‘What’s our musher’s name?’ I asked.
Pat smiled at my question, the guileless smile of the innocently dumbfounded. ‘I’m not really sure. You see, I don’t know him too well. In fact, I hardly know him at all. I only know of him and got directions here from someone else, another musher. You’ll meet her some time during your stay. She’s a lovely woman and a real Alaskan.’
I quietly registered the fact that mushing was not a male preserve, then queried, ‘But didn’t you ask what his name was?’
Pat explained that she had met the man briefly some years ago; she remembered his name as Dan. But in trying to make contact again through other mushers who knew him and could explain how he might be found she’d been confronted with the fact that not everyone knew him as Dan. Some called him Luke, others Mike, and some knew him as Ben. None of them could agree on a surname.
‘So what do I call him?’
‘Dan should do, unless he tells you otherwise. Mushers are a special breed.’ Pat laughed at the unintentional pun before continuing. ‘They are quiet, even reclusive. They can be quirky, occasionally bad-tempered, just like their dogs, but most of them are pleasant and if you can get past all the quirkiness they are quite likeable.’
I could do nothing but take her word for it.
As Pat was driving off she advised me not to wait on ceremony. ‘Just stamp the snow loudly off your boots, give the door a good bang and go right in.’ For a moment I remembered my own instinctive thinking about showing fear in front of animals and decided that this was also the best policy to adopt for Dan the dog musher.
The ferocity of the stamping of the snow from my feet on the cabin porch must have clearly declared to whoever was inside just how apprehensive I was about this first meeting with a stranger with so many names. The cabin, however, was completely different from my expectations. The place was warm and comfortable and very practical in every way. In the centre of the far wall of the main living area was a great log-burning fireplace, and to the side of that a pile of logs and an assortment of newspapers – my eye caught a pile of National Geographic magazines. In the centre of the room was an old settee and on either side, cosily embracing the fireplace, stood two even older easy chairs. The proper state of their dilapidation was hidden by the fact that all three items of furniture had either a tartan throw spread over them or what looked liked ex-army blankets. A big TV and an expensive hi-fi glowed amid this cosiness. The kitchen was an open-plan affair on a raised platform leading from the main living area; it too was unexpectedly tidy. I’d been anticipating the kind of comfortless disarray that marks a single and reclusive male living on the outskirts of the Alaskan wilderness. I couldn’t help but be confused by the casual order that confronted me.
Dan the dog musher spoke up. I had not seen him as he was standing behind the place in the kitchen where he seemed to have hung all his bulky coats and overalls. His voice simply said, ‘Hello, I’ve been expecting you.’ He said little more beyond suggesting that I should get myself a seat by the fire. He moved about swiftly and silently after that. The minutes seemed protracted by my own anxiety about whether I should stand up and say, ‘Hello, my name is Brian Keenan, what should I call you?’ Instead I watched him move about the kitchen, presumably making coffee and something to eat. He was tall and lean and wore the proverbial check shirt and braces, which held up a worn pair of denims. He sported a well-kept beard beneath which I fancied I might find the remnants of a young James Dean, a middle-aged Clint Eastwood and a mature Gene Hackman, if such movie icons could be mixed into one person. Dan the dog musher seemed at every point a classical Alaskan male.
I sat a little nervously on my easy chair waiting on Dan to make the next move or at least to say a little more to ease the log-jam of the silence. As I waited, part of me became aware that men like Dan are part of the silence of the place, as if they had subsumed a greater silence into themselves and words only cluttered up the cleanness of it. I tried to occupy myself by taking mental notes of the cabin I was in and looking inconspicuously at Dan. My first impression, on arrival, had been that the cabin and its environs had all the possibilities of being the perfect location set for an early John Ford western.
In a country where distance frequently makes even your nearest neighbour a stranger, or at least someone who lives twenty miles over the rise and whom you rarely see, I expected our conversation to be forced and filled with more of the kind of silences I had already encountered. But when it came, conversation was slow and easy. It was the sort of exchange I suppose travellers at an airport might share before they set off to their different destinations from the different places they had come from. I answered his questions about Ireland and he talked about life in Alaska. Dan, it seemed, had had many jobs since leaving the army but nothing particularly skilful and nothing that fired his enthusiasm enough to stick with it. His longest stint was working as a carnie, a casual labourer with a travelling circus-cum-carnival. As I listened to him talking about his life with the carnival folk I thought that perhaps the seven or eight years he had spent travelling around America working at the canvas rigs and living with these people who exist at the edge of normal society, even if they bring some curious entertainment with it, had predisposed him, in a way, to Alaska. I suppose if you live with a bunch of people whose life and work is carried on at the very margins of normality you become part of that and find day-to-day existence in a normal lifestyle hard to deal with. I talked over these thoughts with Dan but he seemed unimpressed, though not uninterested.
Our conversation continued, and became easier as he got a hold on who this stranger was in his cabin. I thought I would dare to do what I had been advised not to do. I explained to him how people didn’t seem to know his name and how Pat, when trying to locate him, had rung around a few other dog mushers and had been given different names. Dan listened and laughed unselfconsciously. ‘Many people arrive in Alaska and change their name as soon as they set foot in the place, or as soon as someone asks them who they are,’ he answered by way of simple explanation. I pushed him on the subject, trying to burrow my way into his personal story. He laughed again and shrugged his shoulders, saying once more, ‘Nobody cares up here too much anyway.’ I thought about what he said, and part of me agreed. After all, it’s not so much why you come to a place but what you do with the place when you get there, or what you do with what it does to you, that matters. So I left him with his past. It didn’t really concern him, so why should it concern me?
Soon we were talking about his dogs, the two dozen or so animals he kept outside. They had gone quiet over the time we had been together, almost as if they had accepted that I was here and that there was no need for any more uproar. Dan had drifted into dog mushing like everything else he had done, but now he enjoyed it to the exclusion of everything else. I wasn’t convinced by the exclusion of everything else bit and pointed knowingly to his expensive hi-fi equipment. ‘Maybe dogs and music are a way of dealing with this country,’ he said. There was almost a wink in his eye. ‘Mushing helps you get into the country. When you are behind a team of dogs you can go anywhere and there is nothing your team won’t do for you.’
‘And the music?’ I said, pushing the question.
‘Sometimes the weather gets wicked up here so you turn on some heavy rock or turn up some Beethoven and you can blow the whole friggin’ place away.’
I sensed that maybe Dan was making up some sourdough story just to keep me amused, but the idea of a blizzard blowing outside and Beethoven, Bach or Led Zeppelin breaking decibels inside while Dan’s two dozen dogs howled their own accompaniment seemed to me absurdly honest.
Whether Dan realized I was genuinely laughing at his story or whether he wanted to encourage the fantasy, he decided then to pour us some whiskey. I explained I didn’t drink spirits and he looked at me with mock surprise, said there wasn’t an Irishman alive who didn’t drink whiskey and proceeded to triple the amount of the stuff in my tumbler with the remark, ‘Nobody
up here cares too much what you do or don’t do, and anyway, once you’ve drunk that you won’t impress me about saying you don’t drink spirits.’ I shrugged my shoulders in compliance. Part of me thought that Dan was just being macho again. He must have read my thoughts. ‘You’ll need something warm inside you if you are going out with the team,’ he said. ‘Coffee’s fine, but it doesn’t sustain you out there.’ There was something solicitous in the remark. Dan was after all as practical as his comfy cabin had presented itself to be.
I suggested that he play one of his favourite classical CDs. He laughed. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘music is for listening to when everything else gets done and there’s nothing else to do but listen.’
‘Okay, that seems fair,’ I said.
Raising my overfull tumbler of whiskey, I dashed off as much of the three swallows I could without gagging and choking and suggested we make ready with the dog team. After all, that’s why I was there.
What I wasn’t expecting was the amount of preparation one has to do before going out to hitch the team. Dan rummaged through the gear hanging up in the kitchen, pulled out an old box of more gear and threw clothes at me like a rag picker, saying, ‘Put that on, that should fit, if it doesn’t roll up the sleeves, it doesn’t matter if the gloves are too big,’ shouting orders at me while I just stood in obedient silence trying to fit on all these clothes.
‘What’s all this for?’
‘It gets very cold out there, very cold, and when you’re charging through the bush the cold doesn’t care too much for you so you need plenty of layers, plenty of thermals.’
Soon Dan had me dressed in an outrageously sized pair of waterproof and windproof leggings, a top coat to match a huge pair of fur-lined gloves, a pair of his own special boots, a cap with fur muffs to cover my ears and another coat with a hood to tie around that again, a scarf to ensure my mouth and nose were covered, and finally a pair of sunglasses. I looked in his small kitchen mirror at my bulk and size and said, ‘How are the dogs going to pull all this weight?’
Dan’s answer was quick. ‘A dozen of those dogs in front of you will pull faster than the same number of elephants. Remember, you ride on top of the snow, not through it, and you’ll have to learn to hold on tight.’
On the porch I stood and watched like the abominable snowman in second-hand throwaway clothes. The evening was chill and there was a sense of a new crispness because of the snow that lay all around us. The dogs silently watched for a very brief moment, but as soon as Dan laid out the tracelines and guidelines they jumped up and began howling, yelping and barking with great excitement. The noise was deafening. There was a kind of ritual to this preparation, Dan explained. The dogs get very excited and want to run all the time. You have to be careful to put them in order to stop them bolting off before you are ready to go. You always choose first the older, wiser and calmer dogs who know how to sit and wait; put the younger dogs in last and always put your guide dog in after everything else is done – he will determine the pace and the line you take. I watched amazed at the dexterity of his fingers in a cold I knew to be bitter even in my well-wrapped-up condition. Not once did the dogs stop yapping. This is what they lived for, and I could understand that after sitting half the day in the cold and snow suddenly having this opportunity to go racing off would certainly excite any creature.
When Dan had finished attaching all the dogs to the sleigh he invited me to climb in. I thought the contraption was ridiculously small and equally ridiculously frail, but I settled myself in. There was a thick kind of tarpaulin that was secured around the incumbent’s waist the way it is done in a kayak to stop the water flowing in. The purpose I suppose was the same here – to stop the spray of snow falling off trees and bushes as you passed from settling in around you.
‘We only really use this for cargo, it’s really a cargo sleigh,’ Dan explained. ‘The tarpaulin is to keep everything dry and everything safe, but for today you are the cargo.’
I watched as Dan finished his own preparations – fastening and zipping up his ancient anorak, pulling down the fur over his face and pulling on his long, filthy-looking mittens. I thought how ridiculous we both looked. I suppose in a way he looked like a deep-sea diver; all he really needed was one of those brass helmets. Then I thought of my own position, strapped into this sleigh; I felt like a child of about two years sitting in one of those ancient Pedigree prams you used to see children wheeled about in during the fifties. I was so enclosed and encased in clothes and the greasy old black tarpaulin that not one piece of my flesh peered out. Dan had made sure that no skin was showing, giving me a meticulous once-over.
Then, without warning, we were off with a sudden jolt. Before I had time to realize what was happening we were tearing through the bush. Dan was right: these dogs could pull a sleigh faster than my imagination had thought possible. Pieces of bush and twig slapped into my face as we careered helplessly through the countryside. I now understood why Dan had been so insistent that no part of my flesh or face show: had one of these twigs caught me in the eye or in the face it would have left a scar I would have remembered for a long time, and not with much gratitude. Dan seemed to use only three or four expressions of encouragement to the dogs, directing them left or right as the trail opened up, then for long periods he would run, jumping on and off to negotiate the sleigh without a word of direction to the lead dog or any of the dogs in front of me. The lead dog seemed to know when to turn right or left and when to charge on bullheaded, and instinctively when to slow.
I clung helplessly to the low side rails of the sleigh waiting to be tossed out as the dog team charged into a sharp right or left turn, but it never happened. Trying to be helpful, I occasionally leaned into the turns as they came up or sometimes leaned back against them. On one such occasion Dan commanded me not to roll with the turns or resist them. ‘I’ll carry your weight,’ he said gruffly. I could not for the life of me understand what he meant by that, for how could he, but then I really was an infant at this game.
After some fifteen minutes of charging through the bush I was becoming accustomed to the experience. I relaxed back, did what I was told to do and let Dan carry the weight. I began to enjoy it, quickly understanding what Dan had meant by needing something to sustain you, something stronger than coffee. Without all this wet gear and wind- and thornproofing I could not have lasted more than a few moments in the bitter, bone-shattering coldness of the bush. This was my first ritual experience of the Alaska we know about – panting dog teams and snow and cold too fearful to contemplate – and I was enjoying it the way my sons enjoyed me racing them in their buggies.
Soon the adrenalin rush translated into a strange kind of impatience. I wanted to be physically part of the thrill of this ritual ride. I really was just another piece of cargo and felt a bit like a dead log being hauled back for Dan’s magnificent fireplace. I wanted more than this. I wanted my arms and legs to be embroiled in the experience, to be working like the team charging with exhilaration in front of me. After what seemed like half an hour I raised my left arm in the air and made a circle, signalling to Dan that we should turn back. I hoped he would understand, and he did: with a few commands the whole team circled in a great arc, bumping over ditches and dead logs, and then started their excited charge back again. After some minutes in more open territory where I was taking fewer blows to the head from bushes or low branches, Dan reined in the team with a single command.
‘We’re two miles out,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could manage the team back?’
I wasn’t sure if Dan was reading my mind, but the musher and his dogs had already got to me and I was already unbuckling my sleigh pram. The words tumbled out of me: ‘If you want to put your life in my hands, let’s go for it.’
Dan just smiled, and with a nonchalant ‘okay’ began giving me instructions on how to handle the team. ‘Remember, these dogs can sniff out every nook and cranny and everything that’s buried beneath the snow before you and I can see it or sense it. T
heir nose moves faster than your eyes or mine.’ There was something in Dan’s own eyes that impressed me. I was being taken for a ride, only this time it would not be in the smothering safety of my Alaskan pram sleigh. I was full of questions, to which Dan seemed oblivious. ‘Here’s your riding platform. When the going is easy stand here and let the team do the work. If the ground is rough and the dogs are straining, jump off and I’ll encourage them. Once they are moving, get on quick or you’ll fall flat on your face and this bunch won’t wait for you. When you come to a turn, lean against it; it stops the dead weight going to the dogs and stops the thing going into a roll, otherwise we will have to pick ourselves up, unhitch the teams and start unravelling the lines and harness. The dogs don’t like that, and boy, do they let you know.’ Dan’s words were no longer genial; there was a stern warning in them. As I listened, my enthusiasm quickly became sheepish. ‘You don’t need to use your weight much. There’s enough between the two of us but you can slow the sleigh as it comes into a turn. Reach out your foot, dragging the snow as you come into the turn. It will stabilize everything without losing the drive, and when we get back to the cabin throw out this anchor.’ Dan lifted up a small object that looked like a boat anchor only several sizes smaller. It worked on the same principle of dragging and biting into the ground, where it locked itself on a pivotal spring so that even if the dogs wheeled about they could not uproot the empty sleigh and go charging off again.
Dan’s instructions were curt, but their brevity emphasized how absolutely fundamental they were. He left me in no doubt that this was a once-only lesson and that apprenticeships in running a dog team lasted as long it took to explain these simple rules.
I tried to absorb what I had been told in the same manner as I had been told it. Dan’s words had implied but left unsaid something that was now echoing in my ears: in the bush you learn fast or you get left behind. However, my tutor didn’t leave me much time to dwell on this unspoken speculation. Like an eel he was inside the tarpaulin, fidgeting himself into a comfortable position. In no time his face disappeared behind the thick fur of his parka, his eyes hidden behind the shiny blue-black lenses of his sunglasses. Squatting against the whiteness of the bush he looked like a hideous insect newly emerged from its chrysalis. I quickly jumped behind Dan and his dogs, took a firm grip on the sleigh rails and hung on like grim death.