The Letters

by Luanne Rice

  Be safe up there, wherever you are. What are you doing for Thanksgiving? Hold tight to that photo, and promise me something? Will you kiss it for me? When you get to where Paul crashed? Kiss the picture—his face and your face. I don’t want this letter to end. It’s keeping me with you right now. I wish I were there.

  Hadley

  AURORA BOREALIS

  You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much

  To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud

  And the Northern Lights that run like

  tingling nerves.

  —Robert Frost from “On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations”

  Dear Hadley—

  Dogs, and wind and motion and meat and snow and trees and cold and cold and cold and dogs and darkness and tents and wet and clothes that are stiff and motion, everything in motion, and the sound of two runners in the snow and snow hooks and ganglines and more motion and sleep with your hip digging at stone and restlessness and water tasting of snow and ice and numbness.

  Here are things you would want to know:

  Brass does not freeze as easily as other metals, so the hooks and clips are made of brass.

  Dogs can run forever. Their gait is one of the most efficient on earth.

  Dogs need meat. Not suburban kibbles. They eat and they burn.

  “On-by” is a command to keep going, to ignore the thing distracting you. On-by. I shout it a hundred times a day. On-by. There is a lesson somehow in on-by, but I’m not sure what it is.

  You never let go of the sled. Never. If you do, the dogs will pull it away and run off. And you will be stuck in the tundra with nothing but a team of dogs to track. You do not want to be tracking dogs on foot through the bush.

  Nothing about dogsledding is what you think it is. It is grunt work, mostly. It is hard and it is pushing and shoving like unjamming a car out of a snowbank. Then, when you are too exhausted to continue, it becomes easy and beautiful and you feel in harmony with every breath the dogs take. Part of you wants it to go on forever. It is all next. It is some sort of perfidious human desire to never be where we are, but to be next, to be the next minute forward, to escape the present. I can’t adequately explain it. When you stand on the runners, you are not in one place, but in the future and the present simultaneously, and the dogs are slender backs pulling you through snow and the horizon is everything. Strange, I know. It must be what it is for you to paint. You flow into the brushes or into the picture and suddenly everything is about light and color and texture. When you look up, you are surprised to be standing in the same place. Something like that.

  Hold on. I have chores.

  Hadley, these letters are like an old-fashioned LP and we are both standing above it, holding the stylus, trying to drop it into the start of the song. Do you remember how impossible that could sometimes be? And you occasionally put it down at the chorus, and sometimes into the opening guitar solo, or at the goofy refrain? You and I are spinning like that, within the grooves, and Paul is in there, and our house, and Boing, and the apple trees and autumn weeds and tall grass, and we are both also outside and above the plastic grooves, the stylus arm in our fingers, the needle prepared to pick up small bits and pieces of our lives. And we want to play this song, or that melody, to remember it together, but the needle has a mind of its own, doesn’t it? Sometimes I see you vividly, and I experience incredible joy and contentment, and other times—yes, you with Daniel, that moment I witnessed—the needle skips and fumbles and I want to gouge out the tracks, mar the damn thing so it can never play again.

  Okay, let me slow down. You must think I am a madman, and I am a little. I suspect now that part of my coming here was the hope that I could pare things down and see them once and for all—to see you every bit as much as to see Paul. I had some notions about the cold, the endless landscape, and about the simplicity of dogs, but of course nothing is simple. The dogs are pure and wonderful, but they are not simple. And running a sled across this wide, beautiful country is not what I believed it would be. I will tell you about the trip, because I know you would want to know, but first let me do a little psychological housekeeping.

  First thing: I have your letters here. They arrived just before I left, almost as if fate had a hand in our affairs. I have them in my shirt pocket to keep them safe and dry. (No, not to keep them close to my heart, even I am not that corny.) I’ve had a strange experience reading them. In some way I don’t quite understand, this fragile exchange between us seems like reality, while this trip, these dogs, the marvelous Martha, seem illusory. People always write about dreams, or about a sense of déjà vu, but I am knee-deep in it here. I want to say that I am feeling a connection to Paul, to his final moments, but that hasn’t come yet. Maybe it will. I am not sure. But this other feeling, this dream feeling, is more than strange. Somehow I feel as though I have waited a lifetime for this trip, that I had been destined to be here for a thousand years before, and that the dogs know I am hardly on the sled behind them. Of course I know this is a vision quest sort of thing—yes, I am that transparent—but it’s also too easy, too pat to call it that. How can I make you understand when I hardly understand myself? I have tremendous calm right now because I know, for once in my life, that I am precisely, unerringly, uncannily, where I should be. Can you imagine what that feels like?

  And here’s another thing: I have dreamed of taking you every way that we have ever thought of, or dreamed of—roughly, no prisoners, with kisses that don’t end, with these fierce, deep movements between us, with belts sliding off so hard they make small whip sounds, bras lifted, zippers, one leg in the pants, against walls, on tables…and other times, we are on a large bed, our bed, and you are entirely open to me, and it is afternoon, and the sun is working slowly away, and I am inside you, and the light is perfect, and we are so deep inside each other that nothing matters, and both of us—this is my dream, remember, my interior life right now—both of us wonder why it isn’t always like this, why we don’t always stay like this when it is possible, when this sumptuous Eden is here for us, and we cast ourselves out instead of staying in this warm bed together.

  We were always good together that way, Hadley. You were exciting and thrilling and sexy as hell. You just were. You are. So there.

  Back to the dogs. How’s that for a transition?

  Okay, so here’s how it has gone for me. As I told you in the last letters I sent, Gus drove me over to Martha’s on our departure day. That was Thursday. When I say “drove me over” I mean, of course, that he took me on his ATV. Trucks and most vehicles are useless up here this time of year unless they can go on ice. So he drove me over. I confess I felt a bit like a boy going to his first day of summer camp. I wore some of the clothes I brought, but also an anorak that Martha gives her clients: a gray, fur-lined (caribou!) parka with a front pocket that is incredibly handy. Gloves on strings around my neck; glacier sunglasses. I looked the part even if down in my stomach I felt an imposter.

  I rode behind Gus and we drove for about an hour. Not bad. The sun had just come up and the land glimmered and we saw an enormous flock of crows to the south. A murder of crows. They had found a dead moose or deer, what was left of a dead moose or deer, and they picked at skin and sinew and hair. They bent over their feed, and sometimes hopped, and they resembled men at a craps table, all hunched and intent, and ready to spring away if it did not go well and ended—as it inevitably must. Gus said later that the crows are the final undertakers, short of worms. He told me about a helicopter pilot he knew who began snapping aerial photos of crows on dead things and twice he found they made patterns, and pictures, and moved like the iron filings in old Etch A Sketches to impulses we know little about. I guess they didn’t compose the face of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, but they were interesting anyway. He said once they collected in the form of a picket fence, or black teeth on a white mouth, but that’s as far as it went.

  Martha had the sleds packed in her dooryard when we arrived. A young assistant, a t
eenage girl named Swahili, helped her. Swahili’s parents were homesteaders—they had moved up in the late 1980s—and lived off the grid. Swahili wore dreadlocks and smelled of lavender, and was about as cool a hippie chick as you could find, but she also had tremendous competence around the dogs. I felt like the eastern dude in the cowboy movie, complete with city duds and a pen in my pocket. (Your letters, actually.) Gus knew Swahili, naturally, and they talked for a while about local gossip as they worked. They didn’t intend it, of course, but my sense of being a flatlander—a newbie to this land—grew increasingly acute. I had true misgivings, wondering what in the world I was doing there. The temperature stood at about 20 degrees, but it was wet and raw and a little snow fell from time to time. Martha said the weather had a mind of its own, and the early forecast had shifted some, so she no longer anticipated an easy, routine trek. Nevertheless, she felt the time had come to go, that it wouldn’t necessarily get any easier, so we started the countdown. She knew, I suspect, that psychological readiness is as important as the climate conditions.

  When we were all packed, and everything checked with three run-throughs, it was time to get the dogs. Before we could do that, Martha took Swahili around the dog yard and explained which remaining dog needed medicine, which one didn’t eat this or that, which one had to be kept away from the others because she had gone into estrus. Swahili knew most of it; she routinely house-sat at Martha’s to care for the stay-behind dogs when Martha took out clients. For a second it felt as if Martha and I were the most mundane suburban couple about to head off to the supermarket or the local mall for a movie and dinner, leaving Swahili to babysit and that the whole thing would be concluded by midnight. But the dogs knew what was about to happen, and they went a little insane every time Martha passed among them. They wanted to go.

  At last everything stood ready. I read a long time ago that sailors going out on whaling ships always felt reluctant to take the last step aboard, that they found reasons to dally that made no sense. They comprehended their fate turned the moment they committed finally to going, and I understood the full meaning of that notion at last. Here at Martha’s we were comfortable and safe. Warm quarters and food waited just a few yards away, but instead—for reasons that did not seem entirely clear, when you got down to it—we had elected to forgo comfort and chase off into the wild.

  Swahili and I “lined out” our dogs, while Martha and Gus worked on the lead sled. You line out by putting the gangline on the snow—the gangline is the center line that runs straight forward from the sled and hovers between all the dogs—and then hooking the dogs in pairs down the length of the line. You dance the dogs into place by lifting their collars and letting them spring on their back legs. Most of the dogs only weigh forty pounds or so and they are elite athletes, so hopping along is a piece of cake for them. The dogs closest to the sled are wheel dogs; the dogs midway down the line run point; and the leaders, Sneak and Grabby, on my sled, run up front. We each had a ten-dog team. Martha informed me ahead of time that my dogs were not as fast or as strong as her team. I was on the junior varsity—after all these years of believing myself varsity material!—but she promised my dogs had plenty of power and stamina. And they did.

  The teams stayed anchored by snow hooks. The hooks are vicious looking things, metal cobra heads with two prongs of shiny steel for fangs that jab into the snow behind the driver and attach to the harness of the sled. The harder the dogs pull, the more securely they jam the hook into the snow and ice. In theory, at least, the dogs can’t go forward if one plants the snow hook properly, but Martha and Gus told me a dozen stories of snow hooks jumping out of the snow and burying themselves in mushers’ legs. So, I had that to look forward to.

  Anyway, I won’t get too technical in these letters, but I figured you needed some of the basics. In the end, I stepped on the sled runners, watched Martha lift her hand to indicate she intended to cast off, and then I bent down and yanked the snow hook out of the ground. And I came within a fingernail’s grasp of falling immediately backwards off the sled. It would have been an ignominious start, but I caught myself and the sled took off with me upright and aboard.

  Understand, without Martha in front of me none of this would have occurred. I could not have simply walked up to a team and yelled “Mush” and disappeared in a cloud of snow. Imagine if you can the worst dog you ever walked on a leash, then multiply that by ten, then multiply it again by some factor that expresses the dogs’ athleticism, and the fact they have been bred for centuries to do this one single thing, and you might begin to get a feeling for the enormous strength of the team. They reminded me of an undertow. Something broad and strong and inevitable.

  The sled has a rudimentary foot brake and I used it a fair amount as we followed a snowmobile trail for the first few miles. The dogs, by the way, run in absolute silence. I’m not sure why I didn’t know that. All their barking, their mad lunges to get going, stopped the instant we began forward. We went from chaos—the dogs barking and jumping in the traces as high as your waist sometimes—to pure silence. It’s possible, I’m told, to run a sled with two people standing on the runners, and I thought of you, Hadley, how I wanted you in front of me, my arms around you, your body leaning back into mine. Maybe we will run a team together someday. You would love that part. You would love the dogs and the silence and the trees and snow passing beside you. I’ve never experienced anything to match it.

  We went pretty fast. World-class sprint dog teams can reach thirty miles an hour in bursts, but we ran cargo dogs and so you can picture us chugging along well under ten miles an hour. Still, that’s fairly fast when you are standing on two ash 1×3s in the snow. The runners have a dimpled plastic pad where each foot belongs, so with your hands providing a third point of balance, you feel fairly stable. It required about a half hour before I began to feel I could look around at my surroundings. And about ten minutes after that, I was aware of my fingers and hands growing numb with the cold.

  It’s a little difficult to describe the terrain. The mountains exist off in the distance. It seems every direction you look, you see mountains. The Brooks Range. The air smells of juniper and snow and moisture. It is wet here and gullies and rivulets crisscross any trail you can find. Then the water freezes and you have heaves and buckles—nothing like it is out on the sea ice, Martha assures me—and it’s like running a team over a small hedge, only the hedge is comprised of ice and is slippery as hell, and the sled invariably bounces up, then teeters down. Grunt work, as I said.

  Before I forget, let me list my dog team. I already mentioned Grabby and Sneak. So it looks like this from the sled peering out over their backs.

  Grabby—Sneak

  Jenny—Penny (sisters)

  Wiley—Dash

  Blondie—Dutch

  Snowball—Kya

  ME

  You always harness them in the same position. They prefer to run in established pairs. Occasionally Martha moves a dog up or down the line, or changes a pattern when she judges they are not running to their full potential. She works in younger dogs over the summer, but usually by the time fall arrives her lineup is set. She says it’s a little like managing a baseball team, with rookies breaking in, and wily old veterans keeping the team balanced. I am, truly, running the junior varsity squad. Her dogs are faster and stronger and they break trail when it is required.

  I have to stop here, sweetheart. I’m exhausted and need sleep. I’ll describe the rest of the day tomorrow, if that makes sense. One thing I am thinking about right now: the last glimpses our son had of this world were as beautiful and majestic as anything that exists on this earth. Snow and whiteness and mountains and lakes that catch every reflection and mirror them so that you can sometimes forget what is the real image, and what is the light thrown back at your eyes.

  Sam

  November 26

  To be clear, here’s a note on sleeping arrangements.

  We sleep in a tent. We sleep in fat clothes, with our hoods pulled up an
d a small stove operating in the center of the tent. If any dog has come up lame, or has a problem, the dog sleeps inside the tent with us. Grabby, my newest girlfriend, sleeps next to me. She is a little old, I guess, and Martha dotes on her. Sneak also sleeps inside. The rest of the dogs sleep on a line outside the tent. Martha circles the tent with the dogs—a precaution against bears, she told me, and yes, we have a shotgun with us for moose and potentially bears—and they burrow into the snow. The inside tent temperature is usually around 45. We smell of food and dogs and lamp oil. We do not bathe, by the way, until we return. Martha has taught me to wash my hands in tea water—everything is used, and reused—and we are frugal in the extreme. The tent has a small hole at the top to let our heat and breath escape, and lying next to Grabby—a sweet, thirty-five-pound female with a curled tail and one black paw, who uses her nose like dolphins use their noses on TV shows, constantly flipping it to get you to pay attention or to keep rubbing her—I can usually see out at the stars and the black night.

  Sleeping in a tent up here is many things, but it is not exactly the circumstances for the man-woman thing, I promise. That cozy island life you’re living would seem a much more likely setting.

  It turns out she is from Massachusetts, of all places. I don’t know why, but that makes me laugh. I suppose I thought of her as a mountain woman, born on a bearskin in a hut at the North Pole somewhere, but she grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston and is a die-hard Red Sox fan. (Paul would like that.) She moved here with a geology expedition—an oil company thing, actually, for Exxon, I think—and then fell in love with the territory. She made a good salary as an engineer and she bought a hundred acres and then slowly built her place. The dogs came by accident, mostly. An old-timer died and left about a dozen sled dogs and no one wanted to bother with them, so the police had plans to shoot them, then Martha heard about it and intervened. She said the last thing in the world she wanted, or thought about, was sled dogs. But when she agreed to take them on, the police passed along a few sleds that had been around the cabin, and an old trapper named Jim—a friend of the old guy who died—helped her set up her first dog yard and taught her the basics. After that, she said, it was like anything else: you started as an amateur and became more competent. She tapped into a dogsledding community little by little and the rest is history, as the saying goes.