Jamey Bradbury
The Wild Inside
For my parents, Kit and Jim Bradbury
1
I have always had a knack for knowing the minds of dogs. Dad says it’s on account of the way I come into the world, born in the open doorway of our kennel, with twenty-two pairs of canine eyes watching and the barks and howls of our dogs the first thing I ever heard.
Back then, there wasn’t no clinic in the village, so the community health aide come out to our place once a month. When Mom was partway through carrying me, the aide told her to stay in bed and not tire herself out. Mom minded that advice right up till the night I was born. First of March, so cold the ends of her hair froze. She went outside and crossed the dog yard, got as far as the kennel’s doorway when a pain come over her. She crouched down, holding her belly, and hollered for my dad. I slid right out. I was in this world before she knew it, with barely any help from her. She said it was the only thing easy about me.
Why was you in the kennel? I asked her one time.
She shrugged. Said, I suppose I missed the dogs.
I come out big and heavy and always hungry. Mom told me there’s some women have trouble getting their babies to take the breast, and I have seen it in some pups, how they will ignore what instinct tells them and refuse to nurse, and then you have to strip the milk from the mother and feed the pup by hand. But not me. I clamped down first thing and didn’t want to let go. Mom had never seen a baby like me, she said I was voracious. She fed me till she thought she’d run dry, and then she kept on feeding me.
There’s pictures in the family photo book, all four of us working together in the yard or gathered round a dog sled before the start of a race. Scott and me both with Mom’s dark hair, Dad’s brown eyes. I learned in school that blood has a memory. It carries information that makes you who you are. That’s how my brother and me ended up with so much in common, we both carried inside us the things our parents’ blood remembered. Sharing what’s in the blood, that’s as close as you can be to another person.
That’s probably why I run into so much trouble when me and Scott started school. I didn’t share nothing with the other kids. Before, we done school at home. Mom was our teacher, she give us problems to solve, numbers going down the page in a column and meant to be plussed or minused. When I was little, if I done my work right, I got a star. Ten stars meant I could go outside. I’d get my stars done fast so I could spend most of the day out in the dog yard or running through the woods, or wrestling and chasing Scott, usually just playing but sometimes roughhousing, and Mom would holler at us to stop.
Our place was the best place. It was my granddad who built it, before my dad was born. He found a patch of Alaska he liked, then cleared a ten-acre circle in the trees and in one half built our house and in the other half built the kennel, a long building with a workshop at one end and plenty of room for gear and sleds. In between the house and the kennel, we had forty doghouses. Then trees all around and a trailhead at the back of the yard, the trail cut through the woods three miles to Ptarmigan Lake, then another thirty miles or so before you crossed the river, then beyond that, just more trees, then mountains, then tundra.
I spent as much time as I could in the woods. To look at me, you might of thought, But you are only seventeen, and a girl, you have got no business being off in the wild by yourself where a bear could maul you or a moose trample you. But the fact is, if they put me and anyone else in the wilderness and left us there, you just see which one of us come out a week later, unharmed and even thriving. I rode the back of a sled practically ever since I could stand, and by the time I was ten I could take small teams down the trail on overnight runs, sometimes even for a few days, off on my own with only my dogs for company. I run the Junior Iditarod soon as I was able, and when I was sixteen I competed in my first professional races. I had already logged enough mileage to qualify for the Iditarod, soon as I was eighteen I could enter. I even managed to win back my entry fee when I finished the Gin Gin 200 women’s race in the top five. To be honest, I didn’t care much about the money. I only wanted to be on my sled, outside, as much as I could.
Which is how come I didn’t care for the way Dad pitched his keys at me come Friday afternoon and said, Pick up your brother from school, would you, Trace?
I snatched the keys out of the air with one hand and tossed them right back. They landed in the grass next to the snowblower he was tinkering with.
Can’t you do it?
Sure, Dad said. And you can stay here and fix this machine for Eleanor Andrews. Get it done fast, though, since she’s supposed to send her nephew to pick it up in an hour.
Would if I could, I muttered, clawing through the grass to find the keys.
Here, he said and fished a piece of paper from his pocket. Put this up at the village store while you’re in town.
It was an ad, meant for the corkboard posted by the front door at the only store in town. Folks pinned their signs on the board, some of them said for sale—atv tires or free firewood, you cut.
Dad’s sign was made out in his slanty handwriting, all the letters leaned backwards like they was standing against a strong wind. Room for Rent. Small Room back of House, private, Clean. Woodstove. No Water or electric. You are Welcome to use kitchen and bath in House. Located Mile 112. No Vagrants. Then Dad’s name and our phone number wrote along the bottom.
What room? I asked. Our house was good-sized, me and Scott each had our own bedrooms. I wasn’t about to move in with him so some stranger could pay to sleep where I belonged.
The shed wasn’t always a shed, Dad told me. When your granddad built it, he meant it to be a proper cabin.
Besides the house and the kennel and the forty doghouses that took up the space between, we had two other buildings on our property. One was the woodshed, which was more like a roof with three walls, we stacked all our firewood inside. The other was a real shed, it had a good roof and a woodstove, and even a little window cut into one wall. It had become a catch-all sort of place, we put anything we didn’t need regular there, the mower with the broken blade, sawhorses, fishing poles, greasy parts for the other truck that was up on blocks.
It’ll clean out real nice, Dad was saying.
And some stranger’s supposed to live there? I said.
We need the money.
But if I’m going to be around to help out— I started and he cut me off.
Because you’ve been such a help since you got kicked out?
That wasn’t fair. I had done what I could to make up for the trouble I had caused at school. All week while Dad had drove Scott into town and left me behind, I made sure to clear the table of breakfast dishes before I sat down to do my schoolwork, because it turns out that when you get suspended, they still expect you to do your lessons. And maybe I didn’t finish half the work that got sent home to me, but that was because I needed to hunt. Where else was Dad supposed to get pelts to sell or trade? A nice marten fur, stretched and tanned, could bring in fifty dollars or more, and that wasn’t nothing.
Playing in the woods doesn’t count as helping, Dad said like he could read my mind. Now could you please do as I ask without giving me twenty reasons why you shouldn’t have to?
I slid behind the wheel of the truck and waited for the engine to decide to turn over. The dogs barked after me as I inched down the driveway, mad that they wasn’t going for a ride. I looked one way up the highway, then the other, then back again, two or three times before I pulled onto the road. It wasn’t that I wanted to make trouble for Dad, and I wanted to help, really help. But not like this. I didn’t care to drive, even before what happened. And I never liked going into town, especially when it meant going to school. If Dad wanted my help, I didn’t see why I couldn’t stay on our property and do real work, like making sure the dogs was trained proper, shoveling the dog yard, leading our younger dogs on walks so I could take note which ones minded good and which ones seemed like potential lead dogs.