TRANSHUMANCE (10)
By:
March 18, 2026
We are thrilled to serialize Transhumance, a post-apocalyptic novella by HILOBROW friend and contributor Charlie Mitchell.
TRANSHUMANCE: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10.
The man stops and watches Little Dog for a moment. The youth has stopped and is clearing his throat, hunched, facing away.
“Son,” he says carefully, warmly. “Nobody’s gonna cycle me anytime soon — no way, no how. Wanna heater?”
Little Dog spits and rubs his eyes. “What’s a heater?”
“A bad joke. Hop on the horse and I’ll track where you left off.”
He will protect this boy at all costs.
Give him yard to relish what’s left in childhood, give him enough to navigate his own way.
Little Dog watches Dalton, waiting, as he furrows inward picking words carefully like sinew off bone.
“Don’t hold it against your folk, pal. Fear is a funny thing. It’ll keep you alive better’n most but is downright virulent, cripples some and chews others right to the core of being til it becomes a blackness coloring everything in yer noggin. And for what it’s worth there’s no being brave unless yer afraid,” he muses, picking his way along the scrabble.
He speaks slowly, evenly. Little Dog listens; filling in the spaces left by suspect cognates.
“Wild as the prospect may be you’ll one day find yourself wrinkling and it’ll flit by before you know it. You’ll tread the world and see things wonderful to tell. And in the same breath you’ll ache and hurt so bad that dying loses its teeth — good God how do you sum it all up? The paths of people you love will break off from yours, and you’ll hurt and bleed and wonder why it happened but there’s nothin else to surmise than hoping those paths meet up again, that them paths broke and forked not for anything you did. That’s the worst part — running up are the ones gone and you will never see again. Plenty do meet up in time, plenty fine to leave meandering their own way, and sometimes it takes years — decades, even, through hell and high water.
“I came to see an old brother — to shuck some callouses from my heart — to see such a feller like yourself with my brother’s big blue eyes and goofy fuckin ears.”
Little Dog considers all of this and studies the man’s driftwood lankiness — there’s a contrast. Again he doesn’t have words like uncle, godfather, padriño, and so forth. Quietly he reassures himself that Dalton is mistaken about paths gone for good, ending; though he still feels a vast pit open up of unknowable depth inside himself. He will indeed wrinkle, and think back on that hunt in the woods when he hears the crack in a pubescent voice. The pair share a silent confidence in one another well into the great quiet of the coniferous forest.
“Reckon I did just sorta draft you up out of camp — never gave too much room for objection,” Dalton muses and casts a side eye at Little Dog.
“It is a damn good day for a hike, should you wanna color it as such. We’ll keep going for as long as you want, buddy.”
He understands what’s implied. True — it wasn’t about the buck. Little Dog never understood what their quandary was. Larders still had decent stock. He simply jumped at the opportunity to sate his curiosity about the once-stranger.
And he realizes he’s never put any living thing back into cycle besides trout. Did paths ever really conclude, did they not make their way back around Sam’s Great Wheel? Surely they did; but that fresh pit howling in Little Dog still made him shiver.
The rite of culling and hunting was for Kindred who finished Transhumance. Even then it always smelled like a heavy responsibility, something distant, distinctly adult. He didn’t like it. When a goat is cycled it stamps and screams like a person and cuts short if done right, panic swimming in eyes while restrained — he hates every step of the rite. Or the gruesome aftermath of what wolves do to living things. He hauled away a calf this winter surprisingly light with so much void inside the ribcage. He hates the way her glossy eyes look up at him, that her face is still sweet and innocent — look down and all but her spine, ribs, and legs have been cleaned out. He hates the metallic smell and stickiness of blood, the slippery weight of organs, especially intestine ropes, when helping a butcher. He never eats meat on the same day. There’s an autumn nightmare where Little Dog is all alone on the green at night, and all the meat slithers out of the larder on its own accord and knit themselves into an amalgam of an elk.
But it isn’t really about the meat. Barring famine, the Kindred won’t even accept it if either of them, spiritually untempered, made the kill.
This is Dalton’s life, and for the first time in his life Little Dog is unsettled by the thought of going back home. Where one question was answered he had three more. One underslung all the rest — do you do things because they’re hard? It was unimaginable to leave the Heart Cave until one step further follows another. Easier to imagine seasons following rivers and tributaries, wild people along them, the ways they speak, what they eat, how they love. Wear another name. Who knew if he would be taken back if he left — he only hoped Virgil and River might understand. Ignorant to peril and consequence Little Dog grits his jaw and determines he would rather commence his own Transhumance rather than be passed over another year.
“No, I think we should, I think I’m ready.”
Dalton nods. “Alright then. Keep yer eyes peeled for scrapes,” one hand clawed to mimic scraping soil. “They’ll rummage down to dirt’n mark it with piss — like how you’n me read stone cairns. Sometimes you can read rubs on tree trunks but this time of year, they got nubbins at best.”
Keeping silent, the sun still crowns high by the time they find their prey. He’s grazing on the buds of an aspen limb. Fur chipped and ashy like the remnants of a fire start to give way to a tawny sheen across mature and well-fed hinds and fores. In between twitching ears are the velvet-mossed stalks of budding antlers.
The horse is hitched at a good distance and Dalton and Little Dog prowl like cats and shimmie over rough lichen rock to the top of the crag and study the buck down below. The older man closes his eyes, enjoying the downwind passage and sunlight bathing his face. The youth marvels at the buck’s magnitude held so wary and gentle and it finally settles on him fully — if he fires the gun and cycles this life his path will break from the Kindred’s. This is it, this is the threshold; you are part of the world — reckon it now, a voice not quite Baba’s or Dalton’s.
When Dalton opens his eyes, he hands Little Dog the rifle. He shows him the safety switch, the bolt slide, where to place the eye and shoulder.
“Wait til he turns and shows you vitals,” Dalton whispers. “A gutshot bleeds bad and’s a worse way to die.”
Little Dog has never held a firearm. The black metal has stolen the cold; faint gun oil oddly sweet yet inedible. It’s no light weight, and he tries to wrestle his thudding heart still.
“It’ll kick. Wrap the leather round your wrist to brace it. Good. Big breath in — and when you let it out, just gently squeeze the trigger.”
He triangulates where he feels his lungs are in between iron sights. He can hear the breach and snap of green tree limbs twisted free and buds masticated.
Little Dog’s quarry collapses cleanly cycled below the boughs. The shot shakes loose snow from branches above; the chickadees and starlings quiet as if they sit in wake for their brother buck. And the pit inside him is no less empty — as mysterious as new stars sprung up to scorch the night. Abiding in the silence of the forest and the world, Little Dog lays there with his own agency chartered out.
Written in 2023, this story was serialized, then published in its entirety, here at HILOBROW in 2026.
MORE ORIGINAL FICTION & POETRY AT HILOBROW: James Parker’s COCKY THE FOX | Karinne Keithley Syers’ LINDA, LINDA, LINDA | Matthew Battles’ THE SOVEREIGNTIES OF INVENTION stories | James Parker’s KALEVALA bastardizations | Annalee Newitz’s “THE GREAT OXYGEN RACE” | Charlie Mitchell’s “SENTINELS” | Josh Glenn’s “VALIDATION SESSION” | & more.