Drop City

an airplane was nothing to them. It was probably somebody out of Eagle, headed to Boynton or maybe Fairbanks or Delta. Marco let the buzz fade away in his head. He was in a dream state almost, all his senses heightened as if he'd dropped acid, alive to every shading of the path ahead, to the taste and smell of the compacted air, to the swift whispering rush of the dogs' paws in the snow, to the great and marvelous engine of his own breathing and the unconquerable beat of his rock-steady heart. This was his moment, this was his connection, and he felt it in every cell of his body. He wasn't even cold. Not in the least.
    But that thin unobtrusive buzz that might have been the drone of a mosquito in a sleeper's ear on a restless summer night became something greater, louder, a looming clattering presence, until he couldn't ignore it any longer. He looked to the straining backs of the dogs, to the dark line of the trees in the distance, and then he looked to Sess just as the plane broke out of the treetops behind them, no more than two hundred feet above the ground, buzzing them. Sess never stopped running. He shouted to the dogs, urging them on. And then to Marco, everything rushing in a fluid stream of night and snow and the wind they were generating in their flight--and that was what this was, _flight__--he shouted one word, “Bosky!”
    They both watched the aircraft make the far end of the meadow, bank and come back at them, and there was nothing they could do about it, no time to wonder over the hate and recalcitrance that had brought them to this, no time for reason or even speech. They ran. And Bosky came at them. There was gunfire--of that Marco was sure, the snow leaping beside him and one of the dogs crying out and stumbling in the traces and the others carrying it along in a dark tide of necessity--and then there was the sharp explosive sound of something moving at high speed contacting a stationary object, a single dead whack, and they were in the trees and the plane was gone.
    The first thing Sess did was halt the dogs under cover of the trees and tie up the sled. Then he pulled the .22 from the sheath he'd made for it just under the left handlebar and fired two useless shots into the night. “Fucking son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Fucking madman! Scumbag! I'll kill you!”
    Suddenly it was cold. Intensely cold. The kind of cold that ran through you no matter how many layers of clothes you had on. Marco was numb, numb all over. He barely knew what had happened, gone from one dream right into the shroud of another, but he had the presence of mind to remember the dog. It was hurt. He could hear it whining, the thinnest paring of sound, like a violin careening to the top of the register. “Sess,” he said into the stiffening shroud of silence, “I think one of the dogs is hurt.”
    It was a foot or a leg--Marco couldn't see for sure in the play of moonlight and shadow. He stood there, helpless, as Sess bent over the dog, removed it from the traces and lifted it up in his arms and carried it to the sled. He watched Sess set the dog in the body of the sled, beside the stiff-legged carcass of the coyote, and watched as Sess rearranged the dogs, the breath of dog and man alike hanging dense in the air. There came a distant sound at some point during this ordering of events--Marco couldn't have said when, exactly, whether it was a matter of seconds or minutes--and there was a flare of light some two or three miles off. “Good,” Sess muttered, working in the cold, every pause and syllable an engine puffing in the night, “good, the son of a bitch. Good. I hope he's burned up and dead.”
    They reached the cabin in minutes, and minutes later they were going through the same ritual as the night before--unharnessing, staking, lighting the fire, settling the kettle and the big blackened pot on the stove--but they hardly spoke. They were like relief workers, methodical, bloodless, following the logic and the dictates of the moment. Sess brought the dog in--it was Sky, one staring blue eye, one deep unhurried brown--and set him on the floor under the light of the lantern. The dog whined softly and Marco saw that its right front foot was gone, or the toes anyway. Sess stalked across the room and came back with a bleached-thin flannel shirt and tore it into strips. “Can I do anything?” Marco asked and Sess said he could go out and feed the dogs, that would be a help.
    Only after they'd eaten did the shock