Good Dogs Don't Make It to the South Pole

by Hans-Olav Thyvold

  Janis was unhappy. It wasn’t her own fault, of course. Janis’s happiness was like that of most dogs—entirely in the hands of the creature at the other end of the leash. At the other end of Janis’s leash was a troll.

  The first time I met Janis, I honestly didn’t really notice her. It was the troll I noticed, with her fluorescent hair and giant stomping feet. And then I saw that the troll hadn’t tied up her dog before she went into the Tavern, she’d just left her loose outside with a few calming words of warning before she disappeared.

  ‘There we go. Good girl, Janis. Janis, Janis, Janis. Wait here, Janis. Mom will be back soon.’

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ I chimed in after the troll had slipped into the Tavern, but Janis wasn’t interested in striking up a conversation, not just then. She laid down on the floor with her snout on her front paw and her eyes relentlessly glued to the door. She got up each time someone came out through the door, even when Mrs. Thorkildsen showed up, full and content.

  After that, I don’t think about Janis any more than I think about other dogs who come my way, but that changes the next time we are at the Library, where Mrs. Thorkildsen wants to discuss food and place an order for a book before ducking into the Tavern for her patty melt and her pint.

  ‘You don’t need to tie me up,’ I say when Mrs. Thorkildsen goes to strap the leash to the banister by the stairs. ‘I won’t run away, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’

  ‘I thought you preferred to be tied up,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says.

  ‘That depends on the situation,’ I reply. ‘Sometimes it feels good to be tied up, sometimes it doesn’t.’

  ‘All right, it’s up to you,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says.

  So I sit there, untied, but bound by invisible chains, and think about the Fenris-Wolf. Keep thinking about the Fenris-Wolf until the front door opens down there and I am given something else to think about. Suddenly, beyond the usual soundscape of cars and screaming kids, the most wonderful scent you can imagine streams in from the street. It is as if life itself had come through the door to say:

  ‘Wake up! It’s time to live.’

  I immediately recognize the troll’s stomping steps. They sound like an avalanche in reverse coming up the stairs, and for an instant I think the heavenly aroma is coming from her. But of course it is Janis, who slowly and elegantly tiptoes up and lies herself down right after the troll disappears into the Tavern. It is just the two of us now, us and that chaotic, overwhelming smell of hers.

  Don’t ask me what happened, but it happened, oh yes, it happened! Janis’s scent completely overpowers my nervous system and I turn into an old dog and a little puppy all at once. I can’t think straight while the scent is brutally instructing me to take up a position behind Janis, who does absolutely nothing to hide the source of the smell. On the contrary. I simply have to get a taste, and the taste that unfolds across my tongue removes any doubt about what I have to do. And so I did. And then I did it again. No harm done, and it feels profoundly meaningful even though I’m not quite sure what it is all supposed to be good for. But most of all, it is delightful. And just when I think I am really getting the hang of it, Mrs. Thorkildsen comes out of the Tavern early for once in her damn life, and before I know it I am tied to the wheely bag and strolling streetside, and the whole mysterious miracle is behind me.

  Like clockwork, visitors have again arrived while we were at the Center. As we step through the gate at home, two women, one fully grown and the other young, come walking down the driveway towards us. I do my job right away when I spot them, letting out a few appropriately scary barks that make them freeze on the spot. Before I have time to check with Mrs. Thorkildsen whether she also wants me to tear them to pieces, the older woman says hello, and Mrs. Thorkildsen barely has time to say hello back before the woman asks:

  ‘Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ?’

  I have no immediate associations with that name, but it seems to ring a bell for Mrs. Thorkildsen.

  ‘I do,’ she says. I can see that this delights the older woman, who is about to speak up again, but Mrs. Thorkildsen cuts her off:

  ‘And I can’t stand the guy.’

  What are the odds? Complete strangers approaching a complete stranger, and it doesn’t take more than a moment to establish that they have mutual acquaintances. These are the kinds of things that remind a dog what extraordinary powers human beings have, after all.

  Naturally, I am very curious about what this Jesus might have done, given that women of all ages are now going door to door looking for him, but the fact that Mrs. Thorkildsen doesn’t like him is obviously a blow to both of these women’s happiness, since, after offering Mrs. Thorkildsen some reading material in vain—and she loves to read!—they plod out the gate and across the street looking dejected on their way to our neighbor’s house.

  17

  The Attack of the Home Help. It’s raining tonight, and Mrs. Thorkildsen isn’t feeling well. Not in the least. Mrs. Thorkildsen is lying on the bathroom floor again, and I can’t get through to her. She talks to me on and off, but she won’t look at me, and all I can hear, the only word I can make out from what she’s trying to say, is my name.

  ‘Tassen,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says.

  ‘Chavanaguhrrr chatzz buzz Tassen!’

  After giving it some thought, she adds: ‘Hoo-wah!’

  She flails her arms and legs around a little, but her body, so flimsy and so heavy, mostly stays put where it is.

  It’s the Home Help who is responsible for this disaster but, if I know myself, I’m sure it’s my fault as well. I should have insisted that Mrs. Thorkildsen take me out for a walk even when it’s raining, and I should have done so long ago. But she doesn’t do that anymore—she hasn’t for a long time. If it rains, which it naturally does from time to time, she just opens the door so I can go into the backyard and do my business. But had I forced Mrs. Thorkildsen to put on her coat, shoes, scarf, and hat and do her duty as a dog owner, maybe things would have looked different tonight. Yes, I should have taken her out for some air, then this never would have happened. But, as I said, I maintain that most of the blame lies with the human who bears the extremely misleading title of Home Help.

  The Home Help was the Puppy’s idea. He was as proud as a bird dog with feathers hanging out of his mouth when he stopped by to proclaim that Mrs. Thorkildsen now, thanks to his persistent efforts with the municipality (I have no idea), was entitled to home help. Naturally, Mrs. Thorkildsen first tried to give him the impression that she had no desire whatsoever for home help, just like she didn’t want a cable guy, but perhaps it was the positive experience with the cable guy that eventually made her put her indignation and stubbornness aside and decide to welcome the Home Help into our lives. I thought it sounded like a brilliant idea. I could use a little home help myself, come to think of it. My hair is long overdue for a good brushing, and I can’t remember the last time my nails were clipped. I promise not to bite again.

  This morning we awoke to the rare sound of the alarm clock.

  ‘The Home Help is coming today,’ was the first thing Mrs. Thorkildsen said.

  She’d laid out the clothes she was going to wear, but didn’t get dressed before going through a solid morning ritual with her newspaper and coffee and toast. She’d retrieved a bag of cinnamon rolls from the winter cabinet and laid them out to defrost. I offered to check whether they were done defrosting.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be just fine. We’re going to have some when the Home Help gets here.’

  ‘Don’t you think I should check one, just to make sure?’

  Mrs. Thorkildsen laughed, and that meant it was settled. I got my cinnamon roll. She watched me with a clever smile as I gobbled up the treat.

  ‘Well, was it edible?’

  ‘Hard to say when you’ve only had one.’

  ‘I think we’ll just have to take that chance,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said.

  As the magical hour of the Home Help’s arrival d
rew nearer, Mrs. Thorkildsen got more and more restless. It was contagious. She couldn’t focus on Dr. Pill, could only sit through the first five minutes of ‘My ex-wife claims I assaulted our daughter who ran off with her boyfriend’ before she was back on her feet to check that everything was in its proper place. Everything was in its proper place, and it was still a long time until the Home Help was due to arrive.

  The strange thing is, the more you anticipate something, the more you’ve pictured in your mind how it’s all going to turn out, the more surprised you are when it finally shows up. When the doorbell finally, finally rang, we both jumped out of our seats, but I was the only one who barked. Mrs. Thorkildsen didn’t like that. Worst of all, the Home Help didn’t like it either. To put it mildly.

  How is it possible to have a job with so much responsibility when one is so massively prejudiced against dogs? I only got a momentary glimpse of the Home Help between Mrs. Thorkildsen’s calves, a tiny woman with dark skin and dark hair and instinctive anxiety shining in her eyes. Before Mrs. Thorkildsen had time to open the door, the Home Help had already run down the stairs and partway down the driveway, where she unabashedly stood and shouted for the whole neighborhood to hear:

  ‘Afraid of dog! I’m afraid of dogs!’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said, as if she had anything to apologize for. ‘Wait a second!’

  She pulled the door shut and asked me to sit. No problem. I’m glued to the spot.

  ‘You’ll have to stay in the bedroom, I think. The Home Help is afraid of dogs.’

  ‘It’s a trap!’ I say. ‘The Home Help only wants me out of the way so she can rob you in peace and quiet. I’ve heard about all that.’

  ‘I think we’re going to have to take that chance. You should go take a rest, it wouldn’t hurt you.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘don’t complain to me when she molests you.’

  And molest she did. The Mrs. Thorkildsen who, after an eternity, came to let me out of the bedroom was a completely different person than the Mrs. Thorkildsen who had shut me in. She seemed deflated, plain and simple. She was no longer restless and wired, but slow and lethargic in her movements. She said nothing.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked, although I could see it hadn’t gone well. Mrs. Thorkildsen didn’t respond. She plodded into the kitchen, where the wheely cart was positioned precisely as it had been before the Home Help arrived, and I followed. Mrs. Thorkildsen found a mug and poured herself coffee from the pot.

  ‘Can you believe it? She didn’t want a cinnamon roll,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said.

  Didn’t want a cinnamon roll? Were there people who didn’t want Mrs. Thorkildsen’s cinnamon rolls?

  ‘She didn’t have time,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen said. ‘And it was almost impossible to understand what she said. But she did a fine job with the laundry, I’ll give her that.’

  Mrs. Thorkildsen had been promised help, and she’d thought she would get the help she needed, but no. She’d get help doing the laundry, though she could very well have done that herself, and had the house not been vacuumed already, she could have gotten help with that as well. But what she really needed help with, being the best version of herself, she couldn’t get help with.

  Mrs. Thorkildsen was feeling blue. I know her so well that she didn’t need to tell me that. And depression plus TV plus Dragon Water minus an evening walk equals Mrs. Thorkildsen on the bathroom floor. That much math I know.

  It stinks. Mrs. Thorkildsen stinks, and it stinks in the hallway. That last part is technically my fault. Mine, plus a tray of cinnamon rolls. What was I supposed to do? Mrs. Thorkildsen was in the living room drinking away unsettling memories and stressful home helps and the wheely cart was just sitting there full of cinnamon rolls. There was, I thought, no point in that.

  Mrs. Thorkildsen didn’t see me help myself, and when the cinnamon rolls began to make their presence known in my stomach it was too late—she had already gone horizontal in the bathroom. I tried to let her know, I nudged her with an insistent snout and gave a little woof, but none of this brought me any closer to the door. In the end there was nothing I could do. What happened happened.

  The house stinks of dog shit and forlorn drunkenness. This is when we could use the Home Help.

  I’d like to say something clarifying and enlightening about the sense of smell. Something that could reveal a tiny corner of the mystery, the way Mrs. Thorkildsen did with her water glasses, but I don’t know where to begin. I might as well begin with the eyes, which are about as underdeveloped in dogs as they are in humans. How would you explain not only what you see, but the fact that you see, to a person who can’t see? The answer is most likely that you’re well-mannered enough not to do that. I can’t imagine what the world would be like without the information that smell carries. How would you know anything at all?

  ‘The smell was indescribable’ is something you often hear, and truer words were never spoken, but let me try anyway. It’s an enormous challenge to convey anything at all to a creature who doesn’t have a sense of smell, but thinks it does anyway.

  Three things you should know about smell when you don’t have a sense of smell:

  One: Smell is three-dimensional.

  Two: Smell never disappears, it only takes new forms.

  Three: Smell never sleeps.

  You didn’t hear this from me.

  18

  Greenland is the theme of the day for Mrs. Thorkildsen. The second largest block of ice on Earth, just a bus stop away from the North Pole. The world’s largest island and a tough place to live. The humans who settled there might be the hardiest on Earth, but they couldn’t have done it without their dogs. Or the other way around, for that matter. The Chief ordered no less than one hundred such dogs from the west coast of Greenland—promptly delivered to a small island in the south of Norway, Mrs. Thorkildsen explains. And I have to ask:

  ‘One hundred?’

  ‘Yes, one hundred.’

  ‘Is that a lot?’

  ‘I didn’t think you cared about things like that.’

  ‘Okay, well maybe I do.’

  Mrs. Thorkildsen doesn’t respond, but she makes it impossible for me to doubt that my words are at work in there, my thoughts are making her thoughts move, divide, and merge again into new constellations, which turns into words and actions. The action at the end of Mrs. Thorkildsen’s line of thought is for her to get up from her comfy chair and go into the room behind the bathroom, the one we never use anymore. In there, she rummages around in the drawers before returning to the living room with quick, almost eager steps and settling down at the dining table.

  Mrs. Thorkildsen sits at the dining table and writes. Is that what she’s doing? Instead of the staccato sound of her words, when she scratches them into the pages of her diary there is the sound of a pen trying to complete a continuous, controlled arc over a sheet of paper. And another sheet. The same arc again and again, and it’s almost soothing—I’ve assumed a relatively flat position at Mrs. Thorkildsen’s feet. My rest is promptly cut short when I hear one of the scariest noises I know in the universe:

  The scissors.

  ‘Snip, snip,’ the scissors and the paper sing in unison. ‘Clippy clippy clip!’

  Mrs. Thorkildsen cuts, and the longer she cuts, the more delicate the sound of the scissors through the paper grows. It slices more and more slowly, until finally it’s not slicing at all. It grows quiet. Mrs. Thorkildsen lets out a short, wordless noise that tells me she’s satisfied. She gets up from the table, and I get up from my place at her feet.

  ‘Do you see that?’ Mrs. Thorkildsen asks and reaches out her wrinkly hand, holding a piece of paper that smells like nothing but paper. ‘Do you see what it is?’

  Despite my best efforts, I can’t see what it is—but that doesn’t seem to worry Mrs. Thorkildsen. She moves over to the low table by the couch, the one she strangely claims to be afraid of and thus keeps covered by a floor-length red tablecloth. She places the piece of
paper on the red tablecloth so it stands upright, and asks again: ‘Now do you see what it is?’ When viewed head-on, the piece of paper looks a little like the pointy shape of the house with the ship Fram in it, but when I circle the table and see it from the side, it looks a bit like this:

  I stay still and gaze at the little paper shape on the table, still not quite comprehending what it’s supposed to look like, but then I hear myself say, without having thought it over:

  ‘It’s a wolf. A paper wolf.’

  ‘Well, it’s supposed to be a Greenland Dog,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says.

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  19

  The Puppy made a surprise visit today. With the Bitch. They presented it as a practical little detour since they were in the neighbourhood, but the whole operation seemed more like an ambush to me. I have no idea what time it was, morning is morning, and Mrs. Thorkildsen was still sleeping her sorely needed beauty sleep. I lay in the hallway snoozing among the Major’s shoes, dozing and dreaming and meditating over the mantra of ‘breakfast.’ My bladder was at ease and I was still looking forward to a solid nap when the doorbell rang so ear-splittingly loud I impulsively barked with gusto and stumbled to my feet before I was completely awake. To be fair, I bark with gusto whenever the doorbell rings, but this was something else. This was Code Red, and the captain was still passed out on the deck after yesterday’s rough seas.

  The sound of the key in the lock made me stop my barking. Before the door had time to open, I sprinted into Mrs. Thorkildsen’s bedroom and resumed barking, although she was obviously awake. At least she was out of bed. That wasn’t necessarily good news.