The Secret Thread

There she was: warm eyes, tail springing, nose poking under the door.

“Hello, dog.” She sniffed all around my hands, my bag, my seat. “We don’t have any food. I’m sorry.” Her fur was thin, dark brown and white at the chest, neck, snout and front legs, and after petting her, my fingers smelled of damp earth.

The sign said Reykjadalur 3.0 km and showed a graphic of two people walking with sticks. Before us was a wooden footpath crossing a narrow stream. Two orange-eyed oystercatchers bent their sharp carrot beaks in unison at the pebbled shore.

“What do you think?” asked the man I’d loved every day for over seven years.

Jack was asking if we should walk this three kilometer trail when we were meant to be in Reykjavík by now. There was the rental car return, the hotel check in, the retreat registration, and we also hoped to be there when the Dangerous Waters jet skiers headed off on their expedition that afternoon.

Should we take the journey that presented itself or be sensible?

“How far is three kilometers?” I asked.

“Oh, a little over a mile and a half,” Jack said, zipping up his persimmon Arcteryx jacket. Jack had taught me that it’s often what people don’t say that matters most. He didn’t say that it was a little under two miles.

“Let’s go a bit and see what we find,” I said, “Will you show us the way, dog?”

She perked her bent small ears attentively, listened, then trotted up the steaming mountain without question, without thought to herself and the foodless exhaustions of the journey ahead. The dog was Icelandic, thinking about others in a way that is bigger than the need for reward.

The black, wide path was firm, yet steep. The humans had to stop several times, turning to view steam rising here and there from the geothermal town of Hveragerði. I liked to say the name. Kuh-vair-ah-gair-thee. It means greenhouses in Icelandic. Its foothills steamed like billowing leaks in an unseen, winding water hose.

We kept going up and up as our legs in turns rejoiced and screamed. She did not lose patience with us, but was poised at the next rise like a moveable cairn.

There was the mist of cloud around us and yet we went up. The up did not stop. Pockets of melting snow smeared a chalky gray by the black volcanic soil filled the mountainous corners. Water unwound its braids in trickling streams. The rocks underwater were bright sea green and sulfurous orange.

“You know the good thing, Ms. Sixsmith?” Like my students, the man I loved called me Ms. Sixsmith.

“No, what’s the good thing?”

“All of this uphill will be downhill on the way back.” He smiled, looking French with his black sock hat slightly pointed to the side and his neatly manicured beard and moustache freckled with rain.

The path leveled and we could no longer see the town below. It appeared we were heading straight toward the thick steam billowing from a primordial cleft.

I looked ahead and she wasn’t there. Where was she? “Dog! Dog!” I called out. I tried the Icelandic word. “Hundur! Hundur!”

Ah, there she was.

“How much farther do you think it is?” Jack asked. The concern about time, which had never been my friend, was niggling at him. He would not be late. His mind was in the future, figuring out how he was going to get back to the vehicle and be in Reykjavík by the rental car return deadline. It was when he photographed people or told stories that he was in the present.

“I don’t know,” I said, not trying to be annoying. “Let’s follow the dog and see.”

I called her over, more with gestures than words. She immediately trotted up to my bent knees and waiting hands. I rubbed behind her ears and her eyes went soft and narrow with pleasure. She did not want me to stop. Then, she looked straight into my eyes with an intensity I had only experienced with one other dog. Her eyes were open and gentle. The depth of them was almost too much for me.

“Her name may be on her collar,” Jack said. There was no name dangling from the red band around her neck. Hundur it was.

Hundur led us across melting snow, gray ice, soggy mosses, shallow streams, her little feet so delicate, her prints like a fox.

“Is she a sheepdog?” I asked Jack.

“Yes. I think she’s an Australian Shepherd.”

“She’s a beautiful little dog.”

“Yes, she is.”

We turned into the hill, passing the first steaming opening and heading for one that was even thicker. We could smell the belching of the earth as the wind carried its breath to us.

“Look here,” Jack said.

I heard it before I saw it: a pot of earthen gravy at high boil, blopping and plopping its scalding thickness. It was a pond of creamy cornflower blue in the yellow tundra.

“Wow.”

“We wouldn’t see this at home.”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

Home was Alaska, similar, but different from Iceland. Alaska has the same extremes of light and dark, but not the extremes of fire and ice. There is the same fierce independence, but not the same industrious kindness.

Hundur waited at the top of the next rise while we peered into the boiling pots. In a land with no guard rails, we were entirely responsible for our own safety. In Iceland, common sense is an expectation.

Deeper and deeper we walked, an ebullient river burbling beside us. Sometimes cold, sometimes hot depending on what was or wasn’t boiling up from within the earth.

“You could boil an egg in there,” Jack said, pointing to the high boil in a shallow part of the river.

Where the water was hot, the river edge was drenched in deep green, ribboned with blinding yellow, framed with a sage burnt sienna. There could not be any place with colors so bright and deep as these.

“Which way?” Jack asked Hundur. He was present with me now in the steaming, sopping mountain.

It had been four years since I’d followed a dog up a trail, a beautiful Siberian Husky with sky blue eyes. Stubborn and fearless, she was my companion as I drove around to take the census and as I wrote poems at home. She showed me the joy of running, unable to imagine that anyone wouldn’t love to run. She ran alongside our four-wheelers for miles on rutted trails into the tundra wilderness.

Like me, she was determined and driven. Unlike me, she wasn’t afraid of anything.

She leapt right into a tussle with a porcupine.

We were walking down Bear Trail about a mile from our apartment near the post office. Jack had her in his arms, whimpering and covered in quills. I ran to get the car. It was a beat-up old thing, an old white Subaru ironically destined to spend the rest of its life marooned off the road system. And it was a stick shift, my first experience figuring out gears.

We got her home and spent the night on the kitchen floor. It was a big kitchen in an old dump of an apartment: lots of yellow, orange and 70s green in various floral patterns. The carpet in the living room was still there from the 1970s and had seen lots of ubiquitous sand from the boots of fishermen, pilots, and construction workers. We filled three vacuum bags full when we arrived.

The quills were thick and hollow and didn’t want to come out. They were everywhere. There was one straight through her tongue.

This is how we bonded, Lucille and me, looking into her eyes while I held pliers in my gloved hands and felt the thick quill move unwillingly through the muscle in her tongue.

We got most of the quills out, at least the ones we could see. Others appeared out of nowhere over the next few months, apparently worming their way through her body to come out in unexpected places.

When we hiked her favorite trail and she ran off to the river, we knew she might come back with a face full of quills or not come back at all. We would walk and listen for the relief of the jingle of her collar.

Going to the river had significance for Jack and me. Early in our life together, we would take each other to the river when we needed to say or ask something difficult. It was a place to face truths.

We went to the river when Jack let me know that Lucille was coming. I had always been around cats and was unfamiliar with dogs. He wasn’t sure what I’d think. He’d gotten her as a puppy for his son so many years ago in New Jersey. She was a highly prized Siberian Husky, but there was no cost. If it hadn’t been for Jack’s quick intervention when her father was dangling by a chain over a wall, there would be no Lucille.

We went everywhere with her. She bounded through the tundra like Tigger. Then she’d roll around on her back in the Labrador Tea, its piney scent bursting into the air and burrowing into her fur. Pure joy.

I was impressed when she protected me. We were walking on the Naknek Beach, which has one of the most extreme tides in the world. Sometimes you arrive and you can’t even see the water line. The tide is miles out. Sometimes, waves are crashing up right beside you. Lucille had not been in seawater before, Jack said, so he was intrigued to watch her chase after the waves. We’d throw the ball into the water and, fearless, she’d go out after it, biting at the waves like they were a living being.

Jack liked to climb up onto the bank at some of its steepest points. So I wasn’t surprised when he pointed up the eroding bank. I picked my way through the roots and clay. It wasn’t very stable and my fear of heights was kicking in. Lucille, who had already been up and down the bank several times, sensed this and positioned herself between me and the ground, inching up with me as I went along.

“Jack! She’s spotting for me!”

Her little pink nose was right under me. Her powder blue eyes were steady, patient and encouraging. What an amazing dog!

She didn’t bark. She howled. Not often and more conversationally, like she was imitating human speech.

Sometimes, Lucille would ride behind me on the four-wheeler and rest her chin on my shoulder.

Then she got cancer. Tumors in her side. I flew in a small plane with her to Anchorage to have the tumors removed, but that seemed to make it worse. Her legs swelled up. Sores in her mouth made it impossible to eat. She couldn’t go out with us on the trail anymore. She couldn’t run. She started to snap at Jack. It wasn’t going to get better.

That day was too sunny. I brought Labrador Tea to her. I smelled her fur. Would I remember that wonderful wild, fresh smell?

I felt her spirit leave. I didn’t know that it was something that could be felt. Did this mean she had a soul? There are so many different opinions about animals and souls. But if I felt her spirit go from that body to somewhere else, didn’t that mean she had a soul? And if that spirit went from that body to somewhere else, where did it go? I didn’t feel it disappear or die. I felt it go somewhere. So where?

Numbly, we put her body in a box and strapped it to a four-wheeler and brought it to one of her favorite places on the trail, a place where we’d often camped. It was too bright. I transplanted some yellow flowers over the freshly dug spot, a place where she’d once buried a pancake for later, a place she’d used as a pillow for a camping nap. I patted the earth and, willing them to live, I smelled the flowers.

For days, I kept asking, “Where did she go?” It was a mystery about life, about people and animals, about spirits, about souls, a mystery that I would never understand while in this body on this earth. Yet, my mind couldn’t stop wondering, “Where did she go?”

Over the years, we stopped hiking, we stopped camping, we gained weight, the four-wheelers were sold. People offered other dogs. Lucille was THE dog.

And though they did not look similar, Hundur was the first dog who reminded me of her.

Hundur waited poised majestically on the next rise, a stance very like one Lucille would make on the trail.

She led us toward a towering sheer black rock and dense steam.

“Mordor,” I said.

“Mordor,” Jack agreed.

Mordor was the end of the perilous journey, the place of letting go.

My feet were wet from the rain and the sopping tundra, but I didn’t care. As each step slopped a mix of water and mud, Hundur led us forward. Birds circled over the steam, swooping and landing in the high rock. Some perched perilously high in white nesting pairs.

When Hundur stopped before the burbling cauldron, faithfully showing us the unexpected highlight of the journey, I rubbed behind her ears. She was getting tired, I thought.

“She’ll sleep well tonight,” Jack said.

We explored the primeval site without hurry, careful not to step into boiling water and orange fumaroles. Jack stood, no stress in his body or face, eyes closed, letting the steam waft over him. He was letting go of layers of what he had to control or fix or keep together or make right, letting them all go. When he opened his eyes, they were so soft, his smile was so young.

“You know, I said that I’d lose everything being with you,” he said.

The years of uncertainty passed in an instant between us. So momentary now. His daughter cutting him off. His son storming away. Waiting alone at home while he was working things out, or not, with another woman.

“I would have lost everything if I hadn’t been with you,” he said, looking at me through the steam.

When we were ready, wordlessly, we started back, Hundur at the lead.

We saw people bathing in the hot river. We met a man from Scotland. We met a young blonde Icelandic woman and her Norwegian visitors. The man had a baby in a carrier to the front of him. All of these opportunities for Hundur to leave us, find food, make new friends. And yet she was faithful, guiding us to the very end.

We could see the rented red Suzuki Jimny and the start of the trail when we decided to stop to put our feet in a pool. Fed by a cold part of the river from one side and a hot part from the other, it was the perfect temperature for damp feet at the end of an unplanned hike.

Hundur stayed with us, sitting and smiling. We rubbed behind her ears and told her what a good girl she was.

“You know,” Jack said to me. “Sometimes I give you grief when I’m not sure where we’re going, but just hang in there with me. In the end, it is exactly what I need to be doing. I’m an air traffic controller; I’m always looking to be in control. It was good to let go.”

“Are you disappointed that we didn’t see the Dangerous Waters jet skiers off?”

He watched his feet move slowly through the heated water. Hundur moved in close to him and he extended his hand with such a familiarity that I almost gasped. Could it be? No, no, not possible. How old was Hundur?

“Do you remember what I said when you first brought up the idea of going to Iceland?”

“You didn’t want to go.”

“I said that a writer’s retreat was your gig, not mine.”

“And I said that I thought it would be good for you, too. And then, I found out that the Dangerous Waters guys would be in Reykjavík at the same time. That was the clincher. I still can’t believe it.”

We’d met the Dangerous Waters team just a month after Lucille died. They were adventurers, “five ordinary men” who jet skied from Seattle all the way along the southern coast of Alaska and ended up in King Salmon on the west coast. They were filming a reality TV series. We fed them, housed them, provided transportation, and helped find a needed jet ski part, so we appeared briefly in Episode 11 of Season 1. Iceland was the starting point of filming for Season 4.

“I’ll never forget the look on Rob Cameron’s face when he saw us in the Seattle Airport and found out we were on the same plane to Reykjavík,” Jack said. “When I sent the text, he was sure it was a ruse and I was sitting with my feet up back in the King Salmon tower.”

“Yeah, that was pretty cool.”

There we were with our feet in hot water in Hveragerði, Iceland thinking about how there really aren’t coincidences. Somehow, even our most insignificant choices, are threaded together, bound into some unseen weaving that only begins to emerge when looking back. And the reasons we choose to do things often don’t end up being their real purpose at all. Life is all about choices and the biggest choice of all is perspective.

“We didn’t come to Iceland to see the Dangerous Waters boys,” Jack said. “The black beaches of Vík, the hidden pool, standing behind the full force of the Seljalandsfoss waterfall, holding ice that is millions of years old. Think about it, millions of years old and going back out to sea. Meeting those surfers from New Zealand at Jökulsárlón and those guys from Thailand we kept running into everywhere, even in Höfn.” He paused, remembering, thinking about more things he could add, but choosing to stop. “And this. Maybe this most of all.”

Hundur gently put her snout up to Jack’s face. They looked deeply into each other’s eyes.

“You’re a good girl. You took one look at us and knew we’d need help if we were going to get up the trail without getting lost. We were like two old sheep. And you took care of us. You’re such a good dog.”

It was time to go to Reykjavík. We didn’t want to take our feet out of the pool and we didn’t want to say goodbye to Hundur.

And as happens when you follow your intuition, everything fell into place. We made it to Reykjavík in plenty of time to drop off the vehicle, register and be dressed and ready for the City Hall Reception.

During the Iceland Writers Retreat, we met wonderful people, saw amazing things, and listened to the President of Iceland speak for at least twenty minutes in English without notes about the literary heritage of Iceland. “There is probably no other place in the world where politics are so rooted in literature,” he said as the writers listened with hungry ears.

Through it all, I kept thinking about Hundur. Did she live in one of those farmhouses we passed off the road? She seemed healthy and cared for. Why did she guide us? Why did she stay with us? Why did she look into our eyes with such love when she’d only just met us? Could it be?

We were back in King Salmon for a month when we saw photographs of eleven Australian Shepherd puppies posted on a Facebook community page. We set up a time to meet them. They were sprawled out over a dump of a yard, pieces of tin foil and Styrofoam peeking out of puppy mouths. We met the parents. They approached us simultaneously in a processional manner that was oddly formal. The dad greeted Jack and the mom greeted me with quiet warmth as if to say it was okay if we adopted one of their children. Jack liked the one with a chicken bone belly.

Maybe Lucille thought it was time we let her go a little and let another dog into our hearts, too. It was time to give another dog the good tundra-rubbing Alaskan adventure life.

I remember saying goodbye to Hundur at the car door as I looked deeply into her strangely appreciative eyes. “You are a good dog. Thank you for guiding us. I wish we had some food to give you and I’m sorry we don’t. We loved being with you today, Hundur.” How odd to feel so sad about parting from a dog we’d met so briefly. I kissed the top of her head. It smelled unexpectedly like flowers.