Free Dogsong by Gary Paulsen

inside, and Russel felt warm to see it.
    But he could not see the man and he did not know the meat, and they were important to him.
    The fog came again, and this time when it cleared the man was standing near the doorway in a parka. The parka was deerskin and he held a long spear with some form ofblack stone point, chipped black stone that was deep and shining dark. He was going out hunting and Russel knew, sensed, that he was going to hunt whatever had made the coarse meat and yellow fat and Russel wanted to go with him.
    The woman kept smiling and the children kept laughing but the woman was worried and said something in a language that Russel could not understand. It was words, and they were similar to what he knew, but enough different so they didn’t quite make sense to him.
    As the man turned to leave the hut the woman said something to him and he stopped and looked at her.
    Her eyes glowed at him and there was much fear in them, so much that Russel was afraid, and he knew that there was some fear in the man, too, but hidden.
    Russel would not have known that except that he felt close to the man. More than close somehow.
    The man left the tent and went out to harness dogs and they were already in harness, waiting for him, and they were dogs but they were more than dogs, too.
    Great gray sides twitching, they stood like shadows, with wide heads and heavy triangular jaws. Russel had never seen anything like the dogs in the dream. They were higher than the man’s waist and had silentyellow eyes that watched everything the man did while he put his gear in the sled and got ready to leave, and the way they watched it was clear that they could either run or turn and eat him. It was up to the man.
    He stood to the sled and Russel saw then that it was not of wood but all of bone and ivory, with large rib bones for the runners, and lashed with yellow rawhide. It shone yellow-white and rich in the night light, the color deep and alive, and when the man stepped on the runners the dogs lunged silently but with great speed and power and the fog closed again, swirled in thick and deep.
    When it lifted the man was alone out on the sweeps. The stretch of land looked familiar, but there was something different in the dream and after a time Russel could see that it was the grass. Where the snow had been blown away the grass was taller and thinner, with pointed ends. It was bent over in wind, but not twisted like the tundra grass.
    There was deeper darkness now and Russel watched as the man worked the dogs without making a sound. They were clearly hunting something, that much was sure, but what they were hunting Russel couldn’t tell. He was amazed to see the man handle the dogs with no audible commands.
    They ran to his mind, clean and simple.They went out into the sweeps and Russel watched as if from somewhere above, watched as they hunted in and out of the fog until finally, in a clearing, they found the fresh tracks of whatever they were hunting.
    The gray dogs put their hair up and ran to the tracks nervously. They wanted to catch the smell but they didn’t want to as well. They were still running to the man’s mind and he made them follow the tracks but there was fear now.
    Great fear.
    The tracks were blurred, but huge, and Russel couldn’t see what might have made them. He had never seen tracks like them, nor felt the fear that was in the man.
    Then there was a shape before him and Russel fought to see it.
    Some great thing it was, some great shape in the fog and then the mist was whirled away in a rush of wind and Russel saw two things clearly.
    The animal was a woolly mammoth. Immense, it stood with shaggy hair, its giant domed head swaying, its great tusks curved toward the dogs. The small trunk whipped back and forth in anger and the red eyes tore through the fog like a demon’s from the Below World.
    The man was to kill the beast if he could, or the beast was to kill the man and the dogs, drive them