The noise of the door closing, and the flickering lights of the house, have woken some of the dogs. They stand like wolves, leaning forward with keen eyes, until they see the musher step out of the shadows of the house toward the shed. A dog whines, low. In an instant, the quiet of the world is shattered into a raucous choir, a breaking chorus: the dogs bark. They howl.
Over the din, the musher fumbles with the latch on the shed door, and when it releases, moves a bucket aside to pull open the door. Her right hand is bare, the glove in her teeth. She needs to feel what she is doing. The shed doesn’t have a light, and she curses herself again for not putting one up this summer. If she can keep the shed door from swinging closed on its heavy hinges, the moonlight will be enough this morning to show her the food and supplements, the buckets and scoopers and little packages of additives. The truth is she doesn’t need the light. She knows it all by feel, just like she knows the path down to the lot, and the feel of each dog’s ruff, distinctly. But before that—and they howl for her to arrive—she has to mix the food. She puts the water behind her, finds the empty food buckets, crusted with a very little bit of last night’s dinner, near the garbage can of kibble. Her life is measured in buckets. Only eight scoops of kibble today, they’ve been getting a little heavy. Her hand gets cold against the worn wooden handle of the scooper, even colder touching moisture to unscrew the lid to the plastic bulk container of vegetable oil. She douses the kibble in it. Chips out frozen lumps of chicken fat, adds some to each bucket, and the supplement energy/vitamin powder over that. No meat today—raw and half-frozen—but the mix is repulsive enough as it is. The dogs can smell it and scream for it. She would stop and shake her head for a moment, but they are hungry and there is work to do. She pours the steaming water over the food: it melts the fat and mixes in the oil and powders. The kibble floats and moves, the whole mix a sudden rising stench. Somehow beautiful in its familiarity. Again, the second bucket. Food and water, mixed and ready. Breakfast.
A bucket in each hand, bumping against her legs and spilling over onto her already stained knees; she kicks the shed door shut, and makes her way to the rioting pack down below. A berserk excitement, not feral, but nearly: This is what they live for. This and running.
In the lot, the dogs lean, jump, wait for her with eager tails. Drool collects at the corners of their mouths, freezes in the fur of their lower jaws. Have they forgotten the last time they were fed? They chomp down their full bowls of food in three bites, so fast they forget again they’ve been fed, and clamor for more. But in all of this, never do they forget that the musher is boss, that later she will run them, and now she feeds them. They look at her with worshipping eyes. With intelligent, conversational eyes. Their excitement is the manic excitement of friends. They never forget she is a friend. A boss. A brother wolf, in the pack which is what the dogs understand themselves to be.
It is after, when they have quieted with the realization there is no more food for now, and some of them are still snuffling around the corners of their houses and circles for stray kibble, that she takes a moment to breathe, to enjoy. She has a shovel in one hand, another bucket in the other. The apparently untenable occupation politely referred to as “scooping.” It is not an undesirable job. Despite the mechanics of the operation, the actuality of collecting shit into a bucket and moving it away from its producers, the rhythm of it is calming. The service to the dogs: this is how she repays them for their kindness, their warmth and simple beauty. Their heart and their love of pulling. This is how she washes their feet.
They are comfortable with her. They watch her, and if they don’t watch her, they know where she is. Some of them play with each other, stretching to the ends of their chains and gnawing affectionately at the fur of neck and ear. Some growl, but it is playful. They are well-fed, cheerful to be up this bright moonlit morning. And gradually, as she scoops and listens to their noises, a quiet settles on the lot. The dogs, one by one, sit back on their haunches and watch her, each other. It is the silence of the final dark before dawn. The coldest moment of the night. The dogs watch. And then—it is difficult to tell who starts it, and the musher doesn’t want to look and ruin the rhythm—a dog looks up at the stars. Opens her jaw, to the moon and to god, and sings.
It is not the riotous desperate cry of “Feed me!” that came earlier. It is as silent in its chorus, when the others begin to join, as the quiet just broken. A rising cry, a keening choir. One by one the dogs join in, fade out, join again. Together the lot reaches one climactic note. The musher sings too, in her human voice as much as she can. It hits the peak of its chorus, and stops. Suddenly. The musher, once, may have been caught singing in the abrupt, dead quiet. But she has sung this song before, every morning and every night. The lot is more utterly still that it was when every dog but Milky curled up inside its house. The musher looks at them all looking at her. She breathes. The world begins again. The dogs move, subdued now. They are full and want to sleep. She keeps scooping, stopping now and again to pet whoever it is she cleans after.
When she is done, has dumped the full buckets of crap into the rapidly filling hole in the woods, she trades them for the empty food buckets, and carries those up to the house. She enters into a warmth that is more suited for her frail humanity. In silence, she builds herself a breakfast. Hot coffee, eggs, toast. Warmness seeps back into her fingers, painfully. She is grateful to be out of the cold. But her attention is preoccupied, as always. She sits in the living room and stares out the picture window. She thinks she might watch the sun rise as she eats, but part of her is hurrying too much. She eats quickly, watching the dogs move in and around their houses, washes the dishes quickly, and with her mind thinking three steps ahead, has pulled her gear back on before she remembers. Now she grabs heavier stuff, a pair of Cabela’s snow pants, weighted down in the pockets, and Northface boots. Layers over her polar-fleece shirt, and then a thick overcoat with a ruff. She is out the door before the sun has crested the rocky horizon.
The dogs half-ignore her now. They are always aware of where she is and what she is doing, but for now they have been fed, so they do not feel the need to explode into excitement. It will be hours before it is time to run. She will let the food settle in their stomachs. They listen to her work and are content. Above the kennel, the musher preps the snow machine. She wrestles a drag toward the back of the Yamaha, hooks it on and sets the clip. It will be a cold ride this morning. She pulls up her face mask and goes to the shed to fetch the helmet. It is less for protection from possible injury than from the cold. Straddling the machine, she chokes the throttle and then pulls the start. It revs to life. A satisfying noise, but she doesn’t understand the craze some people seem to feel for it. This is nothing like running the dogs. This is dirtier and heavier. This is polluted.
But she needs it. There are trails to clear. She checks to make sure her two axes are in place. Again, she curses herself for not picking up a chainsaw when she was in town last. It will take longer with the manual tools, but she has been working on these trails, trying to keep them clear. The machine is ready, and she has what she needs for the morning. She fires out of the lot.
The dogs wait for her; she thinks of them while she is working. They sleep soundly for a while. At one point after the sun has been up for a short time, a cow moose and her calf make a rustling path far across the field. The dogs rise and watch, and eventually Jabba barks, setting the whole lot off. The cow is perturbed. She moves her calf away. The dogs settle when the two “other” creatures are gone.
The musher returns, goes into the house to warm her fingers and eat again. It seems an irrelevant activity, and she might have avoided it if she hadn’t had to go to the bathroom so badly.
This time, when she steps into the dog lot, the yard erupts into frenzied noise. They know, and she knows: it is time to run. She smiles, and whistles, and the yard goes silent: it is a straining, edgy silence, as they watch her pull out the sled and get the lines ready outside the gates of the yard. A few whine low under their breath. She throws Jabba an arching glance and he grins at her and is quiet.
She begins to harness them, bring them to line. One by one they fill out the team. Only 12 will go today, because the trails are a little rough for any bigger team. The remaining dogs seem both about to burst with hope that they will be next, and to sag with the possibility that they will stay. They stand on their houses to get a better view of the line, and strain with all their might against their chains. Some of them lean so that they are hanging out in the air, supported by their collars and chain and panting.
As each dog comes to line, the world begins to fill with yammering howls. In harness and hooked up, the dogs may speak. They do, and the chorus builds from Jabba’s single whining yelp to Dejo’s low grumble.
The team is ready. She walks up the line once more amidst the yowling, checking that lines and harnesses and clips are in place; when she comes back to the sled, she zips her overcoat around her and pulls up her face mask. The motions are practiced: she pulls the sled back so she can reach the snub line (not that she can actually physically meet the dogs’ power here; she gains an inch, perhaps). With a bare hand on the metal quick-release and both feet heavy on the brake, she looks up at her team. They feel her standing there. One or two look back.“Ready?” she asks. They pound into their harnesses, and she says, “All right!” at the same moment that she releases the line. There is an explosion of movement forward, out of the lot. The time has come to run.
