I didn’t have any friends at school. I was a loner and more than a bit odd, so other kids tended to stay away from me, and I liked it that way because everything they did, talked about and were interested in seemed trivial and pointless. My best friend, whom I spent a lot of time with when I should have been at school, was an old man who didn’t appear to have a name. He was of unknown age, but looked to me like he was several hundred years old, and he was the spiritual leader of our people. He always dressed in the brightly coloured traditional costume, and was a gentle, kind and tolerant man renowned for helping people work their way through their differences. That he regarded me as a friend rather than a child made all the children and a large number of adults too regard me with considerable awe and fear too. I like it that way too because they stayed away from me and left me to my thoughts.
I didn’t think it odd at the time, but I’d had my own dog team from the age of seven. Like a lot of my peers I trapped and hunted small game, but unlike them I traded the furs and meat to acquire pups not sweets and candies. I was laught at a lot because everyone knew you couldn’t put a team together from pups. You put a young dog in a experienced team to learn. That was the only way it could be done, or so it was said. I started when I was six with a pup in harness, then two and made a game of it for them. Gradually as I acquired more pups I had a team in harness. I fastened heavier and gradually heavier loads to the harness and eventually a light sled. I had a team. I was still laught at, because they couldn’t yet pull their own weight, but I knew one day I would have an adult team.
Sled dogs can be dangerous, and most are. I believe it’s due to the way they are raised, but I played with mine every day. They were the nearest thing I had to friends of my own age and to me at least they were friendly. I was given a pure white pup with blue eyes which is virtually unheard of in sled dogs. He was deemed to be a runt, and it was thought he would never make it to be an adult. I think it was supposed to be a subtle insult, or at least a joke, give the oddball pup to the even odder oddball human pup. They said the pup was half wolf, maybe, he certainly had some wolf in him, but so do most, if not all, sled dogs. Spökekvit, he came to be called, Whiteghost, a curious blend of Swedish and Sámi for a curious animal. You could be staring at the snow and see nothing and then he’d blink and you’d see his blue eyes and often be unable to see anything else of him, hence the name.
Right from the day I was given him Spökekvit was my lead dog by shear force of personality, and in time that team was the envy of everyone, especially those who had sold me a pup for what they later considered had been far too low a price. The truth was they were better fed and better treated than any other team and they grew to be bigger and stronger, but mostly they just wanted to please me. I thought nothing of taking ten days for hunting just to feed them. The man who gave me Spökekvit long regretted it and said he’d have had far more work out of him with a lash than I ever had with my girlish approach to managing my team. If he’d tried, Spökekvit would have killed him, for he had grown into a huge and powerful dog who demanded respect.
As a loner of possibly a tenth of his age it may seem unlikely that the old man would befriend me, but whatever his reasons he did, and we spend countless hours discussing the philosophy of leading a kind and a good life, and I committed the histories to memory, all of the histories. My only interaction with folk in general was when I joiked something or recited tales from the histories in the eve for them. That ensured that one day I would stand in my friend’s shoes and was a personage worthy of respect long before I reached ten. But it was a respect tainted by fear in those days.
The thing I remember most vividly doing together was one summer somewhere in the early fifties we took the team by fishing boat to Greenland to visit relatives of his. We landed on the east coast and went on foot with the team round to the west coast and then back again after spending a week doing what I can’t remember. The boat made landfall on Iceland on our return but I remember nothing of the two days we spent there. The trip took the entire warm season, but all I remember is of the walk in Greenland and his death chaunt that I engraved on my soul as we walked.
Many years have passed since then. I still have the descendants of my first team, and Spökekvit is still my lead dog but she is the great great granddaughter of the first Spökekvit, still pure white, still with blue eyes, still big and still demanding of respect. When the old man died his death chaunt arose in my mind and I joiked him that others might know him better as I evoked him for the first time aloud. Though I have stood in the old man’s shoes for many years now, and joiked him many times I still don’t know his name, but then I no longer have one either.
