Mrs. Thorkildsen never ceases to amaze. After sorting the wolves into four equal groups, standing in rows two by two, you see, she goes to fetch the sleds. They’re made of paper, too, constructed on the same principle as the dogs. They look like small ships, and I suppose that’s what they are, after all. Ships to cross frozen seas.’
‘And they’re ready to march,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘It’s summer, but it’s still colder than the middle of winter here. Negative twenty-five degrees Celsius. Perfect conditions for the dogs. And the dogs are happy—at least the Chief claims they are.’
‘He might be right about that. Unfortunately.’
‘The dogs enjoy pulling?’
‘Enjoy? Greenland Dogs live for it. It’s the only thing they know how to do in this world. They long with all their hearts to pull and pull until there’s blood in their mouths—and even beyond that. That’s what’s so practical about us dogs, you see. If you have a plan and the patience to keep going for a few generations, you can breed an animal specially designed for the most evil or stupid purposes. Just think of all the absurd varieties the Germans and hillbillies have come up with throughout history. You have to be pretty sick in the head, and have a pretty malicious spirit, to come up with the Doberman Pinscher, or the Pitbull or an alligator, don’t you think?’
I’m telling the truth. Sled dogs enjoy pulling, as long as they get to pull at their own pace. Go too fast, and they get exhausted and sit down in the track. If you’re very unlucky, you never get that pack to pull again. Go too slow, and you’ll end up with yapping and confusion. But when the dogs get into a good galloping tempo, a human has to be a good skier to keep pace.
‘So you’re not upset about the dogs pulling the sled?’ Mrs. Thorkildsen is relieved.
‘Nah,’ I say, mulling it over. ‘Greenland Dogs are simple souls, and when they’re enjoying themselves while pulling the sled, one might as well take advantage of it, right?’
But if they’re enjoying themselves, why would the Chief need to beat them?
If it’s not clear already, let me assure you that Mrs. Thorkildsen is a relatively thorough woman. You may also have realized that she’s a woman with a flair for the dramatic, and it’s these two qualities that converge, for better or for worse, when she tells the story about the Chief’s dogs. She tells me far more than I need or wish to know. For instance, Mrs. Thorkildsen knows the exact number of biscuits packed onto the sleds and into the depots that were sent southward before the winter set in. So then I have to ask:
‘Depots?’
‘Well, how do I explain it?’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘It’s probably similar to when a dog buries a meat bone to eat later on. Do you remember how unhappy you were when we gave you the giant lamb’s knuckle? You circled the house restlessly for days, while whining and holding that giant bone in your mouth, endlessly searching for a hiding spot. I don’t know how many times we found that lamb bone behind the couch cushions. What happened to it in the end, do you remember?’
‘I buried it, but I don’t remember where.’
‘So that’s what they were doing down there at the South Pole, or something similar. The summer before they set out on the sled trip, they’d laid out depots along the route to the south so they had food and fuel waiting for them. It’s almost inconceivable that they managed to find them again. White pyramids of snow out there in a landscape that was entirely white. There was no terrain they could use to draw a map. Flat, white, and that was it. To find the depots, they marked them with black flags.’
‘I wouldn’t say it’s a miracle, exactly, that they found their treats again. I mean, if the dogs went the same way they’d gone the year before, all they had to do was follow the scent.’
‘In that cold? After a winter? I don’t think so, Tassen,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen lectures me.
‘What do you know about it? Stupid old lady.’
‘Useless mutt.’
From Mrs. Thorkildsen’s point of view, the purely nutritional is the most fascinating side of the Chief’s whole South Pole project. That’s not so strange, perhaps. Once a chef, et cetera.
‘It’s all an equation, you see,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen explains.
‘No, I most certainly don’t,’ I say, which is the truth.
‘All these dogs have to eat,’ she says, turning to the four packs on the floor. ‘And they have to eat every day. The longer the journey lasts, the more food they have to bring. And since there’s no food to be found along the way, they have to carry all their provisions with them. If they bring too much, their sleds grow unnecessarily heavy, and the dogs get hungrier. If they don’t bring enough, some of them will starve.’
I have a suspicion about who will inevitably be the last to starve, but I keep it to myself.
‘And that’s why they counted the biscuits, tens of thousands of them, several times. They weighed out the precise daily rations for themselves and the dogs, and by adding up what they had on the sleds and what they had in the depots, they could know how many days’ worth of supplies they had. And then there was another factor …’
It gets eerily quiet. Then, at last, it comes out:
‘… and that factor was the dogs.’
‘So, dog meat was part of this “equation”, too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fucking fuckers.’
‘If it wasn’t initially, dog meat became part of their calculations after a while. But before I say more about what came next, there’s a few things I have to remind you of.’
‘Do you have to?’ I object. ‘Your reminders are always so boring. Can’t we just go straight to the part where they eat the dogs?’
‘You have to remember that it wasn’t just the men eating the dogs, Tassen.’
Okay, but something smells here. Didn’t Mrs. Thorkildsen say that there were no other life forms of any kind on the inner Antarctic ice fields?
‘The Englishmen?’ I suggest, for lack of a better idea. ‘Maybe their ponies ate dogs? I’ve never quite trusted ponies; I think it’s likely they suffer from many of the same breeding issues that affect smaller dogs.’
Mrs. Thorkildsen slowly shakes her snow-white head.
‘The dogs that weren’t being eaten, well … they were eating dogs.’
I permit myself a moment’s disappointed silence. ‘This is what you needed to “remind” me of? That “eat or be eaten” is the law of nature? Of course the dogs ate each other. Dogs—like humans—eat anything once they’re hungry enough. And dogs are almost always hungry enough.’
Mrs. Thorkildsen continues down her track without further comment. ‘The yardstick for the dogs’ level of hunger was when they started to eat each other’s shit. Human shit had been on the menu ever since Fram was on the open seas. The toilets in the winter quarters were a giant snow grotto that was kept squeaky clean by the dogs who fought over this privilege. But as I said, when the dogs start to eat their own or each other’s shit, that’s a warning sign.’
Perhaps, like me, you think it’s a bit conspicuous that Mrs. Thorkildsen doesn’t comment on the organization of the pack dogs. I mean, Greenland Dogs are driven in fan formation in Greenland. Perfect for an island like Greenland, where no vegetation grows beyond mid-calf height. In forest terrain the so-called Nome style is better, with the dogs paired up in two long rows. There’s not much forest in Antarctica, yet the Chief still went for the Nome style. Since he rarely left anything to circumstances, I have to believe he had a reason for departing from the fan formation he’d learned firsthand from the Eskimos. With the dogs assembled in Nome style, lead dogs at the front, the Chief had instituted an artificial, human hierarchy in the open, frozen landscape. I see a clear technique of domination here, but Mrs. Thorkildsen sees nothing.
What Mrs. Thorkildsen tells me, she gets from books. And the books come from her hands. Her hands are blue and white and wrinkly and gnarled and painful. They’ve been worse, and they’ll get worse again, Mrs. Thorkildsen says. Before she quit being a librarian,
she had such bad pain in her hands that she’d sometimes go to the restroom to cry a tear or two. Yes, she almost cries just talking about it. But those spindly fingers still have the power to navigate the book’s pages and to find the puzzle pieces she marks with tiny yellow flags.
‘Look what I found!’ says the flag.
That’s how they do it, humans. Plant flags by depots of wisdom and stories that await them when the right moment finds them and they’re put to the test. Without these flags. I honestly don’t know how they’d get along, even with opposable thumbs.
Every single book in this world has a different smell, as far as I can tell. It may be no surprise that an old, leather-bound edition smells different from a cheap paperback, but there’s more to it than that. Every book takes on its smell based on who reads it, of course, and how it’s read. And it pulls into it the smell of time passing. That was the smell I recognized over at the Library, the first time we were there.
What’s odd, you might say, is that a good book smells no different than a bad book. The same is true of the contents. War and young love, philosophy and tall tales, it all pretty much smells alike. Cookbooks, and of course I mean used cookbooks, are an obvious exception. A good cookbook smells like food. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not a good cookbook. But no matter what book you choose, page fourteen smells exactly like page one thousand and three.
If it actually were possible to smell the contents of a book, I think the age of human hegemony over the library profession would be over. At best, librarians would be replaced by dogs. The customer walks in, doesn’t know which book she’s searching for, but Fido only needs a few quick sniffs of the hem of her coat, then he’s on the scent whether the library patron needs comfort, excitement, fantasy, or a recipe for Dover sole. Fido drags the dog handler over to the right shelf and indicates a book like a drug-sniffing dog on a Colombian suitcase. The customer gets the right book. The dog gets a treat. The dog is happy. Everyone’s happy.
29
‘Shit!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen cries. Both content and expression show me that this is serious, and I jump to my feet before I have time to consider what dangers may lurk in the kitchen, where the cries originated. When I get there, all I find is Mrs. Thorkildsen with a book in one hand and a giraffe glass of red Dragon Water in the other. Business as usual, I’d say. No bogeymen, no garbage men to see or smell.
I have to ask what’s going on, but Mrs. Thorkildsen has no time to respond—she’s consumed by the book she’s holding with both hands, the one that’s made her exclaim ‘Shit!’
‘What book is that?’
‘A Life in the Ice. The one about Chef Lindstrøm.’
Of course it’s the one about him.
‘I’ve never seen you read a book that made you curse.’
‘Look at this!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, holding the book open to a certain page, and I again feel the quick jolt of fear that Mrs. Thorkildsen sooner or later will lose track of daily existence, when I once again have to remind her that:
‘Dogs can’t read.’
Although no one knows better than Mrs. Thorkildsen that I can’t read, it sounds a little embarrassing to hear myself say it. This reminds me that no matter how satisfied Mrs. Thorkildsen may be with me, she’d probably be even happier if I could read. Each of us sitting in our own chair, each with our own book in silence, only breaking it to quote a good phrase or refill a drink. A snack from time to time. On the other hand, she’d probably get sick of having to turn the pages for me. It all evens out in the end.
‘It’s red wine!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and I finally understand what she means. In the middle of the page is a circle whose colors blend together the colors of the flag. Red and blue, mixed up with a little white. I’m not sure what to call this color. Dragon Water purple, maybe.
‘Okay, so you spilled a little red wine in a book. It’s hardly the end of the world, Mrs. Thorkildsen,’ I say as cheerfully as the occasion allows.
‘In a library book!’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says, and it’s code red.
When it comes to your own books, you can wipe your own behind with them if you so desire, but books borrowed from the Library are another category altogether. Those can’t be damaged with a single stain or crease during their stay in your home. They must be returned safely to the Library with no more wear and tear than your eyes give the print on the page.
And Mrs. Thorkildsen, of all people! She’s the one who has imprinted on me this reverence for library books. Well, well, it goes to show you that it can happen to the best of us. The question is: what do we do now?
So I ask Mrs. Thorkildsen: ‘What do we do now?’
‘Yes, what do we do now?’ she asks in return.
‘Buy a new book?’ I suggest. Constructive thinking.
‘In the olden days, I could have done that. I think I still have some of the old pocket cards lying in a drawer. All I’d have to do is glue one of those pockets onto the inside of the back jacket. Laminating the cover is a piece of cake to a librarian. I think I have an old stamp around here somewhere, too, so yes, we’d probably be able to turn a bookstore book into a library book. But these days …’
Mrs. Thorkildsen pauses, examining the book from all sides.
‘… now there are all these striped things. Look.’
Now she wants me to examine the book.
‘What is it?’
‘These stripes tell the computer everything it needs to know about the book. You just take some kind of electric pistol, point it at these lines, and then ping! But I have no idea how it works.’
‘Smell,’ I say. ‘Sounds like smell is the key to this.’
‘Smell?’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘I can’t imagine that. Because then you’d smell it,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen sniffs the book, ‘and I don’t smell anything here. Just the book.’
‘I don’t think we should use your sense of smell as proof of anything at all,’ I point out. ‘You can’t even smell it when you’ve stepped in a cow patty.’
Had Mrs. Thorkildsen been more open-minded, I might have been able to teach her a little something about how smell works. It’s not so different from the stripes on the book she has vandalized with Dragon Water. But instead of a quick ping! that probably can tell you the basic facts, you inhale deeply through the nose and experience the third dimension of smell: time. The past. The present. The future. Not necessarily in that order. That’s why, you see, it can take some time to fully absorb a smell. It’s not always enough to take a quick sniff—sometimes you need an intensive, sustained sniffing to get the whole picture. Try to remember that the next time you pull the leash impatiently.
30
The answer to the question, ‘What do we do with the library book?’ turns out to be ‘Nothing at all.’ It sits on top the dresser, just like it did yesterday, and I won’t be surprised if it’s there tomorrow as well. For my part, I never mention that book again. The last time I did, Mrs. Thorkildsen turned gruff and somber and ‘forgot’ to feed me before she went to bed. The book about Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm has become a non-book in my life, but that doesn’t erase the question hanging over us, gnawing at Mrs. Thorkildsen: what do we do now? And a thousand more questions. What kinds of repercussions can we expect from the Library if we simply ignore our duty to return the damaged book? What kind of power do they hold over us? Will the Puppy and the Bitch find a way to exploit this? Can the Home Help help us?
I calm myself down with the thought that we still have weapons in the house. But I’m sure that were Mrs. Thorkildsen to open fire on fellow librarians, it would be with a heavy heart, so I’m still hoping for a peaceful solution. I’d rather bite someone who truly deserves it.
‘In Greenland, they drive the sled dogs in a fan formation,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘I’ll show you how it looks.’
‘Of course I know what sled dogs in a fan formation look like,’ I say, and hear the gruffness in my own voice. ‘What do you take me for? A Tibetan Spaniel? You don’t need to show me
that. You don’t need to show me the Nome style, either. Or the Nordic. I know all about that.’
‘My goodness,’ Mrs. Thorkildsen says. ‘How do you know that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You said you knew all about the various sled pulling techniques?’
‘I mean I don’t know how I know it.’
‘Well, well, Tassen. What I was going to say is that the Chief didn’t use the fan formation at the South Pole.’
‘I know.’
‘So that means you also know why?’
That word again.
‘Because the Chief was a controlling bastard who forced his dogs into an unnatural hierarchial system to dominate them,’ I’m about to reply, and forcefully, but Mrs. Thorkildsen, on her first glass of Dragon Water, beats me to the punch:
‘The ice they drove across may have looked like the flattest of dance floors, but the terrain on the way to the South Pole is dangerous, with deep crevices under the snow that could swallow a pack of dogs whole. So, to reduce the chances of stepping into cracks in the ice, the Chief decided it would be best to move in a narrow formation, even though he didn’t have to worry about vegetation. And this ended up saving the day more than once.’
Well, damn him.
They called it ‘the Devil’s Dancefloor.’ The cracks in the ice summon the only hint of pathos in the Chief’s tale so far. He turns poetic, too:
‘These cracks are impressive when you lie on the edge and stare down into them,’ he writes. ‘A bottomless abyss that turns from light blue to the deepest black …’
There’s a poet in the Chief too.
A
bottomless
abyss
from light blue to
the deepest
black.
‘The Chief has a lot to say about these crevices,’ reflects Mrs. Thorkildsen. She’s on the scent of something. Mrs. Thorkildsen smells blood.
‘I interpret it as an expression of his own position as leader of a giant all-or-nothing project. The fear of falling, plain and simple. A typical man’s fear. With every step he takes, the Chief is contemplating what awaits him if he doesn’t become the first one to the South Pole and the first one back. Thinking of it that way, death by crack-in-the-ice might seem preferable.’
Good Dogs Don't Make It to the South Pole Page 14