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quality, the light fur of her belly blending with the snow color. He held his breath.
    Hold for me, he thought, hold for me, deer. He moved slowly and took the bow from the case. It was still strung from when he was hunting the ptarmigan and he took out one of the wide-ivory-tipped big-headed arrows and fitted it to the bow.
    Inside the center of the center of the caribou, he thought—that’s where the arrow must fly.
    Still she stood. Waiting, looking at him and the dogs, and he pulled the bow and released it and did not see it fly in the dusk but he knew, he knew that it flew as his mind would have it fly.
    The caribou hunched slightly at the shoulder and took four steps and folded down, the front legs bending slowly, almost as if she were going to sleep. The dogs had held silently but when they saw her hit and going down it triggered the prey response from the wolf memory and they went mad.They slammed against the harnesses, again and again until the hook jerked out of the snow and the sled came loose and the team was on the deer in a tangled mass, some tearing at her throat, some at her back legs, some at her belly.
    Russel ran after them. Using the bow as a club, yelling and hitting and throwing them back, he finally got them under control and off the dying caribou. It took five more minutes to get them lined out in the opposite direction from the animal and when he turned back the deer was dead.
    He stopped and looked down at her. The feathers of the arrow protruded from just in back of the shoulder. The arrow had gone through the heart. She had died with her head to the east, which was good, and Russel found some of the sweet tundra grass the caribou liked and put it in her mouth. When the ritual was done he stood away from her and looked above the deer’s head and said: “Thank you for this meat, deer. It will be enjoyed.”
    From the sled back he took the short knife he’d gotten from Oogruk and made the gut cut, from the ribs back, and dropped the large stomach. He reached in for the liver and heart and cut them out and set them aside for Oogruk. The old man could get the eyes later. Reaching up and in he jerked the lungs out and cut them in fivepieces and gave them to the dogs, only just keeping his hands safe from their lunging, again using the bow as a club to stop their fighting. The blood smell was strong for them and they wanted to fight.
    â€œHa!” He snorted. “We are tough now, are we? When we smell the hot guts we are all tough.”
    The deer was heavy and he had to work hard to get her carcass loaded on the sled. When he had her on and tied in he put the liver and heart back in the open cavity, washed his hands in the snow and put mittens back on. As long as he’d been working on the deer her body heat had kept him warm, but now he realized that it was getting very cold and his hands had lost function in moments. They hurt as the mitts warmed them and he smiled with the cold-pain. He thought of cold not as an enemy but as many different kinds of friend, or a complicated ally.
    Cold brought the first ice to the sea, the first strong ice so they could get out and hunt seals. Cold brought the fattening up of game so it was good to eat. It brought snow and made everything clean, it made storing meat and fish easy.
    Cold could kill as well. But if treated fairly, if treated as a friend and if caution was taken, cold was good.
    Russel’s fingers took pain for a timefrom his friend the cold and he smiled with it, smiled with the deer on the sled and the cold and the dogs: the dogs out in front, coming around in a large curve, heading back for the village with the deer and the ptarmigan, the dogs moving in the dark silently with the hot lungs in their bellies and the joy on them from the kill, the dogs with their shoulders curving over and down with the weight of the deer and Russel pulling back against them as they fought up the hill, fought up with lunges and heaves to