FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"The River In The Mist"

The sudden glare was almost blinding in the dark burrow, like a portent of the coming dawn. Lifting the protective outer glass with her free hand, she put flame to the lantern's wick and shook out the match. The foyer had dirt walls, blank besides two alcoves housing some ivory figurines, and some shelving to accommodate the heavy outdoor clothes of the inhabitants. The scent of burning seal oil, greasy, earthy, yet comforting in its familiarity, coated the insides of her nostrils as she dressed. She would be wearing a layered outfit: trousers, shirt and a parka with faux fur trim, then another pair of trousers and a poncho, both of oilcloth to keep the wet out. She had prepared her sled the night before.

"Were you going to leave without saying goodbye?"

Spinning on her toes, she saw Miki, a squirrel like herself, smiling affably from his wheelchair. Her heart, so resolute a moment before, thawed at the sight of him. The smiling face, changed though it was with expansive scars, had not ceased being beautiful. Rather, its beauty had taken on a different cast. Like day becoming dusk, it had gone from vigor to repose, as all things must in the end. It was only ill fate that the transition had come upon him at so young an age.

"Of course not," she said, and he held out his trembling arms to her. She came to him, embracing his frail, shaking body, kissing him on his mouth, his ears and eyelids, whatever she could find. Even the scars she kissed. They were no less a part of him than the rest, and as worthy of her affection.

"You are beautiful," she said, wistful and half-tempted to pull her clothes right back off, followed by his. But she noticed his tail, or the remaining half of his tail, twitching in agitation beneath his lap-blanket. She stood upright and frowned.

"I have to do this."

"Well, I can't stop you, Lusa," he said, looking her a moment in the eyes before letting his head droop on his tired neck. "But I wish you wouldn't go. We could borrow-"

"No," she snapped, tail shaking like a rattlesnake's. "No more borrowing. We're deep enough in debt as it is."

At that, he screwed his eyes shut and winced as if she had struck him a blow, and her arms were back around him at once, holding him fast to her chest.

"Forgive me!" She implored him with dampened cheeks, remorseful to the core for having touched that subject. It wasn't like he had flung his wages away on careless gambling, as some other men did. He had always been a careful sort, and their predicament was not his fault. But if she had never blamed him, then he blamed himself more than enough to make up for it.

"It's alright," he cooed, and stroked her hair. The pair held one another in silence a while, until she gave him a squeeze to signal it was time.

"How long will you be gone?"

"A couple of weeks, maybe. The trip up is the worst part. When I'm done I'll hire a boat and take the river home."

"You promise?" He raised his left hand, upon which there shined the graved copper wedding band she'd made for him after they'd been forced to sell their silver ones in that first terrible year after the accident. She raised her hand in response, a ritual between the two of them alone, and smiled.

"I promise."

She slipped on a pair of gloves, and mitten-like boots. She might need to climb, and the design of her footwear allowed her to make full use of her dexterous toes, the extra grip thus afforded being useful if she would need to walk over ice. She stopped to give Miki one last kiss before trading the warmth and safety of their burrow for the grey morning light just breaking on the horizon.

Seasonal fog hung in the air, dense as pine smoke, while her breath made puffs of mist no sooner born than dispersed and gone. Her footsteps crunched over the frozen ground while the small sled to which she had affixed her pack scraped along behind her. The sea, a short stroll from there, was quieter than she could ever recall it being, as though it had seen the first traces of sunlight and decided to go back to bed. Storm-clouds, low to the earth and dark as bruises, threatened snow.

She shivered, in part from cold, but also from the realization of what she was about to undertake. It was a risk, but what part of living came without risk? With that in mind, she trudged through the thickets of protruding chimneys, each trailing a wisp of pale smoke, that marked the locations of the other burrows in her village.

The nearest road was almost an hour's walk away. There she would meet her ride and begin the long journey north.

***

This area had been tundra in the past, but the world had grown warmer since then. Barren plains had become evergreen forests, roads cut through like arteries as populations trended northwards. Where before they would have needed a sled and dogs to make the trip by land, now most any sturdy vehicle would suffice. It was different in the spring and summer, when the rains turned the roads to mud, but it was winter now and the ground was hard as rock, and as bumpy.

Lusa's driver was named Osha, and she was a chimera of the elk phenotype. Standing face to face with her would have put Lusa's nose just above Osha's solar plexus, and that superfluous height meant that half the humps in the road knocked her head against the roof of the truck. They were on an especially rough patch at that moment. If it kept on like this, they were going to have to get her a helmet.

"Maybe you should slow down," Lusa suggested. "Do you even know where you're going?"

Osha laughed. The snow had been coming down hard for a full day already and showed no signs of abatement, but she hadn't let that impact the itinerary, even if it meant driving blind.

"Does anybody?" Osha was looking at her now rather than the windscreen.

"What?"

"We know where we want to go," the elk elaborated. "But we never know where we'll end up until we get there."

Lusa took her friend's chin between her thumb and forefinger and guided her eyes back to the road. "I'm not sure your philosophizing will be of comfort if we crash into a tree."

"You're too pragmatic," Osha said. "You need to learn to-"

"Look out!"

Osha stomped on the brake pedal with both hooves, but the truck slid on a patch of ice and slammed into whatever vague shape Lusa had spotted out in the storm. The passengers were wrenched into their seatbelts from their own momentum; Lusa's field of vision disintegrated into stars as agony shot through her chest and shoulder. For several seconds she could do no more than gasp after the breath which had deserted her. There was no sound but the rush of wind and snow, the creaking of the windshield wipers, and the soft drone of the heater's fan.

"Maybe I should slow down after all," Osha conceded, and tittered.

"Oh, do you think?"

"Yeah. Let's see what we hit."

Stepping out of the truck, into the cutting arctic air, Lusa gave her shoulder a tentative roll, and winced.

"You ok?" Osha asked.

"Nothing broken, but I'll bet there's pain in my future. Now, listen..." She had made her way towards the front and was about to give Osha a piece of her mind when the elk spoke.

"Uh oh."

Lusa followed the line indicated by Osha's bugged-out eyes to where the headlights showed gore spattered in the snow. The blood, a bright cherry-red, stood out against the ice in such sharp contrast that it seemed almost to glow. For a fleeting instant the air shifted, wafting the musty iron smell of some creature's draining life into their nostrils. The two of them exchanged a wide-eyed, wary look while Lusa's tail-tip thrashed, spastic with nervous excitement.

The victim hadn't gotten more than a few steps before falling. It was a wild deer, a lean, brown buck with a gashed and oozing head, half-buried in a snowbank. His right foreleg fluttered in what must have been his death throes. He stared up at them, uncomprehending, but watchful and afraid. Osha had been holding her breath, only now did she let herself exhale. She tittered again, not from amusement, but from a welcome relief. They were far from any settlement and few cared to travel in such weather, but until that moment they could not have been certain they hadn't killed someone. As they stood there, unsure of what to do, the buck's quivering limbs grew still, his chest heaved one last draft of mist into the wind, and his round, panicked eye was soothed, remaining open, but seeing no more.

"Shouldn't we do something?" Lusa asked, ears and tail sagging. It was only an animal slain, but it had had its own life, one she was dejected to see lost this way. A few seconds earlier, or later, for that matter, and he might have crossed the road in safety. Why, then, should the stars have conspired to make their lives converge at so inopportune a juncture?

"Do something?" Osha mocked, a laugh not far from her lips. "Like what, call his family? Help me get him in the back. Maybe I can trade him for a new bumper."

***

The dead buck's eye seemed to fix them with an accusatory stare as Osha helped her unload the sled and pack from the truck-bed. Lusa shuddered and looked away.

"You sure you'll be ok?" the elk asked. Having spotted lights in the distance in the small hours, she'd insisted on finishing that leg of the trip rather than sleep. Now she stretched her stiffened muscles and wiped at her drowsy eyes. "I could hang around a while."

"I'm alright," Lusa said. "Thanks. I know you're anxious to get home, but get some sleep soon."

"Ok." At that, Osha swept her into her arms and administered a powerful hug. Lusa made a choked sound. Her spine cracked and her tail stuck out at a right angle to her body, fur frazzled as if she'd been electrocuted.

"Too tight!" she cried.

"Sorry." Osha set her down again, and clapped her on the arm. "See you in the spring? Give Miki a kiss for me."

Lusa watched her pull away until the truck vanished around a bend, then headed towards the main gate of the trading post. It had been a small town sustained by a pair of factories at one time; now its significance depended on its geography, as folk came to trade tobacco and marijuana for dried fish, seal oil and ivory. The only industry aside from small-scale handicraft lay in the factory ruins and landfill, to which the residents had affixed a scrapyard to process their finds. In the spring and summer, it would be overrun with treasure-hunters, but the cold weather kept them away. Lusa would have the place almost to herself.

The gate was made of welded I-beams sandwiched between sheet steel. It was itself enclosed by a barbican resembling a castle in miniature, if castles were made of cinder block. The wall comprised slabs of concrete which looked to have been cut from the foundations of buildings and moved into place here, though sections of it were chain link or earthen berms. The whole affair was topped with coils of rusted razor wire. Flanking the gate on either side were sculptures like totem-poles, stacks of fantastical and grotesque faces pieced together from copper and stainless steel, a small fortune's worth.

There were three guards atop the gatehouse she could see, all hooded and wrapped in so many layers of clothing she could not have guessed their phenotypes. Even their rifles were bound with strips of grey cloth, which trailed in the restless air like streamers.

"I don't recognize you," one of the guards called down at her, a rough, masculine voice tinged with boredom.

"I haven't been here before." That wasn't true, Lusa had been here thrice back before she married, when security had been laxer and a nimble squirrel such as her could sneak in and purloin at leisure.

The guard made an indistinct shout, a moment later and the gate rolled creaking off to one side. After she passed through, it slammed and locked behind her with a resounding clang. Another group of guards, half a dozen of them armed and attired like their fellows, were arranged in a ring beside a

campfire, taking turns with a pair of dice. They glanced at her, but no more than that, being more interested in their game than in the newcomer.

She didn't walk three steps before she was met by a pair of skinny curs, one short and wizened, the other willowy and young. To judge by their similarities in muzzle shape and coloration, they must have been close relatives.

"You got any money?" the old dog asked.

"If I had any money, would I be here?"

The dog sighed. "It's fifty credits a day, or you can turn your tail around and go back the way you came. No charge if you're here to buy, though a room will cost you."

"Do you take tobacco?"

"Yeah," the dog said, and nodded. "Depends on the grade, but five grams a day will probably do it. Let's get you to the office and we can arrange for your quarters as well. Unless, that is, you mean to camp."

He grinned then, an expression as devoid of warmth as the barren, windswept road upon which they stood. Lusa shook her head. In the summer she might have considered setting up her tent to preserve her savings, but not this time of year, not here. Most of the remaining structures were so full of holes they wouldn't have done as windbreaks, let alone domiciles, so squatting was out of the question, too. But if her memory served, then there was better housing to be found closer to the scrapyard.

"Lead on," she said, and fell in behind the old dog and his silent companion, her sled's rails gouging the bare earth beneath them. As they walked, some manner of ruckus went up from the gamblers circled beside their fire, roars of triumph intermingled with howls of despair. The sound of it suggested high stakes. But then, the stakes were always high for the impoverished, a fact the world had beaten into her time and again.

Today she had perhaps fifty grams of tobacco with her, all her currency in the world, and that would have to pay for the boat home in addition to whatever fees she accrued here. That left her scant time to salvage something worthwhile from this place, else she and Miki would have a bitter, hungry wait until spring.

***

"The office," as the locals called it, was a building that must once have been a car repair shop, with wide rolling doors, now welded shut, and concrete floors marred by oil stains and holes where machinery had been mounted in better times. Even after all these years, the scent was distinct, a mixture of aerosol lubricant, silicone grease and hydraulic fluid, a sort of burnt and fuzzy smell that most would have found off-putting, but which struck Lusa with a pang of homesickness. It reminded her of the cluttered workshop waiting for her back in her village.

A pair of folding tables stacked with wooden boxes approximated a desk, attended by a moose in a hideous pink and blue sweater. He was so big that he made the furniture look toy-like, and the amount

of yarn in his sweater would have yielded Lusa an entire outfit, with some left over. He motioned to an aluminum chair with a bent leg, so she made herself comfortable for the negotiations.

He took the bag of tobacco when she offered it, his cavernous nostrils flared and contracted as he snuffled at the open end.

"It's from this year's harvest," she said. It wasn't, but she had preserved it well enough to where she might get away with the lie. But remembering that moose have sharp noses, she added, "At least that's what they told me."

"Seven credits a gram," he said in a voice like a depressed bassoon.

"I paid fifteen." In fact, she had traded some old cookware for it, but the exchange rate would have been something close to that.

"Then you got cheated. I could maybe do you nine..."

"Please," she said, taking a different tack. "My husband can't work, so I-"

"Ten," the moose said with finality. "And that's if you spare me the sob story."

"Done!" She swallowed back the fake tears she'd been about to unleash, pleased that she wouldn't be forced to sell her dignity this time. It was the luxury she liked least to go without, though she did not pretend to herself that it couldn't be bought when times were lean.

"Listen," the moose said as he weighed out the tobacco on an electric scale. "We don't run a full crew this time of year. If you go out too far when you're roaching-"

"Excavating," she interrupted. However battered her pride, she couldn't abide comparison to a cockroach. The moose continued as if he hadn't heard her.

"-and something collapses on you, don't expect anyone to come dig you out. We've already had a guy disappear in there this winter. Do you have a gun?"

"Just an air-gun."

"Leave it here. We get enough trouble without people robbing each other in the yard."

She perked up at that, ears erect, whiskers twitching. "Bandits?"

The moose nodded. "They get desperate this time of year. One of the patrols found a pit of bones with bite marks all over them."

"Animal bones?" Lusa asked, though she feared she knew the answer. She drew her head away in unconscious revulsion, lips pulled back, exposing her curved teeth.

"Well, they thought that at first." The moose had boxed up her payment and tucked it somewhere out of sight. Now he looked her in the eye and lifted his hand, waving his digits for emphasis. "But these 'animals' all had fingers."

"Good God!"

He laughed at that gave his great head a shake. "No, I think He cleared out of here a long time ago."

***

Four days had come and gone and now the fifth was drawing to a close. Her sigh condensed into vapor in the chill air and floated lazily away down the tunnel. Not only did they charge her to come in and scavenge, but she wasn't allowed to take anything of value for herself. Instead, the scrapyard would buy her finds at about a quarter of the market value.

"It's tax," they'd said. In short, she and her fellows did all the work while the owners made all the profit. That was not what she would have called an equitable arrangement, especially for someone working the so-called "roach holes." Excavating from the surface down, removing material in the manner of a pit mine, was by far the safest option, but it was slow and would often require heavy machinery to which scavengers had no access. Tunneling was easier for small crews, but garbage heaps are far less stable than either earth or stone, and the passages they dug were shallow and never more than temporary, unsafe at the best of times. But at least down here, under the ceiling of rope nets and makeshift support beams that held the tunnels open, she was out of the wind.

She happened to turn a corner while adjusting her head-lamp and caught herself, gasping in surprise, a split-second before she walked face-first into a wall of black plastic bags. As she stood pondering on why they would have a dead-end here, she waved her metal detector at the base of the wall out of habit. It sent out a radio whine, high and piercing. Curious, she gave it another pass, to the same result. It was time to trade the metal detector for something else. From her kit, she retrieved her shovel and pick and extended their telescoping handles.

"Probably just another fork," she muttered.

Forks oftentimes made up a significant percentage of a scavenger's haul, but she'd been finding them one after another this trip. She must have come across four-dozen of them already. Maybe a store or cafeteria had gone out of business and their silverware had ended up here? But if that was so, then where were all the spoons? Spoons, if nothing else, were worth more.

The ambient temperature was higher than it would have been outside, though not by much, but it was enough to where the trash was semi-frozen rather than rock-hard like it would be on the landfill's surface. That made the digging easier. Twice she had to stop and listen to the ominous creaking and shifting of the mound, wondering if she was about to die in a cave-in. Both times she decided that the noise had come from a place much farther into the pile, and that she was in no danger. It may even have been true.

The pick bit into the wall as she swung, hacking out clumps of icy sludge and soggy, decaying phonebooks which accumulated in curious layers like geological strata. She scooped with her shovel and pried with her crowbar, and hacked with the pick again. The sound of her strikes began to change, becoming more like hollow thuds. She smiled and pressed the attack, knowing then she was about to break into a cavity. A moment more and she was in.

"Oh, hell!" The smile drained from her face. She put her tools down, panting, and removed her gloves to wipe her hands, one of the few places squirrels have sweat glands. There, just beyond the hole she'd made, was an arm in a puffy, white sleeve, and a hand covered in dense, white hairs. By the rich look of the fur, she guessed this had been a member of the fox or rabbit tribe, most likely the latter.

So, she had located the excavator who had gone missing earlier in the year, who had ceased to be a treasure-hunter and become treasure himself. She set to work freeing him. The cold had preserved the corpse to the degree that there was not much odor to it. Even so, she had to stop digging to let herself dry-heave three times during the process of extricating the body. Its mere presence made her queasy. She remembered when her father had died, the way her mother and sister had washed the remains for burial while she hid in another room, too repelled to assist that sacred work. But the both of them had raised litters, something she and Miki could never do, thanks to the accident. Child-rearing has a way of bolstering a weak stomach.

The rabbit (she could see the ears now) had been next to a support when the cave-in had occurred, which formed enough of a cavitation to keep him from being crushed, but with no room to move and precious little air to breathe. Whether it was chill or suffocation that had done him in, she couldn't say, but it could not have been quick or pleasant either way.

Steeling herself, she grasped the lifeless arm, shut her eyes, and pulled with all her might, but to no avail. He must have been caught on something. Crouching, she shined her miner's lamp into the cavitation and saw the problem: the rabbit was wearing a backpack, which had snagged on a burnished iron beam. No matter, she had just the solution. Knife in hand, she slit the straps. When next she tugged, the corpse slid out, inch by grudging inch, from its hiding place.

Now she saw the shriveled face for the first time, the sunken eyes still open, the yellowed incisors dry and glossy, framed by a sickening rictus made worse by lips shrunken from dehydration. She took a few steps backwards, turned, and emptied her stomach. After she had caught her breath, she wiped her mouth on her coat-sleeve and took a drink from her canteen.

First, she checked the body for valuables. His clothes had no pockets, which was just as well so far as she was concerned, but he had a knife and half-full tobacco pouch on his belt. She secreted both into her pack and then extracted the rest of his gear from his burial place. She found a woolen blanket, a pair of heavy work gloves, flint and steel. These were all items which had value and could be traded, but not the sort of finds that would clear her debts. She found twenty forks all bundled together and would have laughed if she hadn't been so nauseas. And then she found the treasure, a true one, and she could not keep from smiling.

It was a box of plastic magnifying glasses, small, thin ones intended to fit in a wallet. Lenses of any kind were in short supply, since the capital was the only place for a thousand klicks that still produced them. Demand was high, since not only could they be used for starting fires, but almost all the women in her village were artisans of one kind or another, and a magnifying glass could do a lot for fine detail work, or eyes that focused less well than they once had done. She couldn't even begin to guess at the worth of this find. It would prove a boon to the entire settlement, and there was no doubt it would keep her and Miki fed for a long while.

The problem was that the scrapyard wouldn't let her leave with these lenses. They would pay her twenty-five percent of the market value, which was whatever they said it was, and she had no recourse, no arbiter to whom she might appeal. It wasn't fair, but those were the terms. But then, need she necessarily work within their system?

Living always on the cusp of bankruptcy, as she had for years now, required a certain intellectual agility, a flexibility that could be brought to bear with speed and efficiency onto whatever issues arose. There were guards watching the perimeter, but the moose had confessed that they were running on a skeleton crew. For her scheme to work, it was only a matter of finding the right spot. Heart pounding in

her ears, she stuffed the corpse back into its hiding place and covered it as best she could. Although there were few others out scavenging, it might have upended her plan to have someone else stumble across the body and raise an alarm. When that was done, she stalked back aboveground.

As she had hoped, the windswept surface was all but deserted, the mounds of frost-covered rubbish like dunes on a pale desert. Only two watchmen were set for this portion of their territory, and neither so much as spared her a glance. She went about her business in what would have appeared the usual fashion, but was in truth a pretext for her scouting. When she was certain she had found the right place, and that the guards were not looking, she heaved the box of lenses over the fence, where it vanished into a drift to await retrieval.

***

She had done it. A sleepless night, one spent fretting that her ploy would be discovered, or that her treasure would be found and stolen, but in the pre-dawn hours she had pretended to take her leave of the trading post and hidden her sled in the woods. Then, having found the drift into which she had tossed the package of lenses, she had darted in to recover them. Squirrels lack the tapetum lucidum which allows other animals to see in low light; she had gone in almost blind. But, she had burned the spot into her memory and knew it even when all she could see were faint silhouettes. She had done it, that was all she could think now. The weight of concern had fallen from her shoulders. She was going back to her little village by the sea, back to her dear Miki, and her heart was so light that she could have flown.

One more step remained: to get to the docks, which were only two days' walk from the scrapyard if she made good time. There she would barter her way onto a boat and ride the current home. With the lenses now safely in her possession, she could afford to part with every last grain of her tobacco if she had to, and still clear her debts when she returned. It was all so simple. Soon, she would be out of the blasted cold. She could almost smell her own bed, and feel the warmth of Miki's arms. There was nothing to stop her. Nothing could stop her.

She was able to live in that happy illusion until the morning of the second day, when the sky began to darken and the wind started to howl like riled wolves. There in the spruce-laden foothills she was close enough to the mountains to get caught in the unpredictable storms that swept down from the heights. But even then she wasn't yet afraid, for the whole of her life had been spent in these stark climes, and she knew the particulars of survival with no less intimacy than she knew her own teeth. There was a tent folded in her pack, and some pemmican and seedcake, enough for a few days if she stretched it. The storm would have moved on by then.

Still, she was loath to stop and wait when she was less than a day's walk to the docks. That a storm was coming was indisputable, but it was not yet upon her and she might, if conditions favored, reach her destination before it overtook her. Breathing deep through fluttering nostrils, she shut her eyes and sampled the air, which was dry and had none of the faint, dank vegetable scent that portended inundation. In the branches overhead, she saw the scales of the long, russet pinecones spread wide and open, as they tended to be when the humidity was low. She stood there, weighing the evidence, then sighed, re-shouldered her sled line, and went onward. She would be in no small jeopardy if a blizzard were to catch her unawares, but she was satisfied that she could continue a while so long as she watched

the skies and was prepared to shelter at the first sign of trouble. It was regrettable, then, that the misfortune which found her was of a sort she needed more than a tent and rations to survive.

Her sense for the weather proved accurate. By the time the winds died and the first snowflakes began to drift groundward, it was late afternoon and she was within shouting distance of the river. Let the storm do its worst, she had but to climb one last hill and she would be looking down at the dock-master's shack, where there would be a fire burning and a dry floor. She spurred her aching legs cheerfully up the slope, the burdensome weight of her sled forgotten, while the snow falling about her may as well have been confetti to celebrate her arrival. So pleased was she in her thoughts that her typical wariness, a hallmark and virtue of the squirrel tribe, was buried underneath her excitement. Otherwise, she might have noticed the lack of smoke from the dock-master's chimney, which she should have seen trailing over the hill.

Neither had she noticed the eyes peering out at her through the trees, not until someone made a careless step and snapped a branch which had been hidden under the snow. That brought her short ears upright, and her eyes opened to fullness, wild and searching as she whirled around on the figures emerging from their cover. The four men she saw all had differing phenotypes, a wolf, the largest chimera of the four, was nearest her, flanked by a white fox and a wolverine on his left, and a greying, raw-boned cougar on his right. All of them were dressed in threadbare rags, sunken-eyed and thin as saplings.

Strands of conversation she'd had with the moose back in the scrapyard floated into her memory unbidden. They get desperate this time of year... a pit of bones with bite marks all over them...

She brought her air-gun around from its shoulder sling. It was an unwieldy contraption she'd pieced together from high-pressure hand-pumps salvaged from the ruins of a sporting goods store, about the size of shotgun without a stock. Three tubes extended from the receiver: the lowermost was the air reservoir, while the central tube was the barrel. The uppermost, shorter than the other two, was the magazine. A laser pointer mounted to the barrel did duty for a sight. On the right side of the gun was a whopping great pressure gauge which was far too big to be practical, but it was the only one she'd had lying around the shop. The trigger had begun life as a light-switch.

They stopped when she leveled it at them. She took the opportunity to turn on the sight, and then to jerk back on the bolt that held the magazine closed, which made a satisfying "ka-chunk" as the mechanism loaded a ball into the firing chamber.

"Stay back," she warned, training the red dot on the wolf's forehead. "I mean it!"

They laughed at her, recognizing the air-gun for what it was and perhaps thinking such a device could do them no more hurt than a flesh wound. They continued to advance, unafraid, the wolf flashing a grin of yellowed fangs. But while it was true that her weapon had far less muzzle energy than a firearm of the same size, it fired seventeen-millimeter ball bearings with enough velocity to punch through a phonebook. She knew that much from testing it. If it could do that, then it could smash into a man's skull with ease.

"Why don't you put down your little BB gun, squirrely-girly?" The wolf's hand moved to unbuckle his belt, where she saw for the first time that he had a pistol holstered there, and a massive bulge behind his zipper. "We just wanna play wi-"

A sharp pneumatic crack echoed through the forest. The ball bearing had struck him on the edge of the eye socket, caving fur and flesh and bone in on his cranial cavity. His right eyeball, dislodged and partially dragged up into the wound, shone white, while the other focused on her a moment in disbelief

before glazing over. He collapsed, dead before he hit the ground, a smile still on his lips. A mixture of blood and cerebrospinal fluid gushed, steaming, onto the ground, melting frost as it darkened the earth like a stain.

That was when the fox said, "Holy shit!"

The three remaining bandits scattered; she didn't wait around to see what they meant to do. She snatched up the line of her sled and dashed up the hill as fast as her lithe frame could take her while dragging her belongings. Once at the top, thinking fast and certain of pursuit, she got behind her sled and leaned her whole weight into it, her boots digging furrows in the snow as she marched it towards the incline. Once the nose began to tip downwards, she leapt atop her baggage and clung tight.

At first, she moved no faster than she might have done running, and wondered in a panic if she might be better served by her feet, but the speed increased, and increased more until she began to wonder the same thing over again, but for the opposite reason. This was the windward side of the hill, sparser of vegetation than the other slope had been, but far from devoid of it. Tree-trunks swooshed by her face, dark blurs that passed so close she felt her whiskers brush them. At such speed, the alternation between the day and their shadows was like a strobe-light. She leaned one way or the other in a futile attempt to control her descent, but the sled was meant to be towed, not ridden, and had no steering mechanism whatsoever. When she saw the crooked root protruding from the earth near the bottom of the hill, she knew she was going to hit it and could do nothing more than shut her eyes and hope.

The dreaded impact did not come. The root, when the rails connected with it, ramped her forward in a shallow arc. Weightless of a sudden, she and her sled parted ways mid-air. It could not have been more than a couple of seconds, but it was as if she had grown wings. She never felt the moment when physics reasserted its harsh rule over her person; when she hit the ground, her world went black.

Someone was shouting. She sat up in the snow, uncertain of the why and where regarding her circumstances, dazed by the force of her landing. She was beside the fenced-in area of the dock-master's dwelling, where he kept a small collection of fishing boats. Her sled was an arm's length away, upside-down where it had struck the ground nose-first. If she had not fallen the way she had, it might well have crushed her.

The shouting continued. Only when she saw two of the bandits dashing down the slope in a reckless frenzy was the gravity of the situation restored to her spinning mind. She stood without even taking time to check if she had broken bones, intent on begging aid from the dock-master, but saw there was a note fixed to the dark window of the door to his shack. It was Inuktitut transliterated into English letters, and she couldn't read a word of it, but then, she didn't need to be able to read it to guess what it meant. He wasn't there. Some emergency, some twist of chance had called him away with his family. She was on her own.

The bandits would be on her in seconds. Knife out, she cut the ropes securing her pack to the sled: she couldn't leave it, it had too much of her and Miki's life inside. She seized it by one end and swung it around with her arms extended, in the manner of the Olympic hammer-toss. Only two minutes earlier and she would not have believed herself capable of such a feat, but the adrenaline was hot in her veins and with a bestial grunt she heaved the pack over the fence and re-sheathed her blade.

Now it was her turn. Her mitten-like boots let her grip the chain-link as though with hands; she scrambled up the fence with the same ease she might have mounted a staircase, but the fox, fast as a flash, was on her before she could complete the transit, his hand clamped around her ankle like a metal snare.

She grabbed her air-gun. Once she pulled the bolt to let ammo into the firing chamber, all that kept it from rolling down the barrel was a pair of rubber prongs. Because of this, it could not reliably shoot straight down, but she didn't have a free hand to operate it even had it been otherwise. Instead, she jerked back on the bolt and angled the barrel at the fox's head. A heavy steel ball-bearing rolled out and pelted him on the nose with a muffled thump. It wasn't much, but it was enough to make him yelp and let go, to let her scurry the rest of the way over the top. The fox recovered and sprang to catch the end of her tail, and might have gotten it, too, had he been a split-second earlier, but fell back on his butt with only a fist-full of white fur for his trouble.

He growled like a feral animal, humiliated but unhurt, and more intent than ever on doing her harm. Rather than attempt to scale the fence as she had done, he went for his pistol, a battered old piece with a rusty slide, drew, pointed it at her and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. A confused look spread over his face like spilt water. She would later puzzle out what it must have been, that the scarcity of rounds meant this fellow had little to no practice with his weapon. He had forgotten to switch off the safety, nothing more than that, but it was enough. She brought the laser sight, still switched on from earlier, to the center of his ribcage, and fired.

They both stood there and looked at each other, dumbfounded. Her shot had collided with the fence wire, and punched through, but the resistance had been enough to deflect her projectile and make it veer off target.

Now the fox remembered the safety. He toggled it, pointed the gun at her and fired blind, frantic to get her before she got him. Her next shot went off at the same time as his own: hers striking him true this time, right in the heart, while his caught her in the left pectoral region, just above the breast. He staggered backwards and went down onto one knee, panting, then tilted face-first into the snow.

Pain radiated through her chest, bright and hot as molten iron. Her left arm, which had been bracing her air-gun a moment before, fell slack and deadened. She tried to move it and found the explosion of pain so severe that she abandoned the attempt at once.

She felt the bullet whiz by her face before she heard it. There were still two bandits out there, she remembered, and they were still trying to kill her. She let the air-gun return to its resting place on her side and, with her remaining good arm, hauled her pack over to a canoe by the river shore, trailing blood. With the last of her fading strength, she slung her gear into the boat, pushed it into the water, and slumped into it.

She drifted with the current. The gunshots had stopped; her pursuers must have given up trying to hit her at that range. The sound of wind and running water was almost intoxicating when mingled with her exhaustion, and she might really have fallen asleep were it not for the sound of something hard banging against the canoe's metal hull.

Once she caught her breath, she dragged herself onto her knees and had a cautious look around. She had launched her craft straight into an ice floe. But maybe that was good? Surely, she thought, the bandits wouldn't be so foolish as to come after her, with a storm at their back and a river full of ice. But gazing back at the dock-master's place, she saw three of them, the two living ones dumping the dead fox into a flat-bottomed motorboat.

To eat, she realized.

"You're gonna pay, tree-rat," the old cougar hollered from the shoreline. "You hear me? You're gonna pay!"

So, they meant to give chase after all. Wincing from the anguish on the left side of her body, she released the catch that held the canoe's propeller out of the water when not in use, and lowered it down into the freezing river. The smaller hunks of ice were not much threat, but there were pieces the size of boulders all around her, bobbing and tumbling in the turbulent current. To be trapped between two of those would crumple her aluminum craft like a soda can. Praying that the battery was charged, she pressed the starter. An LCD screen flickered to life, showing the power-pack at forty-six percent capacity. Well, that was better than nothing.

She had grown to womanhood in a village beside the sea, not far from the mouth of this very river, and while not a fisherwoman, yet she knew her away around a boat. Limbs sluggish with exhaustion, she opened up the throttle and threaded her way through the floe, with the sun setting, the bitter winds and current threatening at every turn to capsize or crush her, to drown or otherwise pull her down into oblivion. The adrenaline was gone now, and the surging pain in her chest and arm began to recede, numbing to a dull ache, though she knew the wound must be serious.

She shivered, for the cold had gotten into her, and draped her tail over her legs to conserve her warmth. In doing so, she noticed the place where the fox had snatched a handful of fur from her tail-tip and left her with a raw and throbbing bald spot. Even with all that had happened, with one useless arm and death along for the ride, that bald spot depressed her more than the rest of it put together, and the thought that the fur might never grow back, that the tail her Miki had praised and loved so well might be forever marred, was more than she could bear. A convulsion of regret and self-pity overtook her then; she wept like a child, her tears and snot freezing to her face as she wailed.

Why had she insisted on making this trip? She cursed her stupidity as she dabbed her nose with her poncho. When the tears finally stopped, she would have liked nothing more than to shut her eyes and snatch a few seconds of sleep. She could wait until she was in a clear patch of river and catch a few seconds, she reasoned. It would do her some good. That was when a voice spoke to her, a primal mind from the deepest recesses of her being, so clear and sharp that it seemed not even to be in her head. It was as though she had been joined by an invisible companion.

"Lusa, you cannot sleep," it said. "If you sleep, then you will die."

***

How many hours had passed, she could not have said. More than two, she thought, but whether it was four or eight, she didn't know. The storm had relented, but the clouds still remained, thick and menacing, and they hid the moon and its light from her straining eyes. She lamented the squirrels' lack of night vision, which so many other animals shared, though the darkness was so complete that she doubted if even the old cougar chasing her could see. She had tried, once, to use her miner's lamp, and that had earned her a gunshot that clipped one of her whiskers off. She hadn't tried again.

Both she and they were using their batteries sparingly to conserve their strength; the best method of avoiding collisions with the ice, both she and her hunters had found, was to keep their boats straight and move with the flow as much as possible. It was chiefly on tight bends that they had to employ their motors, bends she had, through necessity, become expert at feeling out with her ears. But even when they used their motors, they were electric, whisper-quiet, and softened even more by the sound of rushing water, so she was never sure of where she was in relation to her pursuers. Twice she had caught the scent

of blood not her own and known that they were close. Still, they hadn't killed her yet. Perhaps they were too low on ammunition to gamble on iffy shots. If that were so, then odds were good she might never hear the one which found its mark.

She had weapon problems of her own. It takes a lot of pressurized air to get a twenty-one gram projectile to move at two hundred meters a second; her device could do this five times before the reservoir needed to be topped off again. So, while she had plenty of ammo, she had very little air with which to use it. When next the moon came out, she turned the air-gun on its side to inspect the pressure gauge, and cursed. There was enough air for two more full-power shots. She could continue to fire beyond that point, but the ball-bearings' velocity would drop off so steeply that she would do just as well to throw the damned things.

She had a hand pump in her pack, but it took the whole of her body weight to force the plunger down when she used it. That was not something she could not do with one arm, even if she had a stable platform on which to do so, which she did not. On top of that, her air-gun was too heavy to wield with one arm.

Sighing, she took her hand and stuck it down her collar to check the compress she'd put on her wound. Her fingers came back soaked. The blood loss had slowed, but she had been unable to get it to stop; her parka was now so sticky with it that she felt sure the bandits would have been able to track her by scent alone. She shivered, sopped to the skin by a dampness that could not dry because it came from within, colluding with winter to sap her remaining body heat. It was like she faced a new obstacle at every turn, the odds of her survival narrowing by the hour. Miki's face surfaced in her thoughts as though from the depths of the sea, and a pang of regretful yearning came with it, doubling her over like a kick to the gut. Would she ever see him again? And who would take care of him if she were gone? Why had she ever thought that this stupid trip was a good idea?

A slim line appeared in the east like a golden wire across the horizon. She had doubted lasting until sunrise, but now those doubts were put to rest. A few more minutes and she could see the clouds had thinned and lightened, the storm's passing so gradual that she had failed to notice it. It was warming up now, too. A mass of air from the southern sea must have moved in on the storm's wake. The front mingled with the icy river-water and, as the sun continued to climb, it formed a mist as thick and yellow as honey. She watched, transfixed by the glory of it all, her pursuers forgotten in the grips of this miracle she saw now as though for the first and final time.

But something even more amazing was happening: spring was coming up with the sun. At first, she couldn't believe it. How could it be spring in the middle of winter? But grass and green reeds pushed up through the snow, and the needles of the trees along the banks shed their crystalline burdens as readily as a man might have thrown off an unneeded coat. All the while it grew warmer, until at last it was as warm as summer, and she laughed to find she was floating both upstream and uphill, against the current. The river rose before her, far into the sky, and the mist was only a cloud through which she was floating on her way into the blue. The waters teemed with fish come to spawn, as they did each year, but more here than her village could eat in a million lifetimes, their scales shining like silver glitter as they leapt over the pools and waterfalls. And there on the bank ahead was someone waving to her in welcome, someone she was sure she could recognize if only she could get a little closer...

She snapped out of it, gasping, with the word "Papa" on her lips. The sun was up, but the spring had not come with it. It was still cold, and she was still bleeding and exhausted.

"You cannot sleep, Lusa," her invisible friend reminded her.

"I know," she said aloud, wiping her bloodshot eyes. "If I sleep, then I will die."

Yawning, she took in her surroundings. The ground was still hilly and full of rocks, but less so than before. She couldn't have been far from the coast. She must not give into her despair, she told herself, not when she was this close. Even if it was the last thing she did, she had at least to get to Miki, to give him the lenses she'd scavenged and kiss him goodbye. Let the whole universe turn against her, she would sweep the barriers aside like a whirlwind. Let a pitiful fate be written for her in the hardest stone, she would shatter the words and write them anew with her blood. She would not take that journey into the sky until she did what she had set out to do, and damn the odds.

"Hey, bitch!"

If she had turned, she would have seen the wolverine and cougar pointing pistols from only a few meters away, having crept close while she was entranced. She didn't look, but ducked and hit the throttle just before two rounds passed through the space where her head had been. They fired twice more each, but a moving object is difficult to hit even on stable ground, let alone while both shooter and target bobbed on the water while also being conveyed along at speed: one bullet punched a hole in her canoe a hand's breadth above the waterline, the others went far wide to hit nowhere near her.

"That's it, I'm out," she heard the wolverine say. She knew his voice from before.

"Start the motor, idiot!" That must have been the cougar speaking, his tone rough and weary.

"Dude, just let it go!"

There was a slap, a hard one that echoed down the riverbanks. "After what she did to the boss? Do it, she's getting away!"

Their shouting match had bought her some time. Once she had put some distance between her and them, she dared to lift her head and check the battery on her motor. It was at two percent capacity, the display flashed "WARNING: LOW CHARGE" in bright red letters. Up ahead, the river bent to the right around a knoll grown over with what her people called nootka trees, also known as yellow cedar, great, shaggy things with such a density of branches that the trunks were scarcely visible. They were everywhere along the coast, and a sign she was almost home. As she took the turn, a branch smacked her flush on the nose, and in the shock of it, she formed something very much like a plan.

When the bandits took the same turn a few seconds later, and the cougar, gun in hand, got a face-full of the same protruding branch, they found they had caught up with their quarry at last. The squirrel, laying on her back, had caught hold of one of the many such dangling limbs with her dexterous paw and was using it to anchor her canoe in place. With the other foot she had grasped the end of her air-gun as her ruined left arm could not, and her remaining functional hand was on the trigger. He looked down to find a laser dot right in the middle of his breastbone.

A crack like a bull-whip and her shot punched into him and splattered the upper third of his heart. The gun fell from his hand before he could bring it to bear on her, and clacked onto the floor of their boat. He clutched his chest, eyes wide, and made an effort to pick up his weapon, but faltered and tipped into the water with a splash, where the current pulled him under.

Lusa released the branch an instant before their boats collided; the canoe shot away downstream like an arrow, with the other craft in close pursuance. She wriggled upright and checked the pressure gauge on her air-gun as if there would have been an increase, but no, there was only enough for one more

full-power shot. She braced her armament on the edge of the canoe and readied to make of her chances whatever she could.

The wolverine had left steering to grab the dropped pistol, and when he came back up, he did so shooting. If he had wanted to abandon the chase only a minute before, he was wild with hatred now, not even aiming, but at such close range that he could hardly miss. A bullet took off part of Lusa's left ear, another grazed her cheek and ripped free a flap of skin the length of a finger. His third bullet slammed into her collar-bone just as she pulled the trigger, jostling her to the point that it spoiled her shot and sent it low, where it punched into the other boat just below the waterline.

He stopped shooting, regarding this new leak with brows knit in thought. Then a smile spread across his mouth and he went back to steering, aiming right for Lusa and her canoe. If his boat was no good anymore, then he would be content to take hers. She strained to bring her air-gun to bear, thinking a weak shot was better than nothing, but she cried out in the effort and let it fall.

"What's the matter, tree-rat," the wolverine taunted. He was almost upon her now. "Can't lift your little pop-gun?"

He got his boat alongside hers and crawled, shakily, halfway onto the canoe, dragging his torso right on top of her, his legs still in the sinking craft. His ragged breath blew the stink of rotten bone and blood straight into her nostrils. Crazed, bloodshot eyes stared into hers. He put the pistol against her forehead and pulled the trigger.

Click.

He was out of ammo.

Click, click.

"Shit!" He dropped the gun, then, with a manic, triumphant smirk, wrapped his hands around her throat, squeezing and pushing down with his entire weight, his whole overwhelming strength. But then the smile inverted, his demeanor of cruel victory became a mask of shock. He released her and fumbled backwards onto his knees, hands clutching at the knife Lusa had plunged into the side of his neck. He stared at her, mouth moving wordlessly. She spat in his face, the one attack left to her, and shoved their boats apart with her leg. Slowed by the increased drag of its descending profile, he fell ever-further behind as she panted, watching him sink. Only when it had disappeared into the fog did she permit herself the indulgence of laying down.

There was something warm all around her.

Ah, yes, she thought. That would be the rest of my blood.

On the furthest edge of her hearing, there was the crashing of waves. She was home. In a moment she would pass by the little beach beside the mouth of the river where she and Miki had made love for the first time. Her eyes filled with tears remembering that and she tried to sit up, but her body would not obey her. For all her bravado, it seemed her luck had run out at last. A pity, to have come all this way, to within a stone's throw of her village, only to drift out to sea and die alone. But maybe she wasn't entirely alone.

"Did I do well?"

"You did well," the invisible voice said. "It's alright to sleep now."

Where before she had been moving towards the ocean waves, now she was moving away, far above them, upstream, uphill, into the sky with the char and the salmon, through golden mist, into the warmth of a summer that she knew would never end. A white void ate away at the fringes of her perception, and she could not resist it. More and more, the whiteness gnawed towards the center of her, through the sky, the clouds, and the river, through the sound of her breathing and the rhythm of her heartbeat, until there was nothing left and she was gone.

***

When Lusa opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was a wooden ceiling beam onto which she and Miki had carved their initials. There was the scent of burning seal-oil and the soft ticking of a mechanical clock.

"Oh, thank God!"

"Miki?" The name came out thick and with difficulty. Her throat felt like it was full of cement.

Her husband's face came into view, blurry, but the scars were too singular for it to be anyone else. He was crying, and his eyes were so puffy and bloodshot that she was positive he hadn't slept in days.

"How?" She croaked.

"My cousin took his little one out to fish. Almost crashed into your canoe about four klicks out."

She frowned as the memories came into clearer focus. "I got shot."

"Yeah. The doctor said your clavicle deflected a bullet upwards. Half a millimeter lower and it would have torn an artery. You were lucky."

She had to laugh at that. It hurt. He took her hand in his; she clasped it weakly. They shared a smile until she went to move her other arm and found her shoulder so wrapped up in tape and bandages that it might as well have been in a cast.

"A bullet snapped off a piece of your shoulder-blade," he explained. "The good news is you should get the use of your arm back. You're gonna have a nasty scar on your face, though." Then, teasing, he added: "You'll look just like me."

She laughed again. "I'll never be as pretty as you. Never was."

"You've been asleep four days now. How do you feel?"

"How the hell do you think I feel?" she croaked.

"Thirsty, I bet. I'll get you some water."

He wheeled out into the kitchen where she heard him rattling around for a glass. Housekeeping wasn't his strong suit, she could only imagine the mountain of dirty dishes that had accumulated.

"Miki!"

"Yes?"

"Did you find the lenses?"

"We found them, don't worry. When you're better, we'll meet with the others and work out a deal."

He was back now. She tried to sit up and was surprised at the extent of her weakness, but supposed that was to be expected after what she had been through. He helped her up and cradled her head while she drank.

"The doctor'll be by later to check on you. Do you want to sleep some more?"

She nodded. "You look like you could use some yourself."

"Don't worry about me," he said. "I'm tough."

"You always were," she admitted. This was going to require some coaxing. "Come in anyway," she suggested. "You can keep me warm."

Miki yawned, too tired to belabor the point, then wheeled around to the other side of the bed and hauled himself onto the mattress with the trapeze she'd made for him. He lay his trembling arm on her chest, gently, as though she were a soap bubble that might burst at the slightest touch, and the smell of him was a pleasure greater than summer. There were those in the village who felt sorry for her being married to a man in his condition, but she considered herself fortunate. Some people, she reflected as she sank back into a blissful sleep, just have all the luck.