For a split second, there was only the heavy scraping of metal on wood as each dog lifted its head or stood. Then, all at once, came an explosion of barking and screeching that seemed to vibrate through my skin, the dogs leaping at me from all sides before being jerked back by their chains. The noise was so loud that I could not differentiate between its elements. But I was used to it. I held out my arms so that some of the dogs struck me with their wet noses when they leaped. There were maybe fifteen dogs, big dogs, their coats coarse and thick with dust. Two white dogs, a gray dog, another gray dog—they were different, their faces too long, too much red in their fur. Except there, in the corner, one black husky.
The black husky was less excited than the others, older. I walked over, placed one hand under his chin, stroked the other across his hard face. He rose to his back legs, as if in slow motion, and pressed his head against my chest.
“Hey, Saddam,” I said.
CHAPTER THREE
A FEW YEARS AFTER LEAVING LILLEHAMMER, I received a letter from a classmate with whom I’d seldom spoken, an avowed Communist who was active in a national youth movement. The Communist wrote that he and his friends had been talking about “tough girls,” and that throughout the conversation, he kept thinking of me. He wondered if life had been kind to me.
That someone who had only known me during that year might ever consider me tough—and pick me out of a crowd as such—stopped my breath. It seemed at the time unspeakably deep, a recognition so unlikely that the comfort it offered came balanced with an intense anxiety that it wasn’t true. I knew I would never be a tough girl. And yet the phrase, with its implied contradiction, articulated everything that I wanted for myself: to be a girl, an inherently vulnerable position, and yet unafraid.
Back in California for my senior year of high school, I volunteered very little about Lillehammer, and moved forward with life as if I had spent nothing but a long weekend away. I’m sure my parents knew that something was wrong. My mom had a sound to her voice, tentative, when she meant to ask a difficult question; but each time I sensed the quiver before it came, and, my skin suddenly electric, I’d interrupt with some inane comment about the weather or the day’s plans or the latest news, and my mother would let it drop.
One of her concerns in particular stood out to me. My younger host sister would be studying in the United States that year, staying with a new set of host parents whose photo my mother saw in a correspondence. The photo disturbed her. There was something in the man’s expression, my mother said. He gave her a creepy vibe. All that next year my mom worried aloud about my host sister’s host father, and all that year, when the topic came up, I rolled my eyes or left the room. Didn’t I care? she asked me. The answer was no: I didn’t care, not in the slightest, nor could I bring myself to. My mother pressed her lips together. “I’m sure it’s fine,” she’d assure herself, time after time. “I’m just being a worried mom. I’m sure it’s perfectly fine.”
But it wasn’t fine. I wasn’t fine. I felt that my time in Norway had been stolen. Worse, it had turned me into a person I didn’t recognize, someone who snapped at my mother’s concerns and startled awake at small sounds, self-conscious about my body in a way I’d never been before. The solution, I decided, was to go back. Try the whole thing over again. But this time I was going to do it right: I would go to the Arctic. I would go to the place I had yearned for, where I could prove I was the person I had once known myself to be. I just needed a way in.
That year, while my friends applied to jobs and colleges, I considered strategies for going north. If only I could join the crew of an expedition! How easy it seemed, a hundred years ago—stow away on a ship, or cut my hair and tape my breasts and volunteer as a cabin boy. Now every expedition I found, every job, seemed to want someone qualified—a scientist or a mechanic. Nobody wanted a stubborn and dreamy eighteen-year-old from suburban California.
It was Far, in fact, who had first told me about folk schools. They were distinctly Scandinavian—yearlong public boarding schools in which students studied something they loved, no matter how offbeat. “You can even study dogsledding,” he’d said. Maybe I sensed the derision in his voice, or maybe I added it later, in retrospect, so that my dream would not be his suggestion. Dogsledding, like I’d dreamed of. Dogsledding, like in all my favorite books.
There it was. My ticket.
I found 69˚North online. With around forty students, it was the smallest folk school in Norway, and offered training in dogsledding and winter survival. It was Arctic, all right—closer to the pole than all of Sweden, Iceland, and most of Alaska. Photos on its website showed rosy-cheeked students crossing glaciers, dogsledding over frozen rivers, sitting around campfires under the northern lights, and cuddling puppies. Better yet, tuition was free, and students could do extra chores to offset the cost of room and board. I sent in my application and transcript, hoping beyond hope that my straight As would be enough to place me in the top of the applicant pool; in fact, as I later learned, the school only used transcripts to make sure that applicants hadn’t failed gym. Anyway, two weeks later, I was accepted. And just like that, the Arctic was waiting for me.
Like most folk schools, 69˚North advertised itself as idyllic: a school about life, with nature as the teacher. In reality, it was forty teenagers stranded on an isolated peninsula and thrown into a yearlong series of emotional challenges and hazardous situations, a cross between hippie commune and survivalist camp. The school was part of a dwindling, 150-year-old educational system based on the Scandinavian and socialist principles that fresh air was good for self-discovery, and that a society could not be truly democratic unless all its voters knew themselves. These purposes were diligently hidden from the students—none of whom, I came to suspect, had been drawn to the remoteness of 69˚North by accident.
The school program opened with a lamb banquet, held around long tables in an upstairs gymnasium that smelled like Pine-Sol and wet wool. I found myself sitting next to Sven, the wilderness teacher, an ebullient and gorgeous Dane who, it was whispered, had come to 69˚North after police found him wandering in the forest months after a breakup, with only an elkhound for company. At one point, when someone mentioned camping, Sven climbed onto his chair in excitement.
After dinner, the principal took the podium. He spoke of adventure, of learning the rhythms of the polar night, of learning the howls of dogs and the textures of snow. He spoke of bonding into the kind of community made possible only through isolation and hardship. The principal wore black pants and no shirt. He had binder clips pinched to his nipples, and occasionally, as he talked, he tweaked the clips with his fingers; he was proud of his tolerance for pain. He wore this outfit on the opening night because he wanted to encourage bravery, and how could he tell his students to be brave without demonstrating his own courage first? For the rest of the year, the principal wore tidy jeans and button-down shirts. He only busted out the binder clips for special occasions.
When the principal finished talking, the students cheered. Sven pounded on the table. After a moment, I pounded on the table, too, joining the ovation. I was in the Arctic, and in the Arctic things happened for a reason. I felt that nothing could surprise me. The world seemed strange and bright.
Most of my classes that year were taught by the dogsledding teacher, Tallak, a compact Sami man with the gift of authority. Everything Tallak said, everyone believed. It wasn’t that he was forceful, or overwhelming; rather, his voice carried a calm certainty, slow and light, punctuated by little laughs. Listening to him talk about anything—dogs, racism, foster children, Christmas—felt like discovering brilliant thoughts you didn’t know you already had. “I have to be careful,” he sometimes said, “because people will believe whatever I tell them.” This show of responsibility only made the students trust him more.
At first, students were only allowed to go dogsledding with Tallak; after all, as he reminded us, we knew nothing yet. Day by day we waited our turns, waited for him to come into t
he common room after school, where students sat on long couches to knit and play cards and get to know each other. When Tallak walked in, we’d stop talking and will ourselves to look competent. He’d scan our faces, indicating his selection with a nod at the chosen student. I was lucky. I was picked on the second day.
September was chilly but snowless; instead of sleds, the dogs pulled welded-steel carts with room for one passenger and one driver. By the time I’d put on my coat and laced my boots, Tallak had assembled a team before one of the carts, which was tied off to a heavy post. It shuddered as the dogs reared up against their ropes. I settled into the lurching passenger seat with my hands in my lap, as Tallak had instructed, so that my arms wouldn’t break if the cart flipped over. There were eight dogs in the team, and they were all barking and leaping, the sound and chaos overwhelming. I’d learned the names of their positions: lead dogs in front, then swing dogs, then team dogs, and finally the wheel dogs closest to the cart. The wheel dogs were the biggest.
“Ready?” said Tallak, his voice stern. The cart sank as he climbed on behind me. I started to answer, “I think so—” before I realized he wasn’t talking to me. His gaze was only on the dogs, who tensed at the word. Then—
“Ålright!”
Tallak pulled a quick-release and the cart jerked forward, the dogs instantly at a run—fast, it felt; I later learned they maxed out at around twenty-five miles per hour—and stones were flying up from those hind legs and stinging my face, a gob of cold mud on my forehead, so that by the time I opened my eyes again we were at the end of the driveway, headed toward a bridge. The bridge had a cowcatcher on it, a yard across, metal bars with open spaces exactly the right size for a dog’s leg to slip through. We were going too fast to stop. “Will they be okay?” I tried to shout, but we were already there; and row by row the dogs leaped over the grate, rising and falling, lead then swing then team then wheel, in a perfect wave that rolled the length of the team and culminated in the cart’s own rattly pass across the bars. A hard turn onto the road—the cart slid on gravel, I clutched my seat—and we were home free, galloping down the wide paved road of the village of Sand.
The dogs flowed, a perfect thrilling engine. Their legs stretched out like pistons; their ears and tongues bounced in unison. Their running had nothing to do with me. They wouldn’t have stopped if I’d asked them to.
They were beautiful. They were so beautiful.
I have never loved anything as hard and as fast as I loved those dogs, as I loved dogsledding itself. I could have watched them for hours. I could have watched them forever. They ran like water, and I was part of it, and I was struck with the instant and undeniable thought that I had finally come to the place that I had spent my life trying to find. Right here, of course it was here, in the Arctic, in Norway, between the gray mass of the fjord and the sharp snowy mountains, at the top of the turning world. It was almost too much to acknowledge. It was hard to trust the fact of my body in this place. But here were the dogs, pulling me, proving it.
“Fucking hell,” said Tallak. He slammed the hand brakes and shouted to the team. The wheels froze, but the dogs kept pulling, the cart skidding after them, painting black stripes on the road. Finally we bounced to a stop. The dogs were still trying to go.
Now I saw the problem: sheep, sprawled just around a bend. “All we need is another fight with a sheep farmer,” said Tallak.
“The dogs would hurt them?”
“Blair,” said Tallak. “These are wolves you’re working with.”
They weren’t, of course, but it was Tallak’s belief that every dog, down to every last Chihuahua, thought itself a wolf.
He had me stand on the cart while he ran up and heaved the lead dogs around to face the way we’d come. The rest of the team followed in a clump, and on his way back to the cart, Tallak untangled a few that had caught their ankles in the gangline. “Do you want to drive?” he asked me, and before I answered he said, “Better not,” and off we went toward home.
The next week, to demonstrate efficient dog training, Tallak brought a four-week-old puppy into the classroom. The puppy had never been inside a building before, or even away from his siblings, none of whom was named yet. Tallak was still considering options. He could name the pups after a theme, like his last litter, the board-game dogs: Risk, Ludo, Chess. He could name them out of spite, like the dog She Bergeton, christened after a nearby farmer following a dispute over a dead sheep. Ultimately, he would ignore all advice and name them after “terrorists”: Bin Laden, Saddam, and George Bush for the boys. Condoleeza for the girl—Condy for short. He would name the puppy in question Saddam.
Saddam was black and velvety and round, small enough to be scooped up in one hand, with a white tuft on the end of his tail and the thinnest white line down the bridge of his snout. As soon as Tallak set him down in the classroom doorway, Saddam tensed. Then he launched into a series of leaps that brought him to the center of the room, wagging his short tail as much for balance as excitement. He shook his head with his jaw open, as if hoping his mouth might encounter something in midair. He keened a wailing, high-pitched squeal and wagged his body against the students’ legs, crashing into tables and chairs as we all reached down and tried to touch him. Yes, I thought. This was a good school.
Tallak glanced at the clock. It was 10:35. In twenty minutes, he said, he could train Saddam to stay. He lifted the puppy by the scruff and put him in a corner, by the chalkboard. With a tap, he knocked the dog onto its stomach. “Stay,” he said.
In an instant, Saddam had scooted halfway across the floor.
Tallak carried him back to the corner. “Stay.”
Saddam rolled away.
Again and again they repeated the process—the man stern, the dog largely oblivious. But gradually something changed. Saddam grew cautious; his tail drooped; he didn’t leave the corner as quickly. Finally, when Tallak said, “Stay,” Saddam laid his head on the ground. It was 10:51.
“He’s given up,” Tallak explained. He left the room and came back with a slice of raw reindeer on a plate, which he set down a foot or so from the puppy. Saddam’s eyes flicked over the meat, but he didn’t lift his head.
The lesson was complete. We were supposed to be inspired, but the students were mostly quiet. A girl to my left had tears in her eyes. But I couldn’t put my finger on what, exactly, was upsetting. The puppy had been trained. Tallak had proven himself right, and he would continue to do so.
Nowhere were his lessons more urgent than in the kennel. Tallak’s dogs were fighters. Almost daily they broke into terrible screaming brawls and we had to come running from the school or the cabins and pull tight fists of fur from their backs and kick their ribs with our boots. I was always scared to enter the mass of flying heads and teeth and blood and would hold back, hoping for someone else to break up the fight first; but then Tallak called me out—“They’re hurting each other, and you just stand there?”—and I was ashamed. His dogs were valuable. Ten thousand kroner each, maybe more. We should have no reluctance, he told us, to be rough with them, and as with everything he told us, we were embarrassed to have ever not believed it. Manhandling dogs was simply learning to speak their language rather than expecting them to learn ours. To grab a dog by its scruff and whip it onto its back, then kneel on its chest until its muscles finally relaxed—that was being the boss. Tallak showed us how to grip our hands around the dogs’ snouts, to growl deep in our throats and bite their noses and ears. He liked to tell a story about being stuck in a kennel with a strange dog, who was snarling, bent on attacking him. He grabbed a shovel, raised it to the sky, and brought it down on the dog’s head. The dog fell to the ground. And then—and then, Tallak said, he unzipped his pants and peed on it. If that wasn’t dog language, he didn’t know what was.
We didn’t, either. None of the students was inclined toward roughness, but neither were we inclined to question Tallak’s wisdom.
Once, after a fight, I found part of an ear on the ground, a velve
t triangle with one red edge. I folded it between my fingers, distracted from the horror, for a moment, by the softness. Then I remembered, and threw it away from me. That dog would be fine, Tallak said; ears healed themselves. He was more worried about the other guy, who’d suffered a long cut on his chest. Tallak washed the wound with saline and stitched it up on the mudroom floor, while I stared at the slime of muscle just under the fur.
We spent time cleaning the kennel and scooping poop and repairing doghouses and chopping frozen intestines with an ax into meal-size chunks, but also we were learning to mush, first with carts and then, when the first snows came in October, on wooden sleds. As soon as anyone walked into the kennel with a harness, the dogs erupted. Thirty, forty dogs depending on the day, all jumping and yowling as hard as they could, and the trick was to pick out five or six or eight and wrestle their muscular bodies into harnesses and clip them to the gangline that pulled the sled. Finally, when the team had settled down out of boredom or indignation, we could pull the quick-release that held back the sled and it would jolt forward with such force that the insides of my arms felt bruised from holding on. In that moment of stillness to speed, all the noise and screams and howls would stop dead; everything in the world shifted in that one instant when we pulled the rope.
“You are stronger than one dog,” Tallak told us. “One dog, you can pin him down, you can make him do what you want. Two dogs, maybe. Four dogs can pull a truck from a ditch. The sled’s brake is a joke. It is a suggestion. When the dogs are together, you have no chance of controlling them, unless they choose to please you.”
He was right. It wouldn’t be long before I saw a six-dog team uproot a birch tree that they were tied to and take off down the trail, tree and roots bouncing behind them.
Tallak taught us the rules: Never step over the gangline. Never trust a snow anchor. Always keep your knife on your belt. Most important, never let go of the sled. If the sled tips over, if it crashes, hold on. Get up if you can. It’s nothing to be dragged on your stomach a half mile through the snow. As long as you hold on. If you let go, Tallak said, the dogs and the sled will leave you, and alone in the mountains, on the tundra, you can die. I stuffed my pockets with matches, chocolate, extra mittens, and two headlamps, in case I ever got left behind.
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