Today’s story is the second and final 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. 

Last time, Lusa of the Squirrel tribe bid farewell to her husband and set out on her journey in hopes of clearing their debt. She arrived at a fortified trading post and made arrangements to scavenge the landfill there. She had just been informed that bandits in the area have begun to resort to cannibalism and obtained a case of magnifying lenses from the corpse of an unlucky scavenger.

When we left off, she had hidden her find in a snow drift, intending to smuggle it out of the trading post rather than pay their tax.

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 second

and final 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.

Last time, Lusa of the Squirrel tribe bid farewell to her husband

and set out on her journey in hopes of clearing their debt.

She arrived at a fortified trading post

and made arrangements to scavenge the landfill there.

She had just been informed that bandits in the area have begun to resort to cannibalism

and obtained a case of magnifying lenses from the corpse of an unlucky scavenger.

When we left off,

she had hidden her find in a snow drift,

intending to smuggle it out of the trading post

rather than pay their tax.

“The River in the Mist”

by Dwale, Part 2 of 2

She had done it. A sleepless night,

one spent fretting that her ploy would be discovered, or that her treasure would be found and stolen,

but in the pre-dawn hours she had pretended to take her leave of the trading post

and hidden her sled in the woods.

Then, having found the drift into which she had tossed the package of lenses,

she had darted in to recover them.

Squirrels lack the which allows other animals to see in low light;

she had gone in almost blind.

But, she had burned the spot into her memory and knew it even when all she could see

were faint silhouettes.

She had done it, that was all she could think now.

The weight of concern had fallen from her shoulders.

She was going back to her little village by the sea,

back to her dear Miki,

and her heart was so light that she could have flown.

One more step remained:

to get to the docks, which were only two days’ walk from the scrapyard if she made good time.

There she would barter her way onto a boat

and ride the current home.

With the lenses now safely in her possession,

she could afford to part with every last grain of her tobacco if she had to,

and still clear her debts when she returned.

It was all so simple.

Soon, she would be out of the blasted cold.

She could almost smell her own bed,

and feel the warmth of Miki’s arms.

There was nothing to stop her.

Nothing could stop her.

She was able to live in that happy illusion until the morning of the second day,

when the sky began to darken

and the wind started to howl like riled wolves.

There in the spruce-laden foothills

she was close enough to the mountains to get caught in the unpredictable storms

that swept down from the heights.

But even then she wasn’t yet afraid,

for the whole of her life had been spent in these stark climes,

and she knew the particulars of survival with no less intimacy than she knew her own teeth.

There was a tent folded in her pack,

and some pemmican and seedcake,

enough for a few days if she stretched it.

The storm would have moved on by then.

Still, she was loath to stop and wait

when she was less than a day’s walk to the docks.

That a storm was coming was indisputable,

but it was not yet upon her

and she might, if conditions favored,

reach her destination before it overtook her.

Breathing deep through fluttering nostrils,

she shut her eyes and sampled the air,

which was dry and had none of the faint, dank vegetable scent

that portended inundation.

In the branches overhead, she saw the scales of the long,

russet pinecones spread wide and open,

as they tended to be when the humidity was low.

She stood there, weighing the evidence,

then sighed, re-shouldered her sled line, and went onward.

She would be in no small jeopardy if a blizzard were to catch her unawares,

but she was satisfied that she could continue a while

so long as she watched the skies

and was prepared to shelter at the first sign of trouble.

It was regrettable, then,

that the misfortune which found her

was of a sort she needed more than a tent and rations to survive.

Her sense for the weather proved accurate.

By the time the winds died and the first snowflakes began to drift groundward,

it was late afternoon

and she was within shouting distance of the river.

Let the storm do its worst,

she had but to climb one last hill

and she would be looking down at the dock-master’s shack,

where there would be a fire burning and a dry floor.

She spurred her aching legs cheerfully up the slope,

the burdensome weight of her sled forgotten,

while the snow falling about her may as well have been confetti to celebrate her arrival.

So pleased was she in her thoughts

that her typical wariness,

a hallmark and virtue of the squirrel tribe,

was buried underneath her excitement.

Otherwise, she might have noticed the lack of smoke from the dock-master’s chimney,

which she should have seen trailing over the hill.

Neither had she noticed

the eyes peering out at her through the trees,

not until someone made a careless step

and snapped a branch which had been hidden under the snow.

That brought her short ears upright,

and her eyes opened to fullness,

wild and searching

as she whirled around on the figures emerging from their cover.

The four men she saw all had differing phenotypes,

a wolf, the largest chimera of the four,

was nearest her, flanked by a white fox and a wolverine on his left,

and a greying, raw-boned cougar on his right.

All of them were dressed in threadbare rags,

sunken-eyed and thin as saplings.

Strands of conversation she’d had with the moose back in the scrapyard

floated into her memory unbidden.

They get desperate this time of year…

a pit of bones with bite marks all over them…

She brought her air-gun around from its shoulder sling.

It was an unwieldy contraption she’d pieced together from high-pressure hand-pumps

salvaged from the ruins of a sporting goods store,

about the size of shotgun without a stock.

Three tubes extended from the receiver:

the lowermost was the air reservoir,

while the central tube was the barrel.

The uppermost, shorter than the other two,

was the magazine.

A laser pointer mounted to the barrel did

duty for a sight.

On the right side of the gun was a whopping great pressure gauge

which was far too big to be practical,

but it was the only one she’d had lying around the shop.

The trigger had begun life

as a light-switch.

They stopped when she leveled it at them.

She took the opportunity to turn on the sight,

and then to jerk back on the bolt

that held the magazine closed, which made a satisfying “ka

-chunk” as the mechanism loaded a ball into the firing chamber.

“Stay back,” she warned,

training the red dot on the wolf’s forehead.

“I mean it!” They laughed at her,

recognizing the air-gun for what it was

and perhaps thinking such a device could do them no more hurt than a flesh wound.

They continued to advance,

unafraid, the wolf flashing a grin of yellowed fangs.

But while it was true that her weapon had far less muzzle energy than a firearm of the same size,

it fired seventeen-millimeter ball bearings

with enough velocity to punch through a phonebook.

She knew that much from testing it.

If it could do that,

then it could smash into a man’s skull with ease.

“Why don’t you put down your little BB gun, squirrely-girly?”

The wolf’s hand moved to unbuckle his belt,

where she saw for the first time

that he had a pistol holstered there,

and a massive bulge behind his zipper.

“We just wanna play wi

-“ A sharp pneumatic crack echoed through the forest.

The ball bearing

had struck him on the edge of the eye socket,

caving fur and flesh and bone

in on his cranial cavity.

His right eyeball, dislodged and partially dragged up into the wound,

shone white, while the other focused on her a moment in disbelief

before glazing over.

He collapsed, dead before he hit the ground,

a smile still on his lips.

A mixture of blood and cerebrospinal fluid gushed,

steaming, onto the ground,

melting frost as it darkened the earth like a stain.

That was when the fox said,

“Holy shit!” The three remaining bandits scattered;

she didn’t wait around to see what they meant to do.

She snatched up the line of her sled

and dashed up the hill as fast as her lithe frame could take her

while dragging her belongings.

Once at the top, thinking fast and certain of pursuit,

she got behind her sled

and leaned her whole weight into it,

her boots digging furrows in the snow as she marched it towards the incline.

Once the nose began to tip downwards,

she leapt atop her baggage and clung tight.

At first, she moved no faster than she might have done running,

and wondered in a panic if she might be better served by her feet,

but the speed increased,

and increased more

until she began to wonder the same thing over again, but for the opposite reason.

This was the windward side of the hill,

sparser of vegetation than the other slope had been,

but far from devoid of it.

Tree-trunks swooshed by her face,

dark blurs that passed so close

she felt her whiskers brush them.

At such speed, the alternation between the day and their shadows

was like a strobe-light.

She leaned one way or the other in a futile attempt to control her descent,

but the sled was meant to be towed, not ridden,

and had no steering mechanism whatsoever.

When she saw the crooked root protruding from the earth

near the bottom of the hill,

she knew she was going to hit it and could do nothing more

than shut her eyes and hope.

The dreaded impact did not come.

The root, when the rails connected with it,

ramped her forward in a shallow arc.

Weightless of a sudden,

she and her sled parted ways mid-air.

It could not have been more than a couple of seconds,

but it was as if she had grown wings.

She never felt the moment when physics reasserted its harsh rule over her person;

when she hit the ground,

her world went black.

Someone was shouting.

She sat up in the snow, uncertain of the why and where regarding her circumstances,

dazed by the force of her landing.

She was beside the fenced-in area of the dock-master’s dwelling,

where he kept a small collection of fishing boats.

Her sled was an arm’s length away,

upside-down where it had struck the ground nose-first.

If she had not fallen the way she had,

it might well have crushed her. The shouting

continued. Only when she saw two of the bandits dashing down the slope in a reckless frenzy

was the gravity of the situation restored to her spinning mind.

She stood without even taking time to check if she had broken bones,

intent on begging aid from the dock-master,

but saw there was a note fixed to the dark window of the door to his shack.

It was Inuktitut

transliterated into English letters,

and she couldn’t read a word of it, but then,

she didn’t need to be able to read it to guess what it meant.

He wasn’t there. Some emergency, some twist of chance had called him away with his family.

She was on her own.

The bandits would be on her in seconds.

Knife out, she cut the ropes securing her pack to the sled:

she couldn’t leave it,

it had too much of her and Miki’s life inside.

She seized it by one end and swung it around with her arms extended,

in the manner of the Olympic hammer-toss.

Only two minutes earlier

and she would not have believed herself capable of such a feat,

but the adrenaline was hot in her veins and with a bestial grunt

she heaved the pack over the fence

and re-sheathed her blade.

Now it was her turn.

Her mitten-like boots let her grip the chain

-link as though with hands; she scrambled up the fence with the same ease she might have mounted a staircase, but the fox,

fast as a flash, was on her before she could complete the transit,

his hand clamped around her ankle

like a metal snare.

She grabbed her air-gun.

Once she pulled the bolt to let ammo into the firing chamber, all that kept it from rolling down the barrel was a pair of rubber prongs.

Because of this, it could not reliably shoot straight down,

but she didn’t have a free hand to operate it even had it been otherwise.

Instead, she jerked back on the bolt

and angled the barrel at the fox’s head.

A heavy steel ball-bearing rolled out

and pelted him on the nose with a muffled thump. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make him yelp and let go, to let her scurry

the rest of the way over the top.

The fox recovered

and sprang to catch the end of her tail,

and might have gotten it, too,

had he been a split-second earlier, but fell back on his butt with only a fist-full of white fur for his trouble.

He growled like a feral animal,

humiliated but unhurt,

and more intent than ever on doing her harm.

Rather than attempt to scale the fence as she had done,

he went for his pistol, a battered old piece with a rusty slide,

drew, pointed it at her

and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

A confused look spread over his face like spilt water.

She would later puzzle out what it must have been,

that the scarcity of rounds meant this fellow had little to no practice with his weapon.

He had forgotten to switch off the safety,

nothing more than that,

but it was enough.

She brought the laser sight, still switched on from earlier,

to the center of his ribcage, and fired.

They both stood there and looked at each other,

dumbfounded. Her shot had collided with the fence wire,

and punched through, but the resistance had been enough to deflect her projectile

and make it veer off target.

Now the fox remembered the safety.

He toggled it, pointed the gun at her and fired blind,

frantic to get her before she got him.

Her next shot went off at the same time as his own:

hers striking him true this time, right in the heart,

while his caught her in the left pectoral region,

just above the breast.

He staggered backwards

and went down onto one knee, panting,

then tilted face-first into the snow.

Pain radiated through her chest,

bright and hot as molten iron.

Her left arm, which had been bracing her air-gun a moment before,

fell slack and deadened.

She tried to move it and found the explosion of pain so severe that she abandoned the attempt at once.

She felt the bullet whiz by her face before she heard it.

There were still two bandits out there, she remembered,

and they were still trying to kill her.

She let the air-gun return to its resting place on her side

and, with her remaining good arm,

hauled her pack over to a canoe by the river shore, trailing blood.

With the last of her fading strength,

she slung her gear into the boat,

pushed it into the water,

and slumped into it.

She drifted with the current.

The gunshots had stopped;

her pursuers must have given up trying to hit her at that range.

The sound of wind and running water was almost intoxicating

when mingled with her exhaustion,

and she might really have fallen asleep

were it not for the sound of something hard banging against the canoe’s metal hull.

Once she caught her breath,

she dragged herself onto her knees and had a cautious look around.

She had launched her craft straight into an ice floe.

But maybe that was good?

Surely, she thought,

the bandits wouldn’t be so foolish as to come after her,

with a storm at their back and a river full of ice.

But gazing back at the dock-master’s place,

she saw three of them,

the two living ones

dumping the dead fox into a flat-bottomed motorboat.

To eat, she realized.

“You’re gonna pay, tree-rat,”

the old cougar hollered from the shoreline.

“You hear me? You’re gonna pay!”

So, they meant to give chase after all.

Wincing from the anguish on the left side of her body, she released the catch that held the canoe’s propeller out of the water when not in use,

and lowered it down into the freezing river.

The smaller hunks of ice were not much threat,

but there were pieces the size of boulders all around her,

bobbing and tumbling in the turbulent current.

To be trapped between two of those would crumple her aluminum craft like a soda can.

Praying that the battery was charged,

she pressed the starter.

An LCD screen flickered to life,

showing the power

-pack at forty-six percent capacity.

Well, that was better than nothing.

She had grown to womanhood in a village beside the sea,

not far from the mouth of this very river,

and while not a fisherwoman,

yet she knew her away around a boat.

Limbs sluggish with exhaustion,

she opened up the throttle and threaded her way through the floe,

with the sun setting,

the bitter winds and current

threatening at every turn to capsize or crush her,

to drown or otherwise pull her down into oblivion.

The adrenaline was gone now,

and the surging pain in her chest and arm began to recede,

numbing to a dull ache,

though she knew the wound must be serious.

She shivered, for the cold had gotten into her,

and draped her tail over her legs to conserve her warmth.

In doing so, she noticed the place where the fox had snatched a handful of fur from her tail

-tip and left her with a raw and throbbing bald spot.

Even with all that had happened,

with one useless arm

and death along for the ride,

that bald spot depressed her more than the rest of it put together,

and the thought that the fur might never grow back,

that the tail her Miki had praised and loved so well might be forever marred,

was more than she could bear.

A convulsion of regret and self-pity overtook her then;

she wept like a child,

her tears and snot freezing to her face as she wailed.

Why had she insisted on making this trip?

She cursed her stupidity as she dabbed her nose with her poncho.

When the tears finally stopped,

she would have liked nothing more than to shut her eyes

and snatch a few seconds of sleep.

She could wait until she was in a clear patch of river

and catch a few seconds, she reasoned.

It would do her some good.

That was when a voice spoke to her,

a primal mind from the deepest recesses of her being,

so clear and sharp that it seemed

not even to be in her head.

It was as though she had been joined by an invisible companion.

“Lusa, you cannot sleep,”

it said. “If you sleep,

then you will die.” ***

How many hours had passed,

she could not have said.

More than two, she thought,

but whether it was four or eight, she didn’t know.

The storm had relented,

but the clouds still remained,

thick and menacing,

and they hid the moon and its light from her straining eyes.

She lamented the squirrels’ lack of night vision,

which so many other animals shared,

though the darkness was so complete that she doubted if even the old cougar chasing her could see.

She had tried, once,

to use her miner’s lamp,

and that had earned her a gunshot that clipped one of her whiskers off.

She hadn’t tried again. Both

she and they were using their batteries

sparingly to conserve their strength;

the best method of avoiding collisions with the ice,

both she and her hunters had found,

was to keep their boats straight

and move with the flow as much as possible.

It was chiefly on tight bends that they had to employ their motors,

bends she had, through necessity,

become expert at feeling out with her ears.

But even when they used their motors,

they were electric, whisper-quiet,

and softened even more by the sound of rushing water,

so she was never sure of where she was in relation to her pursuers.

Twice she had caught the scent of blood

not her own and known that they were close.

Still, they hadn’t killed her yet.

Perhaps they were too low on ammunition to gamble on iffy shots.

If that were so, then odds were good

she might never hear the one which found its mark. She

had weapon problems of her own.

It takes a lot of pressurized air to get a twenty-one gram projectile to move at two hundred meters a second;

her device could do this five times before the reservoir needed to be topped off again.

So, while she had plenty of ammo,

she had very little air with which to use it.

When next the moon came out,

she turned the air-gun on its side to inspect the pressure gauge,

and cursed. There was enough air for two more full-power shots.

She could continue to fire beyond that point,

but the ball-bearings’ velocity

would drop off so steeply

that she would do just as well to throw the damned things.

She had a hand pump in her pack,

but it took the whole of her body weight to force the plunger down when she used it.

That was not something she could not do with one arm,

even if she had a stable platform on which to do so,

which she did not.

On top of that, her air-gun was too heavy to wield with one arm.

Sighing, she took her hand and stuck it down her collar to check the compress she’d put on her wound.

Her fingers came back soaked.

The blood loss had slowed,

but she had been unable to get it to stop;

her parka was now so sticky with it that

she felt sure the bandits would have been able to track her by scent alone.

She shivered, sopped to the skin by a dampness that could not dry because

it came from within,

colluding with winter to sap her remaining body heat.

It was like she faced a new obstacle at every turn,

the odds of her survival narrowing by the hour.

Miki’s face surfaced in her thoughts

as though from the depths of the sea, and a pang of regretful yearning came with it,

doubling her over like a kick to the gut.

Would she ever see him again?

And who would take care of him if she were gone?

Why had she ever thought that this stupid trip was a good idea?

A slim line appeared in the east

like a golden wire across the horizon.

She had doubted lasting until sunrise,

but now those doubts were put to rest.

A few more minutes

and she could see the clouds had thinned and lightened,

the storm’s passing so gradual

that she had failed to notice it.

It was warming up now, too.

A mass of air from the southern sea

must have moved in on the storm’s wake.

The front mingled with the icy river-water and,

as the sun continued to climb,

it formed a mist

as thick and yellow as honey.

She watched, transfixed by the glory of it all,

her pursuers forgotten

in the grips of this miracle she saw now

as though for the first and final time.

But something even more amazing was happening:

spring was coming up with the sun.

At first, she couldn’t believe it.

How could it be spring in the middle of winter?

But grass and green reeds pushed up through the snow,

and the needles of the trees along the banks

shed their crystalline burdens as readily as a man might have thrown off an unneeded coat.

All the while it grew warmer,

until at last it was as warm as summer, and she laughed

to find she was floating both upstream and uphill, against the current.

The river rose before her,

far into the sky,

and the mist was only a cloud through which she was floating on her way into the blue.

The waters teemed with fish come to spawn,

as they did each year,

but more here than her village could eat in a million lifetimes,

their scales shining like silver glitter

as they leapt over the pools and waterfalls.

And there on the bank ahead

was someone waving to her in welcome,

someone she was sure she could recognize

if only she could get a little closer...

She snapped out of it,

gasping, with the word

“Papa” on her lips.

The sun was up, but the spring had not come with it.

It was still cold,

and she was still bleeding and exhausted.

“You cannot sleep, Lusa,”

her invisible friend reminded her.

“I know,” she said aloud,

wiping her bloodshot eyes.

“If I sleep, then I will die.”

Yawning, she took in her surroundings.

The ground was still hilly and full of rocks,

but less so than before.

She couldn’t have been far from the coast.

She must not give into her despair, she told herself,

not when she was this close.

Even if it was the last thing she did,

she had at least to get to Miki,

to give him the lenses she’d scavenged

and kiss him goodbye.

Let the whole universe turn against her,

she would sweep the barriers aside like a whirlwind.

Let a pitiful fate be written for her in the hardest stone,

she would shatter the words and write them anew with her blood.

She would not take that journey into the sky until she did

what she had set out to do,

and damn the odds.

“Hey, bitch!” If she had turned,

she would have seen the wolverine and cougar pointing pistols from only a few meters away,

having crept close while she was entranced.

She didn’t look, but ducked and hit the throttle just before two rounds passed through the space where her head had been.

They fired twice more each,

but a moving object is difficult to hit even on stable ground,

let alone while both shooter and target bobbed on the water while also being conveyed along at speed:

one bullet punched a hole in her canoe

a hand’s breadth above the waterline,

the others went far wide to hit nowhere near her.

“That’s it, I’m out,”

she heard the wolverine say.

She knew his voice from before.

“Start the motor, idiot!”

That must have been the cougar speaking,

his tone rough and weary.

“Dude, just let it go!”

There was a slap,

a hard one that echoed down the riverbanks.

“After what she did to the boss?

Do it, she’s getting away!”

Their shouting match had bought her some time.

Once she had put some distance between her and them,

she dared to lift her head and check the battery on her motor.

It was at two percent capacity,

the display flashed “WARNING: LOW CHARGE”

in bright red letters.

Up ahead, the river bent to the right

around a knoll grown over

with what her people called nootka trees,

also known as yellow cedar,

great, shaggy things with such a density of branches

that the trunks were scarcely visible.

They were everywhere along the coast,

and a sign she was almost home.

As she took the turn,

a branch smacked her flush on the nose,

and in the shock of it,

she formed something very much like a plan.

When the bandits took the same turn a few seconds later,

and the cougar, gun in hand,

got a face-full of the same protruding branch,

they found they had caught up with their quarry at last.

The squirrel, laying on her back,

had caught hold of one of the many such dangling limbs

with her dexterous paw

and was using it to anchor her canoe in place.

With the other foot she had grasped the end of her air

-gun as her ruined left arm could not,

and her remaining functional hand was on the trigger.

He looked down to find a laser dot

right in the middle of his breastbone.

A crack like a bull

-whip and her shot punched into him and splattered the upper third of his heart.

The gun fell from his hand

before he could bring it to bear on her,

and clacked onto the floor of their boat.

He clutched his chest,

eyes wide, and made an effort to pick up his weapon,

but faltered and tipped into the water with a splash,

where the current pulled him under.

Lusa released the branch

an instant before their boats collided;

the canoe shot away downstream like an arrow,

with the other craft in close pursuance.

She wriggled upright

and checked the pressure gauge on her air

-gun as if there would have been an increase, but no,

there was only enough for one more full-power shot.

She braced her armament on the edge of the canoe

and readied to make of her chances whatever she could.

The wolverine had left steering to grab the dropped pistol,

and when he came back up,

he did so shooting.

If he had wanted to abandon the chase only a minute before,

he was wild with hatred now,

not even aiming, but at such close range that he could hardly miss.

A bullet took off part of Lusa’s left ear,

another grazed her cheek

and ripped free a flap of skin the length of a finger.

His third bullet slammed into her collar

-bone just as she pulled the trigger, jostling her to the point

that it spoiled her shot and sent it low,

where it punched into the other boat

just below the waterline.

He stopped shooting,

regarding this new leak

with brows knit in thought.

Then a smile spread across his mouth

and he went back to steering,

aiming right for Lusa and her canoe.

If his boat was no good anymore,

then he would be content to take hers.

She strained to bring her air-gun to bear,

thinking a weak shot was better than nothing,

but she cried out in the effort and let it fall.

“What’s the matter, tree-rat,”

the wolverine taunted.

He was almost upon her now.

“Can’t lift your little pop-gun?”

He got his boat alongside hers and crawled,

shakily, halfway onto the canoe,

dragging his torso right on top of her,

his legs still in the sinking craft.

His ragged breath

blew the stink of rotten bone and blood straight into her nostrils.

Crazed, bloodshot eyes stared into hers.

He put the pistol against her forehead

and pulled the trigger.

Click. He was out of ammo.

Click, click. “Shit!”

He dropped the gun,

then, with a manic, triumphant smirk,

wrapped his hands around her throat,

squeezing and pushing down with his entire weight,

his whole overwhelming strength.

But then the smile inverted,

his demeanor of cruel victory became a mask of shock.

He released her and fumbled backwards onto his knees,

hands clutching at the knife Lusa had plunged into the side of his neck.

He stared at her,

mouth moving wordlessly.

She spat in his face,

the one attack left to her,

and shoved their boats apart with her leg.

Slowed by the increased drag of its descending profile,

he fell ever-further behind as she panted,

watching him sink.

Only when it had disappeared into the fog did she permit herself the indulgence of laying down.

There was something warm all around her.

Ah, yes, she thought.

That would be the rest of my blood.

On the furthest edge of her hearing,

there was the crashing of waves.

She was home. In a moment she would pass by the little beach beside the mouth of the river where she and Miki had made love for the first time.

Her eyes filled with tears

remembering that and she tried to sit up, but her body would not obey her.

For all her bravado,

it seemed her luck had run out at last.

A pity, to have come all this way,

to within a stone’s throw of her village,

only to drift out to sea and die alone.

But maybe she wasn’t entirely alone.

“Did I do well?” “You did well,”

the invisible voice said.

“It’s alright to sleep now.”

Where before she had been moving towards the ocean waves,

now she was moving away,

far above them, upstream,

uphill, into the sky

with the char and the salmon,

through golden mist,

into the warmth of a summer that she knew would never end.

A void like white mist

ate away at the fringes of her perception,

and she could not resist it.

More and more, the whiteness gnawed towards the center of her,

through the sky, the clouds,

and the river, through the sound of her breathing

and the rhythm of her heartbeat,

until there was nothing left

and she was gone. ***

When Lusa opened her eyes,

the first thing she saw was a wooden ceiling beam

onto which she and Miki had carved their initials.

There was the scent of burning seal

-oil and the soft ticking of a mechanical clock. “Oh, thank

God!” “Miki?” The name came out thick and with difficulty.

Her throat felt like it was full of cement.

Her husband’s face came into view,

blurry, but the scars were too singular for it to be anyone else.

He was crying, and his eyes were so puffy and bloodshot

that she was positive he hadn’t slept in days. “How?” She croaked.

“My cousin took his little one out to fish.

Almost crashed into your canoe about four klicks out.”

She frowned as the memories came into clearer focus.

“I got shot.” “Yeah. The doctor said your clavicle deflected a bullet upwards.

Half a millimeter lower and it would have torn an artery. You were lucky.”

She had to laugh at that.

It hurt. He took her hand in his;

she clasped it weakly.

They shared a smile

until she went to move her other arm

and found her shoulder so wrapped up in tape and bandages

that it might as well have been in a cast. “A bullet

snapped off a piece of your shoulder-blade,”

he explained. “The good news is you should get the use of your arm back.

You’re gonna have a nasty scar on your face, though.”

Then, teasing, he added:

“You’ll look just like me.”

She laughed again.

“I’ll never be as pretty as you.

Never was.” “You’ve been asleep four days now.

How do you feel?” “How the hell do you think I feel?”

she croaked. “Thirsty, I bet.

I’ll get you some water.”

He wheeled out into the kitchen

where she heard him rattling around for a glass.

Housekeeping wasn’t his strong suit,

she could only imagine the mountain of dirty dishes that had accumulated.

“Miki!” “Yes?” “Did you find the lenses?”

“We found them, don’t worry.

When you’re better, we’ll meet with the others and work out a deal.”

He was back now. She tried to sit up

and was surprised at the extent of her weakness,

but supposed that was to be expected after what she had been through.

He helped her up

and cradled her head while she drank.

“The doctor’ll be by later to check on you.

Do you want to sleep some more?”

She nodded. “You look like you could use some yourself.”

“Don’t worry about me,”

he said. “I’m tough.”

“You always were,” she admitted.

This was going to require some coaxing.

“Come in anyway,” she suggested.

“You can keep me warm.”

Miki yawned, too tired to belabor the point,

then wheeled around to the other side of the bed

and hauled himself onto the mattress with the trapeze she’d made for him.

He lay his trembling arm on her chest,

gently, as though she were a soap bubble that might burst at the slightest touch,

and the smell of him was a pleasure greater than summer.

There were those in the village

who felt sorry for her being married to a man in his condition,

but she considered herself fortunate.

Some people, she reflected as she sank back

into a blissful sleep,

just have all the luck. *** END

This was the second

and final part of

“The River in the Mist”

by Dwale, read for you by Khaki,

your faithful fireside companion.

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

or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.