Specimens, Days

Wickwire was a mirror to Moose, his double, almost his twin. A little shorter, with ears only slightly smaller than our Moose’s, but he had the same coat, the same white fur along the eyes, the same ever-curious hazel eyes & the same genuine, self-possessed demeanor. He was every bit himself, uninhibited, fully realized, content unto the last. & yesterday, after a weekend of romping off the Denali Highway, our friends had the dismal & horrendous task of burying their dear Wickwire after he was struck by a passing RV. I cannot imagine their pain, nor the depth of questioning that transpires in such circumstances. Wickwire had been there underfoot when they began their lives in their cabin, camping with them in winter & summer, running in team, destroying the same massive, “indestructible” chew toys that Moose routinely guts. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him well, even if they only met him once or twice. When I first started frequenting Kristin’s old cabin, I mistook...

In between downpours, the interstitial gleams of cleansed light bathing the broad shoulders of the mountains, in stark relief against the bruised purple-blue patchwork of massive clouds roiling endless through the canyon. & in the mud now instead of the snow, the pressed soles of various shoes, the quick puncture work of dogs’ claws, the deep clefts of moose cows & calves. Up Bison Gulch, pockets of rotting grey snow cling still to the undersides of overhangs, rich green lichen spotting with white & pale blue specks stretching from underneath, giving the appearance of delicate china smashed & scattered over a rough moss. & the smell of the wet rocks, the slow slide of talus & scree underfoot in running. It is perhaps the one thing I miss the most in the winter, that feeling of solid earth & that damp soil smell it emanates. & it will come very soon to release instead the sweet, dry tundra smell that appertains to our dogs in their free running. But for n...

Rain has been falling here, almost relentless. Stampede was covered in a series of chained, small lakes, & the rivulet that usually peaks as a trickle parallel the road cut a formidable bank a few days back, the water white capped, roiling, overburdening the culverts. The rivers, too, gnash & tumble. Strong brown gods, said Eliot. & in our yard, welcomed to our home amidst the thunder & clamorous downpour, our new friend Zigzag has joined us from up in Akiak in hopes of breeding a litter with Solo. She floated down the Kuskokwim, flew to us from Bethel & drove back north from Anchorage. She’s taken well to the place & runs the bluff free with our other seven dogs, doting on Solo, Kristin tells me, like an infatuated schoolgirl. Free walking the dogs out to the bluff has become one of our favorite things. Littlehead leads every charge, darting in & out of the spruce that lines either side of the trail, emerging suddenly to check in before sprinting off aga...

It’s an odd thing to mourn the loss of a dog not your own, to confront that pain circuitously. Our friend’s gargantuan & idiosyncratic & incredibly well-loved buddy, at rest & gone from us down in Palmer. & Solo in the meantime with three staples in his head where T’s teeth gnashed & gnawed. In wrestling them apart in a willow copse mottled with snow to see his eyes stretched back under the ceaseless pressure of jaw. A dog’s screaming is nothing you forget. & in the end, it’s another in a long series of dog fights we’ll break up & the wounds are relatively small & will heal fine, but there is the part of me in which these things coalesce to demand an attention to inevitability & time. You forget with dogs sometimes, when they are pleased & you are pleased, when you all fall into your natural cycles together, that their care is such an earnest & ongoing responsibility. That you will pour your love into them & that it will crush you when th...

We read our respective blogs from the beginning of last year to measure their breadth, to see how the year began & think about where it ended. Suffice it to say, our happiness & our rootedness have both continued in their exponential increases, & this New Year’s Day finds my heart at brimming, my enthusiasms all engaged, my life in general pitched at a ludicrously & wonderfully fine height that I would scarcely believe but for the fact of its daily living. It happens with considerable regularity that I will of a sudden take stock of our endeavors here, or our love, or our property & its plans, or a team of dogs, or the painted alpenglow on Pyramid Mountain, & I am left breathless at where I’ve ended up & who I’ve become in the process. There is novelty in each slow dawn, richness in the most mundane of things. I love viscerally here. What a thing. I brought in the new year with a twelve mile run on the 31st in -10, windy Palmer, along the Knik River. I follo...

The manufacture of all dreams goes forward unabated still, in spite of the long silence. We are back from the Sheep Mountain 150, in which Kristin ran happy, healthy dogs through 150 miles of winding, altitude-laden, blizzard-touched trails down off the Glenn. I was her handler, along with Jess O, which meant helping get everything prepared, dropping dogs the night prior, axing meat into snacks, lining out the team, laying underneath the stars with K after her first run, watching the dogs while she slept inside, standing on the break at the appropriate times & generally worrying a bunch while she was on trail. I suppose that what it really meant was getting to witness something absolutely beautiful & awesome & ridiculously wonderful, which was K fulfilling a dream. & like any good dream, it meandered from stunned terror to mild confidence to intransigent doubt & again to a kind of joy that I think could rightly be called incandescent, or exuberant at the very least....