Primal Law

By Lincoln Reed

The Colt revolver’s song echoed through the barren terrain as gun smoke mixed with heavy snowfall. Marshal Roland Chadwick holstered his firearm, grimaced, and spat, watching bloody saliva crystalize and disappear into the white earth. The image reminded him of a disfigured candy cane. After all, it was Christmas Eve. But that didn’t matter. Without a fire, he’d be dead before sunrise.

Ten feet away, Devil-Dan Osiris dropped his Bowie knife and collapsed into a snowbank, a bullet hole through his head. The chase across Texas, Wyoming, Montana, and the Yukon had finally ended in a mano-a-mano confrontation three miles north of Dawson City. Now, Osiris— the infant killer—was dead. And if the marshal didn’t act fast, he would be, too.

Chadwick registered his wounds. Osiris had stabbed his shoulder, but the marshal was numb to the sting. He couldn’t feel his bruised face, let alone his arms and fingers. Even so, he mustered his strength and opened the vagabond’s coat, where a sniffling child gazed at the marshal from behind a frostbitten nose. She was a one-year-old girl with raven hair and green eyes, a hostage and human shield. Taking the small child into his arms, he tucked her underneath his jacket, nestling her against his fading warmth. Chadwick then dragged Osiris underneath a pine and buried him in a shallow, snowy grave. He’d return for the corpse after the blizzard.

Normally, Chadwick would have waited for daybreak to pursue Osiris. But the outlaw had snatched an unattended child while slipping out the Dawson tavern’s back door.

“Stay till morning,” Cassus, the marshal’s guide, had advised. “Then we rescue.”

“She’ll be dead before that.”

Chadwick hadn’t hesitated. The ensuing dogsled chase had swept him into the wilderness beyond the reach of help and cultured humanity. Chadwick’s dogs were already exhausted from a three-day stint of travel by the time they’d arrived in Dawson, and the crew was pushed to its limit in the pursuit of Osiris. Now, with the hunt completed, Chadwick’s group of huskies each burrowed in the snow, warming themselves with noses tucked into their bodies.

Leaving his dogs to rest and return on their own, he assembled Osiris’s team. But the canines wouldn’t mush to the marshal’s voice. He cursed and tossed the sled’s reins aside. He should have brought Cassus along, or waited for other townsfolk to assist. Chadwick had come too far to let Osiris kill again, and his obsession was proving to be a fatal mistake. He’d broken the primal law of self-preservation, sentenced to suffer the penalty in the frigid landscape.

Without the means to start a fire, Chadwick lifted his snowshoes and trudged toward Dawson, the lone outpost at the edge of the world. The child whimpered and clung to his shirt, absorbing his heat like a sponge. With lungs burning and chest heaving, the marshal waded through the sea of evergreens and mapped his course by tracking his team’s sled traces. The temperature had been fifty below zero when he’d left the tavern, and it had dropped to sixty when he’d started the journey back. Countless adventurers and prospectors had perished in similar conditions, too naïve or stupid to respect the Yukon winter. Chadwick would die as they had, stiff and forlorn. Heavy snowfall blurred his vision so much, he could barely perceive the faint outlines of trees, all of which stood in the storm like specters in a fog.

The marshal’s feet and arms were as heavy as bricks. All he wanted to do was sit against a tree trunk and sleep. Rest. Catch his breath. But he knew that to move was to live. Stopping meant death for him and the child.

Shading his eyes from the unforgiving wind, his head remained bent as he marched across the white tundra, blinded by snow flurries and frozen eyelashes. The slow circulation of blood through weary limbs kept his heart beating—but for how much longer, the marshal didn’t know. His legs cramped and muscles screamed. The child sniveled, perhaps too cold to cry.

“Stay awake,” he whispered. “Almost there.”

Visions of heated Dawson cabins filled his mind’s eye, along with the star atop the tavern’s Christmas tree. He wished for a glimpse of any light from town, some signal to steer him in the right direction.

Chadwick fell to his knees, barraged by the squall, bending under the weight of the untamed wilderness. He crawled forward inch by inch through the drift until he could see the flicker of candles in frosted windows, like lighthouses across an ocean of snow. Weary eyes fluttered as he pictured the Christmas star in his imagination, glimmering with hope, calling him homeward.

Men and dogs grew ever larger on the horizon, arriving just as Chadwick closed his eyes.

Chadwick regained consciousness to the sight of morning light sparkling off icicles outside a cabin window. He moaned and turned toward the orange glow of a fireplace, where a pine tree stood in a corner, trimmed with red ribbons. His right shoulder had been bandaged, and thick blankets covered his chest.

“Merry Christmas,” Cassus said, lowering a steaming cup of joe to the marshal’s chapped lips. Chadwick grimaced at the bitter, scalding taste but was grateful for the warmth.

“The girl?”

Cassus nodded toward a nearby bunk where a woman cradled the raven-haired child. “Her mother claims Saint Nicholas saved Ora, her daughter, but when the sled dogs wouldn’t run, the saint carried her home.”

Chadwick grinned, scratching his thawed beard. “What can I say? Gray hair suits me.”

Cassus handed him a plate of grub. Chadwick took a bite of biscuit.

“The huskies?”

“All trotted back. They’ve been fed.” Cassus paused, contemplative. “You were right to defy primal law.”

“Devil-Dan wouldn’t agree.”

“Killed by the storm?”

Chadwick gazed out the window toward the vast Northland, noting its serene glisten compared to the night before.

“Osiris was on my naughty list,” he said, smirking. “And this Saint Nick packs a six-shooter.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lincoln Reed holds a B.A. in film studies from Taylor University and an MFA in creative writing from Miami University of Ohio. His freelance writings have been published in The Secret Place, The Marion Chronicle-Tribune, and in university publications. His short fiction has appeared in Zimbell House Publishing anthologies and Flash Fiction Magazine.

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