Dogsong by Gary Paulsen Page B

went mile after mile, and finally he could stand it no more and he called the team around and headed back, his eyes scanning the ice in sweeps as they ran.
    When they were still half a mile from where Oogruk had gotten off, Russel could see his small figure sitting on the ice and he smiled.
    He would talk the old man into riding back to the village, that’s all there was to it. The old man would come back and tell him more about living the old way, would sit at night and tell the stories that made the winter nights short.
    But when he drew close he saw that Oogruk was sitting still. Very still. His hands were folded in his lap and his legs were stretched out in front of him and the eyes were open and not blinking with life.
    Russel stopped the team before the dogs were close to Oogruk and walked ahead on foot.
    Oogruk did not turn his head but stared out to sea, out past the edge of ice where his spirit had flown, out and out. His face was already freezing and there was some blown snow in the corner of his eyes that didn’t melt. Russel brushed the snow away with his mitten, a small gesture he madeunknowingly, and a place in him wanted to smile and another place wanted to cry. “You left too soon, Grandfather. I was coming back for you.”
    He stood for a time looking down at the dead old man. Then he thought of something and he went back to the sled and took the small harpoon with the ivory toggle point from the weapons lashing. He put the harpoon across Oogruk’s lap so that it balanced on his knees.
    â€œYou will want to hunt seals. Use it well and make much sweet meat.”
    Then he went to the sled. The dogs were nervous. They smelled the death and didn’t like it. The leader whined and fidgeted and was glad when Russel called them around and headed north.
    Before he let them run he turned back to Oogruk one more time. “I will remember you,” he said, then let the dogs go.
    He would run north for a time, then cut across the ice and head northeast into the land. He had weapons and dogs and a good sled. The rest would come from the land.
    Everything would come from the land.

PART TWO
The
Dreamrun

6
The Run
    O ut.
    Into the sweeps, into the great places where the land runs to the sky and into the sky until there is no land and there is no sky.
    Out.
    Into the distance where all lines end and all lines begin. Into the white line of the iceblink where the mother of wind lives to send down the white death of the northern storms.
    Out.
    Into the mother of wind and the father of blue ice.
    Russel went out where there is nothing, into the wide center of everything there is.
    Into the north.
    His village lay on the northern edge of the tree line. Here and there in small valleys nearby there were scrub spruce, ugly dwarfed things torn and ripped by the fierce wind. But as the run went north even these trees vanished to be replaced by small brush and gnarled grass. Snow was scarce, blown, and the landscape looked like something from another planet.
    Still there is beauty, Russel thought.
    It was hard to believe the beauty of that torn and forlorn place. The small mountains—large hills, really—were sculpted by the wind in shapes of rounded softness, and the light …
    The light was a soft blue-purple during the day, a gentle color that goes into the eyes and becomes part of the mind and goes still deeper and deeper to enter the soul. Soul color is the daylight.
    At night, Russel knew, often the wind would die and go back to its mother and the cold would come down from the father of ice and the northern lights would come to dance.
    They went from red to green and back again, moving across the sky in great pulses of joy, rippling the heavens, pushing the stars back, and were so grand to see that many people believed that they were the souls of dead-born children dancing in heaven and playing with balls of grass and leather.
    Even in the wind there was beauty to Russel. The wind came