Dogsong Read Free Page B

“Is there meat in your cache? I could bring some in.”
    Oogruk nodded. “There is much meat. Deer and a seal that some young men brought by. Why don’t you bring in a pieceof the deer and we’ll put it in the pot and get it warm? Maybe the warm meat will help my memory.”
    Russel went outside and opened the cache. There was no seal but there were some parts of caribou, two back legs and eight or nine front shoulders. Oogruk obviously couldn’t hunt for himself and so people brought him spare meat. That explained all the front shoulders—it was not the best part of the animal. The tenderloin down the back was gone—the best part—so Russel took one of the back legs out. He used an ax leaning on the shelf to cut off large slivers, long chunks, of the marbled meat, happy to see the fat streaks and thick layer of fat on the legs.
    Fat was everything. And while deer fat wasn’t as good as whale or seal or even pig lard from the trading post, it was good enough when it was hot. It turned to tallow on the lips when it cooled, but at first it was all right.
    Some of the chips from the ax flew into the nearest dog’s circle and he got up slowly and walked out on his chain to pick them up.
    â€œLazy dog,” Russel said aloud and was answered by a low growl. Not one of anger but of shyness and suspicion—a low rumble that came from the dog’s chest.
    Russel didn’t know the dog’s name, didn’t know any of the dogs. Always they were justOogruk’s dogs; it was Oogruk’s dogs making noise howling, or Oogruk’s dogs who had bitten somebody, or Oogruk’s dogs who had gotten into a fight. He didn’t know their names.
    With the meat under one arm like large red pages from a thick book he went back into the house. It was still light, hazy light, but the light only held for three hours a day. He knew it would be dark soon. Across the ice would come the late afternoon wind and light, both hitting the village, the light dying as it always did in the winter, dropping fast, and the wind making huge drifts off the beach. Sometimes, in the late middle of the winter, the drifts became so large they covered the houses.
    Inside he put a couple of slivers of meat in the pot and Oogruk held it over the lamp to warm it up.
    Another question was bothering Russel, one inspired by the dogs and he decided to ask it. “You have dogs but there is no sled. Don’t you have a sled?”
    Oogruk nodded. “In the lean-to next to the house. It is old but made of hardwood that came from the sea and so has strength.”
    When the deer meat was heating on the lamp—Oogruk holding it over the flame with a corded arm, a wire arm—the old man let breath out of his nose.
    â€œI have not been counting the summers and winters of my age,” he said. “But I amold. I am old enough that I hunted before we had guns, old enough to remember what it was like before.”
    Russel was once again seated, legs sticking out straight, leaning back against the wall. The smell of the heating deer meat mixed with the smell of the smoke from the lamp and made him hungry. The smoke smelled like burned meat, the salty smell of burned meat. “It must have been something back then.”
    Oogruk made the chaa sound. “It was more than that. We lived so differently, so far back and different that it almost cannot be understood now. Now they use guns and make noise, back then we were quiet and the animals felt different about dying. But that’s just one thing, one little thing that was different.”
    A third time Russel got up. He went to the wall where the weapons hung and took down a small bow, made of wood laminated with slivers of horn, wrapped with rawhide. It had a string made of sinew and after much grunting and heaving he got the bow strung. When he tried to pull it back his shoulders knotted but the string only came back four or five inches.
    All this