Lusa of the Squirrel tribe has had a string of bad luck. Now she must leave her disabled husband at home and journey into a merciless frozen wilderness to scavenge the ruins in hopes of clearing a debt. Her luck has to change sooner or later, right?

Today’s story is the first of two parts of “The River in the Mist” by Dwale, poet, singer and award-winning short story author. Its poetry collection “Face Down in the Leaves,” published by Weasel Press, is available from corporate monster Amazon dot com. You can find more of its stories on FurAffinity. 

Read for you by Khaki, your faithful fireside companion.

You’re listening to The Voice of Dog. I’m Khaki, your faithful fireside companion,

and Today’s story is the first of two parts of

“The River in the Mist”

by Dwale, poet, singer

and award-winning short story author.

Its poetry collection “Face Down in the Leaves,” published by Weasel Press,

is available from corporate monster Amazon dot com.

You can find more of its stories

on FurAffinity. Please enjoy:

“The River in the Mist”

by Dwale, Part 1 of 2

The sudden glare was almost blinding in the dark burrow, like a portent of the coming dawn.

Lifting the protective outer glass with her free hand,

she put flame to the lantern’s wick

and shook out the match.

The foyer had dirt walls,

blank besides two alcoves housing some

ivory figurines, and some shelving to accommodate the heavy outdoor clothes of the inhabitants.

The scent of burning seal oil,

greasy, earthy,

yet comforting in its familiarity,

coated the insides of her nostrils as she dressed.

She would be wearing

a layered outfit:

trousers, shirt and a parka with faux fur trim,

then another pair of trousers and a poncho, both of oilcloth to keep the wet out.

She had prepared her sled the night before,

it was there waiting on the ramp leading up to the surface. “Were

you going to leave without saying goodbye?” Spinning

on her toes,

she saw Miki, a squirrel like herself, smiling affably from his wheelchair.

Her heart, so resolute a moment before,

thawed at the sight of him.

The smiling face,

changed though it was with expansive scars,

had not ceased being beautiful.

Rather, its beauty had taken on a different cast.

Like day becoming dusk,

it had gone from vigor to repose,

as all things must in the end.

It was only ill fate that the transition had come upon him at so young an age. “Of

course not,” she said,

and he held out his trembling arms to her.

She came to him, embracing his frail, shaking body,

kissing him on his mouth,

his ears and eyelids,

whatever she could find.

Even the scars she kissed.

They were no less a part of him than the rest,

and as worthy of her affection. “You

are beautiful,”

she said, wistful and half-tempted

to pull her clothes right back off, followed by his.

But she noticed his tail,

or the remaining half of his tail, twitching in agitation beneath his lap-blanket.

She stood upright and frowned. “I

have to do this.” “Well,

I can’t stop you, Lusa,”

he said, looking her a moment in the eyes

before letting his head droop on his tired neck.

“But I wish you wouldn’t go.

We could borrow-“ “No,” she snapped,

tail shaking like a rattlesnake’s.

“No more borrowing.

We’re deep enough in debt as it is.” At

that, he screwed his eyes shut and winced

as if she had struck him a blow, and her arms were back around him at once,

holding him fast to her chest.

“Forgive me!” She implored him with dampened cheeks,

remorseful to the core for having touched that subject.

It wasn’t like he had flung his wages away on careless gambling,

as some other men did.

He had always been a careful sort,

and their predicament was not his fault.

But if she had never blamed him,

then he blamed himself more than enough to make up for it.

“It’s alright,” he cooed,

and stroked her hair.

The pair held one another in silence a while, until she gave him a squeeze to signal it was time.

“How long will you be gone?”

“A couple of weeks, maybe.

The trip up is the worst part.

When I’m done I’ll hire a boat and take the river home.”

“You promise?” He raised his left hand,

upon which there shined the graved copper wedding band she’d made for him

after they’d been forced to sell their silver ones in that first

terrible year after the accident.

She raised her hand in response,

a ritual between the two of them alone,

and smiled. “I promise.”

She slipped on a pair of gloves, and mitten-like boots.

She might need to climb,

and the design of her footwear allowed her to make full use of her dexterous toes,

the extra grip thus afforded

being useful if she would need to walk over ice.

She stopped to give Miki one last kiss before trading the warmth and safety of their burrow

for the grey morning light

just breaking on the horizon.

Seasonal fog hung in the air,

dense as pine smoke,

while her breath

made puffs of mist

no sooner born than dispersed and gone.

Her footsteps crunched over the frozen ground

while the small sled to which she had affixed her pack

scraped along behind her.

The sea, a short stroll from there, was quieter than she could ever recall it being,

as though it had seen the first traces of sunlight

and decided to go back to bed.

Storm-clouds, low to the earth and dark as bruises,

threatened snow. She shivered,

in part from cold,

but also from the realization of what she was about to undertake.

It was a risk, but what part of living came without risk?

With that in mind,

she trudged through the thickets

of protruding chimneys,

each trailing a wisp of pale smoke,

that marked the locations of the other burrows in her village.

The nearest road was

almost an hour’s walk away.

There she would meet her ride

and begin the long journey

north. *** This area had been tundra in the past,

but the world had grown warmer since then.

Barren plains had become evergreen forests,

roads cut through like arteries as populations

trended northwards.

Where before they would have needed a sled and dogs to make the trip by land,

now most any sturdy vehicle would suffice.

It was different in the spring and summer,

when the rains turned the roads to mud,

but it was winter now and the ground was hard as rock,

and as bumpy. Lusa’s driver was named Osha,

and she was a chimera of the elk phenotype.

Standing face to face with her would have put Lusa’s nose

just above Osha’s solar plexus,

and that superfluous height meant that half the humps in the road

knocked her head against the roof of the truck.

They were on an especially rough patch at that moment.

If it kept on like this,

they were going to have to get her a helmet.

“Maybe you should slow down,” Lusa suggested.

“Do you even know where you’re going?”

Osha laughed. The snow had been coming down hard for a full day already and showed no signs of abatement,

but she hadn’t let that impact the itinerary,

even if it meant driving blind.

“Does anybody?” Osha was looking at her now rather than the windscreen.

“What?” “We know where we want to go,”

the elk elaborated.

“But we never know where we’ll end up until we get there.”

Lusa took her friend’s chin between her thumb and forefinger and guided her eyes back to the road.

“I’m not sure your philosophizing will be of comfort if we crash into a tree.”

“You’re too pragmatic,”

Osha said. “You need to learn to

-“ “Look out!” Osha stomped on the brake pedal with both hooves,

but the truck slid on a patch of ice

and slammed into whatever

vague shape Lusa had spotted out in the storm.

The passengers were wrenched into their seatbelts from their own momentum; Lusa’s field of vision disintegrated into stars

as agony shot through her chest and shoulder.

For several seconds

she could do no more than gasp

after the breath which had deserted her.

There was no sound but the rush of wind and snow,

the creaking of the windshield wipers,

and the soft drone of the heater’s fan.

“Maybe I should slow down after all,”

Osha conceded, and tittered.

“Oh, do you think?” “Yeah.

Let’s see what we hit.”

Stepping out of the truck,

into the cutting arctic air,

Lusa gave her shoulder a tentative roll,

and winced. “You ok?”

Osha asked. “Nothing broken,

but I’ll bet there’s pain in my future.

Now, listen…” She had made her way towards the front and was about to give Osha a piece of her mind

when the elk spoke.

“Uh oh.” Lusa followed the line indicated by Osha’s bugged-out eyes

to where the headlights showed gore spattered in the snow.

The blood, a bright cherry-red, stood out against the ice in such sharp contrast

that it seemed almost to glow.

For a fleeting instant the air shifted,

wafting the musty iron smell of some creature’s draining life

into their nostrils.

The two of them exchanged a wide-eyed,

wary look while Lusa’s tail-tip thrashed, spastic with nervous excitement.

The victim hadn’t gotten more than a few steps before falling.

It was a wild deer,

a lean, brown buck with a gashed and oozing head,

half-buried in a snowbank.

His right foreleg fluttered in what must have been his death throes.

He stared up at them,

uncomprehending,

but watchful and afraid.

Osha had been holding her breath,

only now did she let herself exhale.

She tittered again, not from amusement, but from a welcome relief.

They were far from any settlement and few cared to travel in such weather,

but until that moment

they could not have been certain they hadn’t killed someone.

As they stood there,

unsure of what to do,

the buck’s quivering limbs grew still,

his chest heaved one last draft of mist into the wind,

and his round, panicked eye was soothed,

remaining open, but seeing no more.

“Shouldn’t we do something?”

Lusa asked, ears and tail sagging.

It was only an animal slain, but it had had its own life,

one she was dejected to see lost this way.

A few seconds earlier, or later, for that matter,

and he might have crossed the road in safety.

Why, then, should the stars have conspired to make their lives converge

at so inopportune a juncture?

“Do something?” Osha mocked,

a laugh not far from her lips.

“Like what, call his family?

Help me get him in the back.

Maybe I can trade him for a new bumper.” ***

The dead buck’s eye seemed to fix them with an accusatory stare

as Osha helped her unload the sled

and pack from the truck-bed.

Lusa shuddered and looked away. “You sure you’ll

be ok?” the elk asked.

Having spotted lights in the distance in the small hours,

she’d insisted on finishing that leg of the trip

rather than sleep.

Now she stretched her stiffened muscles

and wiped at her drowsy eyes.

“I could hang around a while.”

“I’m alright,” Lusa said.

“Thanks. I know you’re anxious to get home, but get some sleep soon.”

“Ok.” At that, Osha swept her into her arms

and administered a powerful hug.

Lusa made a choked sound.

Her spine cracked and her tail stuck out at a right angle to her body, fur frazzled as if she’d been electrocuted.

“Too tight!” she cried.

“Sorry.” Osha set her down again,

and clapped her on the arm.

“See you in the spring?

Give Miki a kiss for me.”

Lusa watched her pull away

until the truck vanished around a bend,

then headed towards the main gate of the trading post.

It had been a small town sustained by a pair of factories at one time;

now its significance depended on its geography,

as folk came to trade tobacco and marijuana for dried fish,

seal oil and ivory.

The only industry aside from small-scale handicraft

lay in the factory ruins and landfill,

to which the residents had affixed a scrapyard to process their finds.

In the spring and summer,

it would be overrun with treasure-hunters,

but the cold weather kept them away.

Lusa would have the place almost to herself.

The gate was made of welded I

-beams sandwiched between sheet steel.

It was itself enclosed by a

barbican resembling a castle in miniature, if castles were made of cinder block.

The wall comprised slabs of

concrete which looked to have been cut from the foundations of buildings and moved into place here,

though sections of it were chain link

or earthen berms.

The whole affair was topped with coils of rusted razor wire.

Flanking the gate on either side were sculptures like totem-poles,

stacks of fantastical

and grotesque faces

pieced together from copper and stainless steel,

a small fortune’s worth.

There were three guards atop the gatehouse she could see,

all hooded and wrapped in so many layers of clothing she could not have guessed their phenotypes.

Even their rifles were bound with strips of grey cloth,

which trailed in the restless air like streamers.

“I don’t recognize you,”

one of the guards called down at her,

a rough, masculine voice tinged with boredom.

“I haven’t been here before.”

That wasn’t true,

Lusa had been here thrice back before she married,

when security had been laxer

and a nimble squirrel such as her could sneak in and purloin at leisure.

The guard made an indistinct shout, a moment later

and the gate rolled creaking off to one side.

After she passed through,

it slammed and locked behind her with a resounding clang.

Another group of guards,

half a dozen of them armed

and attired like their fellows,

were arranged in a ring beside a campfire,

taking turns with a pair of dice.

They glanced at her,

but no more than that,

being more interested in their game than in the newcomer.

She didn’t walk three steps before she was met by a pair of skinny curs,

one short and wizened,

the other willowy and young.

To judge by their similarities in muzzle shape and coloration,

they must have been close relatives.

“You got any money?”

the old dog asked.

“If I had any money, would I be here?”

The dog sighed. “It’s fifty credits a day, or you can turn your tail around and go back the way you came. No charge if you’re here to buy, though a room will cost you.”

“Do you take tobacco?”

“Yeah,” the dog said, and nodded.

“Depends on the grade,

but five grams a day will probably do it. Let’s get you to the office and we can arrange for your quarters as well.

Unless, that is, you mean to camp.”

He grinned then, an expression as devoid of warmth as the barren, windswept road

upon which they stood.

Lusa shook her head.

In the summer she might have considered setting up her tent to preserve her savings,

but not this time of year, not here.

Most of the remaining structures were so full of holes

they wouldn’t have done as windbreaks, let alone domiciles,

so squatting was out of the question, too.

But if her memory served,

then there was better housing to be found closer to the scrapyard.

“Lead on,” she said,

and fell in behind the old dog and his silent companion,

her sled’s rails gouging the bare earth beneath

them. As they walked,

some manner of ruckus went up from the gamblers circled beside their fire,

roars of triumph

intermingled with howls of despair.

The sound of it suggested high stakes.

But then, the stakes were always high for the impoverished,

a fact the world had beaten into her time and again.

Today she had perhaps

fifty grams of tobacco with her, all her currency in the world,

and that would have to pay for the boat home in addition to whatever fees she accrued here.

That left her scant time to salvage something worthwhile from this place,

else she and Miki

would have a bitter,

hungry wait until spring. ***

“The office,” as the locals called it,

was a building that must once have been a car repair shop,

with wide rolling doors,

now welded shut, and concrete floors marred by oil stains and holes

where machinery had been mounted in better times.

Even after all these years,

the scent was distinct,

a mixture of aerosol lubricant,

silicone grease and hydraulic fluid,

a sort of burnt and fuzzy smell

that most would have found off-putting,

but which struck Lusa with a pang of homesickness.

It reminded her of the cluttered workshop waiting for her

back in her village.

A pair of folding tables

stacked with wooden boxes approximated a desk,

attended by a moose in a hideous pink and blue sweater.

He was so big that he made the furniture look toy-like,

and the amount of yarn in his sweater would have yielded Lusa

an entire outfit,

with some left over.

He motioned to an aluminum chair with a bent leg,

so she made herself comfortable for the negotiations.

He took the bag of tobacco when she offered it,

his cavernous nostrils flared

and contracted as he snuffled at the open end.

“It’s from this year’s harvest,” she said.

It wasn’t, but she had preserved it well enough to where she might get away with the lie.

But remembering that moose have sharp noses, she added,

“At least that’s what they told me.”

“Seven credits a gram,”

he said in a voice like a depressed bassoon.

“I paid fifteen.” In fact, she had traded some old cookware for it, but the exchange rate would have been something close to

that. “Then you got cheated. I could maybe do you nine…”

“Please,” she said, taking a different tack.

“My husband can’t work, so I-“ “Ten,”

the moose said with finality.

“And that’s if you spare me the sob story.”

“Done!” She swallowed back the fake tears she’d been about to unleash,

pleased that she wouldn’t be forced to sell her dignity this time.

It was the luxury she liked least to go without, though she did not pretend to herself that it couldn’t be bought when times were lean.

“Listen,” the moose said as he weighed out the tobacco on an electric scale.

“We don’t run a full crew this time of year.

If you go out too far when you’re roaching

-“ “Excavating,” she interrupted.

However battered her pride,

she couldn’t abide comparison to a cockroach.

The moose continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “-and something collapses on you, don’t expect anyone to come dig you out.

We’ve already had a guy disappear in there this winter. Do you have a gun?”

“Just an air-gun.” “Leave it here.

We get enough trouble without people robbing each other in the yard.”

She perked up at that,

ears erect, whiskers twitching.

“Bandits?” The moose nodded.

“They get desperate this time of year. One of the patrols found a pit of bones with bite marks all over them.” “Animal bones?” Lusa asked,

though she feared she knew the answer.

She drew her head away in unconscious revulsion,

lips pulled back, exposing her curved teeth.

“Well, they thought that at first.”

The moose had boxed up her payment and tucked it somewhere out of sight.

Now he looked her in the eye and lifted his hand,

waving his digits for emphasis.

“But these ‘animals’ all had fingers.”

“Good God!” He laughed at that

gave his great head a shake.

“No, I think He cleared out of here a long time ago.” *** End of Part 1

Four days had come and gone and now the fifth was drawing to a close.

Her sigh condensed into vapor in the chill air

and floated lazily away down the tunnel.

Not only did they charge her to come in and scavenge,

but she wasn’t allowed to take anything of value for herself.

Instead, the scrapyard would buy her finds

at about a quarter of the market value.

“It’s tax,” they’d said.

In short, she and her fellows did all the work while the owners made all the profit.

That was not what she would have called an equitable arrangement,

especially for someone working the so-called “roach holes.”

Excavating from the surface down,

removing material in the manner of a pit mine,

was by far the safest option, but it was slow

and would often require heavy machinery to which scavengers had no access.

Tunneling was easier for small crews,

but garbage heaps are far less stable than either earth or stone,

and the passages they dug were shallow

and never more than temporary,

unsafe at the best of times.

But at least down here,

under the ceiling of rope nets and

makeshift support beams that held the tunnels open,

she was out of the wind.

She happened to turn a corner while adjusting her head

-lamp and caught herself, gasping in surprise,

a split-second before she walked face-first into a

wall of black plastic bags.

As she stood pondering on

why they would have a dead-end here, she waved her metal detector at the base of the wall out of habit.

It sent out a radio whine, high and piercing.

Curious, she gave it another pass,

to the same result.

It was time to trade the metal detector for something else.

From her kit, she retrieved her shovel and pick

and extended their telescoping handles.

“Probably just another fork,” she muttered.

Forks oftentimes made up a significant percentage of a scavenger’s

haul, but she’d been finding them one after another this trip.

She must have come across four-dozen of them already.

Maybe a store or cafeteria had gone out of business

and their silverware had ended up here?

But if that was so,

then where were all the spoons?

Spoons, if nothing else, were worth more.

The ambient temperature

was higher than it would have been outside, though not by much,

but it was enough to where the trash was semi-frozen rather than rock

-hard like it would be on the landfill’s surface.

That made the digging easier.

Twice she had to stop and listen

to the ominous creaking and shifting of the mound,

wondering if she was about to die in a cave-in.

Both times she decided that the noise had come from a place

much farther into the pile,

and that she was in no danger.

It may even have been true.

The pick bit into the wall as she swung,

hacking out clumps of icy sludge

and soggy, decaying phonebooks which accumulated in curious layers

like geological strata.

She scooped with her shovel

and pried with her crowbar, and hacked with the pick again.

The sound of her strikes began to change,

becoming more like hollow thuds.

She smiled and pressed the attack,

knowing then she was about to break into a cavity.

A moment more and she was in.

“Oh, hell!” The smile drained from her face.

She put her tools down,

panting, and removed her gloves to wipe her hands,

one of the few places squirrels have sweat glands.

There, just beyond the hole she’d made,

was an arm in a puffy, white sleeve,

and a hand covered in dense, white hairs.

By the rich look of the fur,

she guessed this had been a member of the fox or rabbit tribe,

most likely the latter.

So, she had located the excavator who had gone missing earlier in the year,

who had ceased to be a treasure-hunter

and become treasure himself.

She set to work freeing him.

The cold had preserved the corpse to the degree that there was not much odor to it.

Even so, she had to stop digging to let herself dry-heave three times during the process of extricating the body.

Its mere presence made her queasy.

She remembered when her father had died,

the way her mother and sister had washed the remains for burial

while she hid in another room,

too repelled to assist that sacred work.

But the both of them had raised litters,

something she and Miki could never do, thanks to the accident.

Child-rearing has a way of bolstering a weak stomach.

The rabbit (she could see the ears now)

had been next to a support when the cave-in had occurred,

which formed enough of a cavitation to keep him from being crushed,

but with no room to move and precious little air to breathe.

Whether it was chill or suffocation that had done him in, she couldn’t say,

but it could not have been quick or pleasant either way.

Steeling herself,

she grasped the lifeless arm,

shut her eyes, and pulled with all her might, but to no avail.

He must have been caught on something.

Crouching, she shined her miner’s lamp into the cavitation

and saw the problem:

the rabbit was wearing a backpack, which had snagged on a burnished iron beam.

No matter, she had just the solution.

Knife in hand, she slit the straps.

When next she tugged,

the corpse slid out,

inch by grudging inch, from its hiding place.

Now she saw the shriveled face for the first time,

the sunken eyes still open,

the yellowed incisors dry and glossy,

framed by a sickening rictus made worse by lips shrunken from dehydration.

She took a few steps backwards,

turned, and emptied her stomach.

After she had caught her breath, she wiped her mouth on her coat-sleeve

and took a drink from her canteen.

First, she checked the body for valuables.

His clothes had no pockets,

which was just as well so far as she was concerned,

but he had a knife and half-full tobacco pouch on his belt.

She secreted both into her pack

and then extracted the rest of his gear from his burial place.

She found a woolen blanket,

a pair of heavy work gloves,

flint and steel. These were all items which had value and could be traded,

but not the sort of finds that would clear her debts.

She found twenty forks all bundled together and would have laughed if she hadn’t been so nauseas.

And then she found the treasure,

a true one, and she could not keep from smiling.

It was a box of plastic

magnifying glasses,

small, thin ones intended to fit in a wallet.

Lenses of any kind were in short supply, since the capital was the only place for a thousand klicks

that still produced them.

Demand was high, since not only could they be used for starting fires,

but almost all the women in her village were artisans of one kind or another,

and a magnifying glass could do a lot for fine detail work,

or eyes that focused less well than they once had done.

She couldn’t even begin to guess at the worth of this find.

It would prove a boon to the entire settlement,

and there was no doubt it would keep her and Miki fed

for a long while.

The problem was that the scrapyard wouldn’t let her leave with these lenses.

They would pay her twenty-five percent of the market value,

which was whatever they said it was,

and she had no recourse, no arbiter to whom she might appeal.

It wasn’t fair, but those were the terms.

But then, need she necessarily work within their system?

Living always on the cusp of bankruptcy, as she had for years now,

required a certain intellectual agility,

a flexibility that could be brought to bear with speed and efficiency

onto whatever issues arose.

There were guards watching the perimeter,

but the moose had confessed that they were running on a skeleton crew.

For her scheme to work,

it was only a matter of finding the right spot.

Heart pounding in her ears,

she stuffed the corpse back into its hiding place

and covered it as best she could.

Although there were few others out scavenging,

it might have upended her plan to have someone else stumble across the body

and raise an alarm.

When that was done,

she stalked back aboveground.

As she had hoped,

the windswept surface was all but deserted,

the mounds of frost-covered rubbish like dunes on a pale desert.

Only two watchmen were set for this portion of their territory,

and neither so much as spared her a glance.

She went about her business

in what would have appeared the usual fashion,

but was in truth

a pretext for her scouting.

When she was certain

she had found the right place,

and that the guards were not looking,

she heaved the box of lenses over the fence,

where it vanished into a drift

to await retrieval.

This was the first of two parts of

“The River in the Mist”

by Dwale, read for you by Khaki,

your faithful fireside companion.

Tune in next time to find out if Lusa succeeds in escaping with her new treasure,

and whether or not her predictions of future suffering

hold true. As always,

you can find more stories on the web at thevoice.dog,

or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for listening

to The Voice of Dog.