Fiction logo

On Thin Ice

A tale from the arctic

By Andrew BellacomoPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
Like
On Thin Ice
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

The dogs looked like strange and restless spirits against the barren arctic landscape. The life brimming in them seemed to contradict their surroundings and took on a quality of the unreal. Their harnesses jingled, dull and metallic in the sharp air, as they danced and pulled with impatience.

Metallic. That was how the air felt. That was how the landscape looked. Northern Alaska had been covered over with ice and snow for five months, and though Randall Van Dallen could not tell how large it was, he knew he was traveling over a body of water - a pond or some great nameless lake foreign to all but a small few human eyes in the course of history. The ground was nothing but an endless expanse of white. A white that ran on to the horizon, its shades barely changing in the hard, late morning sun - and the dogs were the only life on its surface.

They looked at home in this bizarre and brutal frozen world. Or at least they took on that quality in Randall's eyes. It seemed as if the cold gave them life. How different they were from him. The cold took away the life from his crude, human body. The stiff joints in his hands resisted as he slowly forced them open. But there was something in the dogs that seemed to hunger for the harshness of this landscape, for the iron pain of the cold, for the challenge of it. Randall wanted that, whatever it was, or more of it. Had he not had something of that strange animal instinct he would still be down south where it only snowed every ten years.

"Two hundred miles to Black Rock. And God knows how many miles from Aiken," he said to the sky, the wind, the dogs, to no one.

"Three thousand, maybe? Four? No, can't be four."

He shook his head as he dumped the remnants of his instant coffee onto the tight-packed snow. It was frozen seconds after it hit the ground - dark beads made darker against the white.

Was this really easier than owning a construction company? he wondered to himself. Easier than carrying on a tradition begun by his grandfather more than half a century ago? Was it worth the loss of everything that man had built with his leathery hands and his steel-trap mind, a mind polished and hardened by the fires of combat half a world away? He pondered such questions in moments like these when the wind cut like a knife across the open ice and a long day lay before him. This life was easier on the mind perhaps, but not the body. He could take pain, though. He could detach from physical pain. He could not detach from guilt. He could not detach from responsibility. From the suffocating expectations he felt there. From the sight of letters from debt collectors piling high on the kitchen counter, or the way his son wouldn't so much as look at him anymore when they spoke, or how the woman he once loved could cut him down with a glance. These thoughts echoed more distantly on up here on the ice, but they rumbled still like a storm cell, and that dark mass was gaining on him.

On the sled he flew across the ice, transported by the savage, muscular strength of the dogs. "Wolves, once removed," he liked to call them. And sometimes he did see true wolves in the distance, timidly weaving in and out on the edges of conifer forests, but they were always too shy and emaciated to inspire any awe in him.

His dogs were stronger, and he relied on that strength and cared for it above his own. It was a simple and pure strength. Not like power, which comes from control over other men, or influence, but a strength that welled up from some dark and unknown spring within. It was the wild coursing through them, a force of nature. That sled, he felt, took him higher into the atmosphere than any plane he'd been on.

He wondered how long he had before the ice would melt.

Short Story
Like

About the Creator

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.