Creature Discomforts

didn’t mind the rib-poking. On the contrary, I felt grateful to the unsuitably dressed couple for giving me the chance to catch my balance and my breath. The dogs had abruptly abandoned their hell-for-leather forward dash to devote themselves to performing a song-and-dance routine for the tourists. The a cappella music consisted of prolonged peals of a repeated syllable: Woo-woo-woo! Woo-woo-woo-woo-woo! The male spun twice around in a circle. His polished, show-off manner suggested that he was executing a well-practiced trick. Perhaps hampered by her pack, the female settled for wagging her whole body to the rhythm of her tail. Then, as if on cue, the dogs j planted themselves in neat sits in front of the hypnotized couple and, in unison, raised their right paws. I couldn’t tell! whether they were offering to shake hands or were simply waving. By now, the man had the video camera going.
    “Look, Harold!” the woman exclaimed. “That one’s wearing a backpack! Isn’t that cute?” To me, however, she said, “It looks awfully heavy.”
    “Making the dog do all the work, huh?” agreed Harold, eyeing the absence of a pack on my own back.
    I merely said yes.
    “Looks like you took a tumble,” he said. “You all right?”
    “A little scratched,” I replied. “I’ll be all right.”
    “Some old guy got killed here today,” the man reported. “Fell on the rocks.”
    Smiling with undisguised excitement, the woman added, » “Right near here!” If she’d been passing along the news I that the Second Coming had just occurred at the summit of Dorr, she couldn’t have sounded happier. “On something called the Ladder Trail,” she went on. “Would you happen to know where that is?”
    “I don’t know my way around here.” By here, I meant the world.
    The woman scornfully pointed to a legend carved into the stone of the staircase I’d just descended. Kurt Diederich’s Climb, I read. A short time earlier, I’d seen the name on a trail sign. Shortly before that, I’d read it on the map in the guidebook. Even so, the words looked brand new.
    “The Nature Center’s right down that way.” The man pointed to one of several well-worn trails. “And the spring. Not worth visiting.” He glanced at his partner. “Well, I guess we’ll be on our way.” Equipped only with the video camera and the contents of the woman’s purse, the pair took a few steps toward the start of Kurt Diederich’s Climb. The man looked back. “Nice huskies,” he said.
    All on their own, the words seemed to activate a tape recorder stored in my throat. “Thank you,” I said automatically. “Actually, they’re Alaskan malamutes. Bigger than Siberian huskies. All malamutes have brown eyes.”
    “Well, beautiful dogs, whatever they are,” the man said in parting.
    The correction had leaped from my lips without the aid of my mangled brain. I looked at the dogs, who had transferred their attention from the tourists to me. “Alaskan malamutes,” I said. “Of course. Alaskan malamutes.” The syllables fit the shape of my vocal cords. I’d uttered them thousands of times. Strangers had admired my huskies. “Thank you,” I’d replied. “Actually, they’re Alaskan malamutes.”
    I was not, after all, stealing these oddly friendly and staggeringly beautiful dogs. On the contrary, they were miraculously my own.
    I felt ferociously proud. My dogs.
     

Chapter Three
     
    IF THE DOGS WERE MINE , so were the dogpacks, which, I now realized, matched the bright red of my own backpack. Pretty corny, that. A bit too much like the dressed-as-twins tourist couple I’d just met. In panic— was I, like the high-heeled hiker, the female half of a human twin set?—I examined the third finger of my left hand. It was bare. Good! If I had a husband, at least we did not have a traditional marriage. Or maybe we didn’t have a traditional American marriage. All that rice in the dogpack? The Asian owner. Myself! Holly Winter, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a right-handed Asian woman with a polysyllabic vocabulary and utterly magnificent dogs. He, Mr. Winter, was American. Or English? But we’d been joined in holy matrimony in the Far Eastern rite of my native culture. Back home at 256 Concord Avenue, our address, a ceremonial symbol of our union lay reverently preserved in the bejeweled cask handed down from generation to generation in what I somehow suspected was my devoutly religious family.
    The Asian marriage fantasy only