wood that was lying about. The cabin door fell off when I opened it, and this I added to the fire.

  After I had warmed myself a little I put my sleeping bag inside the doorway, out of the storm, set the clock ticking in my head for the hour of daybreak, and lay down to sleep.

  I had not closed my eyes when a wolf came to the doorway, hesitated for a moment, then leaped over my body and crossed the room.

  In the glow from the fire I saw a nest of puppies lying in a corner. I watched while she chewed up a snow rabbit and fed them.

  Wolves, if they aren't in danger, can be friendly, more affectionate than dogs. Yet she was a member of a pack, a pack that might return at any time and cause trouble. She might even belong to the wolf pack that had followed us, though I doubted this.

  Fighting sleep and bitter cold, I thought about what I should do. The wolf's eyes glowed yellow in the firelight. While she nursed her pups, she watched me.

  Overcome by sleep, I must have dozed, for when I saw her next she was sniffing at my hood. I lay still and spoke to her in the wolf talk I used with Black Star.

  She answered me in the same tones. The tones rose and fell. They were wild, not even close to being human, yet as clear to me as spoken words. She had accepted me. She trusted me not to harm her pups. With one leap she d
isappeared through the doorway.

  16

  I went to sleep. My clock awakened me exactly at thirty minutes past three. The cabin was dark. I put on my headlamp and went outside. I tied a new harness on Black Star, changed boots on all the dogs, and started off. The trail had a light covering of snow over the ice, which made the sled easier to pull.

  The storm ended slowly as we left the checkpoint at Unalakleet and a warm south wind sprang up. I began to nod. I pushed back my hood and untied my hair, but I still felt drowsy.

  I got off the sled and ran behind the dogs. They were going too fast for me so I got back on the sled. I recited a poem I had learned at school and I counted backward, starting from the number 1,000.

  It happened when I reached number 465. We were going through a spruce grove. A branch I didn't see struck me across the face and knocked me off the sled. The fall woke me up in time to shout "Whoa!" before the team disappeared. I had a cut on my nose and a bad headache. After that I didn't feel drowsy at all.

  At Shaktoolik, the next checkpoint, the trail crossed Norton Sound to the checkpoint at Koyuk. I knew this treacherous stretch of sea ice. It was here that my father had nearly lost his life.

  The blizzard blew away during the night, but as I got ready to leave, the headlands and the icy stretch of the Sound had disappeared. I couldn't see in any direction. I could scarcely see my own feet. A heavy white mist, like shredded cotton, had drifted in during the night and blotted out the world.

  The three other drivers at Shaktoolik waited for the sun to come up. They thought that it would burn away the mist.

  I knew better. Whiteouts could last for days. I was now running third behind the girl from Willow Creek. We were less than two hundred miles from Nome. This was my big chance to catch her.

  I fed the dogs, changed their boots, and drove away an hour before dawn. The ice was covered with thin snow, which made the sled easy to pull. The dogs were in high spirits, their bushy tails curled over their backs. They wanted to go fast but I held them back. It was a long way across Norton Sound.

  After daybreak the air began to glitter like diamonds. White shadows swirled around us. One minute they were houses in a big village, then bare cliffs, then sailing boats on the sea, then trees and snowy mountains. I got dizzy watching them come and fade away, so I stopped and camped for an hour.

  When we started up again and had gone about two miles, Black Star came to a halt and set his legs as if he had come to a cliff. I got off the sled and went out to see what was wrong.

  As far as I could tell, the trail had not changed. So I walked on for a few steps to make sure we were not heading for a crack in the ice or open water. Black Star wouldn't have stopped had he not felt danger of some sort. He could smell danger half a mile away.

  I had walked ahead farther than I thought, and when I turned back I couldn't find my footsteps. The trail I had followed only a moment before had disappeared.

  I stopped dead still. I faced in what I thought was the direction I had come from. It seemed wrong. Then I faced in the opposite direction, toward the coast and Koyuk. But this also seemed wrong.

  There was nothing to see except swirling curtains of white cotton. There was no sky above me, no ice beneath my feet. An awful thought seized me. It took my breath away. I was lost.

  I had learned that the first thing to do if you are lost in a whiteout is to be calm. I had heard this from many hunters. In childhood I had heard it from my father. "Calm yourself," he had said. "And do not move. In an hour or two the whiteout will go away. And you are alive. You have not wandered off and fallen through a hole in the ice."

  I listened for the dogs' barking. All I heard was a loud silence. Threads of cotton were pressing against my eyes. It was hard to breathe.

  I sat down and put an ear against the ice. Sometimes you can hear noises from far off in this way. I hoped that drivers might be coming from Shaktoolik. I listened until my ear was numb. I heard nothing.

  After an hour or so I heard a droning sound high above me. The sound grew louder and slowly died away. It could have been the plane that carried mail between Nome and Anchorage. When I lived in Womengo, it went over our house three times every week. If it was the mail plane, what direction was it flying? Northeast to Nome or southwest to Anchorage? I couldn't tell which way by just the sound.

  I sat down on the ice and waited for one of the drivers to come by. My sled blocked the trail. The drivers would have to go around it and my dogs would surely bark. They couldn't be more than a hundred feet away, but in what direction? I didn't dare move lest I wander off and go deeper into the swirling mist.

  The sun was somewhere overhead when Black Star began to bark. I heard no sounds of another team. Probably the race was frozen because of the whiteout, as it had been frozen at Rainy Pass because of the blizzard.

  The barking kept up. It was close, yet it came from all directions at once. I cupped my hands and shouted. My voice struck an icy wall and bounced back at me.

  There was a short silence, then suddenly, as though they were floating in a white wave, Black Star and my team appeared. I grasped the handlebar as he swung the sled around and started for the trail. When he came to the trail he didn't stop, as he had before, but turned back toward Shaktoolik.

  I shouted at him and tried my best to turn him around toward the checkpoint at Koyuk, but Black Star had sensed a danger in that direction. It could only be open water. The ice had broken up and destroyed the trail. He was fleeing from danger. He went fast, his nose close to the trail.

  We had not gone far when, again, he stopped suddenly. Again the team piled up on him. I straightened them out as I picked my way forward to where he stood. His front feet were set. His head was raised high and he was sniffing the air, turning from side to side.

  I had brought a rope, which I tied to the towline. I went forward cautiously, holding the end of the rope, determined that I would not get lost a second time.

  The trail in front of me had changed. It reared up one way, then another. I slipped and fell to my knees. My headlamp went out. A few steps beyond, the trail came to an end. Beyond its jagged edges I saw deep water through the mist. I had been cut off. I was on an island of drifting ice.

  I couldn't move. I stood and gazed at the icy water. Through rents in the mist, I saw that the opening was about five feet wide. I could easily leap this distance and the dogs could also. But where would we be jumping? Was it another island adrift like the one we were on?

  I tied the rope tightly around my waist. Hand over hand, I found the way back to my dogs. They were sitting calmly on their haunches, waiting to be fed, except for Black Star. He had his head raised and was sniffing the air. He sensed danger as much as I did. For a while I forgot the danger. I built a fire and cooked the dogs a hot meal of blubber and fish.

  At dusk the whiteout began to break up. The creeping shadows slowly disappeared.

  When night came, scattered lights showed along the coast from the villages of Womengo and Koyuk. But I couldn't tell whether we were drifting toward them or eastward into the vast Bering Sea.

  The night grew cold. There was no wood for fire, and I dared not use the fuel I had for the cooker. On both sides of us rose lofty eewoonucks. I found a place among them that gave us shelter from the wind. Around midnight, the coast was a dark line on the horizon. Still, I could not tell where we were drifting—or whether we were drifting at all.

  A short time later I saw in the distance the light from a headlamp bobbing along. As it drew closer, I recognized the powerful beam and the greenish glow. It was a special headlamp. It belonged to the girl from Willow Creek.

  Her light was steady. She had not come to the break in the ice. I tried to make my broken headlamp work, to signal her that I was in distress, but I couldn't get the wires together in the dark.

  I heard her steel runners skimming the ice. She was not far away and running fast. My dogs were silent, I don't know why. I cupped my hands and shouted into the darkness,
but the wind was blowing against me and carried my voice away. She did not answer.

  Suddenly she was running slower. She had seen open water and was being cautious. Then I heard a whip crack and her team ran fast again. The break in the ice had not destroyed the trail. She was safe, on the far side of the water, headed for Koyuk. The greenish light from her headlamp grew smaller and disappeared in the darkness.

  I had lost my lead in the race. Soon afterward a stream of headlamps poured down the trail and disappeared. I counted thirty of them. It didn't seem to matter. As the ice rocked to the movement of the waves and the wind moaned among the eewoonucks, I was in danger of losing my life.

  17

  At dawn everything became frightening and clear. A piece of ice no larger than a hundred strides in every direction had broken loose. It was close to shore and the main floe in Norton Sound.

  Open water lay on all sides of us. We were on a small island drifting toward the Bering Sea. There was nothing to hold it back.

  I tried to stay calm. I built a fire in the cooker and fed the dogs part of their food and ate some of my own. I untangled the wires in my headlamp, put them together so the lamp worked, cut up the sled covering, and made a rough flag. Then I climbed the highest of the eewoonucks and fastened it to a hand pole I carried on the sled so that drivers could see it from the trail.

  The day dawned clear, but by the time I got the flag set a cold mist had drifted across the island. Now we were hidden from the trail.

  I flashed my headlamp. More than a dozen drivers went past before nightfall. None of them saw my headlamp. More went past during the night.

  Heavy seas slanted across the sound. Waves broke in foaming crests. They were bearing us away from the trail and the shore, into the sea.