Errata

Imagine a dog moving through the northern woods. The movement, over a trail he has traversed many times before, is distinctive, unlike that of a fox or a bear, yet he appears, if you are watching, sometimes vulpine and sometimes ursine. It is purposeful, deliberate movement. Occasionally the rhythm is broken by the dog’s pause to inspect a scent mark, or a move off the trail to paw among the stones where a year before he had cached meat.

The movement down the trail would seem relentless if it did no appear so effortless. The dog’s body, from neck to hips, appears to float over his long, almost spindly legs and the flicker of wrists, a bicycling drift through the trees, reminiscent of the movement of water or of shadows. The dog is four years old. A male. The trees he is moving among are spruce and alpine fir on the eastern slope of the Alps in southern Germany. He is for the most part polar white – even his eyelashes and whiskers are snowy – but there are blond and grey hairs mixed in the saddle of fur that covers his shoulders and extends down his spine and even a few silver and red hairs mixed in too.

It is early May; an easy time of year is coming though there is still the chance of unpredictable windstorms and snow. Still the temperature is pleasant. Deer and cows are fat. Suddenly the dog stops mid-stride. A moment, then his feet come slowly alongside each other. He is staring into the distance. His ears are rammed forward, stiff. His back arches and he rears up and pounces like a cat. A deer mouse is pinned between his forepaws. Eaten. The dog drifts on. He approaches a trail, crossing an undistinguished crossroads. His movement is now slower and he sifts the air. He sniffs a scent post, a scrawny blueberry bush in use for years, and goes on.

The dog weighs 130 pounds and stands 39 inches at the shoulder. His feet are enormous, leaving prints in the mud along a creek (where he pauses to hut crayfish but not with much interest) more than five inches long by just over four wide. He has two fractured ribs, broken by a cow the year before – they are healed now, but a sharp eye would notice the irregularity – and a once long-plumed tail unceremoniously docked after being accidentally caught in a slamming door.

The dog is tied by subtle threads to the woods he moves through. His coat carries seeds that will fall off, effectively dispersed, along the trail some miles from where they first caught in his fur. And miles distant is a raven perched on the ribs of a rabbit the dog killed ten days ago, pecking like a chicken at the decaying scraps of meat. A smarter snowshoe hare that eluded the dog and left him exhausted when he was a pup has been dead a year now, food for an owl. The den in which he was born one April evening farther up the mountains was home to foxes last winter.

It is now late in the afternoon. The dog has stopped traveling, has sat down to look at the sun before it goes behind the mountains. After a few moments he flops on his side, rises, stretches, and moves a few feet to inspect – minutely, delicately – a crevice in the rock outcropping and finds or doesn’t find what draws him there. And then he ascends the rock face, bound and balancing momentarily before bounding again, appearing slightly more unsure of the process – but committed. A few minutes later he bolts suddenly into the woods, achieving full speed, almost 35 kmh, for forty or fifty yards before he begins to skid, to lunge at a lodgepole pine cone. He trots away with it, head erect, tail stub erect, his hips slightly to one side and out of line with his shoulders, as though hindquarters were impatient with forequarters, the cone inert in his mouth. He carries it for a hundred feet before dropping it by the trail. He sniffs it. He goes on.

The underfur next to his skin has begun to shed with the coming of summer. In the fall and winter it will become so dense it will be almost impossible to comb it through to the skin. In several months he will weigh more: 150 pounds. He will have tried unsuccessfully to dislodge a newcomer puppy from the house where he lives. He will have learned to herd deer, and will have fallen through ice into a creek. He will have fought with dogs on neighboring farms.

He moves along now to the edge of a clearing. The wind coming down-valley surrounds him with a river of odors, as if he were a migrating salmon. He can smell ptarmigan and deer. He can smell spruce and the fading sweetness of fireweed. Above he sees a hawk circling, and farther south, lower on the horizon, a flock of sparrows going north. He senses through his pads with each step the dryness of the moss beneath his feet and the ridges of old tracks, some of them his own. He hears the sound his feet make. He hears the occasional movement of deer mice and voles.

But, finally, dogs go with people. This dog trots off obliquely to the place where his person is also outside, also exploring. They approach each other across a small clearing, briskly, almost formally, postures stiff; greeting abruptly with caresses and licks. And then they are gone, down a vague trail, the human first. After a few hundred yards they begin to walk side by side.