TRANSHUMANCE (3)
By:
January 29, 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.
“Few wolf tracks right there,” Baba points a few feet away off the trail. He raises his eyebrows. Little Dog can’t budge. Chickadees and a few passerines start up as the sun breaks over the mountains to warm the loftier reaches of pine boles.
The trees begin to thin out as the pair approach the Heart Cave. Sun glaring off the main lodges’ tin roofs squints Little Dog’s eyes. Plumes of steam from the thermal spring and smoke from stoves rise up thick as pillars in the crisp vault of sky. Faint echoes of barking dogs and the clang of toolwork.
Blithely, the elder waxes and wanes and waxes again on the poetry of spring, hinting at the work to be done around Heart Cave with winter’s ceding. Little Dog tunes him out — his jaw feels like it’s been wound shut with iron.
The youth walks his own way back to the Heart Cave and the elder lingers there at the treeline to think for a while. Eventually he takes the path the rest of the Kindred pummeled out of the snow.
Little Dog winds around the outbuildings — fences, barns, sheds and yurts to find his own. The few mutts who lacked herding instinct swarm him jumping and nipping. Welcome back, welcome back; they were never hard to listen to. Hens chuckle low in their huts. Ahead Kindred kids shriek, chasing each other in circles since it’s too cold to chase the chickens. They’re bundled up in furs to the point of clumsy waddling, falling over one another; pain in the ass to supervise, Little Dog thought. He smells skunk of burning ganja before he sees River ‘supervising’ the runts. She’s perched on top of a dormant apiary and waves at Little Dog.
“You shouldn’t sit on those, you might break it and freeze the colony.”
She laughs and hawks phlegm.
Even more reason to head straight for his yurt. River could always sus out when he was feeling tender, and usually made sport of it. Never like a kid flaying some small creature at her mercy, but to needle at the very heart of his tenderness. She calls this sport Small Potatoes. Little Dog hurries on.
Something feels fit to burst. When he finds his yurt, Little Dog ties the flap shut tight behind him. He circles the space. He can’t yet enjoy this luxury of solitude. He can’t help the sensation welling without the Kindred social eye. Hot base anger, stifling Kindred silence, the shame garnered by the closest figure he has to a father, it all roils pressurized and acrid like the depth of a geyser. His first cry is choked. He’s on his knees and soon after all fours. He’s lanced a boil and from it runs tar. He holes up for the entire day in the yurt until the tar has run its course out from him.
This black tar of something innate in people — blossoming hormones like new limbs to be accounted for, aching and writhing in some tactile twilight of bramble and barbed wire. Some spell is broken. Family’s inadequacy and just how human they abruptly are; putrid buds of dogwood. Inchoate sense of belonging, of self and value, of who Little Dog wants to be in the world — barely tolerating his own name. All of it eventually froths up and out of Little Dog. No one has told him that every human heart is engineered to pump rancor on the backs of platelets. Thorns brustling and scratching along veins from arms to feet and face. He takes long looks at Virgil’s unsettled sleeping furs. He stares at the kindling smoldering in the stove. In his culture, there is no easy equivalent or understanding of ‘pout’. He paces more. No one has called him for dinner.
There isn’t any other recourse but to continue. He thinks of an old bison whose knees buckled with arthritis; instinct led it away from the herd. Then wolves come like funerary monks, he thought. They condemned and tore down that old bull even if the arthritic body thrashed like it had no idea that its time had run its course. He sees a stark two-prong path from here. On one he resigns like that bison. He’ll be embarrassed by this allegory of his in just a few moons.
On the other, he grits his teeth. He can’t imagine a life outside of the Kindred. There’s no dividing words like ‘family’ or ‘friend.’ These people compose his lexicon and thoughts like solid ground underfoot. And there are so few hands and so much work to do.
So he works. He works until summer breaks through the cruel deception of a Rocky Mountain spring, until the rest of the Kindred return.
Little Dog rises in the milky light of predawn. His body shivers him awake then he and Khyber tend to the fence lines. He’s not big enough to hammer posts alone, but holds them in place while Khyber thwacks them deep into the frosted earth. He loves Khyber. The man who drives in the fence posts is half grizzly bear. The same dormant force in all his brawn makes ice cream for kids, brushes and shoes horses, marvels at the hiemal bloom of wildflowers, models for Little Dog’s new diligent silence. A quiet reflection of the world.
When the sun crops up he returns to the main halls and heads towards the greenhouse. He’s grateful for the apricity, to be out from the frosted shadow of the hill line. He kneads blood back into sore hands and sifts the beds for weeds. There’s relief in the soil. In truth they don’t need him there too long but everyone has to know how and what fills their plates. Endive, celery, carrots, peas, broccoli, asparagus, mirriam, garlic — the greenhouse is a vault of life. Insulated, alien, unforgivingly economic with its tiered beds. This vault buoys the Kindred out of the food chain.
The sun has warmed the earth for a couple hours; alone, Little Dog tills the plots hemming the greenhouse. There’s three acres to cover for first seeding and enough snow has melted. His hoe is old but he picks this one out of the shed because of its splinters and roughness. It chafes his hands raw but he grits his teeth for calluses. With each thwack and scrape of the frozen earth he burns thoughts.
To be continued…
Complete story to be published at HILOBROW later 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.