Drop City

country, I mean. If it wasn't for Pamela, I'd be climbing a tree right now, I'd be picking fights at the Three Pup, passed out on the floor, too sick to run my traps and club that lynx today out of its misery. Which, by the way, I ought to drag in here and skin.” There was a silence. “Stay tuned,” Sess said after a while, “that's my advice. But listen, we've got a long day tomorrow, up to the next camp on No Name Creek, and I've about had it, how about you?”
    They were up with the first light, which came just after nine A.M. in a gradual dull accretion of form and shadow beyond the window. Breakfast was moose stew. The dogs had dried salmon, choked down in a fury of wild-eyed snarling and jockeying for position. The sky was low and ironclad. The temperature was minus thirty-eight and rising.
    He helped Sess put the cabin in order--moose stew on the floor, water in the kettle, kindling and stove-cut lengths of birch and poplar stacked up in a crude box in the corner--and then they harnessed the dogs. To Marco's eye, the dogs weren't much--savage-tempered, erratically colored and furred, with long angular stick legs, narrow waists and big shoulders. Back home, in Connecticut, they would have languished in the dog pound for the required two weeks, unlovable, inelegant, unadoptable, and then they would have been put down one by one, a gentle stroking of the ears and then the quick sure jab of the needle. The two close in to the sled--the wheel dogs--were called Lester and Franklin, a Sess Harder reference (and homage, or so he claimed) to the Drop City dropouts he'd seen panning for water in a goldless creek one glorious summer day, and the one just behind Lucius, the lead dog, was called Sky, just to extend the joke. “Let's not make this a shaggy dog story,” Marco told him when the introductions went round out front of the cabin on the Thirtymile, and Sess liked that. “I guess I should've called one Norm,” he said.
    But now it was thirty-eight degrees below zero and there was no time for joking. The dogs were in a frenzy to get into the traces and get going--you could hardly slow them down for the first hour or so--and Marco was bitten twice, right down through his gloves and into the flesh, as he tried to clip Sky into the gangline, and if that wasn't bad karma he didn't know what was. “Jesus,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the din of the dogs, “are they always like this?”
    Sess had just waded into the middle of a three-dog fight, rearranging ribs with his moccasins and hammering the big furred heads with his balled-up fist. “You want dogs with spirit,” he said, and then they were off.
    That was a rush, pure exhilaration, the air so cold it burned, your lungs on fire with it, arms pumping like a marathoner's, now on the runners, now off, feeling the surge of uncontainable power that ran like an electric jolt through the spines and churning legs of the wolf-dogs and right into the sizzling core of you. Marco had never experienced anything like it. They hurtled along the trail, too energized to feel the cold, until they came to the first set and the dogs sensed it, smelled it, and pulled up short.
    The bait was gone, the trap sprung, and there were lynx tracks like mortal punctuation in the snow. Sess showed him how to reset the trap, sprinkle a couple handfuls of snow over it for concealment, then nail a rotted goose wing soaked in beaver castor three feet up the trunk of a tree just behind it. And what made the best bait? Whatever stank the most. For marten, Sess used the guts and roe of the salmon he'd caught last summer--after they'd been properly fermented in a mason jar set out in the sun for a couple weeks. “No big deal,” he said. “Little tricks. Anybody could learn them.”
    They stood there, looking down at the set, the dogs curled tail to nose in their traces, the faintest breeze agitating the treetops. “Even Joe Bosky?” Marco asked. “Even Pan?”
    Sess didn't bother to answer--the question was too irritating, Marco saw that immediately and wished he could take it back. To this point, he and Sess had been getting on heroically, of one mind, and as Sess saw that he could keep up, that he was hard-driven and no tourist at all, he'd given him a larger share of the responsibilities, harnessing and feeding the dogs, mushing them, building up the coffee fire at lunch.
    Sess was staring down at the scatter of tracks, hands at his hips, his parka so patched-over