Leader (Angel Paws)

by Jordan Taylor

  He always tried to play with the dog he ran beside, regardless of placement in the team. Now he was overjoyed to find either his mother or the old and impassive Siberia next to him. He licked faces and wriggled all over, just as excited about the company as the run. One day, Siberia bit him so sharply across the muzzle he bled. Another time, Quest pinned him to his back in the snow. He calmed some after that, though he remained delighted to see either his mother or Siberia working beside him.

  He learned commands readily, but often became distracted by his teammates. The idea that the whole pack chased him, at last giving him their undivided attention, appeared to go to his head. He perpetually raced out of the dog yard looking over his shoulder, leaping and flirting his tail, almost skipping as he ran: so tickled by the big chase. Then he tried to swerve and cut back on them, earning growls, often bites, from his double lead teammate.

  Aaron was startled when Terah began entering Leader in mid-distance races by the time he was twenty months old. He ran point, or double lead, and Terah seemed happy with him, though Aaron couldn’t say the same.

  The only time he ran Leader in a race—point with the soon to retire Siberia in single lead—Leader tried to join another team.

  Aaron had been enthusiastically calling, “On-by!”

  Siberia obeyed, overtaking the slower team at a good clip. As he passed the team dogs, Leader lunged sideways, yanking Keeneye nearly off her feet.

  To Aaron’s dismay, the dogs in the neighboring team greeted Leader with wagging tails as they jogged along. Keeneye, a sweet, hard-working dog, only regained her footing and loped on. But she did not try to tear Leader’s ear off—which might have taught him a lesson. So much of sled dog training depended on existing dogs in the team.

  All that saved them from a tangle was savvy Siberia: feeling the jerk on the gangline behind him, he showed his teeth and leapt ahead, yanking Leader into line.

  They placed second that day, enough for prize money covering their costs, but Aaron told Terah he was done with Leader as far as racing. She could run him herself if she was so tickled with him.

  “He’s really a good dog.”

  “When he’s running in the middle of the team and there are no distractions on the trail. Sure.”

  Leader was two and a half when Terah was preparing for the biggest distance race of their season and planning her team. Aaron helped her train and maintain the kennel, giving no input for team selection. He had no interest in races lasting more than three days.

  He would have paid more attention to which dogs would run if he had the kind of intuition Leader possessed. He might even have tried to keep Terah from finding the sponsors, training the team, entering at all.

  But things were done, ready, less than a month from the big day, when Terah broke her ankle and three ribs in an accident on a training run in the mountains twenty miles from home.

  That was the end of racing season for her. And her dogs.

  Of course, there could be no changing the musher at this late stage, no explaining to the sponsors. Of course, Aaron had no intention at all of running in such a mammoth event across however many hundreds of miles. So many “of courses.” So simple. Scratch from the race, take care of that ankle, plenty of bed-rest, wait for next year.

  Of course. So why, why, is he out here on this trail with Leader upfront and untold miles still to go?

  ~ ~ ~

  Start with the dogs. End with the dogs. In the middle, pray.

  Aaron closes his eyes against fluttering ice crystals. That’s it? Really? A week-long race and that’s the advice he gets. How about: Watch out for hallucinations. Make sure you can reach your gun in case of a moose on the trail in the middle of the night, looking about the size of a cargo ship. Get a warm drink at every opportunity. Pay attention to your feet and fingers, don’t let them get past the numb stage.

  He grimaces, feeling ice crack and part around his eyelids as he opens his eyes. How many more days? How many more miles? A lot. He’s sure it’s a lot. One more checkpoint last night. The dogs are well, eager. The vet seemed pleased with their condition. Yes, the dogs are always good, in their element, ready to run after every rest and snack.

  It’s himself he is beginning to wonder about. He still cannot think of a book passage or song or movie to contemplate while he gazes blearily at the white snow and white mountains and white sky.

  The dogs jog with their tongues out, steam lifting over their backs, freezing into fur and forming ice ruffs around their cheeks. Soft fall of paws inside many dozens of trail booties, tiny click and jingle of harness and collar snaps, light breath, swish of runners. Otherwise, silence.

  He thought several times that a man sat in the basket of his sled. Not possible, he knows. Hallucinating, yet the man keeps returning off and on, waving to get his attention, sometimes asking him ridiculous questions like, “How many days in the year? Come on, how many?”

  Stupid questions that don’t mean anything.

  A tune leaps into his head. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” He can’t stand the song, but it’s a song. He sings under his breath, ignoring the man who has reappeared on his sled. So much extra weight for the dogs to drag. He should order the man out. But he’s not real. Of course not.

  Aaron sings louder, able to remember only half the words. Finally, he gives up, goes back to trying to think of movie titles. Now that song is stuck in his head, repeating like a broken record. The man on his sled sings the song.

  “Whoa!” Aaron sets the snow hook and walks around to the basket as the dogs stop, some looking over their shoulders at him, others snapping up snow.

  Mawson lies down for a good roll through powdery ice. Keeneye stretches and wags her tail.

  “Look, mister. I don’t know who you think you are, but this is not a tourist ride. Get off this sled now and walk.”

  The man lounges back in the basket, grinning, hat tipped down to cover most of his face, still singing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.”

  “I mean it, mister.” Aaron takes a step forward, thinking of his moose gun. But what’s he going to do? Shoot the man? He would never do such a thing.

  It occurs for the first time how odd it is that the man wears a baseball cap. Ridiculous. This interloping moron has got to go.

  Aaron jumps forward, leaning into the man’s partly concealed face. “Get off my sled! Now!”

  Snow swish, jingle, panting dogs. Aaron looks up as his whole team glances around. Another sled is moving up to pass them, stationary in the middle of the trail.

  “On-by, let’s go!”

  Aaron watches as the musher draws level, his Alaskan Huskies trotting amiably past Aaron’s team.

  “Who are you shouting at?”

  “The man on my sled. He won’t get out.”

  The other laughs. “Just one of many problems out here, eh?” The Canadian glides past, looking back to call to Aaron, “Listen to your dogs, not your own eyes. Only the dogs tell the truth out here.”

  Then he’s sweeping away.

  Leader strains forward, eager to be off. The other dogs also lean into their harnesses.

  Aaron looks at the sled. No one there. He closes his eyes and grits his teeth, that horrid song still banging away in his brain. Not one dog ever noticed that the man was here. No tracks lead away from the sled.

  Aaron pulls up the snow hook. “Okay, let’s go!”

  Far down the row of dogs, Leader jogs beside Chinook, a reliable but not particularly bright dog meant to run lead only as backup. Leader dips his head, grabbing mouthfuls of snow as he trots, keeping his tugline barely tight.

  The miles, hours, days, and nights blur and slip together. Coffee and the need to take good care of his dogs keeps Aaron going.

  As he sits one night in a warm checkpoint cabin with other mushers and steaming moose stew prepared for them by locals, he cannot hear a word of the conversation around him. Each face smears across his vision until he can't say if its owner is male or female, musher, resident, or r
ace official.

  By the sixth day, or perhaps the sixth week, Aaron wants to sleep more than anything in the world. More than getting home. More than a hot meal and warm bed. More than a shower and shave and clean clothes. More than seeing Terah and reaching the finish line. If offered, he’s sure he will trade everything he possesses, material, body, and soul, for twelve hours of sleep.

  When he looks up, the world is white. Aaron stares, looks left, right, behind him. Nothing but white. The long team of cheerfully trotting dogs has vanished. The horizon and snow and ice have vanished. The sled before him has vanished. This last he finds most alarming for he can feel the sled, but not see it. The soft jingle, click, pant of the dogs reaches his ears in muffled silence. The dogs are still there as well. As he looks down, he can just make out his hands, incased in furry beaver mitts, gripping the handlebar. Beyond that, only soft white.

  He closes his eyes. Hallucinating. Or he has fallen asleep and it’s not real. He shakes his head, clears his throat, shifts his weight on the runners. Get it together. Everything’s okay.

  He opens his eyes. White. Cold, stinging, biting white. Not a hallucination.

  Whiteout.

  Aaron’s pulse accelerates as he clutches the handlebar in both fists. Terah has been in whiteouts during races. But Terah had a lifetime of experience and a steady head and good dogs. Terah had Quest.

  Stay calm. Always, always stay calm. Panicking out here can mean more than being late for work. It can mean death.

  As he relaxes his grip on the sled, he feels how gingerly they are moving. The dogs still click ahead, but the pace has become slow, uneasy, as if they are checking for thin ice or smell something they don’t like ahead, or someone is limping.

  Slow breaths, in, out. Terah had Quest. He does not. He has to make the best of it.

  “Whoa,” Aaron calls into the wall of nothing pressing his eyes.

  By bending low and peering closely for the sled, he finds the snow hook, sets it in ice, and makes his way up the sled by touch: across the basket to the brush bow, then feeling the gangline below that. Left hand on the gangline, reaching ahead with the right, he follows a tugline until he comes to the back of a red harness.

  “Hi Kaltag. Good dog.” Bending over and holding the lines, Aaron can just see each dog through a whiteness of ice-mist and snow shrouding them. From Kaltag, he reaches Mawson, who swishes his tail and bounces on his forepaws, trying to lick Aaron’s face. Then River, finally up the line to Chinook and Leader.

  Leader stands still, gazing ahead into white as if watching a fascinating movie. He hardly twitches an ear when Aaron says his name. The brown and blue eyes focus somewhere else, nose lifted to the white swirl.

  Beside him, Chinook is a very different dog. He crouches, one foreleg lifted clear of snow, trembling.

  Aaron kneels beside the usually steady Chinook and checks his feet. He has to remove the huge beaver mitts first, letting them dangle on a cord that runs around his neck, under his hood, leaving his hands only in thick snow gloves. All four booties are in good shape. Aaron put fresh on less than two hours earlier by his best guess. Something has happened. Maybe he fell on the ice and twisted something in the whiteout. Maybe he stepped in a hole. Maybe he just doesn’t like the weather.

  Aaron rubs the husky and checks his limbs. Besides flinching a little when Aaron rubs his forelegs, there’s nothing obvious wrong.

  “All right,” Aaron says, unclipping the neckline from Leader’s collar so it forms a short leash to Chinook’s collar. “You come back with me and ride in style, sir.”

  He snaps Chinook’s tugline to Leader’s harness, then pulls his beaver mitts back on over the heavy gloves. One arm around Chinook’s ribs, holding the dog against him, Aaron squints at Leader through white. Even Terah never ran Leader in single lead.

  Glacier would have taken Chinook’s place if she hadn’t already been dropped. Starting the race with four leaders had seemed like enough. Quest being the best, Leader, Glacier, and Chinook being acceptable.

  As Aaron kneels there, staring at Leader and holding Chinook, so utterly surrounded by white he feels as if they are the only three living creatures in the world, Leader turns for the first time to look at him. He barks, once.

  Aaron jumps. The sound rings through him like a scream in this desolation. Behind Leader, Aaron senses heightening of interest in the team dogs, eager to move on.

  Leader gazes ahead, ears up, eyes bright, his blue eye and blue harness forming points of color in a nothing world. He strains forward, tightening his double tugline, glancing again at Aaron, tail swishing.

  “You know where you’re going … don’t you?”

  Leader cocks his head, then barks and bounces in place, hopping against his line.

  Aaron reaches out to cup the dog’s muzzle in his mitten. “Then take us there.”

  Following the team back down the line to the sled, he bundles the unprotesting Chinook into the basket while the team jumps and yaps. Far away in white, Leader barks again.

  “Please be right,” Aaron whispers. He pulls up the hook. “Okay! Let’s go!”

  They swing out and Aaron presses close to the sled, glad Leader’s teammates caught his enthusiasm. Quest has the power to motivate a team like that. Any good leader does. And they must be close now. One day left? Maybe into the night?

  The pace has increased. Aaron wonders at this new burst of loping, arctic wind buffeting his face with snow and ice crystals. He should slow them up. They’re wasting energy. And what if they get lost? What if Leader does not know what he’s doing?

  Through ringing in his ears, Aaron feels as if he’s hearing voices around him, ahead, perhaps to the sides. Not again. Then that song. No, no, no—not that song.

  He closes his eyes to the wall of white. Voices hum, someone calling out. It’s best if he doesn’t think about what they’re saying, try to push them from his mind. Something about numbers and, “Coming in!”

  He shakes his head, opens his eyes, still nothing but white. Something whirrs, rumbles. A generator? Wait … is he at a checkpoint? Are those really people talking? People … calling … to him?

  “Hello?” Aaron says.

  “Hi there. What’s your number?” The voice is close, male, cheerful.

  “Number?” Aaron looks around at nothing.

  “Race number.”

  “Oh. 33. Aaron Buckner, number 33.”

  Something moves out of the white, a shape, tall, vague, dark. A man. “Congratulations, Mr. Buckner, you’ve come in eighth!”

  “Eighth what?” Aaron leans away. Why can’t these crazy visions leave him in peace?

  The man laughs. “Eighth place. You’re in the top-ten finishers.”

  “We’ve got the dogs,” someone calls from up ahead.

  The sled has stopped. The dark shape materializes and a man, leaning forward, muffled in parka and fur hood, carrying a clipboard and pencil, claps Aaron on the back.

  “What?” Aaron stares.

  The white has cleared enough that he can see other shapes moving about, holding hands or long, colorful cords to guide them back to other people or invisible buildings. A great buzz of chatter and excitement surrounds him. And the dogs. The dogs have stopped. Chinook is looking up and around at the man slapping Aaron on the back.

  The dogs can see all these people.

  “Come on. Not really photo ops right now so we’ll get you inside. The vet’s here. I see you’ve got a dog in the basket.”

  “I … I … where…?”

  The man laughs again. “You’re at the finish line, Buckner. Didn’t you know? There’s a Terah Buckner here who’s been on the lookout for you. Come on inside.”

  Aaron can’t go inside. He can’t think of Terah or the vet right now. Or coming in an amazing eighth place out of several dozen mushers.

  He steps off the runners, following the line of dogs and people to the front of the team where he finds Leader in a crowd of race officials. Aaron kneels to hug the ta
il-wagging husky.

  When he stands, someone is hugging him. Terah found him through the white.

  “Congratulations!” She kisses him, arms around his shoulders.

  Aaron can hardly speak: so lightheaded, so dazed, so shocked to find himself surrounded by people, holding Terah in his arms, done with the race—alive. His chapped lips feel frozen together. He cannot think what to say as Terah tells him how proud she is of them.

  She steps away, glancing from Leader—gazing up, ice crystals all over his face—back to Aaron.

  He can only stare at her. Words hammer through his ears. Words about Leader, all Terah’s faith in that young dog. Start with the dogs. End with the dogs. In the middle, pray.

  At last, he knows what to say: “You were right about the name.”

  About the Author

  Jordan Taylor has been a professional dog trainer for over ten years, working in a variety of areas from private consultations to agility and entertainment—training dogs for film, advertising, and live theater. Her first book, Wonder Dogs: 101 German Shepherd Dog Films, traces the history of German Shepherd Dogs in movies from the 1920s to modern times. Jordan continues to merge her love for writing and dogs at home in the Pacific Northwest.

  Stories in the Angel Paws series celebrate the unique bond between canines and humans with heartfelt, moving, and insightful tales for anyone who has ever loved a dog.

  If you enjoyed Leader, please leave a review on Amazon and find more Angel Paws stories on Jordan’s author page: https://amazon.com/author/jordantaylor.

  You can find Jordan tweeting on twitter.com/JordanTaylorLit, updating her website at www.jordantaylorbooks.com, and being delighted to hear from readers through jordantaylorbooks@gmail.com.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Start

  About the Author