Analog SFF, November 2008 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2010-12-15T07:08:20.056000+00:00

* * *

Short Story: COLD FIRE

by Alan Dean Foster

By four P.M. the arctic sky was ablaze with a haunting wispy green that twisted and writhed in front of the stars like the fluttering wing feathers of a frightened tropical songbird, and Morgan knew he was freezing to death.

As if that wasn't bad enough, he was sure the wolf was laughing at him.

It stood above him, silhouetted by starlight on the rim of the depression where he had sought shelter and found only death. Little puffs of laughter emerged from the lips of the formidable gray eminence, crystallizing in the air before the wind flung them off to the north. They were only fitful congregations of breath; soft, anxious, canid exhalations. But in the haze and daze that was slowly smothering his thoughts, Morgan was sure it must be laughter. When the powerful predator was through chuckling at his predicament, it would surely begin to eat him. Gazing up from where the heavy steel leg trap held him pinned to the bottom of what he had hoped would prove to be a sheltering hollow in the tundra, he imagined that the eyes of the wolf were like emeralds lit from within.

Might as well be eaten, he thought resignedly, by something beautiful.

It was not supposed to be this way. He had set off from Barrow with his cameras and one big thermos of hot coffee and another of rich chicken soup in hopes of capturing some panoramic scenes of the deep arctic winter. It was mid December on the North Slope, a time when only the most fitful illumination glazed the landscape like glistening honey between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. Before and thereafter, the sky was as black as the oil that gushed out of the ground at Prudhoe Bay, far to the east. When some of the staff at the hotel in Barrow had expressed reservations about him traveling alone out into the shadowy tundra, he had smiled cheerfully and assured them he had plenty of fuel to make it to the little village of Atqasuk, only sixty miles distant. His all-weather GPS would keep him from getting lost, and he had plenty of experience on snowmobiles (or snow machines, as they called them up here) back home in Wisconsin.

Except ... this wasn't Wisconsin, the satchel holding his GPS unit and cell phone had been crushed when he had dumped and damaged the snow machine halfway between Barrow and Atqasuk, and both the coffee and chicken soup had long since been consumed. Their life-sustaining heat had dissipated throughout his bruised body hours ago. Then the wind had come up out of nowhere, a cold flailing vampire sucking what heat remained in his body out through the exposed frozen flesh of his face.

He had sought temporary shelter in the inviting depression. Perhaps the wolf had come seeking shelter there as well, only to find that today the usually empty hollow was offering board as well as room. A logical place, Morgan had realized too late, for a trapper to set his deadly steel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.