Your granddad left me seven dogs when he died, dogs he’d raced himself, said Dad. But the first three dogs that were just mine, the first three I built my team on, they was Grizzly’s mom, you remember Bear. And one called Suka, and a real pretty mutt named Spruce. I drove all the way to Tok to get the dogs from another musher who decided to pack it in and move to Arizona.
I shoved my hands in my pockets. Watched the woods. Snow starting to fall.
Dad stroked Grizzly’s fur. I went by myself to get the dogs, he said. A good seven hours one way. You almost never drive on your own, so you don’t know the pleasure of a long, empty road, just you and your thoughts. It’s not the same as running the dogs, but your mind goes peaceful in sort of a similar way. It was late summer, almost fall. I come back under a wide blue sky that went purple, then black, and then the stars come out one by one, and a full round moon that made it seem almost like daylight again. I stopped, pulled over to the side of the road for a break, and everything was quiet. No other cars on the road. Night birds calling out to one another and bugs chirring off in the dark. I stood there in the moonlight. Then just as I was thinking I ought to hit the road again, I hear one long, lone howl. It come rolling over the hills to me. And the dogs in the back of my truck, first one, then the others, they answered back. All three of them, wailing. Like they knew they come from the wild, that those voices in the distance belonged to their brothers.
Dad stood up and let Grizz jump his front paws to his chest. The dogs all grinned at him, their ears soft. They wanted to run, but they would also just sit there, long as he asked them to, watching their own team dwindle, losing muscle, losing conditioning. Just to please him. That’s how dogs are when they love you.
I stood there with my mouth dry but my eyeballs burning. The snow was light, tiny flakes that made the air shine but wouldn’t amount to much accumulation. The flakes tumbled straight down out of the sky. No wind when you want wind, when all you want is a gale to come up hard and sweep a wall of snow across the yard, or a flood powerful enough to carry everything away, the house, the bowls, the barn, the dogs. A fire to burn every last sled. Nothing left but an empty space in the trees.
Trace? Dad’s voice come to me through a sticky fog, my anger thick and gluey, it clogged my throat when I spoke.
All the way to Tok, I muttered.
What’s that?
You’d go all the way to Tok and back to fetch some dogs, but you won’t get on the back of a sled now. You won’t let me train. You don’t even take the dogs on walks. What kind of musher are you supposed to be? We might as well get rid of all our dogs. Give them to someone who’d actually let them work.
I kicked Panda’s water bowl and sent it sailing the same direction as the food bowl. A coal inside me, smoldering, and the only way to put it out was to run. I considered it, was close to darting into the woods and staying gone the rest of the night, I would come back in the morning satisfied and peaceful. But I would also come back to Dad’s quiet anger and another stretch of indoor chores and no dogs.
So I took that smoldering coal and carried it across the snow, back to the house. My back hunched against Dad’s voice when he called after me, Tracy, wait. Come on back.
Inside, I shucked my boots and coat and hat, my insides turbulent and crampish, that feeling like I was too full even though I hadn’t drunk that day. It was my period, I knew I would get it soon. I couldn’t count on it coming each month the way the nurse at school said most girls could. Other times, I would get it twice a month. It was too early to turn in, but I crawled into bed anyway, my clothes still on. I was asleep before I heard Dad come back inside.
I woke in the middle of the night, my throat dry. Downstairs for a glass of water, I found Dad still on the couch, he’d fell asleep, too, in front of the fire, which was just embers now. His head propped at an odd angle, he would have a crick in his neck when he woke. In the kitchen, I crept past the sleeping dogs and filled a glass at the sink. But before I could even bring it to my mouth, it slipped from my grip. The glass hit the floor like a gunshot.
Shit, I muttered.
While I sopped up the water and pinched at the shards of glass, Dad went on snoring. He always slept like he was dead. Out soon as his head hit the pillow and not moving a muscle till the alarm went off at four. The house could burn down round him, and you’d find him when the flames was doused, asleep in the ashes.
I dropped the bits of glass into the trash, a bright, glittery clatter that wasn’t loud enough. My eyes on Dad.
All the ruckus had woke Homer and Canyon, along with that night’s house dog, Chug. I glanced at them. Then give a whistle.
Three dogs barking ain’t as loud as fourteen, but it was a nice commotion, specially inside the house. Upstairs, Scott had probably bolted up in bed, wondering what all the fuss was about. I shushed the dogs, and they laid their heads back down.
Meanwhile, Dad snored on.
The last embers was nearly out, but I felt a warmth spread through me. That hot coal still burning inside me, but it had changed. Felt more like hope smoldering in me now than anger. A feeling like that, there’s two options. You can leave it be and it will burn out eventually. Or you can do something with it. Stoke it. Add fuel. Watch the flames grow.
Take it into the woods, light your way.
After she got rid of Masha, Mom stopped going to the village. Used to be, if Dad had to run to the store for groceries or supplies, she would go along to help, sometimes we’d make a whole trip out of it and end the day at the roadhouse where they served the steaks and burgers as bloody as you wanted them. More often than not, we would have a good bit to pick up at the post office, and Mom used to like making that stop, she would chat with the postmaster and the other folks who’d come in for their mail and shipments from Anchorage. Light talk is what she called it, conversations that wasn’t about much at all, just pleasantries and gossip about what was going on in the village.
But all that stopped soon as Masha was gone. Before long, Mom stopped training other people’s dogs, too. She give all her attention to Dad’s team, not that he couldn’t use the help. By then we had more dogs than ever, about forty in all, give or take a new litter of pups or one or two dogs close to retirement.
That didn’t stop Mom from telling Dad she didn’t think we needed to keep the youngsters on.
She was scrubbing the dinner dishes. I sat at the table, scrambling to finish that day’s schoolwork. She’d promised that if I got it done I could spend the night in the woods, long as I took a tent with me. I preferred to make my own shelter or sleep under the sky if the weather was good but I’d take the tent if it would get me out of the house.
What she actually said to Dad was, Why the hell do we need so many people around all the time?
They work for us, Dad said. They’re here because I pay them to be.
You pay them to eat our food?
Hannah, that was just tonight. They worked late, so I told them they could join us—
Without a heads-up, Mom said. Thanks a lot for that, by the way.
Dad got up from where he sat filling out papers to enter that year’s Yukon Quest. He went to the sink and stood behind her, slipped his arms round her waist. She was small enough, the top of her head fit right under his chin. He kissed the place where her hair was parted. She elbowed him away.