Powers That Be by Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Read Free Book Online Page B

freezing before he stuck it back into the glove. As he was bending over to pull the mitten back on, the dog licked his face. “Hey, boy!” Diego said, and hugged him.
    “Girl,” Lavelle, the driver, said. “That’s Dinah, my leader. She likes you, and she’s a good judge of character.”
    “Leader?”
    “The dog I talk to, and the one who tells me and the other dogs what’s going on up ahead, what to do. As you can see from this arrangement, mostly all the other dogs see is the rear end of the dog in front of them.” The dogs wagged their curled feathery tails and grinned as if that was a great joke they all shared.
    He rode with Lavelle while his dad rode in the sled in front of them. The other members of the expedition, two women, one a seismographer and one a mining engineer, and the man his dad said was a soil mechanics specialist, all of them Doctor Somebody-or-other, rode in the other sleds.
    It was a great ride, bundled along with the supplies into the furs on the sled, bumping and whisking over snow and ice while the dogs ran ahead, tails bouncing. But the best part was when, once they were well out of town with nothing much in the way, Lavelle let him drive.
    “When you want them to go, yell to Dinah, ‘Hike!’ and ‘Gee!’ if you want them to go right, ‘Haw!’ to the left, ‘Whoa!’ when you want them to stop. Dinah will do it and see that the others do it. She’s a smart pup. You stand here.” She showed him the rough hair-hide strips along the runners where he could put his feet without slipping. “The brake is here. Step on it if you want to stop, but you won’t stop very quick on ice.”
    The other sleds all passed them, but Lavelle didn’t care. As soon as he had his hands on the handlebars and his feet on the treads and Lavelle had strapped on the nets made of wood and babiche—rawhide strips—he shouted “Hike!” to Dinah and off she went, the others pulling with her, whining a little at the sound of a new voice.
    Dinah was, as Lavelle said, a smart dog. She wasn’t about to let the other sleds stay ahead of them and passed them easily, falling in behind the first sled, the one his father was riding in.
    The run to catch up was the best part, with the wind biting into his face and blowing his breath back, the whole white-and-blue world framed in the icicles clinging to his lashes and the ruff of his hood. As soon as they slowed down to fall in behind the other sled, he got cold, then bored at having to stay so far behind. Lavelle, loping beside him with a funny knee-high gait to let each cumbersome snowshoe clear the snow before she set it down again, began telling him about the great races her grandfather had told her about, the ones they used to have in the old days in Alaska, which was part of a country back on Earth.
    “One of the biggest races they had back in those days developed from a dogsled relay that took emergency serum from a big city to a little town called Nome far away,” she told him. “People admired the stamina and skill it took to do it, and so they made a race out of it. Whole towns sponsored dogs and their drivers, and people all over the world knew about it. Another race they had ran along the route the mail sled used to take. It spanned two countries, and drivers from all over brought their teams to compete. In both races, they still took a little mail with them to deliver at the end.”
    “Why did they need to send the mail by dogsled?” Diego asked. “That’s silly when they could use computers.”
    “Some places they didn’t have computers, sometimes,” she shouted back. “And sometimes folks just liked to prove they could do things in the old ways and still survive like their ancestors did. They were learning to be tough like them, you know?” She grinned, a very white grin in her sun-darkened face. “Tough like us.”
    He grinned back, but he thought privately it was a little backward to do things the hard way instead of learning new