Back to the Homepage

 

A Glow in the Dark

by Gary Paulsen

There are night ghosts.

Some people say that we can understand all things if we can know them, but there came a dark night in the fall when I thought that was wrong, and so did the dogs.

We had been running all morning and were tired; some of the dogs were young and could not sustain a long run.  So we stopped in the middle of the afternoon when they seemed to want to rest. I made a fire, set up a gentle, peaceful camp, and went to sleep for four hours.

It hadn't snowed yet so we had been running with a three-wheel cart, which meant we had to run on logging roads and open areas. I had been hard pressed to find new country to run in to keep the young dogs from becoming bored and this logging trail was one we hadn't run. It had been rough going, with a lot of ruts and mud and the cart was a mess so I spend some time fixing it after I awakened, carving off the dried mud.  The end result was we didn't get going again until close to one in the morning.  This dot not pose a problem except that as soon as I hooked the dogs up and got them lined out--I was running an eight-dog team--my head lamp went out.  I replaced the bulb and tried a new battery, that didn't help--the internal wiring was bad. I thought briefly of sleeping again until daylight but the dogs were slamming into the harnesses, screaming to run, so I shrugged and jumped on the rigt and untied it.  Certainly, I thought, running without a head lamp would not be the worst thing I had ever done.

Immediately we blew into the darkness and the ride was madness.  Without a lamp I could not tell when the rig was going to a rut or a puddle.  It was cloudy and fairly warm--close to fifty--and had rained the night before. Without the moon or even starlight I had no idea where the puddles were until they splashed me--largely in the face--so I was soon dripping wet.  Coupled with that, tree limbs I couldn't see hit at me as we passed, almost tearing me off the back of the rig.  Inside an hour, I wasn't sure if I was up, down, or sideways.

And the dogs stopped.

They weren't tired, not even a little, judging by the way they had been ripping through the night, but they stopped dead.

I had just taken a limb in the face and was temporarily blinded.  All I knew was that they had stopped suddenly and that I had to jam down on the brakes to keep from running over them.  It took me a couple of seconds to clear my eyes and when I did, I saw the light. 

In the first seconds I thought it was another person coming toward me. The light had an eerie green-yellow glow. It was quite bright and filled a whole part of the dark night ahead, down the trail.  It seemed to be moving.  I was in deep woods and couldn't think what a person would be doing there--there are no other teams where I train--but I was glad to see the light.

At first.

Then I realized the light was strange. It glowed and ebbed and seemed to fill too much space to be a regular light source.  It was low to the ground, and wide.

I was still not frightened and would probably not have become frightened except that the dogs suddenly started to sing.

I have already talked about some of their songs.  Rain songs and first-snow songs and meat songs and come-back-and-stay-with-us songs and even puppy-training songs, but I had heard this song only once, when an old dog had died in the kennel. It was a death song.

And that frightened me.

They all sat. I could see them quite well in the glow from the light--the soft glow, the green glow, the ghost glow. It crept into my thinking without my knowing it: the ghost glow. Against my wishes I started thinking of all the things in my life that had scared me.

Ghosts and goblins and dark nights and snakes under the bed and sounds I didn't know and bodies I had found and graveyards under covered pale moons and death, death, death...

And they sang and sang.  The cold song in the strange light.  For a time I could do nothing but stand on the back of the wheeled rig and stare at the light with hold, dusty terror.

But curiosity was stronger. My legs moved without my wanting them to move and my body followed them, along-side the team in the dark, holding to each dog like a security blanket until I reached the next one, moving closer to the light until I was at the front and there were no more dogs to hold.

The light had gotten brighter, seemed to pulse and flood back and forth, but I still could not see the source.  I took another step, then another, trying to look around the corner, deeply feeling the distance from the dogs, the aloneness.

Two more steps, then one more, leaning to see around the corner and at last I saw it and when I did it was worse.

It was a form. Not human. A large, standing form glowing in the dark.  The light came from within it, a cold-glowing green light with yellow edges that diffused the shape, making it change and grow as I watched.

I felt my heart slam up into my throat.

I couldn't move. I stared at the upright form and was sure it was a ghost, a being from the dead sent for me.  I could not move and might not have ever moved except that the dogs had followed me, pulling the rig quietly until they were around my legs, peering ahead, and I looked down at them and had to laugh.

They were caught in the green light, curved around my legs staring at the standing form, ears cocked and heads turned sideways while they studied it.  I took another short step forward and they all followed me, then another, and they stayed with me until we were right next to the form.

It was a stump.

A six-foot-tall, old rotten stump with the bark knocked off, glowing in the dark with a bright green glow.  Impossible.  I stood there with the dogs around my legs, smelling the stump and touching it with their noses. I found out later that it glowed because it had sucked phosphorus from the ground up into the wood and held the light from day all night.

But that was later.  There in the night I did not know this. Touching the stump, and feeling the cold light, I could not quite get rid of the fear until a black-and-white dog name Fonzie camp up, smelled the stump, snorted, and relieved himself on it.

So much for ghosts!

Equizzer