DOG BITES

Creation happens more than once. In our lifetimes, we are re-created over and over again. The land we live with is re-created over and over again. Our families are re-created over and over again. Each recreation braids the old and the new, the métissage of memory and creation.

Here is one such story:

...in the beginning was the darkness, the snow and cold.

When I was eight years old, the world was new, once again, and I was recreated in it. My mother and I left the Yukon for Aklavik, Northwest Territories: she was a twenty-seven-year old divorcée and I was her only child. My grandparents had moved to Aklavik the previous summer so that my grandfather could live out his dream of flying bush planes. Mother and I followed them to the Arctic, just as we had followed them to the Yukon.

We arrived in Aklavik on eve of the winter solstice. When Mother and I climbed out of the bush plane onto the river ice, we stepped into darkness. For the next two months, the night sky was an endless black, lit only by the stars and the cycles of the moon. Each day darkness faded from a sliver of dusk to an increasing arc of muted bluegray or pinkyellow only to collapse back into darkness tired of the seemingly endless struggle between dark and light.

I had to find my way in this new world. Although it was dark and cold, I ventured out-of-doors and trotted around the small town, like a lone wolf pup sniffing out new territory. One night—very soon after we arrived in town—I travelled around town alone following the hard-packed human trails that criss-crossed the village. The trail took me to the back of a shack, and I came upon a husky staked behind the house. When I approached, my boots crunched in the snow, alerting the dog. He lifted his big head as if it were a great effort and stared directly at me without blinking. On the other side of the dog, a raven jumps around and cackles. Picking at the ground with his beak, he dances closer to the dog. I creep forward and offer my mittened-hand, just like Nana, who raised Doberman Pinschers, had taught me. Nana always said:

"Never be afraid of strange dogs. Hold out your hand. Offer your smell."

But her advice came from in a different world, a different time, one where dogs were pets and Myna birds were kept in cages. Here in Aklavik, Raven is free to talk and tease whomever he pleases, especially the huskies. Here in Aklavik I am an unsuspecting pup wanting to play. My potential companion is curled in a circle; his bony back rimming a small depression in the snow, his wolf tail cloaking his paws and legs folded in conserving precious belly heat. When I come close enough to reach out and offer my hand, the husky snubs my hand. Instead, he curls his lips, and Raven cackles and dances around again.

Then the husky jumps up and grabs my outstretched hand, as if to greet me. At first, I think this is a game of Tug-a-War, like the ones we played at the Dominion Day picnics on the 1st of July. I pull one direction, the husky pulls harder in the other. Then with his massive paws splayed in the snow, he braces himself and pulls back with all his power. He jerks his head—with my hand in it—left and right, back and forth, trying to take me down. He clenches his teeth harder, and the top incisor penetrates the mittens. He grinds further, and the incisor reaches the soft flesh of my palm. The flesh is tearing, the hand shakes from the wrist, the arm swings in the socket. My young, southern city self is being transformed. In the microsecond before the husky can overturn me, I give up a self and past I didn't even know I had. In a split second, I abandon my southern manners, the protocols I—like all southern suburban children—learned at great cost in childhood: play fair, take turns, and be nice to animals. In this moment, I am recreated as a young girl who can survive here in this place, alone, under the aurora borealis, with only Raven as my witness.

With my one free hand and both legs, I punch and kick at fur, head, ribs and back. Any part of the dog I can reach. Through the tears and the snot and the fur of my parka hood, my screams register a note of human power, a pitch typically accompanied by the crack of a whip. The husky's jaw relaxes momentarily and I scramble backwards—just far enough. He leaps at me, but a short chain jerks his head back, and his body follows. The commotion rouses other dogs staked nearby. In an instant, the entire team is leaping and lurching for me but their chains snap them back to their wooden stake and the piss-crusted snow around it.

As I scramble away from the edge of this tight circle, the dogs continue to snarl and curse, their stinky fish breath frozen in the air with nowhere to go. They lift their heads in a cosmic howl for freedom, for the loss of the hunt and the kill of the pack. I turn away and start the walk back to Nana's house, my new home in this new world. Tears on my eyelashes crystallize, and through them the path ahead glitters. Behind me, Raven lifts off from the snow and is gone. The crunch of my boots on the snow is a comfort now.

No one in my family remembers this time, when the world was new and I was re-created in it. Or maybe they just don't believe me. Maybe I just never told them. Perhaps I too would doubt this memory, if I could not reach out, right this moment, and touch the palm of my left hand. If I could not feel the white tooth scar paralleling my lifeline, severing my heart line.

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