Reindeer! The most majestic of Santa’s cloven foot creatures— in fact, the only hooved creatures in the North Pole. Not skittish as a whitetail, not brutish as a moose, not dumb cribbing assholes as horses often are— reindeer have the perfectly balanced skill graph of swiftyness, strengthyness, defensiveyness, healthiness, and intelligence-ness. And when it comes to magicyness not one animal can compare! Not even the grand and wizardly kiwi of Van Dieman’s Land. No other fauna could ever be trusted to assist Santa in her ultimate Amazon Prime delivery of the year. It was unthinkable! Santa’s sleigh pulled by flying kiwis? Or helicopter foxes? Or levitating, magical clydesdales? Preposterous! What holiday poppycock!
Place a bet! A bright and shiny Indian head penny says you can’t guess how many reindeer belong to Santa Claus. Six? Eight? Twelve? More! Much, much more! Would you believe Santa has at her disposal a jabillion reindeer? It’s true! Go ahead, take off your mittens and boots and count them yourself! One, two, skip a few, a jabillion! So regal! So majestic! So fuzzy and grunty! All densely packed together like a rippling ocean of antlered flea-bags.
Their black, gray, and brown furs wet and caked with frost. As if the snowy climate had infected their blood and leprous spots of winter scarred across their bodies. Peter beheld the vast and endless herd and wondered how he had somehow not seen them before when he stepped outside yesterday. Was he blind? Dumb? Perhaps both!
But now’s not the time to admire the scenery— save that for the idlers and procrastinators. Now is the time to learn the lost and ancient art of sledging, and who else to teach it but the Master Elf of sledging herself: Yukina! Like a Chukchi princess, she was clad entirely in white and black spotted reindeer furs, carefully stitched so the spots were patterned symmetrically. Her snowy white chin was bundled against a scarf of squirrel tails, and atop her pretty head sat a reindeer fur ushanka— not square like what the Soviets wore, but bell shaped and adorable.
Peter audibly gasped when he saw her reindeer skin boots had curled toes— the elven stereotypes were true!
Bent over, Yukina squeezed a reindeer leg between her thighs and studied the underside of its hoof. Beside her was a small workbench displaying a smörgåsbord of horrible serrated and pointy instruments of torture. When Peter approached her, she was speaking softly to the fawnling in an ASMR voice smooth and sweet as maple syrup butter.
“Okay now, little girl, I’m going to take my rasp now and just… ever-so-slightly… trim away at the edge of your hoof. Just a gentle touch will do…”
Yukina sawed away at the hoof so hard it made an ungodly snoring sound. Peter clinched his butt-cheeks extra hard and ground his teeth down to stumps— the pain! Holy fudgesicles! Imagine the pain of having your toenails scraped away with a giant metal nail file! But the reindeer didn’t flinch from the torturous pedicure!
“There,” Yukina said with a voice soft as a velvet bag full of puppy dog ears. “That’s a happy little hoof. I bet you feel a whole lot better now, don’t you? Now go and be happy, and be in love with life, and play with all your little reindeer friends.”
The reindeer pranced away, light as a feather, as if doing a happy reindeer dance back into the night along with the rest of the herd, and Yukina smiled and placed her hand over her heart to feel the joy bursting out through her chest. She held onto that moment before she turned to face Peter.
“Peter! I’m really glad you could join me today, because I think together we’re going to have a really fantastic lesson.”
Peter was dumbstruck. Her voice was like a lullaby. He just stared at her.
“Have you ever driven reindeer before?” she asked.
“No.”
“How about horses?”
“No.”
“Elk? Moose?”
Peter shook his head.
“Ponies? Camels? Very large goats? Anything with hooves?”
“People drive cars where I come from.”
“Ah, well don’t worry. Because the great thing about life is you can learn anything you want to. All you have to do is try your best and practice consistently. And that’s what we’re going to do today.”
Peter felt his heart melting with each wholesome word she spoke. He wanted to record her voice and listen to it as he went to sleep. She could be saying anything— reading a Taco Bell menu, and it would bedazzle him like it was something profound and poetic. A cheesy gordita crunch with extra beans— just… sublime poetry.
For some reason, perhaps because of every depiction of Santa ever illustrated, animated, or musically elucubrated, Peter imagined the sledge would be a candy-apple red beast. Something slick and trimmed with gold accents. An unruly land-barge of a vehicle that could be stacked twenty feet high with gifts. So he was taken aback when Yukina showed him a jalopy of wood and seal skins lashed together with rope into some kind of mummified excuse of a vehicle. It was not very Christmasy at all— in fact it looked downright Halloweeny.
“Here’s our happy little sledge.” Yukina ran her mittened hand over the abomination. “Now before we begin, I’d just like to introduce you to some of the key parts. These are the runners, and these are the footboards where you stand. These here are called stanchions and they…”
Peter’s cellphone sang out from his pocket, and it didn’t seem like Yukina was saying anything important at the moment, so he pulled it out and checked his messages. Little did he know that he was about to behold the greatest text message ever received in his life. Only two words and a few heart emojis from the Snow Witch: “Morning tittaesssss,” followed by a slew of selfies.
There lay his slim and dangerous abductor in bed, pale and sparkly as the new-fallen snow. Not a shred of pajama covered her waifish figure. Her eyes shyly hidden behind her hands, but her breasts put on display. Peter flipped through twelve other risqué photos of the Snow Witch in a dumb, unblinking silence, judging which one fully captured her demonic beauty: her long, frosty hair, her shark-like pointy smile.
[Scribble Hub Scribble Hub Scribble Hub Whypstopher Pippinsticks Hub Scribble Hub Scribble Hub Scribble]
Which was the holy grail of the set? He preferred the ones where she showed her face and in some sort of display of modesty, groped herself— but the other photos, with chest unhidden—! So lost was he in the pornographic fervor of the text messages, that Peter was completely unaware he pressed the screen against his eyeballs! It’s not that Peter had never seen a naked girl before— but he had never received such precious photos from a girl before! Was this what having a girlfriend was like? Your very own supply of on demand pornography each morning?
“Who’s texting you?”
Yukina craned her neck over to look at Peter’s screen. Peter hit the power button so hard the phone almost slipped out of his hand— he pinned the screen against his chest.
“Nothing!” he blurted out suspiciously with the most awful poker-face.
Yukina didn’t press the conversation further.
The differences between a driving a Volvo versus driving a light running reindeer sledge were too numerous to detail in a single day, but that didn’t stop Yukina from softly listing out every little thing from A to Z. She talked about bridles, and talked about the sharp comb in the bridle, about how a gentle tug and a light scratch from the comb would set them trotting, about the sealskin belts fastening the two reindeer to the sled, about how he only had to command the right reindeer and the left merely followed.
Peter nodded to show he was paying attention, until he had nodded for so long he felt like a dumb bobble-head doll. Yukina grabbed a long and thin birchwood rod from the sled and showed it to him.
“Now this here is our happy little tine. Be careful with it.” She pointed at the end where a piece of bone was tied. “That’s a walrus molar, and boy howdy that can really smart if you hit someone with it.”
With a kung-fu swish the tine cut through the air and smacked against Peter’s thick, red jacket. The reindeer started prancing off but Yukina stomped her boot down on the claw brake and halted them.
“Did you feel that?” she asked.
“No.”
“Neither did they.” She smiled, and she had little white teeth like a child. “But they started moving anyway, didn’t they?” Then she whispered to herself, “Gosh they’re so smart.”
Yukina stood upon the runners of the sledge, held together by arcs of reindeer horn— looking like a muppet in her furry outfit. The reindeer glanced back at her, prepared and awaiting her instructions. She hitched a smokey lantern onto the sledge and drew out the wick until the flame blazed. With reins wrapped around her mittened hands, she lifted the tine like a conductor’s baton.
“Just let go.” Yukina said. “Release your doubts, your fears. Find your happy place. The wild heart knows the way.”
The tine swooshed above the reindeer, and Yukina howled out a “Hakk, hakk! Koos, koos, koos!” And the reindeer flew like a flash off into the snowy wilderness beyond. One moment the elf was there in her winter furs, then she was gone— taken by the deadly winter wonderland. Peter’s eyes held onto the dim flicker of her crappy smoking lantern, until that little light was swallowed up by the dark void— plunged headfirst into a snowy event horizon. The only sign Yukina was still alive were the drumbeat of hooves pounding in a decrescendo.
There was something so intensely, stupidly dangerous about the whole thing that Peter was immediately on board. He didn’t have a need for speed, he had an insanely unhealthy obsession for speed. It came out of nowhere and took him like a sweaty fever dream. He couldn’t wait to jump onto that rickety old sledge and see just how fast those lazy-eyed reindeer could prance. It was like someone had just given him a free car— shoved the keys into his hands and said, “Here you go! Do whatever you want!” and out before him was nothing but wide, empty road begging for donuts and wheelies and dangerous handbrake power slides.
But then Peter’s cutie-sense was tingling. Like that weird moment immediately after déjà vu, where one begins to suspect they can predict the future. Something told him to turn around and face the reindeer herd. There among the cervidae masses, wrapped in the shadowy night, hiding behind the thick of antlers and fluffy tails, stood a girl. Like a porno magazine found in the woods— a regular occurrence back in the dark ages before internet— she was buck naked. Or at least she appeared to be. This shy nymph hid her fragile figure behind the reindeer and peeped out at Peter with large, unblinking doe eyes.
The inner coomer in Peter was dying to hunt her down and run his eyes up and down her body, but once he stepped forward, the girl skipped back, ducked down, and disappeared into the herd. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, perhaps Peter was going insane, perhaps there was some Christmas magic in the air that night, but Peter would have sworn that his mysterious and possibly nude voyeur had a crown of antlers.
He shoved through the thick of the grunting, hooved quadrupeds and searched around, but there were no naked cutie pies to be found. He gave up the search once Yukina returned. She charged towards Peter at top speed, as if he were a bowling pin and she were going to pick up the spare. But with expert precision she drifted the sledge sideways and brought it to a snowplow stop.
“Okie-dokie! Now it’s your turn.” She stripped off her reindeer ushanaka and her golden hair came spilling out, wild and tangled. Then she plopped the hat down onto Peter’s head. “Riding is an art, and art is about self expression. Just imagine all the bad things in your life being left behind you.”
“Alright!”
Peter hopped up onto the sledge and standing on the thing felt even worse than it looked. What a ratty and miserable cluster of wood! It was barely held together with skins and hides of different arctic beasts. He immediately felt uneasy and imbalanced. Yukina assisted him by twisting the reins tightly around his wrist— this way if he fell off and lost his grip, he would be dragged along.
There are very few moments in a boy’s life worthy of a dramatic countdown. For Peter this was it. He felt like a space monkey, one of the poor, expendable USSR primates stuffed into a space suit and duct taped to a giant bomb aimed at the moon. And if Cosmonaut Bongo died— well, he was just a stupid monkey. His heart knocked against his ribs in anticipation of the takeoff. He death-gripped the sledge to ensure he wouldn’t tumble away on takeoff. Yukina gave him an approving nod.
And wow, this chapter sure is long, isn't it? We best stop here and take a milk and cookie break.