For all its occasional monotony, driving a dogsled never let my mind wander. It was an overwhelmingly physical experience: the cold, the shifting runners, the wandering trail. It made my mind shallower. There was the brushing sound of snow under the sled. There were the dogs, the beautiful dogs, running, and I could spend hours watching the changing, hypnotic rhythms of their back legs punching up and down. Occasionally I talked to them, and then I’d drift off in midsentence and recall the rest of my thoughts minutes later. Or else I’d run up a hill, or fix a tangle, or scooter my feet to keep warm. It didn’t matter. I was still just driving dogs.
Sometimes tour groups came by the kennel, and I was responsible for distributing snowsuits and boots, maintaining a fire in the lavvo, and giving short demonstrations on how to drive a sled. I felt self-conscious, certain that the tourists—especially other Americans—would be able to read me as an interloper. But, astonishingly, they took me seriously. When they asked questions about my life, my childhood in the north, I lied without thinking, telling breezy stories about blizzards and living in igloos and dogsledding to school. What about the darkness? they asked. The cold? Being alone in the wilderness? And, although I’d lost sleep over these very things, I shrugged off the concerns as juvenile. “I guess it’s all what you’re used to,” I’d say, pocketing their tip money. The tourists’ respect was addictive. After all, wasn’t this the person I had always known myself to be? It was easy to believe my own act.
I loved being alone, and working with tourists, but I envied Eirik, too, for his racing. I watched him prepare for Finnmarksløpet, the longest race in Europe, packing sleeping bags and pots and frozen meat into the belly of his sled, waxing new runners and selecting his team carefully. On the morning of the race, downtown Alta was packed with dozens of trucks, hundreds of dogs waiting or leaping on chains, mushers making last-minute adjustments, their handlers checking and rechecking the required gear. Despite the commotion, Eirik was calm. He had raced before, he had won before; chaos slid right off him. He had the particular tranquil bearing that I was coming to recognize as characteristic of those who had spent years of their lives surrounded by overexcitable huskies, a composure that increased in proportion to the drama of any situation. At the starting line, under an archway made of ice, it took eighteen volunteers to hold back his ten-dog team; and when the countdown ended and they all let go at once, he surged forward into instant, high-speed silence. His dogs ran the length of the main street and then they crossed into tundra, where they would spend the next five hundred kilometers in solitude—a journey known only to the other mushers and their dogs—only to appear from the wilderness days later and pass under the very same arch. A sport in which the bulk of the action played out in secret.
Back at the kennel, the house and the dog yard were still. I moved through the hours carefully, alone, tending to the remaining huskies, who were quieter than I had ever seen them. The next morning a moose wandered into the yard, and the dogs hardly even freaked out as I chased it away, weaving between the doghouses, hollering and waving branches to make my arms look longer. At night I drank tea and watched the northern lights and wondered if Eirik was running or resting. I told myself that someday I would race, too; I would be part of a team, out on the trail, on the inside of this strange and mysterious process while folks at home gazed into the dark mirror of nighttime windows. They would know nothing. But I would know. I would be at the heart of all of it.
Two days later, Eirik finished the race in fourteenth place. He gave me his race bib, a reflective vest with sponsors’ logos and the number 98, stained down the front with dirt and meat. Back at the folk school, I hung the bib on the wall above my bed. I thought about framing it.
As a culmination of our winter training, Tallak arranged a trip to Svalbard, the barren archipelago halfway between mainland Norway and the pole, where he knew of some sled dogs we could borrow. I could hardly believe my own life. Svalbard was legendary, sharp and ethereal, that particularly arctic combination of spectacular and austere; short of an expedition to the pole, I could go no farther north, no closer to the top of the world. It was March. The sun there had not yet risen. For a few days we hung around the primary settlement, Longyearbyen, where fat reindeer shuffled down the main street. Then we rented some dogs and an armed guide, in case of polar bears, and set off into the interior. That night, atop a glacier, we made an unusual camp: a cluster of tents, with the dogs staked in a ring around us. The dogs were not in a circle so they could fight off a bear. They were in a circle so that the bear, when it reached us, would already have a full stomach. I volunteered for the first watch shift, from ten to twelve, to get it over with. My headlamp was dim. It didn’t illuminate past the first row of dogs.
“How will I know if there’s a bear?” I asked the guide.
“The dogs will know.”
“And then?”
“Wake me up. I’ll sleep with the gun.”
He stepped into the nearest tent, zipped it shut after him. All around, students in the other tents were closing down: flies zipping, lights switching off, the first snores filtering out into the night. I stomped my boots, kicked at the wind-packed snow, shook my hands to keep warm. Somewhere across camp was the other watch, but I couldn’t see her.
My headlamp flickered. It was too cold for the batteries. I switched it off and waited for my eyes to adjust. There were no stars, no northern lights, but the land was too white to ever be pitch black, no matter how dark it got. Instead, the snow, the mountains, the sky—everything was gray. I stood suspended in it. Gradually I could make out the tents. The dogs were small mounds, curled in nests of snow.
Somewhere nearby, I thought, is a polar bear. Polar bears eat people. Eat them. Just when I thought I’d been getting used to things.
Should we worry? My mother had asked me, after I first arrived at the school. I’d assured her that she shouldn’t. I loved her dearly, but her worry felt intrusive. Now she would worry about me. Now that I was facing challenges I wanted.
But I hadn’t said that. Instead, I’d made an appeal more hopeful than logical, pointing out the threats that were lessened here: Car crashes. Terrorism. The flu. The dangers here were different, I argued, but no worse than the dangers at home. It was simply an adjustment. I promised not to be stupid.
The truth was that when it came down to it, the land here seemed kind, and that kindness seemed to be the great secret of the Arctic, at least on the mainland. All its dangers distilled into one crisp feature: cold. And what was cold but a call to the moment? Cold couldn’t creep or consume, stalk or drown. It necessitated only insulation. The things that survival demanded—covering our bodies, keeping them separate from other bodies—were things that I already wanted to do. In extreme cold, nobody thought of any body but their own. Nobody would think about mine, wrapped in its layers upon layers.
Of course, there was the matter of keeping warm. But after months of winter, even cold was easily solved. To live in cold, I had only to internalize its counterintuitive rules: When my body wanted to clench, I had to force it open. Swing my arms when I wanted to pull them in. Jump when I wanted to sit. Pee when I would rather stay clothed. Change into dry long underwear even when the air bit my bare limbs. Cold was the mind’s distraction and the body’s one demand.
Of course I was scared. But at least I was scared of dangers of my own choosing. At least there was joy that came with it.
I walked to the edge of the ring of dogs and stared into the gray, searching for movement. I squinted into the dark.
Are you safe?
I’m as safe as I’ll ever be.
And the dogs exploded.
It happened all at once. The dogs were lying curled in their mounds and then they were shrieking, growling, screaming with an energy I had never heard before. I hit the side of my headlamp and shone the beam around the circle but all I could see was the dogs’ tense bodies and the snow that swirled around them. The guide, I thought. The gun. But my limbs felt
weak. I kept sweeping my light around me. Dogs, dogs. And now the guide was beside me with his rifle high, shouting something I could barely make out—Where were the dogs looking? And I realized, with horror, that they weren’t facing an approaching danger, something they’d scented on the wind. Whatever the dogs were barking at, it was already inside the circle.
I turned around and swept my light: snow, dogs, tents. Nothing. They were barking at nothing.
But their hackles were straight in the air.
The guide saw it first. It was a dog, one of the closest dogs, a little black one named Lucifer. He was on his side, convulsing. The guide ran to him, and I and the others—scrambling from their tents—ran to him, too, and held his legs as the guide instructed us. Lucifer was twitching, his mouth foaming, his body shaking in a way no dog’s body should. But I kept looking over my shoulder. What about the bear?
The dogs didn’t quiet until Lucifer lay still.
“Epilepsy,” said the guide, breathing hard. “We’ve tried everything for it.” He stroked Lucifer’s side with one hand. He was limp.
A ring had gathered, students blinking in their yanked-on boots, shaky with adrenaline and sleepiness. Slowly they traipsed back to their tents. I still had forty minutes left in my shift.
And then I was alone again. The night had a different quality now, the ringing of silence after noise. I was tired but dreaded climbing into my tent to sleep, where I’d lie pressed among three classmates. Even after months of practice, I couldn’t sleep well with other bodies close around me. I was too conscious of their breathing. I woke at small movements. And since I was restless, anyway, and revved up, I decided to make myself a snow cave and sleep alone, where at least I’d get some solid rest. Besides, the digging would keep me warm.
I chose a spot and started to dig with an avalanche-rescue shovel. A sharp, low wind was picking up; it blew straight across the snowfield, blurring the ground with blown snow. It felt like standing in a cloud.
The cave was nothing fancy. I had made a dozen like it before. First I dug a hole straight down, chest deep. Then I hopped into the hole and began to carve a tunnel sideways from the bottom, extending out in an L shape. This was the chamber I would sleep in, a cocoon just long and wide enough for my sleeping bag, just tall enough that if I lifted my head, my nose scraped the ceiling. I finished around the time that the next watch, my friend Iselin, stumbled from her tent. I wished her luck, then started the long process of maneuvering into the hole.
First, standing in the vertical entryway, I put on all the clothing I had and zipped the sleeping bag around me. It strained to close over my parka. For a moment I stood like that, bundled and warm in the polar night. Then I crouched, threaded the foot of my sleeping bag into the bottom of the L, and wiggled the rest of my body in inch by inch. Finally horizontal, I propped my backpack behind my head, to trap the warm air. The wind moaned across the mouth of the hole.
For a split second, I felt a flash of panic: I was lying in a coffin. No. No, I wasn’t. I took a deep breath and turned off my headlamp. The snow hugged me from all sides. I wrenched my arm from my sleeping bag and touched, in the darkness, the ceiling a few inches above my face. It was slick, like ice. Already my breath had smoothed it.
I was warm. I was comfortable. I was, I hoped, polar bear proof. I was in a shelter I had made myself, to take care of myself. I was at the top of the world. I was—wasn’t I?—tough.
The thoughts relaxed my still-racing heart, and before I could think much more, I fell asleep.
I woke to voices and footsteps far above me.
“Where is she?”
“She never came in the tent last night.”
It was pitch black and I couldn’t move. My sleeping bag cinched tight around my face, so that only my nose poked out, but I couldn’t reach up to untie it. No room to bend my arm. And something was blocking my hand. Oh: a baffle cinched around my neck. I fumbled to release the bow that tied the baffle, then reached my face, untied that, too. Cool air stroked my forehead. Where was my light?
More voices now. “Did you see her?”
My light was on my chest. I switched it on. Two flickers, and then a dim circle appeared on the snow just above me. Much too cramped in here. Got to roll over. I shimmied against the ground, landed facedown, and arched my back to lift my head. The snow was lumpy under me, hardened to the shape of my body. I wiped off my face. There was my backpack, empty. I reached out one hand to shove it away so I could climb out. But the bag didn’t move.
I snaked my hand past it and felt packed snow.
Fully awake in an instant, I understood. I saw, in a series of flashes, last night’s wind sweeping snow across the plain. The snow packed, layer upon layer, into the entrance to my hole. The entrance smoothed over, as if it was never there. And then, flashing forward, I saw myself trying to dig into the tunnel with my hands, burrowing my way out, and the packed snow expanding as I scraped it from the wall, filling my airspace, smothering me before I could reach the surface.
My light was flickering again. I switched it off, lay still in the darkness. Then I pulled my arm back into my sleeping bag and reknotted the neck baffle. I couldn’t move. Shouldn’t lose warmth.
One, two, three. As loud as I could: “HELP!”
Nothing.
Now the footsteps were coming back. I recognized the voices. “She goes for walks alone,” someone said.
“Not here.” Oda’s voice was high. “She’s not crazy.”
“Down here!” I shouted.
“Who saw her last?”
They couldn’t hear me.
I closed my eyes—not that it made a difference—and counted my breaths. I wondered about oxygen.
Snow held plenty of oxygen. That’s what everyone said.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
“Iselin saw her.”
“Iselin saw her?”
Six.
Seven.
But Iselin had seen me. And now her voice joined the choir.
“Guys, she was digging.”
“Where?”
Eight.
Nine.
“Over here.”
Ten.
Eleven.
Twelve.
The sound of scraping, coming closer.
Thirteen.
A lump of snow fell from the ceiling and landed on my legs.
“RIGHT HERE!” I bellowed.
“Blair? Are you okay? Answer me!”
“Iselin?”
She said something quietly. Then—“Oh my God. We’ll get you out.”
More digging, more snow falling onto my bag. And then, with a burst of frigid air, the ceiling opened above me and I found myself staring into a circle of headlamps. Arms reached down and lifted me out.
The rest of spring passed quickly, rolling downhill toward May. Suddenly I was faced with the prospect of leaving, or maybe returning; I wasn’t sure what was home, what was away. I had found something here, some surprising strength, but that strength was utterly dependent on this place, with its howling dogs, its dark days and white nights. When I left, I feared that that part of myself would be peeled away, too. I stood in the dog yard and tried to look forward: I saw college orientation, lectures, dorm room parties. What did people do in college? Hook up? There would be no dogs, no snow caves, no space, nothing to force my body through and come out triumphant. Some of the other students had found ways to stay with dogs, taking jobs at kennels around Norway, but my visa was running out, and besides, I had promised my parents I’d come back to the States. It all spread out before me: I saw this year—this year!—as having been one brief phase in a life that would soon return to its predictable trajectory. But it felt more like a beginning, the start of something that could easily be lost. So, one insomniac night, I sat up looking for jobs on SledDogCentral.com.
One in particular stood out. Iditarod finalist Noah Daron was looking for experienced
mushers for his summer tour company. The mushers would live with their dogs on a glacier in southeast Alaska, at a camp only accessible by helicopter. I pictured myself atop an icefield, surrounded by huskies, impressing tourists day after day until their idea of me eclipsed who I actually was. Playing a role that would be my life. I filled out an application immediately, trying to put the best possible spin on what felt like my rather limited experience.
Noah called me on the school pay phone. His voice was friendly but firm. Though I hadn’t had many job interviews before, this one struck me as unconventional. What one thing would I want if stranded on a desert island? A notebook and pen, I answered. If the staff was trapped on the glacier for an extended period of time, what would I do to increase morale? Um—organize a snow-sculpture competition. “We’ve never lost an employee,” Noah told me, “yet.” On the glacier, I would live in a tent city with nine other mushers, each of us responsible for twenty dogs. I’d give eight hour-long tours each day for the appealing salary of $11 an hour, plus plenty of overtime. My regular shifts would run six days on, three days off, but it was possible that I’d be stuck on the ice for up to a month at a time: in foggy southeast Alaska, the helicopters couldn’t always fly. Though the glacier was covered in snow, the snowcover thinned over the course of the season, and there was a real chance of falling into an unseen crevasse at any time. In an emergency, there would be no guarantee of help arriving. Was I still interested?
Obviously.
“Then welcome to Dog World.”
CHAPTER FOUR
MORTENHALS. MY PHONE RANG AT NIGHT as I lay curled in my orange bed above the shop. “I know you,” said an unfamiliar man’s voice on the line. “You’re the girl who likes stories.”
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube Page 8
