What should I call her, do you think? I asked him instead.
He come closer, give her a pat. She reminds me of a dog I used to have, he said.
In Maine? I smiled to let him know it was a joke.
I’m talking about a real dog, he said. Back home, in Oklahoma. Her name was Stella. My dad used to say she was so smart, he ought to put her in charge of the books for the farm.
So much packed into one breath, my brain snagged on words like farm and home and my dad. My mouth felt dry, filled with questions that wouldn’t ask themselves. Jesse knelt next to me, the two of us with our hands on the dog, gentling her, letting her lick our faces. He was so close, I swore I could smell his skin. His blood, pulsing underneath his skin.
I stood up, suddenly unsure what to do with my hands, my arms. Stella, huh? I grabbed the new dog’s collar and led her to the dog yard, to Marcey, whose house was in the first row. The two dogs traded sniffs.
Stella used to disappear for hours at a time, Jesse went on while I kept my attention on the dogs. Just take off, sometimes for a whole day. But she’d always come back. I used to call them her walkabouts. Like she just needed to get away and be on her own for a while.
We went dog to dog, letting each one suss out the newest member of their pack.
Then one day she didn’t come back, Jesse said. We looked for her for days. Put up lost dog signs. Checked with the animal shelter. After a week, Mom said she was sure another family had taken her in. Dad said maybe she’d gotten hit by a car crossing the highway.
He fell quiet as the last few dogs met their new teammate. There was plenty of empty houses to choose from, though most of them still had nameplates over their doors. I pried off the one that said Panda and stuck it in my pocket while Jesse piled new straw inside the house. She was smart, he said as he worked. She was a good herder and she knew dozens of commands. But she was strange, too, for a dog. She seemed to like people well enough, but she was never right there at the door when we all came home after being gone. She would sleep on my bed, but she was just as happy to sleep outside under a tree, on her own.
He stood and brushed straw and snow off his knees. The new dog circled a few times and dug at her straw bed, then laid down. Her ears perked again as he talked. I think sometimes Stella knew she was just passing through. We weren’t her family; we were just some folks she lived with for a time, and when she was ready, she set out on her next adventure.
We was at the edge of the circle of light cast by the lamp, Jesse backlit and made into just the shape of himself. I realized, facing him, the light made my face plain to him. Whatever he seen on it made him smile.
What? I said.
He only shook his head. I went looking inside myself for his lost dog, the foot of his bed where she’d slept only when she felt like it. Nothing there. If I wanted that, I would have to ask.
But he was already on his way to the shed, aiming to shut himself away for another night. I wondered what he done once the door was closed and the curtain drawn, how he sloughed his layers one by one and revealed the parts of himself he otherwise kept hidden. Imagined him slipping into bed, bare body between the sheets. A shiver low in my belly.
Night, I called to him before he closed himself off.
He paused at the corner of the shed. Night, Tracy. Then he was gone.
I rubbed my new dog’s face and she rolled over, let me scratch her chest. When I was done, she watched me make my way to the house, and I called back to her, Night, Stella.
12
When you’re a musher, particularly if you are getting ready for the big race, there’s barely a minute goes by December, January, February, you aren’t thinking about dogs. Through the fall, you have worked hard with your team and you’ve gone on longer and longer runs, but come winter, every day, everything you do is somehow related to the races you’re about to run. You get up mornings and feed the dogs, then go over the day’s chores in your head as you eat your own breakfast. You clean the dog yard and put new straw in houses. The vet comes out for prerace checkups. It takes days to pack the nineteen hundred pounds of food and gear that’ll be dropped at the checkpoints by the trail committee, and you triple-check every drop bag to make sure it has the right number of replacement booties and emergency tools, and still you wake in the middle of the night, certain you’ve forgot something important. You mend harnesses and sled runners. Fret over the dogs who have a poor appetite and work with the ones who cramp easily. And anytime you’re not home, you’re on the trail, long hours and days of running, just you and your dogs, logging your miles.
Thanksgiving Day was like a door to another world that opened when Dad give me Stella and Scott lied about loaning me enough money to enter the Iditarod. On the other side of the door, there wasn’t no secrets, no sneaking out at night to train. There was only a scant few hours of daylight and too much to do between the hour I woke and the hour I fell into bed, tired but happy.
For the first time since Mom insisted we didn’t need youngsters round to help with our dogs, the yard was full of movement and life. I darted from house to kennel to sled, between doghouses, strategies and plans in my head, my hands never empty. I sorted through gear with Helen by my side, she wrote down what we had and how much of it, made shopping lists and packing lists. I stirred great pots of green fish and beef broth and rice then ladled it into bags Scott held open for me and we filled the chest freezer with them, at the race checkpoints I would thaw each bag and dump its contents over the dogs’ kibble, thousands of calories that they would burn on the trail. I pricked my fingers mending booties till Helen brung me a thimble from her personal sewing kit. When Steve Inga wasn’t busy heading up the Iditarod volunteer committee, he come out and give Jesse a hand with the dog wheel, the two of them hammering in companionable silence while Dad helped me ready a sled for a three-day run with a six-dog team. While we worked, he talked about his own experience on the trail. I’d heard most of his stories before, but now I listened with new ears, picking out bits of advice that might help me. I had run the Junior twice before and knew what to expect, but when it come to the big race, only thing I had to go on was what I’d read and what Dad shared.
One morning, middle of December, I come outside to find the dogs already on the line, pulling Dad round the perimeter of the yard. Haw! he hollered, one syllable striking the soft morning. I stood for a minute and watched, Dad standing on the runners of his winter rig, five dogs galloping, legs pumping, tongues wagging, ears laid back. They swung round, swallowed by the early dark, nothing but the sound of their paws digging at the snow. Then their eyes shining green in the moonlight as they circled back, disembodied till they drew closer and the shape of them formed, snouts, shoulders, ears, legs, like a hand drawing and filling them in the closer they got. Dad behind them all, bareheaded, the wind ruffling his hair. Red-cheeked and grinning.
Snow’s awful soft, he said once he’d worked the team to a stop in front of the kennel. We need a good, hard freeze.
Another foot of snow wouldn’t hurt, neither, I said.