Drop City

River.
    She woke to the sound of Sess's voice rising high and strained over the clamor of the dogs and the bludgeoning thump and screech of a resistant object jerked by main force through the high grass and willow. “Gee!” he shouted, “gee, you fuckers!” And “Haw! Haw! I said. _Haw!__” She raised her head, peered out the window. Sun slammed at the yard, at the garden, at the still-smoldering smudge fires. Most of the plants were standing and green still, but she could see where the frost had blackened some of the leaves of the snap beans and the cherry tomatoes. It was something that registered with her in the moment of waking--frost, smudge fires, minimal damage, new sun, more sun--but which she hardly had time to reflect on before a blur of man, dog and sled interposed itself between the window and the garden and then was gone. “Haw!” Sess cried. _“Haw!”__
    Then she was out in the yard in a pair of shorts and a sweatshirt, seven forty-eight by the clock she insisted on over Sess's objections, and the morning warming toward the low forties. She watched him make a turn at the edge of the woods, then tear up along the bank of the river, turn again and come straight for her with the dogs digging at their harnesses and a whole world of dust and threshed weed gone up into the air. He did manage to stop them more or less in the yard, throwing the brake (a sort of anchor that flailed and leapt and finally dug a furrow a hundred feet long), and wearing out the heels of his boots while he roared commands and the two wheel dogs went for each other's throats in one of those ill-tempered canine disputes that seemed to erupt every five minutes throughout the day. He let go the handles and got in between the dogs, kicking and cursing, until they finally got over whatever it was and sat panting in their traces. Sess was powdered with dust and weed, his shirt was torn and both his forearms were drooling blood where the dogs had bitten him. “Hey, baby,” he smiled, “want to go for a ride? I'll take you round the world--you know what that means?”
    “Don't get dirty on me, Sess.”
    Then he was holding on to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “You know I wouldn't do that,” he said, breathing into her ear.
    The dogs turned to look at them, ten wolfish eyes fixated on Sess's back, Lucius, in the lead, looking as if he could go out and run a hundred miles without even breathing hard. Sess had them hooked up to his training rig, a heavy narrow box of dense wet wood with three-inch aspen poles for runners and two pairs of wheels he must have scavenged from defunct wheelbarrows--or maybe children's tricycles--at the four corners. The wheels were useless. The rig weighed a ton. He just wanted to work the dogs, he told her, train them to work as a team, and to pull weight.
    “I've been thinking I might take them up the trapline today,” he said, “just a little ways, to give them the sight and smell of it and to maybe cut back some of the brush and branches and whatnot. I'll be back tonight. Late, though. Real late.”
    She was amazed. “With that? The whole thing'll fall apart before you go two miles.”
    He didn't try to deny it. “The wheels'll have to come off, I guess--when we get into the muskeg, anyway. I'm just going to let them skid the thing till they poop out. And by the way, really boil the hell out of that piece of bear for the stew--they're worse for trichina than pigs even.”
    She knew that, knew it from twenty years ago, but she didn't say anything. The bear was quartered and hanging from the poles at the bottom of the cache, they'd had the liver fried with onions for last night's dinner, and the big yellow-white chunks of its summer-laid fat were already rendered and put up in coffee cans to cool and harden.
    “And you might,” he added, and it was the last thing he said to her, “you might want to keep after that hide, scrape it good and then stretch it and hang it out where it can dry.”
    Later, after she'd made herself a sandwich with the leftover bread and drunk enough coffee to get her nerve ends firing, she dragged the bear's hide out to the picnic table and sat in the sun working the flesh off it with the _ulu__ Sess had given her for a birthday present. The _ulu__ was an Inuit tool, a bone handle attached to a crescent-shaped blade, and it was ideal for scraping hides, a task she guessed she would be performing pretty regularly as the winter months came on and her husband