Good morning doggies. We love you oh so much. You are the light of our lives.
Mush, mush.
Isn’t that interesting? I can say “mush, mush” and I mean one of two things:
a) Either I am self-deprecating myself, commenting on the “mushiness” of my sentiments (i.e. “sentimentality”)
OR
b) I am referencing the beautiful husky sled dogs of the Alaskan departure
Dust is the absense of things. Dust is the “was here”, the “you just missed it”, the precursor to settling. Dust stings the eyes, dust tightens the throat, dust dries the tongue. Let’s talk about sled dogs and leave my sentimentality in the dust:
Sled dogs are an interesting phenomenon in this world. The dogs, they are not typical dogs. They work as part of a team. In fact, it is the one time, that we humans not only encourage the packing up of dogs, but from it we benefit. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that something?
I was once afforded the opportunity to ride in a sled. My mother’s brother moved to the Alaskan peninsula in 1942, and joined in with the Kinue tribe, one of the Eskimo sects. At that time, his interest was to learn about igloo making and living in non-daylight and non-nighttime culture, and being a linguist he also had interest and desire to increase his internal thesaurus for the word “ice” (of which the Kinue tribe has 537 different variations, the most prolific of Eskimo tribes).
While there he fell in love with two women and proceeded to build a family with each of them. I was an only child, and my mother sent me out to live with uncle for some summers, because it let me “pack up” with my cousins.
And it was indeed what happened. Running around with my cousins, all of the same ilk, we became a pack, we experienced life as one organism, as one entity; energy flowed through & among us as blood flows through a single person. And just like a person is a collection of integrated organs, so were we a pack, a collection of integrated persons.
And it was as a pack member that I first encountered the beautiful sled dogs of the Kinue village. We were on a day, sitting in our samox, and there was a puff of cloud of snow in the distance. We all had been howling and laughing and rolling around, and suddenly there was the odd disruption in the distance:
A sled came up around the hill, displaying its proud 5 sled dogs, running towards us, speeding towards us, quieting our discontent and feeding our content, making us whole again, widening our eyes and opening our hearts. We all stood so still our feet sunk deeper into the snow, the heat of our lust for these dogs melting the snow below us.
As the sled neared us, it slowed down. The dogs veered over towards our direction, clearly intending to arrive at our location. We were entranced, we were transfixed, and only as the sled was close enough for me to see the face of the human on the sled did I notice his confusion:
He had lost control of the sled, but not in a bad way.
As I later learned, this was a rare occurrence for sled dogs. Every so often, the dogs who would work as a team to deliver a destination and route for the sled human, would instead turn their allegiance toward a higher calling, and serve a different master.
The Kinue believed in the high spiritual nature of the sled dogs, and rode the dogs in hopes of this rare event happening. This particular introduction of mine to the sled dogs came during this particular sled human’s 14th day of a vision quest expedition, where he was searching around for experiences just as this one.
Well, the dogs of the sled approached our pack at full pace yet none of us was scared, although we well could have been. The dogs were bearing down on us at such a pace that they would have easily trampled us, especially because of how far down we had all sunk in the snow by now.
But we were not scared, because we had snapped into an alternate state of mind. The dogs we could tell had chosen us, and the sled human had realized this already, having let go of the reigns and singing a song of rejoice and prayer.
When the dogs arrived at our location he cut the reigns loose and the dogs circled around us, and then they circled around just me. Then in unison they all lifted their heads, arched their necks, and howled up at the moon in the bright, sun-lit midnight sky. They howled, and howled, and howled. They let loose deep emotions in me, which ignited vivid visions, baked into my consciousness.
It was in this moment that I had the vision of Dog Island, although I didn’t know it as it is today. Instead, I just knew I must address the inequality of species through the treatment of dog relationships by humans.
These huskies had selected me, had found me deep in the snow with my own pack, had howled their enchanting ritual howl all around me, and then, reassembling into the sled, the sled human put me on the sled and set us off for a long journey on the sled. During this journey I learned many things, but I shall discuss those things in future journals as I must retire my pen for today.
Captain’s Log of Saturday, June 12, 2010 8:18 am
Year #32, Month #395, Week #1,716, Day #12,003
3 Kings Cabin, Dog Island
