The thirteen canines that pulled my sled were terrified of the newly wild dogs, and soon I realized my prodding wasn’t needed — those dogs were mad to get out of that river of death. We emerged into the woods on the far bank, passing the ancient riverboat docks, and swinging wide around the great pipes of the county irrigation pumphouse. We entered thicker trees, and, to keep my mind off the madness I’d undertaken, I focused only on the snow, the runners, and the train of dogs ahead, curving through the trees. I could still hear wild dogs out there, echoing our movements. Their panting lope was unmistakable, and that devilish little language of theirs, the yips and whimpers they plotted their attack with, couldn’t have been more sinister.
Before I describe the remainder of my journey, let me say, first, that I’d only worked with sleds for one day, and this was my inaugural experience driving a sled of this size. Second, the dogs were quite suspect to begin with. I’d detected more than a little passive-aggression in their eyes, and their disposition vacillated between longing for sweets, and fleeing with terror at the slightest development, let alone being hunted down by packs of their wild compatriots. Finally, and I’m sure this was an honest mistake, Gerry’s kids had managed to get a fair amount of wax on top of the skids, making the footing quite treacherous.
We mushed through quiet fishing camps along the opposing rim of the lake, places where families had planted stands of white pine and spruce to freshen the air on their weekend stays. The occasional cabin, log-cut and compact, was the kind of retreat that I imagined the blind of South Dakota living in when I read to them over the radio. Cutting through an open meadow, I made out the bounding motions of a pack of dogs as they tried to box me against the water. Behind me I heard the gargly excitement of some beast. I kept looking over my shoulder, but I only made out rushes of fur through the trunks. If it was a chase dog or some kind of straggler, working on his own initiative, I could handle him, but if I was dealing with yet another pack, things could turn grim. Over my shoulder, I saw that, yes, about a hundred yards behind me, a full complement of dogs was closing.
I turned forward just in time to see my dog team disappear under a low-hanging branch. It caught me square in the chest, and deposited me on my back in the snow. It felt as if the pine needles had brushed the skin off my face, and my cheeks burned with the witch hazel of pine resin. The tree hadn’t been a large one, and above me it swung from the impact, shaking off stiff clumps of snow. When I sat up, I saw the last of my vanishing sled and the wag of the dogs that pulled it.
I heard a jingly-jangly sound. It was rhythmic and almost soothing.
Usually when a pack of dogs is bounding headlong to maul you, you’re on higher ground or at least standing tall. Now I was at their eye level, and I saw them — nostrils wide, haunches rolling — as would a toddler in a playpen. Their bodies stretched and balled, dug and flew, and each time their paws clapped the snow, it sent a shudder through their fur. I remember thinking, How shimmering are these coats, how singularly they flow.
I scrambled up the puny tree that had dethroned me. It really was a pitiful thing, leaning this way and that as I stepped from branch to branch. I couldn’t get more than six feet high without its threatening to topple. The mongrels surrounded the trunk, and, tails awag, began making fusillades at my feet. One black standard poodle had my number. Twice he latched on to my boot, and nearly brought me down by way of the rubber sole. Had I been wearing tennis shoes, all would have been lost. The dogs were quite active in their assaults on my ankles, but I grew brave enough to feel my ribs for breaks (none) and to look for signs of my sled (none). That dog team was out there, barreling on without me. What a sight it must have been. Imagine seeing that driverless sled charge toward you, led by a team of frothing, wild-eyed dogs running from the raw history of the last hundred thousand years, all charioteered onward by the hands of extinct humanity, hands that had at their grasp a whip, a bottle of bourbon, and the power to grant doctoral degrees.
The dogs began making running starts to lunge farther up the tree. Then a sheepdog raised up and gave the trunk a bear hug. Its vocal cords had been snipped. It threw a tantrum of barks my way, yet all I heard was a hoarse, tracheal pant.
“Ahoy,” I shouted into the woods.
I pulled the Global Positioning System tracker out of my pocket. It was the size of a transistor radio, but it had no communications abilities that I could see. I turned it on. “Acquiring Satellites,” it flashed. On the screen came a depiction of our globe, with a flashing dot in the Northwestern Hemisphere. That was me. I pressed the zoom button. The flashing dot appeared on a map of North America. I pushed zoom again and again. I flashed in South Dakota, in Parkton County, and, to my dismay, I realized I was technically still within the city limits of Parkton. I pushed the mark-map button and put the thing away.
Afternoon wore on, cold and still. The color spectrum shifted to dark green, with long shadows of dirty purple. An Airedale had done a ditty on my calf, and a collie drew blood. If you know the lonely sounds of wind vibrating your clotheslines or a gust cycling through a leaf-burning barrel, if you’ve heard the breeze play the bones on the rusty tines of an upturned fan rake, then you know where I was. You know what I saw when I gazed from that tree upon a birdless America. That’s the state I was in. That’s how low I was. The thought crossed my mind that it I was my coat that was driving these dogs mad, that they could smell the Pomeranian trim on cuffs and hood. It actually crossed my mind to take my coat off, the one thing I had left, the thing that Eggers and Trudy had made for me by hand, and throw it to the dogs in an effort to appease them. “What’s wrong? What’s gotten into you?” Trudy had asked me as I insisted on going off on my own. The question kept cycling in my mind.
I’d never throw that coat to the dogs, but the GPS cartography had gotten me thinking. I loosened the top toggles on my coat and pulled it off, steamy and leather-smelling. I opened it and fanned it across the branches. There was a map of North America, embroidered by Trudy, with a star exactly where I was. And there, on the inside breast, was embroidered “Open in Case of Emergency.”
I tore loose the stitching, and from this pocket removed a photo of Eggers, Trudy, and myself at last year’s Parents Weekend mixer, an affair to which none of our parents came. This was back when Trudy had just won her Peabody Fellowship, and Eggers, clad in a black suit, was about to begin his dissertation as a Clovis. I had to wipe my eyes with the back of a mitten. I dug deeper in the pocket and pulled out dental floss and Q-tips. My students knew me! They really knew me. But there was something else in the pocket. I withdrew a piece of buckskin, and before I even unfolded it I knew what it contained. I nodded my head. All this time, I thought. Through my prison stay and escape, through brown infernos and the harrows of ice, I had been carrying Keno’s spear point the whole time. It burned pink in my hands.
Right away I got to work. I found a limb about an inch thick, and this I whittled from the trunk with the spear point. I stripped the small branches, cut a deep notch at the end, and, after seating the point, I secured it with several hundred wraps of floss. It didn’t take long for our four-legged friends to make another foray toward my legs, but now I was ready to redden a few muzzles.