Where the Dogs Run

For The New York Review of Books, Bathsheba Demuth recounts falling in love with the Arctic at age 18 and learning how to run a team of sled dogs by apprenticing with Gwitchin musher Stanley Njootli. Sledding with a team through an Alaska winter, she reflects on the bond between dog and musher, realizing that through the darkness of the long polar night, the dogs’ sight, smell, and hearing have become an extension of her senses.

That first winter spooled out with the sensation of the land moving under my feet and through my hands. In December and January, when there is no sunrise for several weeks and all running is with a headlamp, I realized that the lead dogs had become part of my sight. By spring, which in the Arctic is full with snow until May, the land grew rich in long dusks and dawns. The dogs’ ears and noses sensed things I could not: a coming storm, the bear early from her den. Their glee or hesitance carried down the lines to my hands. Sled, dogs, and human, all distinct but united, held together through dark spruce needling against a sky moon-bright and purple-green with aurora. Mushing requires physical knowledge—how to care for dog feet or repair a sled stanchion—but none of it works without trust.

Sled dogs pull best for people they know, a relationship that requires consistency and care. Races have been lost because a musher yelled in frustration and the team refused to run. Months after meeting my team, I went home for Christmas, in the middle of mushing season. When I returned after several weeks, even Sergio would gee when I said haw. Some of the dogs turned their backs on me when I approached with a harness. By breaking our regular days together I had fumbled their trust.