Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

“Right away, Dad.”

“Get dressed quickly,” his father told him. “I’ll feed the dogs in the meantime. I’ll be outside.”

Geľo took his axe, climbed through a narrow opening in the yurt’s leather wall and from a storage room made of snow blocks he pulled out a huge lump of frozen walrus meat. He began to chop it into small bits.

It was dark everywhere, but thanks to the radiant snow you could see far into the distance. The morning was quiet and man’s voice would echo a long way. From the ice hole a freezing wind blew.

The dogs woke up, gathered and began to shake the freshly fallen snow off their backs. Geľo began to feed them. He called out the dogs by name and threw them pieces of fat meat. There was no shortage of it now. Geľo himself had shot two walruses.

The sledge was ready by the yurt’s entrance. Jurko came out already dressed and began to untie the long walrus-leather leash and tack with nooses over a foot apart. The nooses would each harness a pair of dogs.

Geľo’s father, head of the clan and once a great hunter, also shuffled out. He complained of rheumatism. He began to advise Geľo how to feed the dogs. In the old days you threw the meat to the dogs differently. Geľo should do so. This isn’t how to do it. Geľo wanted to put his hands over his ears, but he was holding the bowl of meat. So he gave it to his father.

“You feed them, if you’re so wise,” he said deferentially.

He came to the sledge. He turned it so the runners were on top.

“They’re rough,” he told his son. “Pour water over them.”

Jurko ran into the yurt and soon returned with a teapot full of water. He quickly dipped a piece of polar-bear skin in it and spread it over the runners. A thin layer of ice formed.

Geľo looked at it in the light of the lamp and said:

“Too thick. Should be thinner. We’ll lose it on the bumps.”

Grandpa finished feeding the dogs. He returned to the yurt mumbling something. They could hear him outside complaining to anyone around of his humiliation.

There was an echoing tinny noise. In front of the yurt appeared the priest with a long rifle and an ammunition bag. In front was an empty three-hundred-litre barrel that he was kicking ahead of him.

“Praise be…” said Geľo.

He didn’t go to Mass in the priest’s yurt, except for yesterday, but he did go out hunting with him. He was doing something to save his soul.

“The good Lord has given us a nice day,” said the priest. “You can see far into the distance.”

“Yes, Father,” Geľo agreed. “Yesterday you talked divinely well and wisely.”

Jurko took out a knife and quickly scraped off the layer of ice down to the wood.

“I’m glad when the word of God falls on fertile soil,” said the priest. “And you, Geľo, I’d like to see at services more often.”

Geľo blushed. He took a piece of bearskin and smeared the runners himself.

“This is how it should be done,” he told his son and turned the sledge back on its runners.

Jurko poured the rest of the water into a bottle and handed it to his father.

Geľo put the empty barrel on the sledge and sat down in the front.

The priest sat down in the back, on the place of honour. Covered by a bearskin, he leant on a whalebone backrest.

“Are you dressed warmly?” he asked Jurko.

Jurko nodded and opened his jacket to show the fur vest underneath.

“Then sit down,” said the priest.

The boy quickly settled down in front of him.

“Mush!” shouted Geľo.

The dogs jerked the sledge and ran off. They had set out on a long trip to Stormy Tooth.

Day was breaking. The ice and snow were not white, but kept changing colour according to the thickness and angle of the sun’s rays.

“Hey, it’s beautiful on the snowy plains,” Geľo said in praise.

The sledge rushed like a wind. Geľo had bought pedigree dogs from Inkirunnuit dog breeders. He paid eight or even more fox skins for each dog. Now he was breeding good quality dogs himself. There was no better dog team on the coast. Nobody had better dogs than Geľo and his family. Geľo had traded with migrant herders for a long time. A long time ago, in the bad times of hunters’, fishermen’s and herders’ collectives, he would take to the tundra leather belts, walrus skins, shoes, and always brought back a quantity of red and arctic foxes. Some he was forced to give to the collective, and some he sold on the side in the town.

Geľo preferred exceptional dogs, huge with a long stride. They had to be all the same size so that they could run in each other footprints. Moreover, Geľo would harness up to forty or fifty dogs at a time and had an enormous sledge. With a sledge like that you could carry big loads.

Imperceptibly, the sun had climbed high above the horizon. The ice shone thousands of colours until it burned their eyes. Geľo reached into his vest and pulled out an ornamental wooden mask covering half of his face, with a narrow slit across it at eye-level. He put it on and fixed it with a leather strap.

“Jurko, your mask!” he ordered his son, who reached for his mask, sighing reluctantly as he obeyed. He knew that many a hunter on the coast had gone blind by not wearing the mask. The sun burned as it refracted through the myriad of crystals all round. It was getting worse and worse every year. There was not much the unfortunate victims could do except throw themselves into an ice hole and drown, if they didn’t want to live off scraps that compassionate people threw them.

The priest put on his sunglasses.

“People seldom got blinded by the sun in the old days,” he remarked. “The old people don’t remember anyone going blind in the old days.”

“A lot has changed,” Geľo said. “So should a lot of other things, but they haven’t. The Soviet regime went away and we thought we’d be better off. We’re not. Hüğottynünđ Űrģüll, who was First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Junjan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, became President of the Junjan Republic, but he abolished it and turned Junja in a Khanate. And he had himself crowned Khan. It’s shitty politics, excuse my language, Father!”

“Daddy, but why are we here?” Jurko asked.

“What do you mean, why?” Geľo is puzzled. “Because we have to check the traps near Stormy Tooth.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Jurko objected. “How did we Slovaks get all the way beyond the Arctic Circle? The priest at catechism class said that we used to live somewhere else.”

“Well,” said Geľo, “our forefathers came here from far away.”

“Where from?” Jurko wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” Geľo admitted. “The priest can tell us, if he knows.”

He looked back at the comfortably ensconced priest.

“You’d have to use good dogs for many moons to get there,” said the priest from his cosy lair. “But first you’d have to cross the sea on a huge kayak.”

“You must be babbling, Father,” Geľo disagreed. “Are you telling me there are more countries beyond the sea?”

“Of course there are!” said the priest.

“Whoa!” Geľo said astonished. “Can the world be that big?”

“That big!” said the priest. “And somewhere very far away,” the priest pointed with his hand in its fur glove somewhere far away, “is the Slovaks’ land. Some of them live there to this day.”

“Are you telling me that there are Slovaks living somewhere else?” said Geľo, even more astonished. “Not just here?”

“There, too.” said the priest. “They say that they don’t have winters like ours. Most of the year, there’s no snow.”

“What do you mean: no snow? What happens to it?” Geľo is surprised.