The Dog is My Professor- by Tucker
/The shell of Dwight’s heavy skull emerges from the morning darkness to rest on the bed. It goes sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff and I reach out to scratch it. I can smell him. It’s a distinct sled dog smell, a medium-bodied minerally athletic aroma, a sommelier might say. If you’re more meat-and-potatoes you can talk to Sam, which I did.
“Go smell Dwight.”
“Why? Did he roll in poop again?”
“No, just sniff his head and tell me what it smells like.”
“He smells like a sled dog.”
If you know, you know.
Scratching Dwight’s head in the dark, I feel the sizable fin-like bone between his ears. Anatomy calls this bone the sagittal crest but my dad has always referred to it endearingly on dogs as the “dumb bone”. Turning on a light reveals squinty, yellow eyes and a big blue nose that hides one hell of an overbite. A muscled, 85-pound white-furred frame completes the physique. He’s one of those “that’s an Alaskan Husky?” looking dogs. At two years old, a heart defect has disqualified Dwight from becoming a professional sled dog. He’s aware of the disqualification; not the defect. At hook-up when the dog yard is going bananas, Dwight’s head hangs cooly from his box, observing. As to the defect, it bothers him not.
Down the road at Angel Creek Lodge the other night we were talking about loans. I had a few beers in me and I thought, you know, if I were to ask for a loan, I’d go to the banker and I’d say: Look, there’s this dog, he’s a hulk, defines the term “romp”, absolutely no sense of proprioception. 85 pound blur that doesn’t instinctively understand inertia, runs smack into trees and will take you out at the knees. He comes into my one-room cabin like a polar wind. He swallows toys whole and he plays rough with others. He needs a lot of space, he probably needs a whole barn on a ranch with good views. He needs a horse and a pack mule to accompany him on long trips into the mountains. He needs all this to be happiest. Dwight and I, we’ll pay you back eventually.
I spent the prior season familiarizing Dwight with indoor living, having lots of conversations like, “Dwight, stop licking that book.” Nowadays, he comes into the cabin more like a cold draft than a polar wind, though it’s doubtful he’ll ever make it to soft, ocean breeze status. Anyways, I watch the guy sprawled out and actively dreaming on the couch and it’s apparent that, like any dog, he doesn’t need a loan to swallow up bliss.
Casually flipping through Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac one quiet morning with sled dogs dozing about, I come to the chapter where Leopold compares his dog to a professor and refers to himself as a “dull pupil”. I consider this. Ryne recently had to remind me that Dwight does indeed know how come to his box and sit for a preferred treat. I had been fed up and wrestling him to his spot the past days. A dull pupil, I think.
This summer, Ryne called me.
“What do you want to do this winter? Would you rather race more or adventure more? I’ve got a skijoring trip in mind.”
“Skijoring,” I said, easy.
Skijoring, I’m finding, is not that easy. A dog’s inclination to pull you on skis is fairly unpredictable. A dog that’ll lead a whole team through a storm might shut down with just you back there on an easy road with fine weather. A dog that pulls like a son of a buck in a team might just coast when there’s nothing to chase. A big goof who bounces all over the place might focus up, bear down and be awesome. Professors at work.
Ryne’s been cycling through pairs of dogs, bikejoring with them while we wait for better snow. Better snow? That’s ski-able snow, I thought, disregarding the patches of dirt and rock. Just gotta test it out. We’ll take the short, easy loop on the back forty — the river loop.
In the opening scenes of the movie Iron Will, you see flashes of sprint mushers whipping sleds on tight turns, driving like hell, gnarly X Games type stuff. When the river loop is wanting snow, it’s rutted and groovy, it’s — as I dramatically described to my parents over the phone last year — “some Iron Will shit.” Additionally, since it’s directly off of our exit trail, the dogs are revved to full throttle. They fly. So was the case strapped into skis and hooked to a sprinting dog, no way to stop except via eating shit. I ate a lot of shit. Woody says to Buzz Lightyear: “That wasn’t flying. That was falling with style.” This wasn’t skijoring. It was dragging with style. And soon enough, as I lay groaning in the dirt, a Leopoldian Professor sat there patiently and said to me, “Hey kid, this isn’t very much fun. If you unhook me it will be fun. Maybe another time.”
“Do you want to borrow my ski helmet so you don’t look like such a nerd?” I asked Ryne the next day, “Maybe protect the sides of your head, too.”
“Nah, this has been working fine,” she said, strapping on a bike helmet over her purple wool hat.
We headed out for a run. Two teams of twelve dogs pulling ATVs, Ryne on the bike with two dogs. Ryne was ahead of me and I watched her biff it.
“Biffed it,” I said out loud, using the term for the first time since I was 12 years old. Now that’s the term, I thought. To biff: To fall hard. I’ve been missing that term. Since when did I transition to eating all of this shit every time I hit the earth?
Later on that same run I sat, ATV idling, as Sam and Ryne talked up ahead about the trail.
“Not the solidest [sic] of poops today, Fly,” I say to my wheel dog, Firefly. She grins back at me, pooping more liquid. I go back to singing the Irish folk song “The Rocky Road to Dublin” of which I know one line:
“Wellllll, in the merry month of May…”
It’s a song that was lodged into my head the other day by a man named Sean Villanueva O’Driscoll. He’s a mountaineer of epic proportions. From various footage of him on YouTube you can easily ascertain that he’s a guy with goofy childlike gusto and drive, a guy who biffs it. He described himself in one video as enjoying “proper adventures”. I caught that quote and looked over at Dwight on the couch, his big blue nose squished into the end of a marrow bone, licking into its center, eyes closed.
