Legend of the Ghost Dog (8 page)

“But what about Balto? What did he do?” Jack asked.

“His team got lost in a blizzard,” Quin said, “and the lead dog couldn't find the way back to the trail. The musher put Balto up front to give him a try at leading, and Balto found the trail and got the medicine into Nome.”

“Whoa,” Jack said again. “That's so cool. So he, like, saved a whole town.”

“Well, Balto's the one that got famous for it, that's true,” Clay said, stirring his stew. “But there were twenty teams that ran themselves ragged on the trail, and every single one of them deserved equal credit. Balto was one heck of an animal, no doubt about it. But it could have been any one of them lead dogs that pulled that sled into Nome. All those reporters and photographers, they all did their stories just about Balto. ‘Hero dog,' all the papers called him. Took him all across the country on a tour. Even had statues built of him. There was some bad feeling about that in Nome for a long time. Plenty of mushers felt like their dog teams didn't get their due. When the Iditarod comes each year, we remember all those dogs.”

“You must have some stories,” my father said.

Clay chuckled and dunked a piece of bread into his bowl, mopping up the last of the fish stew.

“I guess I do,” he said. “Which reminds me, I brought a whole folder full of pictures of sled dogs. Nice pictures — going all the way back to before the race. I think a few of 'em are older than I am.”

“Oh, can I see them?” Quin asked. “I'm done eating.”

“They're in a bag by the front door,” Clay said.

Quin gave her father a pleading look. “Dad? Can I be excused — can Tee and I go look at the pictures?”

“Sure,” Joe said. “Wash your hands first — don't want to get fish stew on them.”

“What about me?” Jack complained as Quin and I stood up.

“Jack, ask Clay to tell you about the time he and his dogs went missing in the blizzard of 1991,” Quin said.

Jack's mouth dropped open, and he forgot all about the dog pictures.

“What happened? Did you almost die? Can your toes really fall off if they get too cold? If they do, can you just stick them back on?”

Quin and I headed out of the room, though part of me really wanted to stay and hear Clay talk about being lost in the blizzard with his dogs.

“Here it is,” Quin said, picking up a shopping bag by the door. “Let's go to my room. It's up there.”

Quin was pointing at a ladder, which I realized I had walked right past without noticing. It was built into the wall, and it led to a large loft area above the main floor. I climbed up behind Quin.

“Wow,” I said. The loft was amazing. It was just as big as my bedroom back in Woodstock, with a low double bed, a beanbag chair, several good lamps, and rows and rows of bookshelves. “This is fabulous,” I told her.

“It's pretty cozy,” she admitted. She flopped onto the bed, holding the fat folder of pictures, and I did the same.

The first picture Quin pulled out was a color photo of a hefty-looking dog with distinct markings on his face. He was mostly black, with a mask of white on his muzzle and around his eyes, and a jet-black stripe up the center of his nose. Quin turned the photo over.

“It says this is Piccalo,” she read. “Iditarod runner — doesn't say the year.”

She pulled out the next picture.

A dog with a mottled coat was standing with another dog, his face turned toward the camera. He was wearing a red harness and little racing booties on each paw. The fur around his muzzle and eyes looked almost gray, giving him the appearance of an old man. The tip of one of his ears drooped slightly. But you could see by the way he was standing that he was a powerful, fast dog.

“Zorro,” Quin read. “Owned by four-time winner Lance Mackey — oh, I know who he is. The Mackeys are super-famous here. They have a kennel.”

I pulled a picture from the file. It was an old black-and-white shot, the edges yellowed with age. A somber-faced man in a heavy dark jacket stared into the camera, an enormous pure white dog in his arms. The dog's head was tilted
back and his nose was touching the man's face, almost as if he were giving the man a kiss. I turned the photo over.

“Leonhard Seppala with Vodka, 1936,” I read.

“Let me see,” Quin said. I pushed the picture to her.

“Beautiful,” she said. “Here's another really old one.”

We stared at the black-and-white portrait. The dog was dark brown or black, powerfully built, with ears that stood straight up and pale, intelligent eyes.

I knew that face.

“Whoa,” Quin said. “He looks kind of like …”

“He looks
exactly
like him — our Shadow!” I said. “Quin, it's him. The shape of the head, the pointy ears, those peculiar eyes, the dark fur. He's the spitting image of the dog at the cabin. You probably got even a better look at him than I did — don't you think it's him?”

“It could be,” Quin said. “Any dog could have that coloring, but you're right about the shape of the face and the ears. And the eyes.”

“Is there anything on the back?” I asked excitedly. “Turn it over!”

Quin turned the picture over.

“It says something, but it's really faded,” she said. “Hang on.”

She got off the bed and carried the picture over to a light.
She held the photo directly under the lamp and squinted. Then her face changed to confusion.

“What?” she murmured.

“Can you read it?” I asked eagerly. “Is there a name?”

Quin nodded.

“What is it?” I pressed, barely able to contain myself. “Quin! What's the name?”

She looked up at me with a perplexed expression.

“Balto. This is a picture of Balto.”

A late blizzard came that May, roaring over us with no warning one morning. Silla had gone for a walk with Caspian, though she wasn't supposed to. She told me she had dreamed of gold again, and she meant to follow the old creek into the woods up to a spot where the water pooled. Silla always said she was sure there was one more nugget of gold in that pool, and that she meant to keep looking until she found it. Sometimes I went with her, and though I didn't like her to go alone, I never worried about her as long as Caspian was there. I knew he'd protect her with every ounce of strength he had, and he was a powerful dog.

By the afternoon there was more than a foot of snow on the ground, and Silla had not come back. In my heart, I had not begun to worry. Silla knew as well as anyone that the best thing to do was hunker down and
take shelter until the snow stopped. There was little by the way of shelter out by the creek, though. Silla would have to dig an ice cave in the snow and sit tight. My father was almost out of his mind with worry, so I told him what I knew, that Silla was with Caspian at the wide pool in Dorothy Creek, and that Caspian would keep her safe — and when the snow let up, he would lead her home. I was so sure Daddy would feel better knowing that.

But he didn't. He went crazy, shouting at me, his face this terrible, angry red, yelling that the woods were dangerous, that Caspian was dangerous, and that it was my fault for letting Silla go, and his for letting Caspian anywhere near her. There was nothing I could do to convince him that it would be all right. He simply would not listen to me. But even Daddy knew he could not go out looking for a lost child in the middle of a blizzard. We would have to wait for the snow to stop.

It did not stop. The wind blew and the snow came down for three days and three nights. On the fourth morning, I woke up with a sick certainty in my heart. Too much time had passed. Silla had not been strong to begin with, and her lungs were bad. No matter where she might have taken shelter, Silla would not survive the storm this long.

The morning the storm finally broke, my father was downstairs throwing things in a pack, to rush out and search for Silla. In my heart, I knew he would not find her. The little buzz I always felt, the bright bauble of Silla's presence in my own spirit, was gone. But I did not want my father to go out searching alone, and I was determined to go with him whether he liked it or not. I had to run to keep up with him as he got onto the path into the woods, following the direction of the creek. The creek I was named for.

We hadn't been following the creek for more than a half mile when Caspian came bolting toward us. His eyes were wild again, like they'd been that morning the wolf went after the pups. His muzzle, mouth, and teeth were covered in blood, and with each step he left a crimson paw print in the snow. Why would Daddy have thought that blood was Silla's? How could he have jumped to a conclusion so wrong?

But he did. Every doubt he'd ever had about Caspian, all the worries that the dog had a savage nature, might again turn on humans, returned. Before I could stop him he had raised his shotgun and was pointing the barrel at Caspian's great chest. And Caspian simply stood there.

Quin was just as obsessed with getting to the bottom of the dog ghost story as I was. Neither of us had been able to get Shadow off her mind. Clay, Joe, and my dad had talked for several hours after dinner, and my father had been more than willing to say yes when Quin asked if I could sleep over. Jack would have been outraged to be left out, except that he had fallen asleep in front of the wood-burning stove. He never woke up when my father carried him to the car.

Long past midnight, Quin and I sat in front of her laptop, searching for information about Balto. We fell asleep with the laptop still lying open on the bed and kept sleeping until almost noon the next day.

“Okay, so let's go through this again,” Quin said, pulling the blanket more tightly around her. I flipped my pillow over, fluffed it up a bit, and laid my head back down.

“Right, so Balto leads his team into Nome with the medicine in February of 1925, and all the sick people are saved,” I said. “There's a big to-do about it — all the newspapers have stories about him. The musher, Gunnar Kaasen, ends up taking Balto and the whole team on a cross-country lecture tour of America so people can hear the story and see the dogs.”

“Then somehow all the dogs end up being left in California,” Quin continued. “It's too hot there and the dogs get sick. Then a bunch of kids in Ohio donate pennies and raise enough money to buy them.”

I pulled more covers onto me, and Quin yanked them back.

“Sorry,” I said. “So the dogs retire in comfort at the Cleveland zoo, and eventually — what, six or seven years later? — Balto dies of old age.”

“Yep,” Quin said. “Just doesn't make any sense. Why would he be haunting some old cabin up by Dorothy Creek when he died thousands of miles away, and hadn't even been in Alaska for, like, ten years?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Okay, what if something happened in that cabin before the epidemic in Nome? Do we know who owned Balto, where he was from?”

Quin pulled the laptop toward her.

“Google ‘who owned Balto,'” I suggested.

“I just did, genius,” Quin said. “This is interesting. Balto was actually owned by Leonhard Seppala.”

“The guy from the old picture holding the big white dog?” I said, sitting up and leaning toward her to get a better look at the screen.

“Yep,” she said. “He seems to have been a big deal back then. Apparently a lot of great working dogs came from the Seppala kennels. Okay, it also says Seppala himself was one of the mushers that helped run the medicine to Nome, but he didn't take Balto because he thought he was too young and inexperienced. His favorite dog was Togo and he took him as the team leader. He left Balto behind, and somehow Gunnar Kaasen ended up taking him with his team.”

She set down the laptop and looked at me. “If Balto was a young dog being raised and trained in Seppala's kennel, I can't see any way he would have ended up out by Dorothy Creek in some miner's cabin, ever.”

I sighed. Quin was right. It didn't make any sense. But I badly wanted to know more about the ghost, and the photo was our only lead.

“I need to see the picture again,” I said.

“It's on my desk,” Quin told me.

I got out of bed. The floor was freezing — the whole house felt cold. I grabbed the picture as quickly as I could while still being careful, and hurried back to the warm bed.

There was a small skylight in the sloped ceiling just above the bed, and daylight streamed in. I looked at the picture carefully.

“Quin, look at the face. The shape of it, the way the mouth curls up a tiny bit at the edges like he's smiling. And those pale eyes. I could still swear it's Shadow.”

“Gimme,” Quin said, holding out her hand.

I handed over the picture.

“It could be,” she said. “Then again, how many malamutes and huskies with all dark fur were there in Alaska in 1925? Hundreds, maybe? This looks a lot like him, but in reality, what are the odds? We see a ghost dog out in the wilderness and it turns out to be the most famous sled dog in Alaskan history? I mean, we don't even know what time period our dog is from. He could have been alive in Balto's time, or it could have been just twenty years ago.”

I sighed again.

“I just wish we could get a better look at Balto,” I said. “A different view instead of just his face.”

Quin smacked her forehead.

“Stupidy-dumb! Balto's famous — we can just Google Image him!”

She typed something and hit enter. A moment later, she sighed, and turned the laptop toward me so I could see the screen.

“Well, I found a picture of Balto standing. Look at his chest.”

I did.

“He has a big patch of white fur,” I said.

“Yep. Shadow is black from head to tail. I hate to say it, but it looks like we've been barking up the wrong tree.”

I groaned, half from disappointment and half from Quin's terrible pun.

“Darn it. All right, then. So we're back to square one.”

“I don't think we even have a square one,” Quin said. “It's not like we have a picture of Shadow to work from.”

I sat up and stared at Quin.

“That's it!” I said. “My camera! We could get a picture of him. The whole reason my father is here is to talk to the people who were around sixty years ago when everyone had teams — the people who knew everyone's dogs. People like that Dorothy Shaktoolik. People like Clay! Somebody might recognize him.”

“Let me get this straight,” Quin said, pulling the covers up to her chin. “You're suggesting we hike back out to the cabin, bring your camera, and hang around in the brush waiting for a dog ghost to come back so we can snap a picture of him?”

“Well … yeah,” I said.

A grin slowly crept across Quin's face.

“Tee, my friend,” she said. “Now you're talking.”

A quick telephone call home to my father, and we had permission for Quin to come spend the night with me. Joe offered to drive us to our cabin, but not until later in the afternoon.

“I was sort of hoping we'd be able to hike back to the cabin today,” I said to Quin, disappointed, watching her create two lopsided ham sandwiches as we stood at the kitchen counter. “But I guess we'll have to save it for tomorrow morning.”

“It's already late — we slept half the day. Going tomorrow is better anyway,” Quin said, taking the top off her sandwich to plop an additional spoonful of mayonnaise on it. “Do you want more mayo?”

“There's never enough mayo,” I said. Quin pulled the top piece of bread off my sandwich too, and added a huge dollop.

“There. Made to order. Okay — so, while we eat, we need to think about what we bring in our packs. We're going to want to dress really warmly. It's one thing to be out in this weather hiking. If we end up having to stand around waiting for the dog to show up, we're going to get really cold really fast. Plus, this is Alaska — we need to check the weather report right up until the minute we leave. They've been talking about snow coming this week, and believe me, you have
never
seen snow until you've seen it here. April is not too late for a storm.”

“I'm ridiculously excited about this,” I said, taking the plate with my lunch and sitting across the table from Quin. “It's so nice to have something to look forward to, for a change. I have this feeling we're going to do it. We're going to get a picture of Shadow. I just wish we didn't have to wait until tomorrow morning!”

“Well, we do,” she said firmly. “Dad can't even take us to your place for another two hours. But hey, I know what we can do in the meantime — we can go see Clay and ask what he knows about the history of Dorothy Creek. He lives just two houses down.”

“Really? You don't think he'd mind?” I loved the idea of seeing Clay again.

“Are you kidding? Clay lives for company,” Quin said. “I think he's kind of lonely. And he always has the best cake.”

“Cake? Lead the way,” I said.

We finished our sandwiches quickly, gulping down milk as we stood in the warmth of the wood-burning stove. Quin ducked into her father's office to let him know where we were going, then we pulled on our fleeces and hats and went outside. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue and the sun shone warmly, making the air feel a little warmer than it actually was.

“This way,” Quin said, pointing to her left.

Clay's was exactly two houses down. It looked even smaller than Quin's house — no second floor at all. But it was freshly painted a deep blue, and it looked well cared for.

Quin knocked on the door, then opened it slightly.

“Clay?” she called. “It's Quin and Tee.”

I heard the sound of footsteps, and suddenly the door swung all the way open. Clay looked like he'd known somebody was going to stop by, because he was dressed in a spiffy deep blue flannel shirt and neat jeans, his snow white hair combed carefully into place.

“Well looky here — two rays of sunshine, right on my doorstep! Darn it, but I'm a lucky guy. Come on in!”

I looked around curiously as we walked inside. I was struck by how incredibly neat it was, and by the absence of clutter. Like Quin's home, most of the ground floor was a combined kitchen and living room area dominated by a wood-burning stove. A kettle had been set to boil on a burner on top of the stove. The cabin was furnished with a couch, a solid dining table with four chairs, and a large chest beneath a window. There was a closed door I presumed led to a bedroom and bathroom. With Clay standing in the middle of the room smiling broadly at us, it seemed like the most cheerful and welcoming place on earth.

“You know, I was just this morning wondering what to do with this big old slab of lemon cake I got sitting here,” Clay said. “Would you two help a fella out by taking some of it off my hands?”

“We'd love some,” Quin said. “I'll get the tea ready.”

Quin opened a cabinet and pulled out a teapot and a tin of dry tea while Clay unwrapped the wax paper from the cake. From the way she knew where everything was in the kitchen, I could tell Quin was a frequent guest here.

A few minutes later we were sitting near the wood-burning stove, each of us with a mug of spiced tea and a massive slab of lemon cake.

“Mmm,” Quin said, her mouth full. “Best this month, Clay.”

“You may be right,” he said. “Come back tonight and we'll have the rest for dinner.”

“I wish,” Quin said. “But I'm going to sleep over at Tee's tonight. We've got a big hike planned for tomorrow. Up by Dorothy Creek.”

Clay looked at me, then back at Quin.

“You'll need to keep an eye on the forecast,” he said. “There'll be some snow coming this week. Could be a few days off, or it could come sooner.”

“We will, I promise,” Quin said. “Clay, whose land is that up there?”

“That'd be the Shaktooliks', I guess,” Clay said, dunking a piece of cake into his tea and popping it into his mouth. “Don't know why they don't just sell some of it off. Most of those grandkids are in Anchorage or Juneau now, and Marilyn lives here in town. And Pete and Clyde got no use for it. Maybe Doe just doesn't want anyone else to have it.”

“We found an old falling-down cabin up there the last time we hiked,” Quin said.

“Yeah?” Clay asked.

“We thought it might be an old miners' cabin,” I added.

“Well, that could be,” Clay said. “Plenty of prospectors went panning the creek and thereabouts back in the day. Or could have been someone who worked for the Shaktooliks — they had a big place up there they built before the war.”

“You mean … Iraq?” I asked.

Clay smiled. “Vietnam,” he clarified.

“I didn't know there was ever a house out there,” Quin said.

“Well, the weather probably took most of it back by now,” Clay said.

“Why would someone just abandon their house?” Quin pressed. Clay put his mug down and looked out the window a moment, his eyes distant with memory.

“They just couldn't bear the memories, I guess. Touched by tragedy, the Shaktooliks were. They had a string of bad luck. Lost a son in Vietnam. And then that little girl died, or maybe it happened the other way around. Anyway, I guess that was about all they could take.”

“What little girl?” I asked, with a strange feeling of foreboding.

Clay kept looking out the window. Then he shook his head.

“That was a long time ago,” he said. “It was the youngest child. Something happened to her. In those days there were so many things that could carry a child off — fever, accident, a long winter with too much snow and not enough food. I don't remember now exactly what it was. Only thing that sticks out in my mind is the Shaktooliks packed up and left their place after she passed.”

“That's so sad,” I said, thinking of a home abandoned to the woods because a family was grieving for a lost child.

“It sure is,” he replied, his eyes grave.

His face grew somber for a moment, and I wondered what his story was. Where was his family? Did he have children? Why did he now live alone?

“Clay, do you believe in ghosts?” Quin asked suddenly.

“I'm surprised a girl as smart as you would even think to ask such a fool question,” he replied.

I looked at him curiously. He was staring into his mug, shaking his head.

“I've lived in Nome most all my life, seen things you'd never believe. Seen people come and go, wars come and go. Storms come and go. Things in the snow, things in the woods. Never got much book learning, but I've got more life learning than most.”

He put his mug down, and looked from me to Quin.

“Of course I believe. I know what's real, and what's real is what I can see with these two eyes in my head,” he said. “That's how come I believe in ghosts.”

“Then you've seen one?” I asked.