by Gary Paulsen
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Though I ran sled dogs for close to ten years, did some twenty-two thousand miles with them, this book is not about sled dogs or running them. They were truly wonderful and I have written of them in other books. This book is about other dogs in my life and other times. I am—I say this with some pride and not a little wonder—a “dog person.” I make no excuses for unabashedly loving them— all of them, even some that have bitten me. I have always had dogs and will have dogs until I die. I have rescued dozens of dogs from pounds, always have five or six of them around me, and cannot imagine living without dogs. They are wonderful and, I think, mandatory for decent human life.
All that said, there are some dogs that are different, special in amazing ways. Josh is one, and you’ll read about him later in this book. Cookie was another.
Cookie was my lead dog when I first started to run dogs, and she was also my lead dog in my first Iditarod sled dog race; she took me from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska, when most people—including me—thought I couldn’t do it.
But she was more. She was a good friend, a kind of dogsister or dogmother to me, and while I have written much of her in other places, she belongs in this book, too.
Cookie was given to me by a man who thought she was so sick she couldn’t run any longer. She merely had worms, and when I wormed her she became a wonderful sled dog, and then a wonderful lead dog.
I did not set out to race dogs; I used them for work. I brought in wood with them, went to the Laundromat in town with them (it was grand to tie the dogs up to the parking meter and watch people jump as they walked by) and trapped with them.
In January of 1980, I was running a seventy-five-mile line, trapping beaver. I had previously trapped with a friend, but this year I was trapping alone, not the wisest thing to do, since there is some risk from bad ice or injuries and it’s better to have a companion. I was alone when I made a mistake that nearly killed me.
The ice around beaver lodges is very dangerous. Beavers live in their lodges and come out of underwater tunnels to get food they have stored at the bottom of the river or pond through the summer, in the form of branches stuck down in the mud. Each time they come out they let air out of their noses and it goes up to make bubbles under the surface of the ice, and this, along with the beavers’ rubbing their backs on the underside of the ice, keeps the ice very thin near a beaver lodge. It can be fifty below with two-foot-thick ice around the whole lake and the ice near the lodge might be less than a quarter inch thick.
I had parked the sled near a lodge and unpacked the gear needed to set a group of snares. Cookie was leading the work team of five dogs and they knew the procedure completely by this time. As soon as I stopped the sled and began to unpack they all lay down, curled their tails over their noses and went to sleep. The process could take two or three hours and they used the time to get rest.
A rope tied the cargo to the sled. I threw the rope across the ice to get it out of the way. One end was still tied to the sled. I took a step on the ice near the rope and went through and down like a stone.
You think there is time to react, that the ice will give way slowly and you’ll be able to hang on to the edge, somehow able to struggle to safety. It’s not that way at all. It’s as if you were suddenly standing on air. The bottom drops out and you go down.
I was wearing heavy clothing and a parka. It gathered water like a sponge and took me down faster.
Two things saved me. One, as I went down my hand fell across the rope I had thrown across the ice, which was still tied to the sled.
Two, as I dropped I had time to yell— scream—and the last thing I saw as I went under was Cookie’s head swinging up from sleeping and her eyes locking on mine as I went beneath the surface.
The truth is I shouldn’t have lived. I have had several friends killed in just this manner—dropping through the ice while running dogs—and there wasn’t much of a chance for me. The water was ten or twelve feet deep. I saw all the bubbles from my clothing going up to the surface and I tried to pull myself up on the rope. My hands slipped and I thought in a wild, mental scream of panic that this was how it would end.
Then the rope tightened. There was a large noose-knot on the end and it tightened and started pulling up and when the knot hit I grabbed and held and the dogs pulled me out of the hole and back up onto the ice. There was still very little time. I had a quart of white-gas stove fuel on the sled for emergencies and I threw it on a pine tree nearby and lit a match and set the whole tree on fire and, in the heat, got my clothes off and crawled into a sleeping bag. I stood inside it and held my clothes near the flame to dry them.
I would have died if not for Cookie.
She saw me drop, instantly analyzed the situation, got the team up—she must have jerked them to their feet—got them pulling, and they pulled me out.
That was January 1980. It is now 1997 as I write this, and everything that has happened in the last seventeen years—everything: Iditarods, published books, love, living, life—all of it, including this book, I owe to Cookie.
This book is dedicated to her memory.
Mother stood looking down at the puppy I was holding.
“This one,” I said. “I want this one.”
It was a little black female with a perfect white circle on its side and I clutched it close to my chest and saw only the puppy, me, and the endless possibilities.
I did not realize how impossible the situation happened to be:
I was just seven years old. We were in a mountain village in the Philippine Islands in 1946, where my mother and father had come on a sort of work-vacation-getaway trip. My father was in the army there and Mother and I had taken a troopship from San Francisco to be with him.
The dog represented a problem in more ways than one. We lived in strictly controlled base housing, such as it was, and Mother wasn’t sure if dogs were allowed. But that was just for openers.
The village we were visiting raised dogs for food. I had just—to my utter seven-year-old horror—watched them strangle a dog for cooking. I grabbed the puppy thinking only to save it, but it was so cute that I immediately loved it and would not let it go. I had never had a dog before but there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that this dog, this dog, was meant for me.
The village headman who owned the dog was not eager to give it away and had reached to pull it back. Mother, who had been dickering over some carvings she wanted to buy, had seen the man reach for me and had come over like a tigress, ready to attack him, only to find that I would not let the puppy go.
“This one,” I said again. “I want to save this one …”
“Save?” Mother asked.
“They eat them,” I said.
“Dogs?”
I nodded. “I want to save this one and take it home.”
She looked from me to
the headman, back to me, then nodded and turned back to the headman. “How much?”
He stood mute.
“How many pesos for the puppy?”
He understood that and they started to haggle over price. My mother loved it and was in her element. I knew I’d won when she finally nodded, handed the headman some money, and motioned to the Jeep where my father and our bodyguard waited.
I do not remember much of the drive back down to the base. I sat in the back next to the bodyguard—a sergeant who had just fought through the Second World War and was completely bored with me, the puppy and life— and cuddled the dog.
The Jeep was open, with the top down, and conversation was nearly impossible at highway speed, but as we neared the base Father slowed down and Mother turned to me and smiled. “What are you naming her?”
I pointed at the white circle on the pup’s side. “Snowball.”
She nodded. “Perfect.”
And so we became friends, Snowball and I, and more than friends.
It was a very strange time in my life. I was only seven and found myself dropped into a world that was in many ways insane. My mother and father were caught up in the whirl of being an officer and officer’s wife involved in some way with the civilian government. This, coupled with the fact that they were getting a good start on their drinking careers, meant that I almost never saw them, and when I did they were usually not sober.
We had a servant named Rom, a young Filipino man, who took care of me when he could. But he had a family of his own, and I was left alone much of the time. Or left alone with Snowball.
The Philippines had been ravaged by the war and much of the islands was still in ruins. The people had been devastated, buildings bombed and blown to pieces, whole tracts of land pitted and scarred by battle. It was impossible to walk anywhere without stepping on empty cartridge cases or seeing some part of an exploded shell or mine. There were burned-out tanks and trucks everywhere, old Japanese fighter planes sitting on the ground, buildings blown in half and all too often a shallow grave or bulldozed trench with bodies in it.
This became my playground and Snowball became my guide.
We grew up together.
Snowball became an extension of me. I “went native,” as they said then. I wore army shorts that were miles too big for me, an old army belt holding them up, no shirt, no cap. I sunburned constantly so I had a Band-Aid over my nose to keep it from peeling all the time, and I evolved into being Filipino.
Snowball grew tall in that first year, with a thin hound look, one ear flopped down, the other standing straight up, and her tail tightly curved over her back. I took to standing on one leg, my other foot cocked into the knee, one hand holding Snowball’s back by the short fur. In many ways I think I became more dog than human.
I would see things—blown-apart buildings, old tanks, Jeeps upside down, rusting guns everywhere—but Snowball would know things. She would see the obvious outside way a thing looked, but then she would move to it and smell it and perhaps lick it and dig at it and look under it, and I took to doing the same things.
I would try to look inside what we were doing, follow Snowball’s lead, and in doing this I found more and saw more than I ever could have alone.
We went everywhere, including many places where we were not supposed to be.
We found a cave in the jungle full of Japanese bodies—skeletons—and boxes of Japanese money and swords, and rats almost as big as Snowball.
We moved through places in Manila where people were so poor and hungry that a whole family lived under a single overturned Jeep and had only a handful of rice a day for six mouths. Still they offered us food—even a tiny bit for Snowball—and I took to “stealing” food from home and taking it to them and we would sit and talk their language, and eat rice and sardines with our fingers, and I would hear of their lives, Snowball next to me as we squatted in the dirt, and how the war had been for them.
We watched cockfights, where men put two roosters in a dusty ring and let them go at each other. Pesos flew around the pit while the men bet money on which rooster would win.
We moved outside of town, where the farmers wore conical hats and walked through rice paddies with huge water buffalo pulling wooden plows through the mud. Once, here, Snowball saved my life.
We were walking along a trail where the grass came down next to the dirt in tight clumps. I had gotten ahead of Snowball when she stopped to examine a pile of buffalo droppings. As always, I was barefoot, and I was shuffling along. Two steps ahead I saw a pretty colored ribbon lying along the trail. Another step closer and I saw it had moved. It wasn’t a ribbon but a snake, one that—I was to learn later—was deadly. Some involuntary signal made me start to jump but I was too close. I was almost on the snake by that time. It was about to strike when a flash of black fur passed my leg and Snowball grabbed the snake just in back of the head and with a quick flick broke its neck.
It was all over in half a second.
I stood, shaking slightly, while Snowball made sure it was dead, threw it off to the side of the trail and continued on, stopping to look back, one ear up and the other down, her black face questioning, wanting to know why I wasn’t coming. At last I regained some control and followed her.
We were in the Philippines two and a half years and I can’t think of a day I spent without Snowball next to me. In many ways she became a kind of parent, watching out for me. When I slept she would crawl up beneath the mosquito netting at the foot of the bed and sleep with one part of her touching my foot or leg. The top of her head, her back, a paw—always she slept touching me, and when it came time to go back to the States I would not agree to go unless and until Mother made arrangements for Snowball to come with us. I made such a fuss that Mother and Father actually went through all the reams of paper it took to bring a dog from the Philippines to the United States.
But she did not come. Not two weeks before we were due to leave, a military truck swerved and hit her while she was walking next to me. She was killed instantly.
I remember standing, not believing she was dead, thinking how nothing would ever be right again, not ever, and how I would always, always miss her, and that is all true. Now, forty-nine years later while I write this, I can see her laughing tongue hanging out while she turns to beckon me on, see the white spot on her side, her tail curled tightly over her back as she turns and jauntily heads up the path ahead of me, and I miss her as much as if she’d just died yesterday.
Snowball.
Much of my childhood I was alone. Family troubles—my parents were drunks—combined with a devastating shyness and a complete lack of social skills to ensure a life of solitude. This isolation was not natural, of course, especially for a child, and most of the time I was excruciatingly lonely I sought friends whenever I could, but was rarely successful.
When I was very young these times of aloneness were spent making model airplanes, reading comic books or just daydreaming. But when I was twelve, living in a small town named Twin Forks in northern Minnesota, an uncle gave me a Remington .22 rifle he’d bought at a hardware store for ten dollars. I ran to the woods.
It is not somehow “politically correct” to hunt, and that is a shame for young boys. For me it was not only the opening into a world of wonder, it was salvation. I lived and breathed to hunt, to fish.
Two rivers ran out of town, one to the north and one to the east, and any day, hour or few minutes I could spare I would run these rivers. The first year I hunted mostly rabbits and ruffed grouse—feeding myself in the process. I scuffled along in old boots with a box of .22 long rifle cartridges in my pocket and the single-shot rifle in my hand. On my back was an old army surplus light pack I’d bought with money from setting pins at the local bowling alley. In the pack I had matches, usually a loaf of bread, salt and an old aluminum pot for boiling water.
There was great beauty in running the rivers, especially in the fall when the leaves were turning. The maples were red gold and filtered the su
nlight so that you could almost taste the richness of the light, and before long I added a surplus army blanket, rolled up over the pack, and I would spend the nights out as well. During school—where I did badly—I would hunt in the evenings. But on Friday I was gone, and I would frequently spend the entire weekend alone in the woods.
The problem was that I was alone. I had not learned then to love solitude—as I do now—and the feeling of loneliness was visceral, palpable. I would see something beautiful—the sun through the leaves, a deer moving through the dappled light, the explosion of a grouse flying up through the leaves—and I would turn to point it out to somebody, turn to say, “Look …” and there would be no one there.
The second fall after I’d started living in and off the woods I decided to hunt ducks. Miles to the north were the great swamps and breeding grounds of literally millions of ducks and geese, and when the migratory flights started south the sky would seem to darken with them. The .22 rifle was not suited for ducks—was indeed illegal for them—so I saved my money setting pins and bought an old single-shot Browning twelve-gauge shotgun from a kid named Sonny. The gun had a long barrel and a full choke, and with number four shot seemed to reach out forever. I never became really good with it, but could hit now and then when the ducks were flying at the right angle. Duck hunting soon became my life.
I did not have decoys but I made some blinds six miles out of town where there were cattail swamps. I would walk out there in the dark, leaving the house at three in the morning, nestle into the blinds and wait for the morning flights to come in from the north. Usually I would get one or two ducks—once a goose—but some I wounded or didn’t kill cleanly and they would get into the swamp grass and weeds in the water and I couldn’t find them.
It was about then that I met Ike.
Ike was a great barrel-chested black Labrador that became one of the best friends I’ve ever had and was in all ways an equal; not a pet, not something to master, but an equal.
I had had other dogs. Snowball in the Philippines, then a cocker spaniel somebody gave me named Trina. They were sweet and dear and gave love the way only dogs can, with total acceptance, but Ike was the first dog I’d ever known not as a pet but as a separate entity, a partner.
