Dog sledding in north of Finland
When I met Suka for the first time, she was working as a sled dog in the north of Finland. I was working there too. It was a hard, physical lifestyle, but it had its consolations.
The dogs began to howl for their breakfast at four or five in the morning, as we lugged heavy sledges laden with meat through the dark. I didn’t see daylight for more than a month but the sky was a shifting wall of technicolour: a pink and purple dawn teasing the sky for hours, never quite spilling into sunrise. Blood-red noons. The moon hung heavy in the sky, burnt orange, and at night, the stars blazed with a fierce intensity. The aurora in veils of green and gold.
This was the winter of 2012. I’d taken the kennels job as an escape route from a life in the city that had been making me sick. What had begun as urban ennui had metastasised into a more malignant form of depression, one I had never experienced before. By the time I left London for the Arctic, I’d had the uncanny sensation of watching my life unfold as if through glass for a period of six months or more.
I’d known instinctively that the harshness of an Arctic climate and a challenging manual job would serve as a sort of shock therapy for my brain: that through corporeal trial I might reunite body and mind, force them to work in concert once more. So there I was, in Finland. As a career move, I wouldn’t recommend it. But the thing is: it worked. My soft hands coarsened – I grew callouses on my palms and my numb fingertips were peeling. My sinews tightened, my clavicles sharpened. I felt more fully alive than I had in years.
To begin with, the dogs were an anonymous canine horde with deep barks and flashing eyes. But soon I saw them for who they really were: good-natured familiars, with names and personalities. Monty, the old boy with only half a tongue – an injury from licking ice-cold metal as a pup. Pikkis, with his big black eyes and phocine face. Little Rosie, who would jump from the roof of her kennel into your outstretched arms. And Suka.
Suka was my favourite dog: a docile, heart-faced creature who closed her eyes in ecstasy when you rubbed her rump. Small in stature and not too strong, she might not have been a valuable sled dog had she not been the only female dog submissive enough to run with Hulda – an athletic, pointy-eared bitch – without getting into fights.
Designing dog teams is a feat of matchmaking: the dogs run in pairs, sorted for strength and intelligence. Everyone has to get along with their partners. As long as Hulda was running, Suka had an important role: official wing-woman to the top female lead dog. I liked to watch them together on the start line: Hulda snapping and yowling, cavorting like a demon in her harness, ready to run. Suka beside her, ears perked, waiting,
sweet-natured. When she was allowed in at night, I would bribe her to sleep on my bed, curled up tight like a cat. Where the other dogs were bouncy or rambunctious, she was watchful and reserved. She was, in other words, a perfect companion. Whether she felt the same about me was more difficult to tell.
Seven years later, I am deep in concentration on a writing residency in Switzerland when I get an unexpected call from Finland. Suka is nearly 11, ready to retire. She’s slowing down, getting stiff, holding up the team. Might I give her a home? I don’t hesitate.
A former colleague brings Suka overland to the UK for me. I meet them in a cafe, buy her breakfast, then it’s just me and my dog. She is smaller than I remembered, and – mid-moult – has a dishevelled, bewildered air. Having barely left home for her entire life, she has travelled through five countries in as many days. My presence seems barely to register; she lets me pat her but refuses to meet my eye.
I drive us home, to where my partner Rich is waiting. We show Suka her new bed, her new bowls, her new collar. We take her for a sniff around the town. People want to know: did she recognise you? I say it’s difficult to tell.
It’s difficult to tell a lot of things. Suka is quiet and respectful. She gets up when I ask her to. Sits when I tell her to. She’ll take a treat gently from my hand but she won’t always eat it. The closest I can find is that it’s like hosting a foreign exchange student; she is scrupulously, unfailingly polite. But I have the very faintest impression she might be saving up slights to tell her friends about later.
On our first walks, she finds a cold welcome from the local dogs. Something in her gait, her manner – her smell, perhaps – seems to get their backs up. She assumes a dignified bearing, declines to engage. When, finally, a friendly pup approaches, almost frantic to meet her, Suka doesn’t seem to know how to react. Out of a hundred huskies she might have been the softest of them all but here amid the Labradors and spaniels she seems proud and stand-offish.
In the house, I don’t quite know how to place her. She does not follow me around, as other dogs will. She has her own agenda. She does not beg at the table. She does not bark. She does not come when she is called.
Her body language is peculiar too. She will wag her tail but the exact meaning is difficult to parse: rather than the uncomplicated happiness of a pet dog getting its cuddles, it signals a more ambiguous kind of anticipation. Praise or attention might merit a slow pendulum swing but the approach of an aggressive dog or a visit to the vet occasionally elicits a fulsome swish of the kind I might once have hoped for on arriving home after a long day.
She is entirely benevolent, except when she’s not. She has no interest in fighting. She is entirely neutral on the subject of cats. But early one morning, in the dancing light of a sun cast low through bare branches, a sparrow darts from a tumbledown wall and her jaws snap shut. It leaves this world as fast as it appeared. She swallows it whole. This makes me look at her afresh: this dog knows what she’s doing. It’s not that I’m unnerved,