ALL THE PRETTY REINDEER
The boys were two days' ride out of Hispanosuiza, nestled into their ragged bedrolls and just about asleep with nothing left standing but the strange startled forms of mesquite and saguaro trapped in the last pale reflection of the dying fire. The land was hunkered down and empty like a place where even god was too busy searching the souls of sleeping children for lurid dreams of sweets to pay much mind to the rocks and dust of the high country.
In the cold indifferent moonlight the snow heaved over the low hillocks and eskers like the breasts of a Tilapias whore in the sugarplum fairy dance of heartless love. In the fourth hour of darkness they heard the sound of the team approaching. A big team, six or eight maybe, bigger than anything John Grady had heard of this side of the ovens of Death Valley. And in the fifth hour of darkness they came, eight in all, small and tense in their silver-mounted traces, muscles rhythmically straining against the mass of a sledge weighted down with god-knew-what baggage, the driver cursing gently and then speaking out to each one in turn, a roll call of a pagan demons. Their antlers stood clean and proud, twelve points each at least, the perfect fantasy of some fabulous huntsman from a book of forest heroes.
For some minutes the team circled the campsite warily, like wolves unsure whether their prey might yet lash out in one last murderous flurry, looking for a place to set down or perhaps giving the driver pause to reconsider just how far this obsessive need to give was going to drag him into the dark frigid wastes of the chaparral, so different from but so much like his own polar home. The reindeer, drawn annually southward by their own crude instincts, an inchoate but iron discipline, seemed at last to make the decision themselves, and the sledge touched earth a few yards from where the boys lay.
John Grady sat upright in the bedroll as the driver brought the team to an uneasy halt. Red-clad, sweating, the driver put his arms around a great sack and hefted it to the ground, snowflakes rolling away from it in shockwaves like the fleeing spirits of the frozen dead. The driver was close to John Grady now, heavy, with a wild white beard of whiskers like old cornsilk. Like the tendrils of a primitive plant locked forever in a cave away from light and warmth. He breathed with the wet sibilance of a fat man's breathing, the pipestem clenched in his teeth glowing red with each intake of breath and lighting his hot damp face. Around the firesite the driver dropped strange bundles like stale King's cakes, working quickly, breathing hard. His old-fashioned boots had been polished black too many times over too many scuffs and scrapes, and for an instant as the driver passed near John Grady saw his own crazed reflection in the ancient cracked leather.
At last the fat man finished, and he turned his gaze full onto John Grady as if daring him to ask, as if daring him to name what he had seen. The yellow-gray vapor from his pipe formed a mocking crown about the ragged nest of his hair. Placing a gnarled, nicotine-stained finger against a pock-marked nose, the driver leaped into the sledge with a lightness that defied all laws of gravity and grace, his eyes still locked on John Grady. A Cooper's hawk swooped by, drawn briefly by the metallic glint of the ribbons on the bundles left by the driver and then flexing his wings to accelerate away on his own quest for sleepless, doomed mice.
For a moment the driver drew the pipe from his mouth with his left hand and gathered the reins into his right and pulled out the slack in a single flourish. The easy mastery in the gesture stirred envy in John Grady, but he knew the skill was past any he'd ever have even as he knew this tale was one he could never tell. The driver whistled sharply, the sound unreal in the silent night, and once more the team leaned into its work, legs moving in unison as the sledge turned tightly on it runners and rose away from John Grady. Strangest of all were the words the driver cast into the sky behind him, like the cry of a mad shaman so filled with the spirit that he might explode were he to stand still even for an instant. Like the sudden blast of air and foam churned up by canada geese flushed into the sky from still water.
Happy Christmas to all, he cried out, the team gathering speed, antlers glinting in the moonbeams and hooves beating in weird silence against the sky.
And to all a good night, I reckon, whispered John Grady, pulling the bedroll more tightly about his shoulders.