The Dog After

We lifted off from McCarthy towards Skolai Pass, three-and-one-half souls on board. Along with the pilot and my future wife Kristen was a black ball of fur, curled at Kristen’s feet. The trip to the Goat Trail in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park was Chloe’s first. The puppy was not yet six months old, and I wondered how she would handle the wild, gray-green world beneath us.

Chloe had a tough act to follow. I was still aching with memories of Jane, my chocolate Labrador retriever, who had died two months before. Jane had shared my 13 years in Alaska, and I was closer to her than to most people. She was my friend, a warm body that pressed against my sleeping bag at night, a travel partner, and part of my identity. When my father etched the names of my brothers, sisters, and their partners into a cement slab at the entrance to our childhood home years ago, he wrote “Ned and Jane.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of Chloe. She was Kristen’s dog, even though I was along when Kristen picked her up from a woman in the Goldstream Valley for $30. People asked what breed Chloe was, and we shrugged: Border collie mom, dad with a good vertical leap. Jane was a purebred Lab, a beautiful creature with kind brown eyes, expressive brows and a groan when she plopped down that made her seem almost human.

Chloe is built like a creature of the desert—serpentine tail, snout like a fox, tubular body, spindly legs. Her ears belong on a mule deer. With them, she heard the laughter of a woman who passed us on a trail near home one day:

“That dog looks like a fruit bat.”

Jane had met the fruit bat, and Jane wasn’t thrilled. She was 13 then, in her last months of life, and here was a bouncing little pest that clamped onto the loose fur under her neck and tried to herd her. A few times, I had to cup my hands around the puppy’s hips and pull her toward me when Jane was about to snap.

The contrast between them made my heart heavy. Chloe, lithe and flexible, showed that Jane was indeed an old dog, stiff and shaky, nearing the end. One of the saddest moments of my life was the time I closed the tailgate with my old friend in the back of the truck, getting ready to run the Angel Rocks trail with the new puppy. The trail was too steep for Jane, who had arthritis in her back. She looked at me from the back of the truck with sad brown eyes, as if she was letting me down.

When Jane died, I wrapped her in the chamois sheet that covered her couch and buried her at our favorite walking spot behind my cabin. At the grave, along with Kristen, friends Andy and Lisa and Lisa’s dog Suzy, was Chloe. She had no sense of the gravity of the moment, and at one point dashed to the grave and mouthed the wild rose pedals Lisa had set there, shaking them to confetti.

Then, Chloe was all there was. She saved me from the empty dog-dish syndrome after Jane’s death, but she was no Jane.

I had made it my mission to give Jane a happy life. I’d go bird hunting at 5 a.m. just to experience the teamwork of crawling to a pond together. I walked across Alaska with her when she was 10 years old, in large part because I wanted one summer when we could be together 24 hours a day.

With the loss of Jane came a waterfall of other changes, including the death of my father and a decision to move in with Kristen after living in a one-room cabin with Jane for more than a decade. I tried to push away as much of the change as possible, including the little black dog that used to ambush Jane.

But Chloe chipped away at my walls by expressing her own quirky personality. She was so excited in Skolai Pass that she nipped my pant legs, gently pinching my calves as she knew a good day in the outdoors was ahead. Kristen, Chloe and I hiked up the broad saddle of Chitistone Pass, with Castle Mountain looming in the background and the ocean of Russell Glacier ice a few miles east. At its steepest, the Goat Trail is a narrow walkway of rock pressed into canyon walls by the footfalls of sheep, Native traders, and, after lonely men spread the word about gold in the town of Chisana in 1913, prospectors and pack horses who wanted to avoid a dreadful trip up the Nizina Glacier and Skolai Creek.

Many national parks, including Denali, don’t allow dogs in the backcountry, but Wrangell St. Elias does, and I was glad of it. The more adventures I had with Jane, the more I trusted her not to run off after a moose calf or gallop back to me with a bear following. Now it was Chloe’s turn to earn some trust. As a tiny pup, she had ridden in a fanny pack to a cabin in the White Mountains north of Fairbanks, but the days of the free ride were over; it was time to use her own skinny legs.

Two things stick in my mind when I remember the Goat Trail trip: River crossings and a wolverine. The river crossings scared me more than anything else. Jane would have dogpaddled across them, but Chloe was too small to cross the glacial creeks and the Chitistone River. I carried her in my arms across the smaller creeks, but when we came to the upper Chitistone I needed my arms free.

Kristen had an idea. She would ferry the pup across in her backpack, if we could get Chloe inside. I hoisted Chloe and Kristen folded her legs into the backpack. We snugged the cord around Chloe’s neck, securing all 30 pounds of her in a doggie straightjacket. Kristen and I each clamped onto a spruce pole with both hands, and I led us into the river. Invisible rocks detached beneath our boots and tumbled downstream. Cold water knifed through the seams of our rain pants and penetrated our boots. As our feet went numb, Chloe was silent, taking in the scene above Kristen’s shoulders like a calm little Batman.

When we neared the end of the trip the next day, Chloe minded my heel command as we busted through an alder-choked trail next to the Chitistone. When we popped out of the brush and onto a gravel bar, Kristen squinted at something up ahead.

“Is that a bear cub?”

The wolverine shot a glance our way. We had caught it out in the open, at the river’s edge. The wolverine wheeled around and tore back for the brush, kicking up a roostertail of sand.

Rather than chasing her first wolverine, Chloe stayed at our heels, tracking it with her radar ears and sniffing the air. The wolverine disappeared and Chloe looked up at me, waiting for the OK to start moving.

Chloe is now a regular companion on trips through Alaska. She makes me laugh as she throws a stick into the air and catches it after a long day, and she impresses me as she carries her doggie pack without whining. Chloe will never replace Jane, but she pads a bit deeper into my heart with every mile we cover.