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Kevin Anderson hated dogs. All his friends knew that. The only person who didn’t know was his brother, Jimmy, who invited him to Vermont to climb a mountain. Jimmy’s Alaskan Malamute, Sasha, accompanied them on the climb, and his actions changed Kevin’s anti-dog attitude forever.
We’ve all heard of those valiant St. Bernard dogs with the little barrel of whiskey strapped to their collar that rescue
people stranded in the Alps. Dogs like Sasha, who Kevin calls the Wooly Mammoth, also operate in the mountains to help lost or endangered climbers. But dogs do so much
more work in our society today than most of us realize, from the cadaver dogs who helped find human remains in the ruins of the World Trade Center to bomb- and drug-sniffing dogs to scent tracking dogs that can help find missing persons.
Dogs today toil in police departments’ K-9 corps, but many human volunteers also prepare their dogs for search-and-rescue missions. These dogs must be trained by age two; by age seven their ability to scent begins to fail and they are retired. Drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs must be trained to a particular scent. Most working dogs are trained to a passive alert: The dog sits and points, for example, rather than digging and possibly setting off an explosion or damaging a crime scene.
Kevin Anderson learned one mantra that dog handlers repeat over and over: Trust your dog. Kevin Anderson did, and it changed his life. He told me about it after work in Detroit.
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WHEN HE CAME BACK from serving in Iraq for a year, my brother, Jimmy, decided we needed some sort of bonding, brotherly ceremony: On Christmas Eve—a cold day, mind you— he wanted us to climb a profoundly high mountain. The problem was, I lived in the city, wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of hiking boots, had no interest in mountains, and didn’t like outdoor air. If I needed to see some green, I ordered lettuce.
And while I was out to all my intimate friends, I was not out to my brother. He still thought of me in the sweet-and- sour terms of our boyhood, when he, the younger brother, would jump on my back and wrestle me to the ground, and I’d wrestle him. It was probably an exchange that meant completely different things to each of us.
We were raised outside of Detroit in a so-called normal family situation: Our father worked at a factory every day and drank on the weekends; our mother drank during the week and yelled at our father on the weekends. Dad died of a heart attack years ago, and neither one of us goes back to see Mom much. Mom never approved of anything I did, and she still doesn’t know I’m gay.
Jimmy wasn’t gay, so I thought he got along fine with Mom. It surprised me that he didn’t want to spend Christmas with her, either.
We really didn’t know all that much about each other. He’s eleven years younger than I am. And our mother always got between us.
He’d been climbing this mountain in Vermont almost every single day, and he wanted his big brother to join him. And I couldn’t say no, partly because I’d been bragging about my physical capabilities. The hospital where I work has a great gym, and I got in the habit of taking lunch at a weird hour so I could have the equipment mostly to myself and not worry about wiping somebody else’s sweat off the seat before I sat down.
Then I even bought a multisystem workout bench so I could do leg curls and biceps extensions and lateral pull-downs and power crunches in my spare time. I was lifting regularly, and working on my cardio fitness, so I’d been bragging to him about it. Probably because I was angry that he was in the Reserves and spent a year in Iraq and had all these credits on his side for patriotism and service to the country and generally good behavior that I was never going to have.
My brother’s house in Vermont was this cute, gingerbready, Victorian, little-town thing. There was an old wooden rocker on the porch, even though there was snow all around. And all kinds of Christmas wreaths and Christmas decorations and this Santa in a red sleigh and reindeer with noses that were light bulbs that lit up. The whole thing made me wince.
I knocked on the door, and it swung open, and my brother said, “Kevin!”And my heart melted because he’s my brother, he’d been in Iraq, and I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He chucked me on the shoulder, and I shook his hand. He called, “Patty! Kevin’s here!”
And out from the kitchen came his blond, busty, smiling girlfriend. I went over and kissed her on the cheek. She looked me in the eye, and I could see right away—she knew.
She was surprised, but she was sympathetic, too. I could see she wasn’t some backwoods redneck who was going to give me a lecture about the Bible. She was very warm and shook my hand and gave it this slight pressure, which meant a million things to me. It said, “I know, I know Jimmy doesn’t know, I’m not going to say a thing to him, you are welcome, you’re his brother, I just don’t want Jimmy to be hurt.”All this passed through with this one little pressure from her hand.
I realized that the two of us had the same goal in mind. We wanted to get through the weekend making sure that Jimmy had a good time. That was the main thing.
And the next thing that happened has the most meaning for this story: They opened the back door, and this giant thing came bounding in.
This gigantic mass of fur was like one of those strange, prehistoric elephants from the Pleistocene Age that I had previously seen only on Dinosaur Discovery Day at the Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor. Instead of being smooth and gray, it’s covered with long, rough hair, and it’s called a Wooly Mammoth. This beast was galloping toward me in my brother’s house.
It bounded in, and just before it hurdled itself into my groin, Jimmy said, “This is Sasha.”
I suddenly realized there was something else about me Jimmy didn’t know: I hated dogs. I hated all of them. I hated big ones, I hated small ones. I hated furry ones, I hated smooth ones. I hated ones with big eyes and long noses, and I hated ones with shiny hair and flat noses. I hated all the dogs I had ever come across. As far as I could tell, they were whiny, needy, clingy, sad creatures whose favorite things to do were mount your leg, stick their nose in your genitals, pee on your furniture, demand to be taken out even in cold and rainy weather, and generally make life awful.
So here I was with my little brother, who I was feeling all weepy and sad for, and he had—a dog. And this dog ran straight up to me, and I thought that I was going to get the big schnozz in the genitals, but he stopped an inch short of extreme pain. And he looked up at me and he grinned.
Now this was something new, because previously I did not know that a dog could grin. But the only way I could describe his face is—he grinned. I got this weird feeling that, just like Patty the girlfriend, this dog knew. How did he know? Did he care? Was my gayness going to be a problem in dogland?
It had never occurred to me that gayness might be something that a dog didn’t like. But I had never seen a dog like this, a gargantuan monolith of the dog world, and maybe his thought processes were different from the Jack Russells and Yorkies and Chihuahuas that my friends own.
So I said to Jimmy, “What kind of dog is that?”
And he said, proudly, as he handed me a beer, “Alaskan Malamute.”
I said, “I never heard of an Alaskan Malamute.”
Jimmy said, while the dog started bounding around the room, narrowly missing the furniture, that an Alaskan Malamute was a sled dog. And that Eskimos and polar explorers harnessed the dogs to a sled that they pulled through the ice and snow all the way to the North Pole. He said a dog like this was worth its weight in gold in Alaska. And I was kind of impressed.
In the meantime, the Wooly Mammoth was making me really uncomfortable. He put his head on my knee and looked up at me with these big eyes.
Jimmy started telling me how much fun we were going to have on this climb. He’d been going up and down this mountain since he got back from Iraq two months before, though never all the way to the top. But in honor of us brothers being together, he wanted us to go all the way.
Secretly, I groaned, because in my letters to him I had bragged many times about what great physical condition I was in. I told him I was bench-pressing 100 pounds. But what he didn’t realize was that I was doing it for nicer-looking pecs and a six-pack of abs and better cut to my calves. He thought I was doing it for physical accomplishment.
We sat around talking, and of course Jimmy asked me if I was seeing anybody. Patty looked at me with an absolute blank look. And I said, well, yes. Jimmy whistled and said, “What’s her name? Is she hot? You should bring her up here some time.”
I said, “Uh, Stevie.”
He started asking me more questions, and then Patty said, “Dinner’s served!”
I could’ve kissed her, because this just wasn’t a conversation I wanted to get into with my brother right then.
After dinner Jimmy dressed me. Which, in an odd turn of events, was fun for him and torture for me. He got out this thick, heavy, ugly jacket that you can wear in case the temperature drops to fifty below zero. And he pulled out two pairs of socks—“one for insulation and the other for protection.”And worst of all, the boots. I had honestly hoped to pass my entire life without ever wearing a pair of Timberland tough and rugged, tire-treaded size tens. I looked exactly like the Sta-Puf Marshmallow man, stumbling along stepping on little kids and small cars.
The dog was lying on the floor, looking at me with his calm eyes.
The alarm went off at five the next morning, and I smacked it down and ignored it. The door opened, and I thought it was going to be my brother. If he’d have come in there all full of good cheer, I would have popped and told him that I’m gay, I’m not into sports, my gym is a hangout place, I’m a complete fraud, let’s forget the whole thing.
But it was the damn dog. He came over to the bed and put his head down and snuffled my hand. And he wouldn’t stop. I moved my hand and smacked him to go away. Then I realized that’s what he wanted. He thought I was petting him. He came back again—snuffle, snuffle, snuffle—getting real close to me, and when I didn’t get up, he leapt up onto the bed, put his head over mine and started giving me these big, wet kisses. I thought I was going to be ill. I said, “OK! OK! OK!”
I stumbled around the room and started to put clothes on. Fortunately I had only drunk half the beer the night before. So when Jimmy whistled, I screamed back, “I’m coming!”Then I realized he wasn’t whistling for me but for the dog.
In the kitchen Jimmy was putting a leather harness on the dog. Briefly I imagined a sled, myself riding in it under a blanket, and Jimmy running along behind. But Jimmy said the harness was good to grab in case you fell; the dog could pull you up. Well, maybe he could pull Jimmy up, because he sure as hell better stay away from me.
We got to the mountain. There was a glass-enclosed bulletin board with a notice that read, “Snowshoeing in the Green Mountains is exhilarating, but trips must be well planned as the margin for error on a winter hike is small.”
That made me uncomfortable. I read on: “The trail is marked with white blazes, which can be difficult to see against the snow” and “Deep snow may obscure all signs of the trail—maps and a compass are helpful.” Great. I left mine at my last Boy Scout meeting.
We strapped on the snowshoes. I could see the trail, and the snow was really hard, so I asked Jimmy, “Do we really need these things?”
And he said, “Yeah, because otherwise you’re going to posthole, and even if you’re OK, you make holes in the trail that are bad for other people.” I was thinking, I don’t see any other people.
We started off. The fresh air was invigorating. It had an intoxicating touch, and the sky had a warm glow, and the trees were outlined in black, like sculptures. I’d never seen this combination of tough and delicate in the city.
Jimmy had already climbed Camel’s Hump and Mt. Abraham. He needed to climb this mountain, Mt. Mansfield, to bag his Vermont 4,000-footers. (That’s how he talked, mountain-climber talk. )
He said, “We are going to do around five miles, with 2, 800 feet of elevation.” I had no idea what that meant.
The dog kept bounding along, totally unafraid. Nothing bothered him. He was so beautiful that I could see why my brother liked him. He had the incredible strength you can have with lots of exercise; he was like our guardian, and no matter how far he went, he always came back to check on us; and he had this incredible exuberance. When we saw him looking around for small animals to hunt, we saw his wildness, like at any moment he was going to strip off the veneer of civilization and attack a bear. I thought like that for about twenty minutes.
Then the trail started to go straight up. I thought, How the hell am I going to manage that? We kept struggling onwards and upwards. Always in front of me, I saw this figure of my brother. Sometimes he was struggling, too, because it was hard.
We got to a place called Smuggler’s Notch. There’s a small shelter there, and some park ranger had written up some more helpful advice: “Stay alert to the dangers of hypothermia and frostbite. Know the signs and how to treat them.”
The sun came out, and it was warm on my face, so it didn’t look like hypothermia was going to be a problem.
We hung around there looking at the great view. Jimmy said, “Let’s pick up the pace.”
I wanted to murder him because I thought we had come up this far at a backbreaking, Olympic, Flo-Jo pace.
Then we set off on the Profanity Trail. That made me happy. I imagined all the profanity that had been let loose on this damn trail by people dragged there by brothers or boyfriends. I started reciting profanity in honor of the trail: “Damn! Piss! Fuck! Shit! Whore! Asshole! Prick! Dickhead! Douchebag!” I tried to think up curse words in French and Spanish, too.
My brother and the dog disappeared up ahead. I just couldn’t go fast in those damn snowshoes. I thought if I didn’t have the snowshoes on, I could jog for a few minutes and get caught up. The trail was hard as a rock. In fact it seemed to be some sort of cliff I was going along. If I just stayed away from the ledge, I should be OK.
I unstrapped the snowshoes and stuck them into the rucksack on my back. They didn’t weigh much, but when I went to walk, it was like I had just taken a hundred pounds off my feet. I started walking real fast, then I broke into a jog, and then—wham! I didn’t see any goddamn hole, and yet there I was, fallen into a huge hole up to my shoulders.
How the hell was I going to get out? I had pretty good upper-body strength, but while I was scratching and wriggling, trying to get my trunk up on the level ground, I realized something else: There was no mountain beneath me. I was on a shelf made of snow and ice that was sticking out from the top of the mountain.
I had never seen an avalanche in my life, but it suddenly occurred to me how they happen. Shelves like this form, sticking out of the mountain, and then they crack off and tumble hundreds of feet down, taking all trees and humans and anything else with them. Funny, the things you learn in moments of complete panic.
I was calling out, “Jimmy! Jimmy!” and then I switched to “Help! Help me!” But we hadn’t seen another soul. Who would be so crazy as to come out on a Christmas Eve morning to freeze their ass off trying to climb a mountain when they could be home with a warm breakfast?
Who came? The dog. The Wooly Mammoth saw my situation, and he got this really serious look on his face. But instead of bounding up with his usual enthusiasm, he walked very slowly toward me, as if he knew he didn’t want to disturb this shelf or we would both die.
When he got to me, he licked my face. I just wanted him to get me out. I grabbed him, and there was that leather harness. He waited till I got a good grip, and then he started backing up, pulling me. It went real slow, because I realized I didn’t want to kick around a lot and disturb the shelf. So I stayed still, and even when my body was out and I was flat on the ground, I let him keep pulling me until he thought it was safe. He stopped and put his nose in my face, saying, “Huh? Huh?”
This dog weighed like, ninety pounds. I outweighed him by seventy pounds, and yet he had pulled me off that cliff. Something to think about.
I threw my arms around him and noticed how warm he was. He wasn’t even breathing hard. There was still no sign of Jimmy; he was dancing on ahead, not even worried about me. I put on the snowshoes.
I got to the next resting place, which is called Taft Lodge, and there were more warnings: “Those people who are not in great physical condition are advised to turn around and go back now.”
Good idea. Only I wasn’t sure that I could find my way back. There were lots of turns and places where the trail disappears, and we had crossed over fields. And besides, I wasn’t hurt, and my brother was up ahead, and the whole idea was to get to the top. So I went on.
The dog stayed with me, as if he had decided I needed watching. I came to a fork, and it seemed pretty obvious to me I should take the left. I went a couple steps, and the dog barked. He had stopped back at the fork. Then he turned his head and looked up the right fork. It couldn’t be more obvious. He was telling me my brother went the other way. So we went that way.
We were so high up that there were beautiful views. That’s something you never get over, looking out over beautiful mountains that go on and on, and it’s just you and nature.
We went a while longer and I fell again. This time it wasn’t so bad, because I had the snowshoes on, but I was beat and it was tough to get up. I felt like I had no strength left. The dog was right there, and he pulled me up. I had to go on; he just wouldn’t let me quit.
Finally we got to the top. My brother was in the shelter, gloves off, sitting there, looking warm, steam rising out of his thermos, and he grinned when he saw me stumbling in, and offered me a cup of hot coffee. This warm, steaming, great-smelling cup of civilization. What did I do? I burst into tears.
I was shaking. I couldn’t take the cup. I wobbled onto the bench, bawling my eyes out, and I said, “Jimmy, I’m gay.”
He said, “What?”
I told him again. I told him that I’m not the brother he thought I was, that I’ve been mean and rotten to him, that I wish I wasn’t gay so he wouldn’t have to have a gay brother, but I am. While I was talking, the dog started rubbing his body against my knees. I grabbed him like my lifeline.
Jimmy said, “Does Stevie know?”
I said, “It’s Stephen, not Stevie. Stephen.” I gave a little laugh.
The dog moved over. He started rubbing against my brother’s legs. My brother looked uncomfortable. I was thinking it was because of me, and how awful that weekend was going to be. But then he said, no, he was sorry about making me climb the mountain, he only did it because he hoped I would fail. He said that I was always the older brother who could do everything, and he always felt like he couldn’t measure up. He said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made you come out here.”
I asked him if he was mad that I’m gay. He thought about it. He said, “No, I’m more mad you’re a climber.”
I told him about the climb, how I almost died and the dog came and rescued me, and we both started petting the Wooly Mammoth, who loved it of course. He sat between us, looking from one to the other with this dopey, happy look on his face.
Then we started feeling the wind, and we decided it was time to go back down. The descent was easy and fun, and we glissaded most of the way. We had no problem following our snowshoe tracks down. We reached the car around two, just as snow was starting to fall.
And I decided, right then, that I had to have a Wooly Mammoth of my own. Jimmy called a couple people, and he figured that if I came back in the summer, there would be some puppies.
After a while, I realized I couldn’t have a Wooly Mammoth in my apartment. I started thinking about how the hair would shed and how the shelves behind the bar sometimes wobble if someone starts dancing hard. But I really wanted the Wooly Mammoth. It was a big dilemma.
I talked to Jimmy about it, and he had an idea. We went to see a friend of his who had adopted a Greyhound from a racetrack. This animal was sleek and gorgeous, much quieter than the woolly mammoth. The way he sat around, posing on his pillow, he was more like a work of art than a prehistoric creature. But he had a lot in common with the Wooly Mammoth, including those big eyes that look right inside your soul and see everything.
So I got a Greyhound and named him Lincoln. He is gentle and understanding. I’ve told him all about the Wooly Mammoth and how he outed me that weekend, but Lincoln is too kind to judge. Next summer I am going to drive him out to my brother’s house so he can meet the Wooly Mammoth and have a word with him. Lincoln would never out anybody. He’s not that kind of dog.
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