Black Star, Bright Dawn

by Scott O'dell

  I held on to the handlebar. I planted my feet on the mat. The starter counted down from ten, down to three, down to two, down to one. Yet when he shouted, "Go, driver, go!" and the dogs lunged forward, I lost my footing but held tight to the handlebar. The handler's sled slowed us.

  I got back on the mat and we went slowly down the street. Crowds cheered us, and a little girl ran out and gave me a pink flower.

  The drivers started two minutes apart, Oteg thirty-two minutes after I did. The trail was packed hard by the sleds in front. Four teams passed me and I passed no one. Late in the afternoon Oteg caught up with me. He was pleased.

  "You listen," he said. "You are not like my nine daughters. Good!"

  At five o'clock we came to the checking station at Knik. We had traveled fifty-nine miles. I was thirty-fifth and he was thirtieth among all the sixty-nine drivers.

  "Good for us," Oteg said. "Tonight, tomorrow, we run where we are. The day after tomorrow we move up, to thirty and twenty-five, maybe."

  A warm wind blew from the south as we left Knik. The stars sparkled in a clear sky. Near midnight, before we reached Rabbit Lake, the next checking place, I heard the sounds. I shone my headlamp on Black Star to see if he had heard them, too. He always ran with his ears laid back tight to his head. They were cocked up now. He was listening. He heard the same thing I did.

  I thought the sounds came from the teams ahead of us. Then they were on my left. They were softer than those moose or caribou make, more like fox or wolverine. I turned and shone my headlamp on the back trail. The nearest team was a mile away.

  There were no more sounds, but Black Star still ran with his ears cocked up, listening.

  The sky clouded over. The wind shifted to the north and blew bitter cold. I put on my heavy parka and my mittens, which were warmer than my gloves. When we came to Rabbit Lake at two o'clock in the morning, many teams were already there, camped on the hillside.

  After we checked in and picked up the food our plane had dropped, we traveled for half an hour and made camp.

  "It's no good to stay at the check stations," Oteg said. "This way there's no fighting among the teams and so the dogs get more rest."

  I staked out the team and cooked them their supper of meat and salmon. Oteg shared his supper with me. It was a string of herring eggs and six candlefish the size of my little finger. The wind blew hard and was very cold.

  I asked him if he had heard animals stalking us before we came to Rabbit Lake. "They could have been wolves. But I never saw them."

  "No, you can't see the wind," Oteg said. "The wind has no head and no body. Only a voice."

  "I heard the sounds."

  "So did I. It was King Raven! He has disguised himself and become the wind. He wishes to cause us trouble."

  Oteg went to his sled and came back with a handful of small, sharp knives. They were carved from yellow walrus tusk and tied in a bunch with sinew. I had seen their like before. They were called "weather cutters." Many people in Ikuma owned them and believed that they could change the weather by cutting it into pieces, just as they wished it to be.

  Oteg did a dance in the snow. He shook the bundle of knives above his head and muttered, "Wind, who blows cold from the north, we've had enough of you. We do not wish to freeze and soon we must travel fast. Speak to your sister, South Wind. See that she replies."

  Sleds were passing us. We harnessed the team and set off on the trail to Skwentna. Before we had gone far, the wind that had buffeted us during the night died away. Near dawn, in the darkest of the night, I heard the sounds once more.

  At dawn, while we were moving amid tangled brush, I caught a glimpse of animals traveling. It was a pack of wolves. The leader was white with dark yellow markings on his face.

  Suddenly Black Star brought the team to a halt. I shouted, "Go!" He did not move. I walked down the line of dogs and shouted again. Still he did not move. He threw his head back and closed his eyes. A chill sound came from his throat. It was not one sound but many. It was the sound of ice breaking up on the big river. It was the sound the sea makes in an angry storm. It was like the sound the little snow owl makes on a wintry night.

  The leader of the wolves answered him. The two howled together. The sounds became one. They rose and fell, rose and fell. Then they trailed off to a whisper.

  I waited. The wolf leader moved away. Then I heard him no longer. Black Star fell silent. I scolded him and he scolded me back. Then I bent down and put my nose against his to show him that we were still friends.

  Oteg said, "Raven was the wind. Now he has changed. Now he is the leader of the wolves. He has many faces. But I know his tricks. I have a charm against them."

  He reached in a pouch he wore at the end of a string and took out an amulet of blue beads and heron feathers. He rubbed it between his palms and muttered a few words, which I did not understand.

  "Have no fear," he said. "Now King Raven will not follow us."

  When I was a child I heard about King Raven. How we people were only specks of dust until he came. How he picked up a speck of dust and rolled it hard on his black tongue and dropped it into the sea. After that, many people and animals appeared.

  Among the animals were two beautiful wolf-dogs. They roamed the hills. They fed upon fat rabbits and drank sweet water from the rivers. They were very happy until Raven, the jealous trickster, came and gave them a burdensome task. He commanded them to sit on a lonely rock by the shore. He told them to bark loudly twice each day and make the tide flee. Thus, every day the sea has two low tides, forever.

  "King Raven is trying to lure the dogs," Oteg said. "He will fail."

  I did not believe much in Raven and his power, though more than the Reverend Cartwright thought I did. But from that moment I kept an eye on Black Star in the daytime and always at night.

  9

  We came to Skwentna early in the morning. We had run a hundred and forty-eight miles from Anchorage. I was still thirty-fifth and Oteg thirtieth.

  Teams were camped everywhere in the icy meadow. Blue smoke drifted up from their fires. An airplane landed and brought food for us and the other teams.

  We went on for half an hour and camped until four o'clock in the afternoon, then we left for Finger Lake. It was two hours after midnight when we got there. Our places in the race had not changed.

  Oteg said, "We will sleep until we have good daylight. Rainy Pass Lodge is the next station. The trail twists like a snake. It goes down and down and back and forth. It is the most dangerous part of the trail. You can go over the bluff and fall into Happy River Gorge. We go rapidly until we get there."

  "Good," I said. "I am tired of poking along."

  We started with Oteg in front. My dogs were eager to run and I let them. We caught up in a few minutes and passed him. It was wonderful to hear the runners sing, to feel the rush of the wind, to see the trail skim by and the dogs running with their ears laid back.

  Before I got to the bluff, a sled came up fast behind me. It was number 41, the girl I had talked to the morning the race began. Her name was Katy Logan and she lived in Ohio.

  She had a team of pure white Samoyeds, fifteen of them. Samoyeds are dogs raised in Asia to round up reindeer. She shouted "Trail!" in a haughty voice, and I moved over as much as I could to let her pass. She was soon out of sight.

  At the bluff I took Oteg's advice and slowed down. Snow began to fall. It hid the tracks of the drivers in front of me—also, the trail the snowmobiles had cleared out for us. The red metal stakes that marked the trail were far apart and some had fallen down.

  I rode with one foot on the mat and the other dragging in the snow. Still, we went much faster than I wanted to.

  As we rounded the second steep turn in the trail, suddenly I came upon a sled lying on its side. The dogs were tangled in their harness.

  I jumped off and shouted "Whoa!" at Black Star, but our heavy sled ground on. As I passed the wreck, as the girl stared helplessly at me, Black Star veered off the trail and
brought us to a halt against a snowbank.

  We were on the very edge of the bluff. I looked straight down and saw the banks of the frozen river. Black Star glanced back at me and wagged his bushy tail. He was proud of himself. I told him what a fine dog he was.

  The girl was covered with snow. Her frozen pigtails stuck out like sticks. She had rolled up the sleeve of her parka and was rubbing a swollen arm. Her dogs were trying to free themselves from their tangled harness. She was too dazed to help them. After I straightened out her team, I went over to the sled, which was teetering on the edge of the bluff.

  Her sled weighed no more than thirty pounds, a beautiful racer barely two feet wide and six feet long. It had a fold-down seat over the runners. I picked it up and set it on the trail. The carriage had broken, but both runners were in good shape.

  Oteg rounded the steep turn, singing at the top of his big voice, and pulled up behind me. He was not surprised to see the pile-up. He took it in at a glance.

  "No time for talk," he said. "You go with your dogs," he said to the girl and to me, "You go next. We'll talk later at Rainy Pass."

  We started down the gorge and passed an abandoned sled but no driver or dogs. The snow was falling harder than before.

  In the middle of the afternoon we came to Rainy Pass Lodge, having covered seventy-four miles from Finger Lake, two hundred and nineteen miles since we left Anchorage. We were running twenty-first and twenty-second in the race.

  Oteg said, "We will feed the dogs now and rest until night comes. If the snow stops, we go. Night is best for traveling."

  10

  It stopped snowing, but we did not go. The marshal "froze" the race. No one was allowed to move. A radio message from Rohn, the next checkpoint, said that the weather was so bad, planes could not fly in with food.

  We had a hard time finding a place to camp. The fields were covered with staked-out teams. Before we did find a place, word came that the "freeze" would last for at least two days. Oteg found a place on the riverbank among some stunted spruce trees.

  He cut a hole in the ice near the riverbank and caught eight big trout, more than enough for the dogs and our supper. The fish turned hard as wood the instant the cold wind struck them. Oteg hacked them up into pieces and I put them in the cooker.

  "We will be here for two days. Maybe three, who knows?" he said. "It is best to build a snowhouse."

  "I will not be here," Katy Logan said. "I am going home."

  "Too bad," Oteg said.

  He picked out a flat place under the trees and we scraped off all the new snow, down to the snow that was old and packed hard. "Now we get out the knives and cut some blocks," he said. "About two feet one way and two feet the other way. Square."

  Katy Logan was nursing her swollen arm, but she got out a knife. I had helped to make an igloo at school, so I showed her how to cut the blocks. I handed them to Oteg and he put them side by side in a circle. When he had one row, he trimmed off the top edges so that each of the blocks slanted in.

  We worked until there was a circle three rows high. It was not yet an igloo, but it helped to shield us from the bitter wind. After we fed the dogs and cooked the trout, we put our sleeping bags inside the circle, got into them, and went to sleep. Before morning we were three mounds of snow.

  At dawn we began again on the igloo. One by one Oteg added rows of blocks until they met above the top. He got down on his knees, cut a round hole in the wall, and crawled out. The cracks between the blocks were filled with soft snow. The opening at the top of the dome was closed with a piece of clear ice.

  We finished at dusk. Oteg caught more trout. I fed the dogs and cooked supper, which we ate in our igloo. It was below zero outside and above zero inside our new house. I was warm for the first time since I left Anchorage.

  The wind blew in wild gusts. It smashed against the snowbank that had piled up outside. Then it rumbled over the igloo's dome and shrieked away into the night.

  "The wind cannot get hold of the roof. It is too slippery," Oteg said. "Igloos are very good in the wind. They are good all the time except in the summer, when they melt and fall on your head. If we stay here another day and night we will build a porch for ourselves, a very good place to cook in."

  Katy Logan asked, "Our friend keeps saying na-ma-kto. What does it mean?"

  "Na-ma-kto means 'very good,'" I said.

  Oteg had brought a lamp with him and set it up between us. It was not really a lamp, simply a hollowed-out piece of soapstone. Filled with chunks of frozen seal and fitted with a long cotton wick, it glowed and made blue shadows dance against the walls. I should have felt snug but I didn't. I wanted to be on the trail.

  I had not seen or heard the wolves again since the night we were near Skwentna. I did not hear them now. Black Star was tied tightly to a tree, but I brought him inside the snowhouse. He lay quietly beside me except when the wind moaned. Then he raised his head and pricked his ears.

  "It is very good to have the dog here," Oteg said. "No rope will hold him with Raven prowling about."

  Katy Logan asked what Oteg was talking about. When I told her, she said, "Do you believe all that stuff about Raven?"

  "Not when the sun is shining," I said. "But on nights like this, I wonder."

  Somehow Oteg got Katy Logan's sled through the door. He took off the handlebar. Then he began to wrap the sinew around the places where the sled was broken.

  The wind had shifted from north to east and blew harder now in gusts.

  "With Raven about, we are lucky to have such a strong snowhouse," Oteg said. "I feel sorry for this Raven sometimes. I remember what a poor beginning this fellow had. At first, when he was only a speck of dust and people were only stones, he was the smallest bird that ever lived. Believe me, he was no bigger than a melon seed and he had a voice like a small mosquito."

  I translated everything Oteg said.

  "One day the Great Spirit visited the earth to look at the creatures he had created. Walking through a village at evening time, he heard people singing the sunset song. The trees were filled with birds of every color, but none of them were singing. All were silent, listening to the sunset song.

  "'Why do the birds not sing?' the Great Spirit asked.

  "'Because they have no voices,' the people said.

  "'What a terrible mistake,' the Great Spirit said.

  "At once he called all the birds together. Hundreds, thousands of them came from everywhere. They darkened the sky. They made thunder with their beating wings.

  "'At dawn,' he said to them, 'you are to fly as high as you can. When you reach the limits of your strength, then you will find your voice. The bird who flies the highest will find the most beautiful voice in the world and return to earth to sing the most beautiful songs.'

  "Raven, who was no bigger than a mosquito and sang like a mosquito, knew that he had no chance to fly high, so he thought of a scheme. He hid himself in Eagle's tail. Eagle flew higher than any of the birds. But just as the Great Spirit was about to give him the most beautiful voice in the world, Raven crawled out of his tailfeathers and flew even higher. Then something awful happened that he had not imagined."

  The lamp began to sputter. Oteg put in two chunks of frozen seal. Then he put a big handful of tea leaves in a pot and began to work on the sled again.

  "What about Raven?" I asked him. "You were saying that something awful happened to him."

  "Oh, yes, it was awful. When he got back to earth, he found out that the Great Spirit had watched him all the time. He had seen Raven crawl into Eagle's tailfeathers.

  "'Raven,' the Great Spirit said, 'you are a cheat. So therefore I will not give you the most beautiful voice in the world. Instead, your voice will be the worst, caw, caw, caw.'"

  Oteg poured tea for us. It was so black and bitter I couldn't get it down. He drank mine, then three cups more, then ate the tea leaves. Then he smacked his lips and looked content. I wondered if he had come to race the Iditarod or just to tell stories and have a good t
ime.

  It stopped snowing during the night and the gray dawn was quiet. But drifts were piled high against the doorway. Katy Logan and Oteg were fast asleep. I had to dig a tunnel to get out of the igloo and attend to the dogs.

  They were buried in the snow. Just their noses showed. I dug them out, walked them around, and fed them. By that time Oteg was up. He looked at the clear sky.

  "Very good," he said, smiling.

  After he had fed his team and I had fed Katy Logan's, we went to the station. The drivers were voting whether to stay or leave. There was a blizzard in Rohn, the next station, the radio said.

  The vote was divided. Half of the drivers, of those still left in the race, voted to stay and half voted to leave.

  Oteg voted to stay. "This is no time to head off in a blizzard," he said to me. "The race has just started. We do not need trouble now. We have a long way yet to go."

  I could see what he wanted to do. He wanted to build a porch on the snowhouse. He wanted to tell stories, burn his big lamp, brew his bitter tea and drink five or six mugs, then eat the black leaves. I voted to go on to Rohn. He was angry and muttered something about me and his daughters.

  The marshal decided to hold the drivers until nightfall. But at noon an airplane came in from Nome with word that the weather had cleared ahead, and the marshal sent the drivers off. The airplane was going to Anchorage. Oteg and I helped Katy Logan get herself and her dogs on board. When he picked up her sled, she told him to keep it. "I will never use it again," she said. "It's yours."

  We carried the sled back to the igloo.

  "Get on," Oteg told me. "Sit on the seat and try the brake."

  I tried it and put one hand on the bar and one foot on the snow. I sat on the folding seat. I stood on the runners and pretended that I was driving a team of barking dogs.