Teaser Tuesday

The only official speed limit through the village of Niniltna was the one observed by common sense and a decent respect for the lives and property of others, neither of which did Kate have on display that January evening. She used the hill down from the school as a launch pad and hurtled the snogo into a long, heart-stopping skid of a right turn onto Riverside without letting up on the throttle, worthy of a 911 call all on its own. The Meganacks house flashed by on their left and that’s when Kate really hit the gas. Mutt let out another startled but this time also exhilarated yip and took a firmer grip on Kate’s parka.

The snowgo’s top speed was ninety miles an hour, or it had been when it was new, but Kate had kept it in good shape. Eight feet of accumulated winter snow had been packed down by two months’ worth of traffic so that the road home was a hard, fast surface that more nearly resembled a luge run. Traffic was mostly going in their direction. Kate blew past them like the Roadrunner outrunning an Acme rocket, with Wile E. Coyote still back in Niniltna. The only oncoming traffic was Willard Shugak’s ancient International pickup and while Willard wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box even he had enough smarts to pull over as far to his side as he could without going into the ditch when he saw Kate’s rooster tail coming at him.

Well before the turnoff to the homestead Kate applied brakes and body weight in injudicious proportions to put the snogo into another death-defying sideways slide that jostled Mutt’s teeth loose from their hold on Kate’s parka. With a sound that could only be described as “Yikes!” Mutt tumbled from the back of the machine and went rolling off the road to be buried headfirst in a snowbank. Kate, laughing like a maniac, came to an exceedingly momentary stop with the nose of the snogo pointing precisely at the trailhead. She gunned the engine again and shot down it. Behind her she heard Mutt barking madly and she laughed again.

The trail was narrow and twisting and she hit only the tops of the bumps. Woman and machine slid to a superbly executed hockey stop in the clearing, raising a spray of snow in another rooster tail that reached as high as the shop roof. With a war whoop that could have been heard fifty miles away in Niniltna Kate vaulted off the seat, but Mutt, hurtling down the trail and into the clearing, was one second before her. On the fly she grabbed the hem of Kate’s jeans in her teeth and dumped Kate on her ass. Kate rolled to her hands and knees and tackled Mutt with a rolling dive into a pile of newly shoveled snow that under the impact went up like a small atomic bomb. For the next ten minutes the hundred and twenty pound woman and the hundred and forty pound wolf-husky hybrid roughhoused all the way around the clearing, a circumnavigation that shook the stairs to the house, nearly knocked the cache off its stilts, and knocked the door to the now blessedly retired outhouse off one hinge. They somersaulted into spruce trees that unleashed more clouds of snow from heavily laden branches and banged against the big sliding door of the shop before winding up once more at the foot of the stairs to the house.

By now Kate’s short cap of black hair was frozen into icy dreadlocks, she had snow up her pant legs and down the back of her shirt, her parka was half off one shoulder, and she was losing her right boot. This called for drastic measures. She grabbed Mutt’s head in both hands and covered her muzzle with loud, lavish kisses. Mutt leaped back in horror and gave a mighty sneeze. Kate knew an opportunity when she saw it and in a flash she was on her feet and taking the stairs two at the time. There was an outraged “Whuff!” from behind her and Kate took the last three steps in one jump and hit the door with a crash that shook the house.

She flung it open hard enough to shake the house again and took a giant leap inside. She landed on the floor with bent knees and raised arms, struck a pose like a Pamyua dancer and shouted, “With one bound, Kate was free!”

Mutt romped in behind, scattering snow from the kitchen to the living room. Velocity overcame friction and she slid into Kate with a hard thump, knocking Kate off her feet, and the tendency of bodies in motion to stay in motion rolled them up into a ball that thudded ingloriously into kitchen counter.

Kate was laughing so hard she couldn’t speak. Mutt, more conscious of her dignity, or perhaps just readier to reengage the enemy, made a mad scramble to reachieve the vertical.

She froze in place. A tentative growl emerged from her throat.

Kate blinked up at her, and raised her head.

Johnny stood at the stove with a spatula in his hand, Jim sat at the dining table, and a total stranger sat on their couch. All three of them were regarding Kate and Mutt with identical quizzical expressions.