Author: G. Gleason, Word Count: 984
Featured in Midwinter Archaeological Story Moot: Live Stream – Twixtmas 2025
We’d had an old house up in the north in our younger days, my wife and I. We kept it, but moved south to have kids. Perhaps, we thought, they wouldn’t want the wilderness for a nursemaid. it was a cabin really, with a wood-stove, but also a good modern heater; I suppose the previous owners hadn’t had the heart to rip out the
old iron behemoth. In those quiet years we had a big red Malamute named Qilak who loved to laze before the stove when we weren’t running the big electric unit and grin while warming his paws Qilak was trained to pull, and from time to time whoever asked would get him in the traces and race, until he was no longer young enough to do it.
Not long after he died and we buried him under the giant spruce that guarded the place, I got a job in Sacramento, teaching kids how to write English like they knew what they were doing. I suppose some of them must have paid attention, because even now I every so often get a very well-written letter from some former student, and my oldest, with only modest irritation forwards them, because we took the regrettable step of naming him after me, and that’s how such things go.
My wife was fond of saying that my words were frozen. She meant it as a compliment and I knew it as one. My writing did express a certain longing for the North. We did visit the old cabin occasionally. The kids enjoyed sledding in the winter, but whenever I announced with too much enthusiasm that we would go “up there” for vacation the kids would roll their eyes and sigh. Not that I mind California, you see. The redwoods are truly mighty, and the food is legendary, but perhaps I buried my heart under that spruce beside the dog without knowing it.
“That’s always been where you are truly you,” was the last thing she said to me on the day she died., patting my cheek Not long after, I retired. The kids were all grown and my pension seemed like it wasn’t going anywhere, so I left.
I don’t know how long I spent cleaning the old place up before winter set in, the year I moved up there, but something had gone wrong with the heating unit. Fortunately the caretaker had thought to stack plenty of wood, so my nights were full of resinous, natural warmh. It wasn’t long after the first night where I had began to need the stove that I heard a familiar singing. It was very much not human singing.
When I opened the door, Qilak strutted in as if he had spent the last thirty years or so as only a moment, gone out to color the snow. He immediately made for the stove, as any normal dog might do, but remembering himself, he stopped to greet me, stretching his front paws low, I bent, although the years had made me stiff, and rubbed his ears, pressed his forehead against mine. There was the smell of utterly ordinary dog-breath as he grinned,
and also the old aroma, of the herbs we used to grow in spring and summer. He had gotten into them on too many occasions. “You would come back from the dead, wouldn’t you? Big old scoundrel.” My throat runs dry when i think of that moment, but my voice only caught a little when it actually happened. He looked up at me, eyes somber in that way dogs look at you when they want you to do something that doesn’t involve food. Outside, I realized, the singing had not abated. I threw on my heavy coat.
Several large dogs who looked like they could be Qilak’s litttermates (and one who almost certainly was his dam from the shy way he looked at her and ducked his head) stood in harness and traces. Overhead the aurora blazed with a brilliance that rivaled the full moon. The seat waited for me, but there was no one else. When I took my place the wood did not seem cold.
I gave the command–
–and under nature’s finest curtain they ran. The dogs knew what to do, almost before I could tell them to turn, they turned, and in the sparkle of their eyes, above their lolling tongues, the aurora in miniature again. We found hills I never knew existed, and conquered them, a cold black stream I hadn’t noticed, where they stopped to drink, whose waters would have been black had not they painted the dancing sky. This was not the tamed outdoors of today, but the quiet, dangerous wild of elder days, that would claim the unwary but at the same time seduce the whole being of anyone with a sense of wonder left. A dangerous beauty.
Sometimes I thought I could see dark, fur-clad figures striding across distant rises, and for all I know they really were here, but if they were real, and they knew about us, they never made motion to say so.
But when it was time to return, we returned. The slope of the house’s roof was a dark shape against the night. When I dismounted, Qilak made as if to follow me so I let him out of the harness, and the others departed with the riderless sled. He would not come inside, but laid his head on my knee, as much as a giant dog can do that, and looked up at me expectantly. So I trudged to the woodpile and set to making a fire in the old way, with hand and heart. He put his chin on my lap as if he hadn’t seen me for thirty years.
He stayed until well after the light of the fire upon the snow was the only light left to see.
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