Drop City

word in an hour. She felt bad for Pamela, because Sess hadn't showed, and that was the one damper on the evening--the bummer, the downer--the one thing that hadn't worked out. Pamela was worried, she could see that, and as the hours slipped by she'd said all the conventional things till there was nothing more to say, and then a joint went round, and a jug of wine, and she leaned back into Marco and let herself drift. But now, now Bill was in the middle of the room and people were coming back to life--it was Christmas, there was a surprise, a present. For everybody, he said.
    It took a while, people fumbling into their jackets and boots, searching for gloves and scarves in the tangle of clothes in the loft, but then they were filing out the door into the cold. Bill led them. He was in the yard out front of the meeting hall, Santa with his freak's flag of hair and cotton-puff beard, his arms spread wide. It was clear now and cold to the teeth of the stars. “Here it is!” he shouted, and they lifted their eyes to the sky and saw the light pulsing there, cosmic light, yellow-green, blue, a tracery of red, indefatigable light, light that soared up out of the black shell of the horizon and burst and shattered and renewed itself all over again.

Drop City
    34
    He was moving as fast as he could, the storm blown out now and the quarter moon slicing through the cloud tatters to illumine his way. The wind was in his face, the cold rode his shoulders like a hitchhiker. There was no sound but for the whisper of the sled's runners in the fresh powder and the faint, wind-scoured chiming of the cold steel clips on the dogs' harnesses. He was late, very late, ten or twelve miles out, thinking of Pamela waiting for him at the hippie camp, of Christmas and the present he'd kept hidden in the back doghouse since before she was his wife and just a hope flickering on the horizon. It was in the sled now--he'd snuck it in there, all wrapped in a spangle of colored paper that featured candles and bells and holly and suchlike, three mornings ago, early, when she was still in her slippers and the light hadn't yet come into the sky. He'd harnessed the dogs then, kissed her at the door and moved out across the yard and into the trees with a promise, three days, Christmas, the hippie camp.
    The dogs knew they were heading home, six dogs now because Sky would never run again, and they ran as a team, as smooth and efficient as the conjoined wheels of a locomotive, streaming through the night, barely aware that he was there with them. They were going a good flat-out ten miles an hour, he guessed, and so he'd be there before long--by midnight anyway, judging from the stars. The present was nothing he'd made or bought, nothing you could mail-order or find in a store. It was a gift of nature, like the furs, the salmon, the moose, like gold. He'd found it projecting from the bank of the river after breakup had torn the earth away to leave it exposed, a bone-yellowed gleam against the flat alluvial gray of the gravel bank. He knew right away what it was--Charlie Jimmy, of the Indian Village at Eagle, had showed him one once--the curving dense-grained tusk of a mastodon, intact, earth-stained maybe, but a magical thing, a blessing, a totem to take away your fears and sharpen your prowess till you were one with the frost and the melt and the cycle of lives gone down and sprung up again.
    He squinted into the wind and pictured the animal itself, the pillars of its legs, the rich red pelt stretched over a mile of hide, the tumbling sluggish winter life of the shadowy herds emerging like phantoms from the impacted ridges and wind-blown plains and then vanishing again as if they'd never been there in the first place. But would she like it? He didn't have a clue. It could be carved, certainly, made into jewelry, bric-a-brac, chess pieces, but to his mind that would be a sort of desecration. She could take it to bed with her, make use of it as a fertility charm, but she didn't need any charms, not Pamela. He smiled at the thought and the ice cracked at the corners of his mouth.
    He was late because he'd had an accident, one of those things that happen once or twice a winter, no matter how careful you are. He'd been leaving the cabin on No Name Creek with the new furs he'd taken and the ones he'd had to leave behind the previous week in order to accommodate the mortal remains of Bosky and Pan, two dead men, frozen and dead, and he'd miscalculated along a