The frozen nylon smell hit me before I got the shed door fully open, that particular cold that means something was left out overnight that shouldn’t have been. One of the neck lines, coiled on the wrong hook. I knew whose it was. I didn’t say anything. You fix the mistake and you remember the face of who left it, and the next time you hand out equipment you watch that person’s hands.
I read the essay on my phone while the water for the dogs was heating. The woman had done it, genuinely done it, all fifty states in twelve months with her border collie mix named Rue. Sponsored by a gear company. Documented on Instagram. She wrote the piece herself and it was honest enough that I kept reading. The one state she wouldn’t return to was Hawaii. Not because anything went wrong. Because, she wrote, the land didn’t need them there. She and Rue were tourists moving through something that existed completely without them, and for the first time in the whole year, the dog seemed to know it.
That stopped me.
I’ve been running dogs on this prairie since 2010 and the land out here off Highway 2 has never once needed me either. That’s not a feeling I was prepared for the first winter. I’d come from working with a kennel operation outside Bemidji where there were trees, actual windbreaks, places where the landscape would hold you a little. Out here the cold comes from every direction at once and the flat goes on until it doesn’t and there is nothing between you and whatever is moving across that sky. The first time I ran a team alone out here I understood that the land was not hostile. It was simply indifferent, and indifferent at scale is its own kind of brutal.
What surprised me was the dogs. They ran better out here than anywhere I’d worked them. No hesitation in the leads, no drift, just that clean forward pull into open country like they were solving a problem they’d been waiting to solve. Rue probably felt something like that in Hawaii, or her version of it, padding across volcanic rock with the salt coming off the ocean and the trail not asking anything of her that she wasn’t built to give.
The woman’s point was about humility. She framed it carefully, the way people do when they’ve arrived at something real and don’t want to oversell it. Hawaii had been the most beautiful place they’d been, she said, and the place where she’d felt most like an interruption.
I’ve put a lot of people on sleds who came here expecting the land to perform for them. The prairie in January does not perform. It sits there, grey and white and rimmed with nothing, and the silence before the dogs start is the kind of silence that has weight to it, that presses against your ears. Some people find that unbearable. They start talking immediately, filling it, and the dogs flatten their ears and you can see the energy in the yard shift. The land out here will not close the distance for you. You either come to it or you stand at the edge of it your whole visit.
Rue’s owner understood something out there on those trails in Hawaii that took me two full winters to understand out here. The land isn’t background. It isn’t setting. It’s the other party in whatever is happening, and it has no obligation to make you feel welcome, and the places that don’t need you back are the ones that show you what you actually brought.
What she brought was a dog who moved through the world without an agenda about how the world was supposed to receive her. That’s the thing about a good trail dog. Rue wasn’t waiting on Hawaii to confirm anything. She was just walking.
My neck line was stiff when I finally coiled it right, the nylon crackling a little in the cold, and I hung it on the correct hook and went to feed the dogs and the morning did what mornings out here do, which is arrive without ceremony and ask you immediately what you’re made of.
Fifty states in a year is a feat. But the border collie didn’t know it was a feat.
That’s probably why it worked.
Helen L. Corlew runs a team of Samoyeds, Alaskan malamutes and Alaskan huskies. I am a Tellington TTouch practitioner and use this mode of work with training and living with my dogs.
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