“Can we travel through time with our questions? Is love alive? How many “out there” questions can you have lingering in your head in the space between waking and sleeping? Love can definitely travel through time though. I just know it.”
Watering eyes are glancing out across the landscape. Scarf masking mouth and nose, keeping the blizzard out. Beanie pulled tightly over eyebrows and ears. Nejla has been walking for what feels like hours but it can’t be more than fifteen minutes.
The train had stopped in the middle of the night. A huge tree, an ancient oak, had fallen across the tracks taking part of the overhead line with it as it went down, the conductor had reported over the intercom. The train could not get any further until the tracks were cleared and the overhead lines repaired.
Fortunately Nejla had booked a sleeping carriage for herself, Kriya, Tuva and Starlight. It was some sight for the passengers boarding the train at the later stations as they passed through the narrow corridors on the way to their carriages. There, in coach 28 D, E, F & G, a woman reading in the top bunk, a husky, a malamute and a samoyed sprawled out on the two lower bunks.
The blizzard moved in less than an hour after the announcement, making it impossible for the railway repair crew to climb the poles to fix the overhead lines until the storm had died down.
The passengers were kept warm with nutmeg spiced gluhwein, steaming hot soup, extra blankets and hot water bottles. Saved by the fact that the kitchen on the train still ran its stove on gas.
Seven hours in to the wait, the dogs really needed to get out. For some reason Nejla had decided to strap on both her own as well as Kriya and Tuva’s backpacks. Starlight was a little too slender for those dogpacks so she’d gotten a smaller one. The only one available in the store that day was a glittery version, originally made for “glamorous poodles’ and not for huskies. But hey, her name was Starlight, so why not!
They stepped out of the train, Nejla planning to follow the tracks ahead, past the fallen tree and check what the situation was.
The same insight had guided her to attach the dogs harnesses to each other with the longer skijöring lines as well as attach two of them to her own skijörning harness.
Lumps of ice are beginning to form on her eyelashes.
Cecilia Götherström, December 7th 2021
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