The Wild Inside: A Novel

1

I have always had a knack for knowing the minds of dogs. Dad says it’s on account of the way I come into the world, born in the open doorway of our kennel, with twenty-two pairs of canine eyes watching and the barks and howls of our dogs the first thing I ever heard.

Back then, there wasn’t no clinic in the village, so the community health aide come out to our place once a month. When Mom was partway through carrying me, the aide told her to stay in bed and not tire herself out. Mom minded that advice right up till the night I was born. First of March, so cold the ends of her hair froze. She went outside and crossed the dog yard, got as far as the kennel’s doorway when a pain come over her. She crouched down, holding her belly, and hollered for my dad. I slid right out. I was in this world before she knew it, with barely any help from her. She said it was the only thing easy about me.

Why was you in the kennel? I asked her one time.

She shrugged. Said, I suppose I missed the dogs.

I come out big and heavy and always hungry. Mom told me there’s some women have trouble getting their babies to take the breast, and I have seen it in some pups, how they will ignore what instinct tells them and refuse to nurse, and then you have to strip the milk from the mother and feed the pup by hand. But not me. I clamped down first thing and didn’t want to let go. Mom had never seen a baby like me, she said I was voracious. She fed me till she thought she’d run dry, and then she kept on feeding me.

There’s pictures in the family photo book, all four of us working together in the yard or gathered round a dog sled before the start of a race. Scott and me both with Mom’s dark hair, Dad’s brown eyes. I learned in school that blood has a memory. It carries information that makes you who you are. That’s how my brother and me ended up with so much in common, we both carried inside us the things our parents’ blood remembered. Sharing what’s in the blood, that’s as close as you can be to another person.

That’s probably why I run into so much trouble when me and Scott started school. I didn’t share nothing with the other kids. Before, we done school at home. Mom was our teacher, she give us problems to solve, numbers going down the page in a column and meant to be plussed or minused. When I was little, if I done my work right, I got a star. Ten stars meant I could go outside. I’d get my stars done fast so I could spend most of the day out in the dog yard or running through the woods, or wrestling and chasing Scott, usually just playing but sometimes roughhousing, and Mom would holler at us to stop.

Our place was the best place. It was my granddad who built it, before my dad was born. He found a patch of Alaska he liked, then cleared a ten-acre circle in the trees and in one half built our house and in the other half built the kennel, a long building with a workshop at one end and plenty of room for gear and sleds. In between the house and the kennel, we had forty doghouses. Then trees all around and a trailhead at the back of the yard, the trail cut through the woods three miles to Ptarmigan Lake, then another thirty miles or so before you crossed the river, then beyond that, just more trees, then mountains, then tundra.

I spent as much time as I could in the woods. To look at me, you might of thought, But you are only seventeen, and a girl, you have got no business being off in the wild by yourself where a bear could maul you or a moose trample you. But the fact is, if they put me and anyone else in the wilderness and left us there, you just see which one of us come out a week later, unharmed and even thriving. I rode the back of a sled practically ever since I could stand, and by the time I was ten I could take small teams down the trail on overnight runs, sometimes even for a few days, off on my own with only my dogs for company. I run the Junior Iditarod soon as I was able, and when I was sixteen I competed in my first professional races. I had already logged enough mileage to qualify for the Iditarod, soon as I was eighteen I could enter. I even managed to win back my entry fee when I finished the Gin Gin 200 women’s race in the top five. To be honest, I didn’t care much about the money. I only wanted to be on my sled, outside, as much as I could.

Which is how come I didn’t care for the way Dad pitched his keys at me come Friday afternoon and said, Pick up your brother from school, would you, Trace?

I snatched the keys out of the air with one hand and tossed them right back. They landed in the grass next to the snowblower he was tinkering with.

Can’t you do it?

Sure, Dad said. And you can stay here and fix this machine for Eleanor Andrews. Get it done fast, though, since she’s supposed to send her nephew to pick it up in an hour.

Would if I could, I muttered, clawing through the grass to find the keys.

Here, he said and fished a piece of paper from his pocket. Put this up at the village store while you’re in town.

It was an ad, meant for the corkboard posted by the front door at the only store in town. Folks pinned their signs on the board, some of them said FOR SALE—ATV TIRES or FREE FIREWOOD, YOU CUT.

Dad’s sign was made out in his slanty handwriting, all the letters leaned backwards like they was standing against a strong wind. Room for Rent. Small Room back of House, private, Clean. Woodstove. No Water or electric. You are Welcome to use kitchen and bath in House. Located Mile 112. No Vagrants. Then Dad’s name and our phone number wrote along the bottom.

What room? I asked. Our house was good-sized, me and Scott each had our own bedrooms. I wasn’t about to move in with him so some stranger could pay to sleep where I belonged.

The shed wasn’t always a shed, Dad told me. When your granddad built it, he meant it to be a proper cabin.

Besides the house and the kennel and the forty doghouses that took up the space between, we had two other buildings on our property. One was the woodshed, which was more like a roof with three walls, we stacked all our firewood inside. The other was a real shed, it had a good roof and a woodstove, and even a little window cut into one wall. It had become a catch-all sort of place, we put anything we didn’t need regular there, the mower with the broken blade, sawhorses, fishing poles, greasy parts for the other truck that was up on blocks.

It’ll clean out real nice, Dad was saying.

And some stranger’s supposed to live there? I said.

We need the money.

But if I’m going to be around to help out—I started and he cut me off.

Because you’ve been such a help since you got kicked out?

That wasn’t fair. I had done what I could to make up for the trouble I had caused at school. All week while Dad had drove Scott into town and left me behind, I made sure to clear the table of breakfast dishes before I sat down to do my schoolwork, because it turns out that when you get suspended, they still expect you to do your lessons. And maybe I didn’t finish half the work that got sent home to me, but that was because I needed to hunt. Where else was Dad supposed to get pelts to sell or trade? A nice marten fur, stretched and tanned, could bring in fifty dollars or more, and that wasn’t nothing.

Playing in the woods doesn’t count as helping, Dad said like he could read my mind. Now could you please do as I ask without giving me twenty reasons why you shouldn’t have to?

I slid behind the wheel of the truck and waited for the engine to decide to turn over. The dogs barked after me as I inched down the driveway, mad that they wasn’t going for a ride. I looked one way up the highway, then the other, then back again, two or three times before I pulled onto the road. It wasn’t that I wanted to make trouble for Dad, and I wanted to help, really help. But not like this. I didn’t care to drive, even before what happened. And I never liked going into town, especially when it meant going to school. If Dad wanted my help, I didn’t see why I couldn’t stay on our property and do real work, like making sure the dogs was trained proper, shoveling the dog yard, leading our younger dogs on walks so I could take note which ones minded good and which ones seemed like potential lead dogs.

But the day I got kicked out of school for fighting, Dad had told me, No dogs. I wasn’t to run them or play with them or even feed them, which really just meant more work for him. He was awful mad about what I done to that girl in my class, and it was the worst punishment I reckon he could come up with, other than telling me I couldn’t hunt.

I worked to become a good musher, but I have always been natural at hunting. I liked to do it and I liked to read about it, we had plenty of books round the house on the subject. My favorites was: A Knife and Your Wits: Minimalist Survival by Joe Wilcox, and What’s Good to Eat: Edible Wild Plants by Nancy and Bill Philomen, and Traps and Trapping by Alec Cook, and best of all, How I Am Undone by Peter Kleinhaus, which is not a guidebook but a regular book, but I still learned a lot about survival from it. Peter Kleinhaus is this guy who come to Alaska from the lower forty-eight and tried to live outdoors for one whole winter, and the only shelter he had was whatever he built himself, and the only food he ate was whatever he killed or scavenged. He lost an earlobe and two toes to frostbite but other than that he come out okay in the end.

I have always liked the Kleinhaus book best because there’s parts where he stops teaching you things and just writes what he was thinking, and I tell you what. There are books out there that when you read them, you wonder how some stranger could know exactly what’s in your own mind. There’s a part where Kleinhaus has been outdoors for about three months, and it has been snowing a blizzard for almost four days straight. He is stuck on a ledge on the side of a mountain, no fuel for his fire. So he wakes up in the middle of the fourth night and finds the snow has finally stopped. The sky is clear, with all the stars like metal filings shook out across a black cloth, and the cloth is so wide it never ends but goes on and on so you feel you could be swallowed up by the sky, and you almost want to be swallowed up, just to be part of something so big. And even though he is cold and has no fire, he just sits and stares up into the sky. He writes, Under this vastness I forget myself. My humanity slips away and I am no longer recognizably me, but one more animal under an ancient, heedless sky. First time I read that, I had to shut the book and go outside. It made my head spin.

Driving made my head spin, too, but not in the same way. Trees whisked past and the sky unrolled overhead, gray with the promise of snow that hadn’t yet been delivered. I was cruising well under the speed limit, but the truck’s studded tires whined something awful on the pavement, and I eased up on the gas as I come round a curve in the road and tried not to look at the shoulder.

My mom died the month before I turned sixteen. It was a car accident. She wasn’t driving but walking alongside the road. All the places we got to walk on our property, but she decides to take a walk on the shoulder of the highway.

The road that goes past our place is mostly a straight shot with good visibility. But there’s one spot where the road curves sharp and runs downhill, and if you are coming round too fast you might not see whatever’s on the shoulder till it’s too late. The guy driving the truck said he only looked away for a second. I didn’t even see her, is what he told the village safety officer, he only heard his car hit what he first thought was a big dog or maybe a moose calf.

The impact threw my mom into a tree. I suppose that is what killed her. If you trap a squirrel and it ain’t dead when you find it and you are not yet strong enough to snap its neck with your hands, you can knock it hard against a tree and do the job that way. What I wonder is what went through her head as she sailed into the air. Was it like how you hear, how time stretches out and you have what seems like hours to think about your life or watch how the snowflakes fall around you like stars drifting down and settling on the ground and the night gets brighter when everything is clean and white? If she thought of anything, I hope it was that.

What I also wonder is what she was doing out, middle of the night, walking along the road. It is not a pleasant place to walk. When a car whizzes by, it spits up rocks and snow and dirt, pummels you with the wind that kicks up in its wake. I can’t see the draw of a place like that. But there she was, on the road, alone in the dark, till a pair of headlights lit her up.

Scott wasn’t there when I pulled up to the school, I waited and watched the other kids stream into the schoolyard, the ones who lived farther away loaded onto the bus, which is how me and Scott used to get to school till I got us kicked off the bus, too. According to the principal, I had been trouble since day one.

Finally I got out of the truck and brushed past the groups of older kids who was horsing around, talking and laughing before they got on their four-wheelers to head home. And there was Beth Worley, a splint on her nose and a bandage covering the stitches she’d got earlier that week. I was surprised she was already back in school, the way she cried when they carried her off to the clinic, you’d of thought she was dying. She glared at me, and her friends fell quiet as I walked by, then started their whispering when they thought I was far enough away. But I have always had better hearing than most.

I found Scott kneeling outside his classroom, his books scattered all round. Wasn’t till I got close enough to help him scoop them into his backpack that I seen he had a nice bruise blossoming at the corner of his mouth.

Who done that? I asked.

He shook his head. Doesn’t matter. Let’s go.

You know I’m the one who’s supposed to get in fights, don’t you? I told him as we left the building.

You’re a trial, Tracy Sue Petrikoff, he said and sounded exactly like Dad had sounded back in September when he got a call from the school saying I’d kneed some kid in the groin after he threw a ball straight at my head in gym class.

I reached out and socked Scott in the shoulder, not hard enough to hurt, just playing.

Shut your hole, I said.

He pushed me back.

Shut yours.

Watch out, Scotty! some kid called from across the schoolyard. She’ll bite your face off!

Then laughter from a group of kids that wasn’t even in my grade. Word spreads fast when you got too many people in one place, all of them running their mouths.

Go to hell, Scott hollered back.

Hey, I said. Ain’t that kid your friend?

Scott shrugged. Yeah, but he’s also kind of a jerk. And you’re my sister.

I ruffled his hair, the way I knew he hated. He smacked my hand.

We swung by the village store like Dad asked and I made Scott run in and put up the sign. Then I steered us back toward home, me growing more at ease the farther we got from the gas station and the roadhouse where folks was lined up at the counter, practically shoulder to shoulder, like them little fish in a can. The inside of the truck smelled like grease and wet fur, it made me think of all the times all four of us would cram into the cab and ride into the village to stock up on supplies, and sometimes, before we headed back, we would eat at the roadhouse. That’s when men would come over to our table to shake Dad’s hand or buy him a drink. The entire state knew the name of Bill Petrikoff Junior. Seemed like a whole other life back then, like something I must of read in a book. After Mom died, things changed fast.

It was like this game me and Scott used to play, Before and After. Mom would give us two pictures that at first looked alike, but if you studied them closer you’d see there was tiny differences. A man wearing a cowboy hat in one picture, but in the other he would have a baseball cap on his head. A red shoe would be blue. A bird flying in the sky would be vanished altogether. You was supposed to catch the differences.

For us, everything was dogs in the Before picture. A yard full of them, and Dad repairing a sled, and Mom standing over the fire, cooking a pot of green fish and beef tallow to pour over kibble. Making bags for food drops, sewing booties for the dogs’ feet. Enough money to pay for extra hands to help us prepare for each race, right up till the big one. When the Iditarod come round and Dad’s team was in the chute, Mom would handle one of the big wheel dogs, that is a dog who is harnessed directly in front of the sled. The horn would sound, and all the handlers let go of the dogs, and Mom would turn and give Dad a quick kiss before he slid past her. Then she’d hurry over to me and Scott on the sidelines, and Dad would look back and wave to us, wave till he crested the first small hill then disappeared.

After the race, we would meet Dad at the small landing strip where the plane he chartered brung him and our dogs back to us from Nome. We’d load up the truck and head home, Mom on one end of the bench seat and Dad on the other, and me and Scott in the middle, like a sandwich where our parents was the bread. Cold outside but always warm in the truck. Flakes of snow lit up by the beam of the headlights.

That was Before. After was Dad standing with his hands on his hips when I parked the truck in our driveway, looking like a little kid’s drawing of himself, just a collection of skinny lines. All the padding gone from his bones, and his eyes big and dark, like they was sinking into his head. He frowned while he waited for us to get out of the truck.

Hey, son, he said and give Scott a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. Go on in and get after your homework, you hear?

Yes, sir.

You, Dad said and I stopped short, my stomach dropping at the tone of his voice. You are grounded. And I don’t just mean no dogs. I mean no leaving the yard, no hunting, no running the dogs. Not for a good long while.

My stomach dropped.

What?

The school called while you were gone. You got yourself expelled. I told you—

No.

Excuse me?

No, I said. This is bullshit. I’m the one who’s been training, up till you told me I had to stop. I’m the one who cares for the dogs most of the time. This is the last year I’m eligible for the Junior. The first year I’m eligible for the Iditarod!

He shook his head. You’re not going to be racing this year, Trace. Even if you was still in school, we can’t afford the entry fees.

The sun throwing shadows of the trees across our yard, long columns of dark soaking into the brown grass. Our dogs had started wondering what we was up to. They sat on their haunches and cocked their heads at us. A couple nosed their bowls. I imagined Dad out there, his hands gentle on each one, checking their paws or massaging their legs after a long run. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d got on a sled.

The thought made me grit my teeth and clench my fists, made me want to hit something. I felt the way I’d felt the day I broke Beth’s nose, rage building inside me like a fire rolling through a forest, consuming every tree and blade of grass.

The madder I got, the quieter Dad seemed. He give a sigh like he was deflating.

Your mom was better at this, he said.

Better at what?

This, he said. Doing what’s good for you. Knowing what you need. It was easier when you were little. You just wanted to be outside all the time, following me around.

I wanted to tell him it wasn’t true. Mom was good at lots of stuff, and there was a time we would spend hours together, just talking. But there was plenty of things she didn’t tell me. Sometimes she would be on the edge of something, like standing on the bank of a creek, deciding whether or not to cross. Instead of putting her foot in the water, she would turn round, walk away from whatever it was she wanted to say to me.

But I didn’t say anything. It was rare for Dad to bring Mom up, rarer still for us to talk about how she used to be, or what she would of done. I half-expected her to wander outside right then, poke her head out the front door and ask, You two telling secrets out here? I caught myself actually waiting for her. It feels dumb to say how disappointed I was when I didn’t see her. Like just talking about her could conjure her up.

That’s still what I want, I told Dad. Just to be outside. To race.

You’re not the only one doing something you don’t want to.

He was so quiet, it seemed mean to shout at him. But I couldn’t help myself.

You could do what you want! Instead of wasting time fixing other people’s shit, building stupid tables and shelves to sell—

How do you think I pay for food, Tracy? How do you think I keep the lights on?

You’re a musher! My voice hit him almost like a fist. It hurt me to see him hurt, but I couldn’t stop. Part of me didn’t even care. You’re supposed to be a musher! That’s your job! I’m the only one who raced at all last year—

His face dropped. I did stop then.

He cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was calm.

I’ve said my piece, Tracy. I’d appreciate it if you’d go on inside now. You can get dinner ready tonight, too.

It was worse than if he had yelled back. A chill rolled through the yard. He give me a wide berth as he headed to the dog yard. Soon as they seen him, the dogs hopped to their feet, barking because they knew it was suppertime.

I watched till he disappeared into the kennel, then punched the truck. My knuckles come away scraped and hurting but I punched it again. Then I launched into a run, I blew past the house, across the circle of our yard. To the woods. The cool, solid ground under my feet. Dad would be steaming when I come back. But I had to do something.

There is satisfaction in running fast. When you run you are going one place but you are also leaving another place behind. A feeling comes over you like a blanket. It wraps itself round your mind and quiets your thoughts so you can stop listening to the voices in your head and focus on the rustle of brush or the chattering of a squirrel in the treetops. I run as fast as I can for as long as I can. My mind travels somewhere else, and I become only breath and bone and muscle. The feeling is serene and focused, powerful and energized, all at the same time.

This is how I shake off anger and worry like a dog shakes water off her coat. This is how I empty myself out to fill myself up again.

After a while, I veered off the trail and plunged deeper into the woods. All the leaves whispering in the wind. Fall is brief in Alaska, like Peter Kleinhaus wrote, the leaves browning and turning and tumbling to the ground in the space of one day. But it is a good time to put out traps or go hunting. There’s places you can find where moose have rubbed the trunk of a tree raw with their antlers and if you put your hand there the wood is soft as a cheek.

I felt how soft it was and asked my mother, What about a moose?

Even after she was gone, I would find her in the woods sometimes. Barely there, a cobweb I could put my hand through. I could conjure up the memory of her voice, thin as a scrim of ice on a puddle.

A moose is too big, she said. What would you do with it?

I shrugged. But the thought of taking something big as a grown moose made my insides flutter.

You shouldn’t ever take more than you need.

When she was alive, she had showed me a place where voles made little runways through the grass, with their droppings here and there and tracks all round, you know them by the two middle toes that point forward and the two smaller toes on either side. There was a time when we would