Hourglass

Hourglass

The six-team strain, leather harness taut against deep chest walls.
Glacial eyes, electric blue fixed on distant horizon.
Runners, waxed and polished glide over crumbling snow.
Beyond the vista is a child on the day of her First Holy Communion, clean, and intact.
But looking behind the child has already been taken.
By the grizzled man and his team of hounds.
But perhaps she is not a child at all.
Perhaps she is grown, a woman already, ripe on the day of her marriage.
If this is so, if her virginal purity was freely given, the team will make it safely back to camp
If not...
The driver needs no timepiece to know that time is his master.
They left too late.
The sun is burning away twinkling seconds.
Seven lives rest in his frostbitten hands.
The dogs are sluggish, wading through shoulder deep snow, their spirits defeated.
He winces as his whip cracks, and eight lamenting echoes cry across the frozen desert.
He must keep pushing them on.
His nemesis is mocking, she morphs before his gaze.
She, the sun, turns into an hourglass,filled with melting drops of dripping time.
She is high and fierce as an an icecap dislodges beneath her heat and aspires to become an avalanche
The dog's tired legs are leaden, fighting hard against the melting snow.
The driver's 'mush' hard, callous and desperate against the vast landscape of nothingness.
He has no time for kind words or fondled ears.
His respect is shown by getting the boys home.
The sled is waterlogged, snow turning to liquid as he powers through.
Laboured, jerking strides, forward through dirty slush.
He looks behind him and the torrent approaching strikes him mute.
Cracks appearing. Ice breaking. The land beneath his feet fracturing.
And before him the land is cut off by a thirty second river. They are adrift, lost.
He does the only thing left to him.
He whips the dogs hard,
Screaming the frost-bitten words, 'Mush. Mush. Get on.'
Dogs eyes white, wild, rolling. Wanting to turn against nature and disobey but unable to.
The man drives his dogs, two at a time, over the edge of the ice flotilla into turbulent, rushing death.
The last thing he can do for them.
'Get on.'