Every Dog Has His Sleigh

While we eat, Paul Schurke arrives to welcome us; he has blond hair and blue eyes half-closed against an imaginary glare, and he speaks in whole, literary sentences with long pauses between. (When I ask how he became interested in dog sledding, he says, "I had a mentor whose unquenchable thirst for exploring the polar regions proved infectious.") He mentions that the winter has been unseasonably warm; temperatures in St. Paul for the annual winter carnival were above 50 degrees. "So that's depressing," he says.

One of our group approaches him afterward; she and her husband had been here four years before, she says, and she just wanted to say hi.

"Oh," Paul says, interested, and then regards her silently, as though trying to place her. After a moment, he brightens. "Do you recognize any of the dogs?"

DOG SLEDDING AS A FORM OF TRANSPORTATION has been around thousands of years, a necessary technology for the often nomadic residents of the higher latitudes, native Mongolians and Siberians, and in North America, the Inuit and the Ojibwe, some of whom settled in northern Minnesota. Polar explorers adopted the dog sled over the last couple of centuries, and despite the advent of the snowmobile, it is still, Schurke says, the best way to traverse what he calls the "chaotic texture" of polar landscapes: shifting ice blocks the size of houses and yawning seams of open ocean. "No wheeled or tracked vehicle has yet been designed that can negotiate that tortured terrain," he says, nor are dogs as affected by the severe cold and salt water that can wreak havoc on mechanical parts. "Dogs will start every morning," he says. "Machines won't, necessarily." In the Boundary Waters, where no motorized vehicles are allowed, dog sledding has become a favorite winter pastime.

The art of dog sledding mostly consists of divining and encouraging the dog's natural tendencies, as has been done with every animal that humans have pressed into service. Sled dogs are born (that is, bred) to pull -- a team of six or so Inuit dogs will happily haul a loaded sled for 20 or 30 miles in subzero temperatures. But they are also pack animals with, Paul says, "their own universe that we can only look into sort of darkly." Before the pulling season, Paul turns his pack loose in an open space, and within a week the dogs have established their hierarchy: lead dogs; "wheel" dogs, who take up the rear; and "incompatible pairs" -- dogs who cannot be persuaded to get along.

But there is more to working with dogs than that. The dogs are not pets -- they sleep outside, they pull a sled almost every day -- and caring for them is work. (Jason's first task at Wintergreen, he told me, was to salvage pieces of a harness from the vomit of a dog who had ingested it.) But they are voraciously and indiscriminately social, as though the building block of the pack mentality were a gruff kind of love, and they inspire a similar, reciprocal love from people. In the ease and enthusiasm with which they navigate the winter woods, it seems they also provide an entry into an inhospitable world and some insulation against the bleakness.

In the lodge, there is a photo album of generations of dogs, all labeled with their lineages, characteristics and dates of birth and death. A pen down by the dog yard holds frosty-muzzled dogs, too old to pull, who are fed and watered with the rest. Paul, Dave told me, reputedly has a sled-dog cemetery on his land, though none of the guides has ever seen it. During Paul's expeditions in the High Arctic, he found it easy to make friends in the Inuit villages, where people warmed to their visitor upon seeing his team. "Everyone," he says, "loves to talk dogs."

AFTER ANOTHER DAY SPENT MAKING SHORT RUNS NEAR THE MAIN LODGE, we make a half-day trip to another cabin, where we spend the night. In the cabin's kitchen, where Dave is making blueberry pancakes, the sun falls in medallions on the wood floor. A radio propped in the window is tuned to WELY (94.5 FM), which serves as sort of a central intelligence for the remote corners of the Boundary Waters area and broadcasts personal and emergency messages in addition to its standard programming. There is a woman's red down jacket for sale, the DJ announces, and a used snowblower. He moves on to the news: Someone has caught a 3-foot, 1-inch rabbit.

Outside, the sunlight needles off the snow. Jason has found me a spare pair of boots with wool liners to replace the ones I brought. They are almost twice as big as my feet, bald and patched like old tires, and as warm as Dutch ovens. On the snowy surface of the lake, Dave is circling on skis and a rig Paul invented called the "push-pull," which allows him to be pushed, or more accurately, chased, by two dogs hooked to the end of a long pole, the other end of which is planted on Dave's rear end. The arrangement gives him a lot of speed but not much control. We watch him careen around the ice.

"The first time Paul got someone to try this, the dogs ran the guy right into the outhouse," Jason says.

Maybe it's the sunshine, but our outing today seems far more manageable; the trail is smooth, the dogs convivial. We coast along the serrated shore of the lake. For a solo rider, it is not the most social form of transportation, but I take the opportunity to work on my relationship with the dogs, as Dave has suggested, and keep up a patter of nonsense commentary to which they occasionally prick up their ears. Little details begin to emerge from the blur of the scenery. A bird's nest, with a long beard of lichen, hangs in a shaggy pine. During a break, Keith points out a wolf paw print, as big as a piece of toast, in the snow next to our trail. In the woods, Jason takes us to a beaver house, parked like a giant igloo above a frozen stream. He shows us the ventilation hole at the top and the prints of interested predators around it.

At lunchtime, we eat with another group, which has built a fire in a clearing scalloped with drifts of snow. Their guide, Chris, a young man with a little metal barbell in one ear and a knife in a scabbard in his belt, is squatting over the fire frying quesadillas with a brick-size stick of butter end-down in the pan. Jason pulls out a thermos of hot water and arranges our drink options in a snowbank -- powdered chai tea, powdered hot cocoa, instant cappuccino, Tang -- and pulls some spears of frozen cheese out of his bag. "Cheese sticks, mmm," he says, encouragingly.