Every Dog Has His Sleigh

Our last activity before bed is a clothing check. Although I am on one of the less rigorous trips Wintergreen offers, and we will be sleeping in lodges instead of outside, Jason and Dave spend a long time discussing how to regulate body temperature. At least in this respect, I feel prepared. My friend, who refused to allow me to go inappropriately clothed into the wilderness, had marched me through a camping outfitter's the week before, studying me as I horsed around self-consciously in the items she had picked: a pair of fuzzy skintight leggings, a neck gaiter, a black Ninja-like balaclava that pursed around my eyes with a drawstring. "Cotton kills," she admonished me gravely.

Dave rummages around in my suitcase, fingering fabrics and inspecting labels. "This isn't cotton, is it?" he says, snatching up a pair of long underwear. "Duofold," he answers himself, raising an eyebrow. He gives me an appraising look, as though he hadn't figured me for someone with a working knowledge of wicking fabrics. "Nice. Cotton kills, you know."

We will be harnessing the dogs at 7 a.m. in the dog yard. People begin making their way to their pine-paneled bedrooms. Keith announces that he will be getting up hourly to look for the northern lights, if anyone wants to join him. Jason flips a switch on the wall, and the fire in the stove goes out.

IT IS SNOWING LIGHTLY WHEN WE MAKE OUR WAY down to the dog yard just after dawn, gray flakes sifting out of a gray sky. Keith and his wife, Sandy, who are from North Carolina, are telling us about their house -- "It's down a road, then down a possum trail, which is not as big as a pig trot" -- when I hear a noise that sounds like a hundred sirens, in different stages of the Doppler effect, converging on us from the surrounding woods. Sandy laughs at the look on my face.

"That's the dog yard," she says. "I forgot you hadn't been here before."

Wintergreen's dogs are Canadian Inuits, the sled dogs used by the Inuit people in the High Arctic and, until 1991, at research stations in Antarctica until they were retired in favor of snowmobiles. Paul Schurke, the Arctic explorer who founded Wintergreen, calls them "the SUVs of sled dogs," built for power rather than speed, and happiest when covering great distances with large loads in the extreme cold. Wintergreen has more than 70 of these dogs, many of which Schurke has collected on his expeditions from his friends in Inuit villages. Some are also descendants of the dogs from Antarctic research stations ("children of immigrants," Schurke says).

Walking into the dog yard is like being given a hero's welcome by small but exuberant denizens of a tidy shantytown. Each dog has its own hut, in which it sleeps and eats, and as we enter the yard, they are perched on top of them in full cry. The dogs who will be pulling my sled, Buster and Prairie, can hardly contain themselves as I struggle to slip their noses through the webbing of the harnesses. They are lean and rough-coated from living outdoors, unrefined and work-hardened, like rowdy longshoremen. They are inordinately pleased to see me. Buster stands on his hind legs and catches me around the waist in a ham-fisted embrace. As soon as the harness falls across their chests, they throw their weight against it, and it is all I can do to drag them over to the sled to be tethered. The lodge's pet dogs, an assortment of well-fed retrievers, stroll through the chaos with a superior air, like landed gentry.

In the morning light, I can see that, beyond the lodge and the dog yard, the land slopes down abruptly; through the trees lies the frozen expanse of White Iron Lake, one of the area's many. By the time we are ready to go, the dogs are leaping in their harnesses. Peering through the mouth of the dark tunnel of my balaclava, I find my sled. While the couples are piloting large sleds, pulled by five dogs, mine is the dog-sledding equivalent of a jitney, slim and lightweight, pulled along by two dogs. I take my post, standing upright at the back of the sled on a little platform between the runners and gripping a crossbar about stomach-height. When Jason calls my name, I pull the slipknot that frees the sled from its hitching post, and we catapult down the hill in front of the dog yard. "Hup," I manage, as an afterthought.

DOG SLEDDING IS A LITTLE LIKE WATER-SKIING -- holding onto something hurtling along while shouting orders, largely ineffectually, from a distance. The dogs tear furiously down the hills and settle into a brisk jog on the level stretches. The sled stutters onto the rough ice near the shore and then skims out over the new snow covering the lake, our group in a long, orderly line, strung out over a half-mile or so like a wagon train of pioneers. The sled has a rudimentary brake, made of spikes on the bottom of a lever between my feet; when the dogs are in full stride, it takes my entire weight on the brake to slow us. Entering the woods, we progress in fits and starts, pinballing around trees, hitching up on drifts and roots and pausing precipitously at the summits of small knolls while the dogs strain at their end of the sled and I push at mine. Despite my best geeing and hawing, there is little steering, though none is really needed: The dogs are unshakably goal-oriented, following the path the sled ahead has carved, and they resent being impeded. Once or twice, when we come across a fallen tree and have to leave the trail, they fall on each other in a teeth-baring skirmish, like a terrible grinding of gears, until we get back on track.

Our top speed, on the open ice, is about as fast as I can run. While I appreciate the fact that I am traveling more quickly and easily than I could on foot, if I were on foot, where would I be going? The landscape we are moving through is so vast and insensate that I can hardly locate myself. I have heard people talk about "pitting themselves against the wilderness," but the wilderness barely registers my presence at all. It is simply being what it is: foreign and impenetrable. What I have become -- a small, perishable spot of warmth -- is thrown into high relief.

On the way back to the lodge, across the empty, whistling surface of the lake, my fantasy of sweeping through the grandeur of the winter landscape behind a team of straining animals, like a North Woods Ben Hur, dwindles to an image of me inching perpetually through an unchanging scene, like an Eskimo in a snow globe. Jason, who has been darting from sled to sled on skis, drops back to inquire whether my feet, shod in a cheap pair of winter boots I found on the Internet, are getting cold. They are. All of me, in fact, despite my layers, is getting cold, a strange, generalized discomfort that is more like a physical crankiness. Little electric convulsions run up my back. Per Jason's advice, I jog the last half-mile before lunch behind the sled. The dogs, when we catch sight of the lodge, burst into a sprint, as though showing off.

Our lunch has been prepared by Bernard Herrmann, Wintergreen's master French chef. In the lodge's dining room, its windows fogging up as we thaw, he announces the menu with his hands clasped in front of him: tomato soup with olive oil; a potato souffle, carved into a pattern of scallops; and a ham cloaked in a puff pastry, which Bernard pronounces "poof," and of which I have three helpings. Food, Jason has told us, keeps you warm.