Every Dog Has His Sleigh

I am beginning to understand why our guides place so much emphasis on food; the body, in this weather, is little more than a simple furnace, and although I have no appetite for frozen cheese, it does give me a warm glow. While we eat, Dave tells us about the time he and Paul picked up lunch at a convenience store, and Paul bought an apple, a bag of pork rinds and a carton of half-and-half. "Half-and-half," Dave remembers Paul saying. "Where else can you get 2,000 calories for 75 cents?"

We spend the afternoon ducking in and out of a string of little forested glades and frozen ponds sugared with snow. Perhaps because of my ongoing monologue, Buster, Prairie and I reach a tentative detente; when the sled hitches up on a root or stump, they look over their shoulders, tails wagging, and wait until I give the sled a little shove before digging in again. Their personalities emerge: Buster is bigger, more of a goon; Prairie is little and quick, and in charge. She bares her teeth at Buster if our pace slows.

The afternoon goes quickly. By the time we emerge from the woods and begin the long stretch home across the lake, the sun has slid obliquely to rest at the horizon, where it flickers through a dense scrim of trees. The sidelong light, under the vault of the sky, is yellow and violet, and the air is sharp. We scrape across the middle of the lake, where the ice, as hard under the runners as iron, is cloudy and lumpy, like congealed wax. The landscape is silent but no longer empty; I recognize the silhouette of the far shore. In the distance, a low buzz swells into the tenor hum of a two-stroke engine. A snowmobiler materializes and sprays past us with a wave, leaving in his wake a sour plume of exhaust and the musty smell of a cigar.

At dinner, we are flushed from the sun, the wind and a bottle of port that someone has brought, and spirits are high. Jason's girlfriend, Karla, a pretty woman with a cloud of blond curls, has come in for the weekend from her office job in Minneapolis. She will be going on a trip above the Arctic Circle that Paul is leading in May. On her last visit to Wintergreen, Jason tells us, Karla chose to participate in some of the preparations for another group's polar expedition, including jumping into the lake through a hole in the ice, fully clothed, with a backpack on. This story prompts one of our group, a Brit named Mike who is here with his wife, Nancy, to tell us about the coldest he has ever been, which was when he was in the British army and spent the night sleeping in a snow pit in Norway during a whiteout.

I had been feeling pretty proud of myself -- we did, after all, go almost 20 miles today -- but I am beginning to think that rising to the occasion in a pair of borrowed boots and then coming in to drink wine over a plate of one of Bernard's chicken dishes, is not, really, outdoorsiness, certainly not the kind the rest of my group can claim. True outdoorsiness, it seems, is not just a tolerance for the cold

climate, although that is part of it. It is more an intolerance for the unchanging climate of the indoors, the static landscape of a manmade life.

"The guys I work with don't understand," Keith says. "They say, 'Man, why don't you just get a six-pack and go to Myrtle Beach?'"

"I wanted to cut down a beech tree and stand it in our living room," he says, "put a creek running through, put some rocks, make it like a campsite, but Sandy wouldn't have it."

At the other end of the table, Charlie, who is here with his wife from Illinois, says: "When I was a kid in Chicago, I had a pet crow. He would step around in the laundry when the lady two doors down was hanging out her sheets. He would come and land on my arm."

I comb my memories for a worthy anecdote, but the only thing I can come up with is our family's sole camping trip, when I was 9 or 10, during which it poured rain and most of our group spent the night in the car. Earlier in the day, Jason had mentioned that he had camping equipment if anyone wanted to sleep the last night outside. I lean over and ask him under my breath if the opportunity is still available.

"You want to sleep outside?" he asks, in clarion tones. The effect of this announcement on our group is electric, as though I have announced my candidacy for the presidency. Karla, across the table, slaps her knees in a gesture of decisiveness. "Let's get you into a Wiggy!" -- the brand name of the insulated "sleep systems" that enable the human body to conserve enough heat over the course of a very cold night to survive, effectively if not comfortably.

On the floor of the cabin living room after dinner, Jason puts me through a dry run of my sleep system: a mat; a black sleeping bag, like a pillowy sarcophagus; and a tarp to go on top. Inside the bag, I yank on the cords until the aperture around my head contracts and the ceiling narrows to a spot. The bag is extremely efficient; I am already beginning to sweat. Jason's face appears in my field of vision. "And we'll fill a bottle of boiling water for you to take inside the bag," he says, cheerfully.

The spot I have chosen is a few yards from the lake in front of our cabin. I crawl into the bag with my hot-water bottle and my cheese sticks and batten down the hatch. I am wearing a hat, wool boot liners, three pairs of pants, four long-underwear shirts, a sweater and my 600-fill down jacket. I am also wearing my glasses, because it is a clear night and I want to see the stars, which I can until my glasses steam up and then freeze.

To say that I sleep outside would be a misnomer; I drift through the night in a stupor, woken at intervals by stiffness, or by chills, or by the wide, echoing reverberations of the lake ice contracting and expanding, a sound like someone tapping a gigantic microphone, or as Keith had described it, "like someone rolling a 55-gallon drum." Despite my layers, I'm not warm. Nor am I visited by revelations about the purity of the wilderness or my place in it. But I am not spooked, as I thought I might be. Rather, it feels as though I am sleeping snugly in the center of a very large room. Once, I hear a solitary howl to the north, a ridiculously stereotypical high-lonesome yodel that nonetheless gives me gooseflesh. The answering chorus from the south, where our dogs are tied for the night, puts me back in the civilized world.

As soon as the patch of night above me pales with the dawn, I extricate myself from the bag and make my way to the cabin for a cup of coffee. But it feels insufferably hot and stuffy inside, and I go back out for a walk, cutting across the lake to where the dogs are tethered in the blue shadows on the shore. They are in fine fettle for having slept, Wiggy-less, on the bank of the lake. They yip and howl and leap joyfully at the ends of their chains when they see me. Their coats are furred with a fine layer of frost, each individual hair like the antenna of a moth. Jason, who is shoveling food into bowls, raises his eyebrows.

"They say it went down to 10 below last night," he says. He thuds one of the dogs ruminatively over the rib cage, with a sound like a bongo drum. Jason's beard is frosted, too. "So?" he says. "Were you too hot?"

ELY, AS I DRIVE THROUGH IT ON MY WAY OUT of town the next morning, is bustling with its winter festival. The central plaza is filled with snow sculptures: a giant pair of dice, three bears in a barrel, two mammoth hands that cast a shadow in the shape of a wolf's head, a chunky, reclining abstraction like a gelid Henry Moore. People stroll with their children in the morning sunshine. It is a pity, I think, that I am leaving just as I have mastered the art of layering. In a pair of fleece leggings and a couple of Duofold shirts, I am a perfectly regulated system. Although it is still around zero outside -- cold enough to numb my hands as I search for my keys -- I keep the car window cracked. The town smells like bacon and eggs.

On WELY, the deejay is playing antiwar songs. I drive through the cluster of shops and diners and onto the highway south toward Duluth. The featureless woods stretch for miles on either side. The long, empty road and the occasional house make the surrounding countryside seem lonelier, somehow, than it did from the helm of a sled in the middle of a frozen lake. On the radio, a song by Steve Earle wraps up the set, and then it is time for personal and emergency messages. There is only one. "Lost dog," the deejay reads. "Basset hound-beagle mix. Mostly black. Please call."

Lauren Wilcox is a writer who lives in Jersey City, N.J. She last wrote for the Magazine about a Michigan Santa school. She can be reached at 20071@washpost.com.