by Julia Glass
The dogs yip and pant as they find a shared rhythm, get a feel for the weight of the two men they’re hauling. After a series of veerings and lunges away from the tugline, they settle toward a center. The tracks of the renegade dogs quickly leave the trail, of course. Nothing’s that easy. Jasper knows the places they favor, but the sled must follow the meandering track to the top.
Kit crouches before him, under a fleece blanket, holding the front rail.
Jasper concentrates on the trail, trying to see as far ahead as he can. He hates using goggles, but snowflakes sting his eyes. Now and then, heavy clumps of snow fall from high branches, briefly spooking the leaders. This is where Pluto excelled. Nothing much deterred him from forward motion. Mitchum’s the same, but his bravado is rash, not a dividend of experience. He started out as a pet, a puppy too headstrong for life as a suburban pooch. (Where the hell is he now, that scoundrel?)
“Hi hi hi,” Jasper urges them on. Not necessary, but it’s reassuring to hear his voice penetrate the harsh brilliance of their surroundings.
At a place where the track dips into a hollow, “Ho!” he shouts once, halting the dogs for a rest. Kit unfolds himself slowly from the sled. Together, they release the dogs, who run in circles, gulping snow, digging, marking random trees. Their noses point toward the sky as they yearn for promising smells. They’re like children begging for a story.
Jasper takes a swig of coffee. Kit declines. “I’m remembering everything,” he says.
“Everything?” Jasper says, alarmed.
“Everything about this place—the trails, where they go. The hideouts I had with my friends, to get away from you and Mom.”
“Don’t tell me things I’d rather not know,” says Jasper. “Even in hindsight, ignorance is bliss.” He whistles to Yoda, who’s wandering. “You must miss your family.”
Kit nods.
“Things all right with Sandra?”
Kit looks directly at Jasper, though most of his face is obscured by the knit hat pulled low, the scarf wrapping his chin. “I’d like to say yes. But no is probably the truth. At least my kids miss me.”
What the hell is Jasper doing? “Ah well, those periods come and go.” With his mittened hand, he makes a hills-and-valleys motion.
“Not counting my mother,” says Kit.
“Sandra’s not your mother, that I promise you. Not to—”
“Insult Mom? Say what you like. Right now I’m pretty pissed at her. I can’t believe I actually came here thinking I could somehow outsmart her.”
Jasper says quickly, “I’m glad you came here. That was a good thing. Good for me, too, by the way. Today, especially!”
Kit gazes around at the dogs, laughing. “Until we disappear into the wilderness, never to be heard from again.”
“Hey. You’re with an elite survivalist guide. I’ve got certificates to prove it. I’m your next best thing to a bulletproof vest.”
“Ski Bum Number One. You think I’ve forgotten?”
He didn’t start mushing until he and Daphne had been married for two or three years. The first time he took her out on a sled, she told him it felt like Doctor Zhivago: she was Julie Christie to his Omar Sharif. That, in a crazy way, he misses: a woman to exaggerate the romance of everything, turn up the volume on beauty. You could never say that of Loraina. Loraina’s a leveler. Viv, he imagines, would have viewed the team like a harmless fraternity, including the bitches. “You and your dogs,” she’d have said, the way other women scoff at a husband’s poker crowd, his fellow Sox fans down at the juke joint.
Jasper is the product of one cliché begetting another. He is the man neck deep in dogs because he was denied even one as a child. Why? Because his father was the postal carrier who hated dogs.
Jasper’s mother kept a parakeet in the kitchen, caged in the warmth of a sunny window. Its ceaseless chitterings sabotaged all attempts to eavesdrop on conversations between his parents that sounded tense or urgent. Early on, Jasper figured they had to be about money. Later he found out that they were about his mother’s cancer, something secret and female that took years to eat her from the inside out, the way termites consume a house, finishing the job when Jasper was ten. His father was a veteran of Belleau Wood who carried with him, as heavy as his mail pouch, a lingering darkness, a weary pessimism. He’d arrived late—reluctantly rather than gratefully, Jasper has guessed—at marriage and fatherhood. He died two months after Jasper married Viv. The one thing Jasper could thank his parents for was raising him near a mountain, letting him seek refuge there—from his father’s negative pronouncements on the future of mankind, from (though he didn’t know it then) his mother’s drawn-out sufferings.
Viv was tender about that distant loss. He claimed not to remember much about his mother’s death; there was no ritualized good-bye, no emotional father-son bonding. An aunt had broken the news to Jasper. Viv told him that all these vaguenesses only deepened the wound. She promised to take care of herself as well as any children they might have. “Don’t you worry: I’ll outlive you,” she said, “even if it’s the last thing I want to do.”
Oh, promises.
An hour later, still no sign of the escaped inmates. Jasper guessed wrong on three spots where he assumed they might be loitering. The coffee’s long gone; the crackers are stale, the dried apricots tough; his fingers feel brittle despite a change of mittens.
Jasper gives the team a second break. This time Kit says very little. He’s probably wishing he had been assigned Kyle’s post. Probably the power’s back on at the house, Kyle sitting on his toasty butt, watching cop-show reruns.
“We’ll do a loop round that hill, head back,” says Jasper. “We can do chili on the woodstove. Nothing like beans to heat you up from inside out. Furnace food. Just the ticket for today.”
Kit merely nods before helping him hitch up the dogs yet again.
The trail that lassos the high foothill before them cleaves to a steep slope on the far side. He will have to maneuver the team tightly for a stretch. But through a break in the trees, they’ll have a broad view of the valley. Jasper will broadcast a big yahoo. If the dogs are anywhere out there, they should heed his call.
As they make the curve, Jasper spots a cardinal through the trees below. Is it time for cardinals? Shouldn’t they be on vacation somewhere down south? Viv knew birds; Jasper knows trees, terrain, skies. That final year, they advertised hikes for birders. Viv led the first of those outings. It was the last one, too.
The bird is some distance downhill, but suddenly it moves in a way that corrects the scale: it’s a hell of a lot larger than a cardinal, farther away than his eyes first told him. At the same time, Kit points, and the ersatz cardinal morphs into a person in a red jacket, waving hysterically.
Jasper halts the dogs. They look back at him, whining. Trixie barks.
The red figure begins to climb toward them, clumsy and slow.
“I’ll go,” says Kit. He waves and calls out.
Jasper wants to be the one to go down, but he should stay. The sled is on the narrowest part of the track.
“Help me!” calls the oversize cardinal. “My boyfriend!”
Backcountry fools. Storm chasers. The sort of people who think it’s fun to swim in a riptide, surf in a hurricane, ski in a blizzard, sail across the ocean in a washtub. Idiots who, Jasper thinks privately, deserve whatever fate the elements hold in store. Now Kit is face-to-face with the fool, who gestures spasmodically. All Jasper can hear of their conversation is the helium pitch of the girl’s voice.
Kit motions her to stay where she is and climbs back up the slope.
Panting, he tells Jasper, “Campers. The boyfriend’s leg is broken. Slipped off a ledge.”
“Where the heck is he?”
“Somewhere up ahead. She came toward us when she heard the dogs.”
Jasper thinks about the logistical fix they’re in. The prospect of chili, more glorious than ever, recedes across a day that’s suddenly looking unbearably long.
“She says we’ll see the tent if we go farther along the trail.”
Jasper takes the first-aid kit from the pack attached to the sled. “Couple aspirin and an Ace bandage in here, that’s about it. You go with her. I’ll go round, tie the dogs, climb down from there.”
The dogs are revved now, as if they know the outing’s changed its purpose. Only a minute round the bend, he has to rein them in again when he spots the peak of the tent a couple hundred feet down the slope. Yoda and Trixie bark their objections, and then they’re all putting up a ruckus.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Mitchum and Zev are mingling with their teammates. “Christ all blooming mighty,” says Jasper. “Boys, you are in one big fat cauldron of trouble, know that?”
From next to the tent, Kit’s waving at Jasper. Now he gets it: the runaway dogs, in their free-agent wanderlust, found the campers. By happenstance, sure, but Jasper can see the local headlines already: Mitchum and Zev elevated to heroes on the order of Balto. Loraina will be pleased: nothing like free publicity.
Leaving the dogs hooked to the tugline, Jasper detaches it from the sled and fastens it around a tree. “Set your furry butts down and stay.”
As he starts down the slope, snow up to his groin, Jasper feels the sensation he dreads most, that nerve-twisting click in the joint where thighbone meets pelvis. Because he slept on the couch, not in his room, he forgot to take the naproxen this morning. Even with the pain dulled, moving downhill is torture. He clutches at a sapling. Right now, like it or not, he’s going nowhere.
The red girl has disappeared—presumably into the tent. Kit is looking expectantly up at Jasper.
“Can’t!” he shouts down. “Fuck,” he says quietly. “Sorry, Viv.”
Kit pushes up the slope till he’s next to Jasper.
“I’m fine,” Jasper insists. “Except I’m stuck. Stuck and madder than hell.”
“They screwed up, and they know it. But we’ve got to take the guy out.”
“The idiot girlfriend, too.”
“You can take both, can’t you? You’ve got the two other dogs now.”
Jasper actually remembered to pack the extra harnesses. He feels the pain in his hip settling from a bellow to a mutter. One marvel after another. Still, he hasn’t seen the boyfriend to assess whether it’s safe to move him.
The girlfriend’s joined them. “Oh my God, we were going to die out here, I swear. If it wasn’t—” She looks at the dog team, lying together in a hollow they’ve dug from the snow. “Oh my God, are those amazing dogs yours?”
Jasper looks at the young woman’s face, her skin a mottled mask of red and bluish white. He unwinds his scarf. “Wrap this around your face.” He can’t help sounding brusque, but the rage he feels is at his own limitation. He cannot go down to that tent. “Anybody know you’re out here, anybody likely to be looking for you?”
She shakes her head. “We figured we had our phones, but it’s like we’re in a black hole of some kind.… ”
From Kit’s face, Jasper can see that the boy knows how angry he is. Kit says, “Raven and I can pull him up. I think that’s what we have to do.”
(Raven? This blond matchstick is named Raven?) Jasper nods at Kit. “Can you pull him uphill in a sleeping bag?”
“Wait.” Kit goes to the sled and shoves things around. He comes away with the two extra harnesses, the ones Jasper packed for Mitchum and Zev. He holds one up before him, turning it this way and that.
“You hear me, Kit?”
“I have it figured out, I think. I hope.”
Raven’s wrapped most of her face in Jasper’s scarf. She’s a wispy thing, to start with, but now her muscles have probably turned to jelly from the stewed effects of cold and fear. She’ll be useless. Useless with a touch of frostbite. Kit tells her to stay with Jasper.
Jasper has managed to pull himself to the trail, using the trees. This is it, he understands: the beginning of his retirement, right here on this side of a not-even-mountain. Here he stands, marooned with this helpless harebrained girl, while his suburban stepson, a professor of art, is left to deal with the kind of problem that he, Jasper, is trained to solve.
“I’m coming, Bruno,” Kit calls down to the tent.
Raven and Bruno?
Kit gallops back down the slope and goes into the tent. The harnessed dogs wait quietly now, having played out the ritual of scolding, inspecting, and forgiving the two scofflaws.
“Climb in the sled and wrap yourself up good in those blankets,” Jasper tells Raven, who’s crying steadily now.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“You’re all right, you’re just fine now,” he tells her gently, though what she needs is a good dressing-down.
“We came up a few days ago. There was no sign of this in the forecast,” she says through chattering teeth. “No warning.”
“You have a radio?”
“We brought our phones.”
“Never enough.”
She cranes her neck to see what’s going on below. “Oh God.”
Not a sound from the tent until Jasper hears an outburst of fury or pain. The tent seems to shudder, and from inside emerges a composite human creature made of Kit and a tall, thin young man. It takes a minute or so for Jasper to see that Kit’s used the dog harnesses to strap the two men together at the waist. Kit has one arm clamped around Bruno’s back, his opposite hand clenching the harness at the front of Bruno’s waist. He is virtually hauling the guy up the slope. Bruno clings to one tree after another as they climb.
Close up, Bruno is disturbingly pale and has no energy to speak. He doesn’t even seem to see Jasper; he’s attached in every way to his rescuer. Kit has broken out in a sweat and cannot seem to speak, either. “Blanket,” he gasps, and Raven climbs out of the sled to surrender the fleece throw in which she’s been wrapped. “Ground.”
Kit unfastens the harnesses only when he can lower Bruno onto the blanket. He then goes back to the tent. Jasper won’t ask any more questions. He feels as if he’s being rescued right along with these silly young lovers.
Kit brings the sleeping bags from the tent and makes a nest of them in the front of the sled. He instructs Raven to help him pull Bruno to the sled.
“Can you splint the leg?” Kit asks Jasper. “I assume that’s what we have to do.”
Still Bruno says nothing. His pleading gaze darts between Kit and Jasper. He is shivering feverishly. “Don’t touch,” he whispers, his shaky hands shielding his injured leg.
“Got to. Won’t be too bad,” lies Jasper. Inhaling against his own pain, he gets down on his knees in the snow and, with his knife, slits the boy’s jeans and long underwear. He’s seen worse breaks. No bone exposed. On the other hand, he doesn’t dare guess what shape the boy’s feet might be in. Not a good idea to take off the boots.
“The dogs were with us,” says Raven. “They kept us warm.”
Jasper sets about finding a straight branch. Kit hands him the Ace bandage. Jasper works on Bruno’s leg while the boy whimpers and the girl jabbers manically about the dogs saving their lives, about how she tried to light a fire but all the wood was wet, how she tried to find a trail but the snow hid everything, how she couldn’t leave Bruno alone because how would she find him again, how the weather came out of nowhere and when did it ever snow this much so soon in the season.…
Midway through binding the leg, Jasper stops to stare at her until she stops speaking. “Let’s conserve our energy,” he says. She reminds him so much of Daphne at her worst, Daphne in a panic over some minor catastrophe or other. They will all get through this alive, maybe minus a few toes, an earlobe or two. Kit and Jasper may have to take turns mushing and walking—depends how supple the snow is on the return—but the sky is clearing, and the sun will be out long enough for them to reach the house before dark. Loraina will be in a very bad mood, holding down the commercial fort. That’s fine, but please, thinks Jasper, please let Kyle be sober, just for the rest of this difficult day. His hip
rebukes him as he stumbles to his feet, but the dogs are eager and ready to go.
Kyle’s not at the house when they make it back, but he left a note: How’s this for lunch? Gone to check on Sally and Myrtle. Back soon with more coffee! And, the cosmos willing, a case of Mountain Dew.
Sitting on the warm woodstove is a pot of boiled hot dogs and another of canned beans. On the table sits a bowl containing chopped-up lettuce and chunks of carrot. Beside the salad, Paul Newman’s at the ready with his jaunty carnivorous smile and famous blue eyes. (Eyes like a husky, come to think of it. That spooky crystalline blue.) Kyle’s even put out plates and forks.
It’s clear he got the small plow rigged to the front of Jasper’s truck and got it down the driveway; a wobbly track leads to the road. Power’s still out, but the town rigs are going through; you can hear, from somewhere near enough, the grinding protest of their blades as they strike the potholes in the road. Without the truck, however, they can’t get Bruno to the hospital on their own. Kit volunteers to head down and flag the first vehicle pointed toward town. He’ll ask the driver to call an ambulance once he gets there. Jasper can’t wait to be rid of Bruno and Raven, return them to the world of perpetually generated warmth, electricity, and people paid to deal with the damages wrought by human folly: privileges the pair do not seem to appreciate.
He’s sitting with Raven at the kitchen table. Bruno is propped on the couch, wrapped in comforters, triple dosed on Jasper’s painkillers, a blazing fire in the hearth. After eating a few bites of hot dog and beans, he dozed off.
Among the too much information Jasper now has about this couple, he knows that Bruno and Raven are “collaborative creative engineers” who teach at the famous art school in Providence. Once it was clear to the girl that her boyfriend would survive, once he fell asleep, her hysteria gave way to hunger. After two large helpings of everything, she’s begun to sermonize. She explains how they’ve compromised their aversion to all things urban in order to be the artists they are meant to be. Together, they construct bamboo bridges linking trees together in parks, on college greens, sometimes on private grounds. The idea is to draw people into dialogue with trees. “So many people don’t realize that our survival, our very ability to breathe, will come down to the worldwide fate of trees. It is almost as simple as that!” She seems to think of herself and Bruno as arboreal missionaries. Every chance they get, they flee the city and find someplace off the beaten track. Nature in the raw is their inspiration.