As for the trek home: though I have by now taken many long journeys across the frozen waste—too many to tell—I am no Nansen, so I limit myself to that which is memorable. Tapio felt that a retracing of our steps, with its gauntlet of thawing ice, glacial bibs, crevasses, and shoreline rock, would result in my demise, or that of our “team.” Our new return journey, much more direct, led us over and between mountain ranges, in depths of snow I would have previously considered implausible, and seemed just as likely to be my last.
Initially, the reindeer was perfectly willing, and an amiable companion. The dog less so. This meant that I was paired with the reindeer, owing to my lack of experience on skis (and otherwise). I stood or knelt upon the sled as the reindeer pulled. I was instructed severely to keep hold of the reins at all costs, as they were the only things preventing the animal from escaping with all our gear.
Exodus was an idea that seemed to occur regularly to him, and three times he brought his plan into action, waiting until I was dozing and then bolting away. It was as though he could sense my inattention. Each time I was ejected from the sled and each time I gave up the reindeer—and our lives—for lost. Fortunately Tapio was not so easily dispirited, and the reindeer always allowed himself to be caught and led back. Perhaps he remembered the wild, hungry life he had once led, and deemed hard labor and reliable grain to be preferable. Perhaps Tapio reminded him of the Sami man who had been kind to him.
But the third escape was the ruin of our sled, for it careened against a boulder as the reindeer made for his liberty. Our supplies were mostly intact, but the sled was beyond repair. At that point, the gear once again split between our two packs, I had to strap the dreaded skis back onto my protesting feet and try to stay upright while the reindeer trotted along at his uneven clip. We had traveled less than a mile like this before the arrangement was abandoned. Tapio took the reindeer, and I was given to Eberhard.
It was with trepidation that I approached my new relationship with the dog, who had been a fractious, willful brute from the moment we left civilization. Tapio was not the sort of person to use force or fear on an animal, but he was firm. In spite of this decency, Eberhard appeared to retain vivid memories of his treatment on the sled team, or as a Longyear stray, and he resented them. Whenever Tapio shook the harness firmly or shouted his directional commands, the dog would either turn around and snarl with real animosity, or shriek with a weird unearthly vehemence as though he were being murdered. This had terrified the reindeer. Eventually Tapio and the dog had settled into a workable alliance, but neither party was pleased, and at night Tapio staked Eberhard a good distance from our tent, claiming that if the dog were consumed by an ice bear, at least he would perform one good deed by alerting us to the danger with his pitiful scream.
Up until the switch, Eberhard and I had had very little to do with one another, mostly due to my general inexperience with dogs. In industrial Stockholm, pet dogs were a luxury. I’m sure Olga and I begged for a Norwegian wolfhound or a spaniel or some such nonsense, as all children do, and I’m equally sure the request was rebuffed as offensive or ridiculous. There were strays, of course, but from childhood we had been instructed not to engage with them, lest they impart their myriad diseases upon us. Also, packs of feral dogs were known to kill and eat wayward children who loitered or took shortcuts through alleys. That, at least, is what we were given to understand by our parents.
I learned quickly that dogs are discriminating individuals. Anyone who says otherwise—that all it takes is a piece of meat and a dog is your comrade for life—is a fool. Within five minutes of our being attached to each other by harness and rope, Eberhard appeared to sense something in me that he rather liked. At the very least, he was wholly unthreatened. I shouted the directional commands I’d learned from untold miles of listening to Tapio, in as gruff and officious a tone as I could summon, to no effect whatsoever. I could curse until my throat was sore, or yank the rope with great force, or plant myself on the ground and bring him to a violent stop—it did not matter. He never cowered or showed his teeth. He never shrieked. He was an entirely new animal: sometimes placid and sanguine; sometimes rambunctious and, I had to admit, almost merry.
This change in attitude made our journey no less difficult. The reindeer had all but transformed himself under Tapio’s steady leadership. So had Eberhard under mine, yet not in a productive way. Sometimes he pulled and pulled, wholly inexhaustible. But only when he was feeling exuberant, in which case he was pleased to drag more than two hundred pounds of clumsy weight up and down slopes, through snow up to his ears, with little acknowledgment of the cargo or the difficulty. At other times, though, he did not wish to pull me at all, preferring instead to run alongside my skis, looking up at me with his tongue hanging out. Occasionally he even ran behind me, taking pleasure, it seemed, in the trails I was making on his behalf, treading on the backs of my skis and getting our harness horribly tangled. At those times I would shout at him, swinging my ski pole in a threatening arc, and he would simply gaze at me, impassive.
He delighted in eating reindeer shit. This would send Tapio into a rage because it brought our beasts in close proximity to each other, which invariably resulted in a knot of ropes, or turned the reindeer’s fickle attention away from his burden in order to kill the dog. Worse, Eberhard made me complicit in his crimes. He ducked under Tapio’s harness to inhale the falling reindeer pellets only when he was running beside me, and while he engaged in this transgression he kept his eyes on mine, his mouth open and his tongue lolling in a look of demented satisfaction that conveyed a clear message: Is not this great fun?
We proceeded in this haphazard fashion for the remainder of the journey. At times I caught myself thinking that perhaps it would have been easier without the creatures, but of course it would have been nothing of the kind. I likely would have died. In grateful recognition of the fact that I had not, I felt it necessary to give Eberhard bits of my own rations.
This, Tapio insisted, was a grave misdeed. “You will ruin him,” he said on several occasions.
“He is already ruined,” I said, winking my lone eye at the dog.
“He will cease pulling altogether if he’s always keeping watch on your food sack.”
“He pulls when he wishes,” I said. “My influence is profoundly limited.”
No longer resigned to Eberhard’s fate as a meal, I staked him closer and closer at night. When, to Tapio’s horror, I stopped staking him altogether, Eberhard slept with half his body outside the tent and half in, his head resting on my feet. Tapio protested, but without much enthusiasm. He only muttered ruefully, and so we relied on the reindeer’s little bells to warn us of intruders.