Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers Page 5

So I sat and wrote notes in longhand with an old fountain pen for books I hoped to write, while Cookie watched, growling if somebody came to sit too close to me and lifting her lip if a dog or cat appeared on the screen. The months passed and we evolved from friends who had run thousands of miles together to friends who would sit and talk together. She stayed with me constantly, wherever I went in the house. Even the bathroom. If I locked her out of a room she tore at the door until I would open it, then she would come in and sit near me—eating, resting, bathing. Wherever. If I went outside she followed, each time I left, even for an armload of wood. When I sat and read—which I did more and more—she would sit nearby, or lie down and half sleep, one ear cocked to hear if I moved or said anything. And so we spent our days and I thought we would continue to spend them.

  It had been months since I'd let the dogs go and some of the grieving at losing the kennel and team had abated, or the edges had dulled.

  I assumed the same had happened to Cookie. She seemed to love lying around watching television, walking with me to the mailbox to get the mail—a daily event—and sitting on the back porch and watching the loons come back from whatever mysterious southern world they go to in the winter. Summer passed and the grass grew back where the kennel had been and a neighbor farmer plowed and disked and planted alfalfa where the pups had run. By early fall, when the alfalfa was knee-high, the last signs of the kennel were obliterated and visually, at least, it seemed there had never been the noise and joy of the dogs.

  But for two things...

  There came the first hard fall morning. I arose early—the diet and exercise and medication had helped and I was becoming more active; not as I had been but better all the time—and I went out for wood for the stoves. Cookie, of course, went with me. She had slept next to my side of the bed, arose with me, and followed me into the bathroom and watched while I brushed my teeth and dressed and then, of course, followed me outside.

  The fall color was in full bloom and the oaks and maples and poplars around the house and the field looked like a garish impressionist painting. To say it was beautiful was an understatement—it was very nearly in poor taste, the colors so loud and vivid they cut the eyes, went into the mind.

  There was, for the first time in the year, a snap to the weather. Not bitter cold but just that, a snap, enough to sting the cheeks and ears and fingers. I walked to the woodpile to split kindling for the woodstove and Cookie accompanied me. But at the pile I stopped and she kept going.

  Out, into the field, to where the kennel had been. I watched her go and knew what she was thinking. First long runs came with first cold, the first real reaches, and Cookie used to love them, loved to take off when there was not always the possibility of coming home. I called her but she ignored me and kept going, and I put the ax down and followed her out into the drying alfalfa stubble. There was, literally, no sign there'd ever been a dog there, let alone seventy or eighty of them. The neighbor had plowed and eradicated any indication, but Cookie knew exactly where everything had been. She went to the precise spot where she'd stood so many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times, where she had waited in harness for the rest of the dogs to be harnessed and hooked up, and looked back as if expecting dogs to be there, ready for the first long run, the beginning of fall.

  "No," I said, coming up next to her. "There aren't any."

  She looked up at me, then back to the rear, and whined softly.

  "We don't do that now. Come, come with me back to the woodpile."

  I walked off and beckoned but she hung back, stayed for another thirty or forty seconds, a minute—it seemed an hour—and I would have gone back to coax her but I would have lost it. It took everything in me to keep walking and not look back at her standing there waiting, and when at last she caught up with me, still whining, I reached down to pet her and she leaned in against my leg.

  I thought that was the last time the memory would bother her but I was wrong. There was to be one more time. She would rise one more time, and it came during a storm.

  Fall had surrendered to winter not with a blast but with a whimper, easing in to soft rain and low gray days, turning gradually to slushy snow and never the clean, hard brittle beauty that was northern winter.

  Until the storm.

  We were secure. The house was tight, there were sixteen cords of oak cut and split nearby, the chimneys were clean, the pantry full of good—vegetarian—food. Even Tudor, normally upset by weather, had settled in for winter and sat on the back of the couch, one eye warily on Cookie because he still didn't trust her, staring out at the wind ravaging the trees and driving snow sideways.

  Cookie asked to go out. She had become—except for marking her paper daily—the model of cleanliness and was housebroken to a fault, and she went to the window and put her feet up on the sill and whined and looked out and then moved to the door, and without thinking I let her out.

  But it was not because she had to go to the bathroom. Not this time.

  We had always run to storms. I am not certain how it started but at some point early on in our training, either consciously or subconsciously, I had decided that the worse the weather, the better it was for training. In a way it made sense because nothing in Minnesota—not the very worst storms I have ever seen—could prepare us for the storms and winds in the interior of Alaska, where I have seen people literally blown off their sleds and cartwheeling out across the tundra. But the upshot of this all was that whenever it got bad we ran, and Cookie had learned this as a pattern and I had forgotten it.

  When I let her out I always watched because her arthritis was acting up and she had trouble walking. I expected her to hit the yard, get her business done, and come back in the house. But she didn't do anything I expected. Instead she smelled the wind, stood for a moment, wheeled and headed back for what used to be the kennel.

  "Darn," I said.

  "What?" Ruth was by the stove with a cup of coffee.

  "I have to go out..."

  "In this?"

  I found my parka and, bundled with the hood up and tied, staggered out into the wind and into the open field, where the gusts almost blew me over. The snow was new and nearly a foot deep but Cookie's tracks were already filled in. It didn't matter because I knew where she was going and had been there so many times I didn't need to see the direction.

  I found her in the same place, standing alone in the kennel in the harnessing position, waiting, the wind tearing at her, her nose up and into the storm, smelling, knowing what we had to do, waiting for me to harness her and the dogs.

  I stood next to her and petted her neck and held her there while the wind and storm came at us and she whined, a soft sound barely over the howl of wind, and I shook my head so she could see it.

  "No," I said. "It's done now, it's all over—no more runs."

  And that time she understood. She leaned against my leg as she had done so many times so I could pet her head and the whine ended then, for the last time the whine to run, the beg to run, and I started back for the house and she walked with me and didn't need to be convinced.

  Two more summers and one more winter went by while I kept to my diet and somehow got better and Cookie took the yard, owned it, and owned the house and became part of my new life as she had once been part of the old, of the runs, the long runs.

  And then one morning, a soft morning in late summer, I let her out and she did not come back in for breakfast, to be with me, to be close to me. After a cup of tea I went into the yard and called her. It was the first time in those years since I had been home that she had not been with me for any length of time, and when she did not come to my call I knew, I think, but I looked anyway. I found her under the spruce tree, her face to the east, dead with her eyes half open.

  I sat for a time next to her, crying for her and mostly in self-pity because I would have to live without her now, and then I took her back to the place in the kennel where she loved to stand, the place where we harnessed, and I buried her there with her co
llar still on and the little metal tag that had the number 32, her number (and mine) in the Iditarod, and after a long time I went back to the house and sipped tea and thought of when she was young and there was nothing in front of us but the iceblink on the horizon, and I hoped wherever dogs go she would find a lot of good meat and fat and now and then a run.