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She Thought She Spied a Killer Beast Out There Among the Turks, and fled the river for the hills where odd adventure lurks. “Hello,” said Bob the earless dog. “I’m one of many quirks.”

A looking glass experience in wild, wild Turkey
By Laura Hendrie

It occurs to me, as the Turk crosses the river toward us while jabbing wildly at the air with his dagger, that this is not what I expected. I’ve come to the northeastern corner of Turkey to raft the Ìoruh, one of the last free-running rivers on earth, but I keep thinking there’s been a mistake.

Our campsite, for instance, is less than 50 feet from a highway. Everyone who’s spotted us since our arrival has slammed on the brakes to get a better look. Some even took pictures. Since people around here used to be nomadic themselves, their interest in our camp setup is understandable, but it’s also disconcerting. One group laid out a picnic on the shoulder of the road,
brought out a samovar, and poured little glasses of tea. The three women wore traditional Islamic ankle-length dresses and white scarves, and whenever any of us looked up, they quit laughing, covered their mouths with their chadors, and waved. Their driver crouched off to one side with binoculars. He was laughing, too. He laughed so hard he fell off his heels and rolled onto his
back.

The Turk brandishing the dagger, however, isn’t laughing. He’s wearing a white skirt, and in that Frankenstein way people have when they’re leaning against a current, he moves slowly, determinedly, one foot at a time, across the Ìoruh. When he glances up and doesn’t return my smile, only yells something and points with his knife, I swallow hard. I hate to admit it, but
fear of Turks — a solid Christian tradition that dates back to the sixteenth century, when Martin Luther prayed for deliverance from “the world, the flesh, the Turk, and the Devil” — is a part of my psyche I’ve yet to erase. The evil sultan, the bloodthirsty devourer of children, eyeballs bulging, gold teeth flashing, scimitar raised to strike. He’s not wearing the
turban and pointy shoes that Hollywood put him in — but here he is, straight out of the more racist parts of Midnight Express: the rabid fanatic, the grinning killer, the Terrible Turk.

But then he gets closer and I realize he’s raising the dagger only because he doesn’t want to tangle it in his skirt, which is a fishing net. As he wades into the reeds along the bank, instead of attacking, he stops and pretends to search for something among the bright flags of litter, waiting for someone to invite him to shore. I look around for help, but the New Zealander
river guides, Southy and Pily, are organizing the kitchen. The kitchen seems to consist primarily of a two-gallon plastic container labeled Gin, another labeled Vodka, a cooler of warm beer, and a bottle of fine Turkish rocket fuel known as raki. This must be what they mean by “a comprehensive first-aid kit.” Anyhow, the guides are busy. As for my nine fellow rafters, they’re
either helping themselves to first aid or struggling to figure out their tents. I take a deep breath and go down to greet the fisherman myself.

“Merhaba!” It means hello, and since it’s one of the few Turkish words I can pronounce, I somersault it off my tongue like a gymnast hitting the mat with both feet — ta-da!

The fisherman responds with a long, sharp burst of language. Turks have little use for facial expressions, relying instead on the power of Turkish, a fierce, guttural language derived in part from the same warlike tongue Genghis Khan spoke in the eleventh century. He sounds like he’s announcing a beheading, but all I can do when he pauses is smile and nod.

He sighs as if I’m hopeless, wades out of the river, and opens a plastic bag tied to his belt. It’s full of small, silver-colored fish. I whistle in admiration. I may not know much about Turks, but fishermen are easy.

“��‼���!” I say. Beautiful.

“��‼���,” he agrees. He takes out a fish and hands it to me.

“Nice catch.” I pretend it’s too heavy to hold. When he hands me another, I roll my eyes.

“Wow!” Then he hands me another. Then another. Every time I try to give them back, he hands me another, and soon I’m brandishing half a dozen fish in each hand.

“No, no,” I plead. “They’re yours.”

He nods and squeezes another in under my thumb. I stare at him and he stares back, deadpan. I’m desperate for the right word, I’m begging him for it, and finally, as he’s reaching into his bag again, it comes.

“�ձ������’r!” I’ve massacred it, but it means thank you, and at last, gravely, he closes the bag. Then he squats and scratches something in the mud with his knife, leaning back so I can see. “Tehlikeli.”

I have no idea what tehlikeli is, but he’s drawn a four-legged animal on the run that looks very much like a wolf. The guides assured me I won’t see much wildlife; most reports of bears, jackals, wild boars, leopards, ibex, and wolves, they say, are fairy tales left over from before everything was hunted out. But maybe they’re wrong. I nod. “Wolf,”
I say enthusiastically, pointing a handful of fish. “I understand! Wolf!”

With a terrible sigh, he straightens, gathers his net in both hands, and wades into the river. “�ձ������’r,” I call, but he never looks back.

I stare at the drawing, uneasy. A group of Turkish right-wing terrorists called the Gray Wolves claimed responsibility for several murders and assassinations back in the seventies, including an attempt on the pope. Is this what tehlikeli means? Are they around now, hunting foreigners in bright-colored life vests?

Only later that night, while roasting small but delicious fish kabobs over the campfire with the other rafters, do I realize I’m wrong. A wolf runs with its tail straight out. In the drawing, the tail curled up over the animal’s back. The fisherman wasn’t talking about wolves. He was talking about Kangals.

Kangals are Turkish dogs specially bred to protect fat-tailed sheep from predators. They’re large, notoriously vicious, and probably responsible for the ancient Turkish curse “may you be torn apart by dogs.” My trekking book mentions them as one of three problems to avoid in eastern Turkey — the others being Kurdish guerrillas and drug arrests. I’ve also seen a Turkish
film in which a dog the size of a buffalo, no doubt a Kangal, attacks a bus as it rolls through a village. Maybe the dog was just acting, but he seemed to enjoy his work.

And lastly, there’s my friend Bob, who has climbed Mount Ararat, just south of here. “If you run into a Kangal,” he said the night before I left, “you won’t even believe it’s a dog. A huge, oozing, pus-eyed, drooling, snarling, rabid, disease-ridden killing machine, yes. But not a dog.” After a pause, my husband added that he’d just heard about a star called Canicula that makes
dogs go crazy, a star that would appear while I was in Turkey. Bob only smiled grimly. “Kangals don’t need stars to go crazy.”

What’s it’s like to raft the Ìoruh? i can’t really say. Certainly I was on the river for 11 days doing what most people call rafting. I had thrilling moments, hysterically funny moments, and moments when I was so sure our boat would flip in the rapids that I felt an actual sense of relief when it finally did. But to assume that a trip down the Ìoruh in
low-water July is the same trip you’ll have in high-water May is wrongheaded. In two months, the river had changed from an absurdly violent whitewater thrash that’s been described as “harder and more continuous than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado” to a much quieter form of transport that — while still able to boil up into a shriek of water walls and bottomless holes
— mostly just moved us from one bend in the canyon to the next. As days passed and no one suffered any life-or-death moments, our guides began to worry that we might feel cheated, or worse, lose respect for the river. They kept pointing to the faint white line high up on the smooth black rocks where the water had raged earlier in the season. They spoke of boats flipping and
equipment lost, of clients sent cartwheeling down rapids without so much as a merhaba. “A bit dodgy here last May when the water was high,” they kept saying, and you could hear apology in their voices, their regret that the river wasn’t as dodgy now.

But for me there was more to the trip than rafting. We were in a corner of Asia Minor so far off the beaten track that little has changed since the eleventh century, when Christian infidels fled in terror before the glee of the newly converted Islamic Seljuks. Every day we floated past crumbling ruins of Georgian castles, past rice fields glowing green as precious silk carpets,
past donkeys and olive groves, mosques, stone aqueducts, ancient high-mountain villages of wattle and mud and stone. This is the river Xenophon and his hapless army of 10,000 followed in 400 b.c. while retreating from the Persian campaigns. It is perhaps the same river where, between 1915 and 1918, countless Armenians were drowned, bunches of them tied together like a necklace and
thrown in after one had been shot to become a millstone for the rest. Now, waking to the ghostly echo of the muezzin in the next village calling his people to prayer at four in the morning, I watch impossibly tall cypresses swaying overhead in the dark, graceful as stallions’ tails.

Indeed, the fact that the river, while insisting on my respect, has not demanded my undivided attention seems more of a gift than a disappointment. I enjoy a good hard kick of adrenaline now and then, but I’m 43 now, and in the last few years I’ve seen so much death happen for no reason that I don’t think I need to find out anymore if the same thing will happen to me. Once you
finally understand that you’re going to have to die, you can stop fretting about it. I’ve come to the wilds of northeastern Turkey because, after years of struggling to stay in control, I’m finding a new desire to be tested and roughed up and confused again. Maybe learn a few more things before I draw my conclusions.

Rafting is only a part of it.

The whole Islamic deal about women, for instance. At the Istanbul airport, in western Turkey, women wear less than fashion models in Miami, but at the airport in eastern Turkey, in Erzurum — also known as “the city that has never recovered from winter” — armies of females float by completely draped in black. There’s also the walking sack — an adult human who
does all her shopping and probably everything else from inside a dirt-colored gunnysack, without so much as a peephole (thankfully, it’s a coarse weave). Despite Ataturk’s success at reforming, secularizing, and westernizing his country in the twenties and thirties, I stepped into the ancient world of Islam as soon as I left Istanbul. Still, reading about fundamentalist Islamic
customs is one thing, and bumping into a women shuffling and groping her way down the street in a giant brown bag — well, I wasn’t as prepared as I thought. My first reaction, pity, is probably all wrong. Maybe they’re not subjugated women at all, but defiant female warriors waging a holy war against Calvin Klein, Coca-Cola, the Marlboro Man, Tourism, and all the other
western pseudoreligions that have recently invaded their country. In any case, their presence certainly stirs up European reactions. My female companions shudder and blush as if they’ve been publicly insulted. The male rafters stare, and bristle at the thought of being married to a woman like that. Even the guides aren’t immune. Don’t mess with them, they joke. Those are
ninjettes. But what’s really going on inside that bag? Nobody wants to know.

After we leave Erzurum, signs of rising Islamic fervor seem to shrink along with the size and number of minarets. The minaret, that narrow tower from which the muezzin calls people to prayer five times a day, never completely disappears, but in more remote villages it’s reduced to a wooden pole with a rusty bullhorn on top. These are places where the power of folklore vies with
the word of Allah, where newborns are rubbed with salt for strength, burying a snake brings rain, donkeys wear blue beads to ward off evil, and kindness to travelers brings luck.

This last superstition has helped Turkey, which is the only land bridge connecting Europe to the Middle East (and thus to Africa and all of Asia), survive visits from some of the greatest travelers ever known: Marco Polo, Omar Khayyßm, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Jason and the Argonauts, Cleopatra, Noah, Napoleon, Xerxes, Don Quixote. All the great empires
came through, too — the Hittites, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Ottomans — one conquering civilization washing in over the next in the slow, inevitable creep of time.

But in the rough backwoods of the Ìoruh valley, where in spite of all the comings and goings of empires, civilization has never amounted to much more than a handful of villages cut off from the world for months at a time by snow, only one empire truly left its mark: the Seljuks of the eleventh century. Seljuks: bravest of all warriors, best of all horsemen, a fierce,
nomadic tribe descended from Mongols who — after they’d settled long enough to call themselves Turks — proved to be the most congenial of all hosts. It was they who introduced caravansaries to Turkey, inns where travelers could eat, bathe, drink, smoke opium, listen to music, or just sleep — all for free. Caravansaries don’t exist anymore except as ruins, but
Seljuk hospitality is as alive as ever. Children run to help us pull in our boats while their fathers, in dark, ill-fitted, two-piece suits, scramble down embankments to offer cigarettes, to help us find the trail, to show us which house is theirs, to invite us home. They don’t seem to care how we’re dressed or what we believe in.

“Cok g’zel!” I cry.

It’s a cold, rainy morning, and I’m crouched at the water’s edge several hundred yards from camp, washing sand out of my toothbrush. Before noon we’ll land at the village of Zeytinlik, where the river guides will put my fellow rafters on a bus to the airport, deflate the rafts, and head for the Zambezi in Africa. Another guide who recently joined us, Trekker Eames, has agreed
to take me and photographer Steve Alvarez hiking in the Ka‡kar Mountains north of here, where Trekker has hiked several times. I’m not sure why. Despite the nickname (his real name is Paul), Trekker’s the kind of river dog who can’t even stand to put on shoes. “I don’t mind hiking,” he confessed to me, “but there’s so much bloody gravity involved.” All the same, he’s over
at the rafts, earnestly comparing notes with Southy and Pily on which part of the Ka‡kars he should take us to and how to get there. I like Trekker. At 24, he’s open-hearted and full of life. Besides, I’m not interested in how far we go — 11 days of rafting has made distances irrelevant — only that we keep going.

Something’s missing from this trip, and though I can’t put my finger on it, traveling with ten tourists is part of the problem. The more we’ve seen, the less they notice, and the less they notice, the more fun they have. Not that I blame them. They’re on holiday. As for me, I’m sorry I’m not as easygoing as the river guides. Nothing bothers them. Day after day they prepare
meals, make and strike camps, load and unload boats, handle whiners, heatstroke, hangovers, and fools, and as long as they’re moving, they’re happy. Nomads, moving through a foreign land yet always at home, as mysteriously fluid as water itself, able to put up with anything, get along with anybody, fit in anywhere, leave nothing behind. When Southy taught me to steer the raft, he
said, “The trick is to always take the boat the way it wants to go.” Good advice, and not just for rafting. I rinse my toothbrush and look up to see, not one, but two enormous pale dogs with black faces sitting on the opposite bank.

I’m not sure this is real. I look over at our camp wondering if one of the rafters can explain it. Then I look at the Kangals, and a whole series of calculations spins through my mind about the width and depth and speed of the river between us. But they aren’t moving, just sitting there, one next to the water, the other on a boulder. They wouldn’t try crossing the river here;
it’s much too strong. They’re just watching. What do they want?

Then I start getting this feeling. It’s the same contradiction of shivery excitement and flat-faced numbness you get just before you commit to a current that will slide you into the foaming mouth of a roaring, belching, boat-swallowing rapids. It’s the feeling that you’re hanging fear and joy in the balance off the end of your paddle and you’re about to choose joy — that
anything can happen. I know all of this as surely as I know Bob was right; these two yellow-eyed animals aren’t real dogs. They don’t even look like real dogs. I feel the hair prickling at the back of my neck. Too much religious fervor in this country, I think, that’s what’s wrong. Too much fervor and too many big dogs. Backing up a little in case I have to run, I do what seems
logical. I begin to bark.

What happens? Nothing. The rafters get more excited than the Kangals. The Kangals simply stretch, turn, and trot up the hillside. In a moment, they’re gone.

The best way into the ka‡kars is by dolmus, which means “stuffed” or “shared taxi.” This form of transportation requires patience, because the driver refuses to move until his dolmus, like the similarly named appetizer, is properly stuffed. Still, if you don’t have claustrophobia, it’s a fine way to meet Turks. This time we’re only three hours late, and as soon as we
leave Yusufeli, rock-and-rolling up a route so narrow I can’t see any shoulder to the road, a man in the back, whom I also can’t see because I have someone’s elbow in my face, shouts to the driver over the roar of the engine to put on some music and open the beer.

That, of course, is when we hear the small ffft of the driver opening a beer for himself.

But nothing’s so bad that Turks can’t figure out how to make you enjoy it. When the driver begins to argue in the rearview with his imbibing friend without watching the road, a woman has her little boy quietly hand out candy. When the drinker demands another beer and begins arguing back, shouting so everyone can hear, a man in a tatted skullcap leans forward to sprinkle my
hands with perfumed lemon water. And when our driver not only holds up his end of the argument but also tries to light a Marlboro while we careen toward a curve with nothing beyond it but a magnificent view — when there’s no question in my mind we’re about to die — the woman in the chador shyly links her pinkie to mine. Don’t pay attention, she’s saying. If we die,
we’ll die as friends.

But we don’t die. As we climb higher and the air cools and night comes on, the argument between driver and drunk peters out. After a long, mournful silence, the drunk demands another beer and it’s passed to him, but instead of joining him, the driver tosses his empties out the window, lights another Marlboro, and out of nowhere begins to sing. They both sing, a sad, quiet
song, the driver singing one line and the drunk echoing it. Their voices are rich and full of feeling, and in the smoky, sweaty darkness of the bus, the repetition of lyrics, of one man calling out to the other, is eerily soothing. No one else joins in, but after the song ends, the silence in the dolmus is easier, more companionable.

At midnight, when we crawl to a stop in the pitch-black village of Yaylalar, the drunk turns out to be a red-faced walrus of a man slouched against the back window, stroking the thin head of a small boy asleep in his lap. He whispers something to me, and then I hear him say it to the man behind me as well. He says it to everybody as they get off. When I ask Trekker if he heard
it, he grins.

“G’le g’le? It’s a way of saying good-bye when someone’s leaving on a journey. It means ‘go smiling.'”

Next morning we wake to a new world. Gone is the hot, stark desert country of the Ìoruh, with its carefully irrigated pockets of greenery and latte-colored river. In the thin, cool, alpine air of the Ka‡kars, the streams are as clear as foaming blue glass and every inch of land is covered in green, rich robust fields of green. Thick-boughed firs have replaced the
lean whips of cypress, and in every direction the jagged, purple, snow-tipped fingers of the mountains rise straight up in a salute. There are four massifs to explore, and we’ve decided to start with Bulut, the Cloud, which lies up at the end of the Kiramet Valley to the northwest, the distant white cap of it showing above a nearby hillside choked in bright sprays of red, blue,
and yellow wildflowers. I’ve never seen the high mountain dream-villages in Nepal, but from what I can see of Yaylalar, I don’t feel cheated.

Out in the middle of the main street, Trekker is sitting tailor-style in the dust, trying to hypnotize a rooster by talking like a hen. I can tell by the way Trekker’s eyes have changed color since we’ve been out of earshot of the Ìoruh that his heart has started to grieve for whitewater, but all the same his hen talk is pretty damn good. The rooster, however, looks
more bewildered than hypnotized, pausing to listen on one leg, then the other, ducking down, then craning up for a better view, beak open.

“Last time I tried this,” Trekker says cautiously, “he came right for me. Nearly bit off my nose.”

“Then why are you doing it again?”

“Dunno.”

Three yaylars lie up in the wide bowl of the Kiramet Valley, and the only way to get to any of them is by footpath. Yaylars, another remnant of the Seljuks’ nomadism, are villages without names or addresses, without streets or cars or phones or doors that lock. They’re simply villages for nomadic herdsmen that are abandoned to the weather in winter. The first two yaylars were
like stone mazes, and we threaded our way along narrow corridors of hand-dressed granite where cows peeked out from behind wooden doors, and then suddenly we were out the other end. Maybe 30 people lived in each of the yaylars, but I’m only guessing. They were shy of strangers, and although we felt watched, we saw no one.

Back out on the path, however, we met the drunk from the dolmus. Dressed in a ratty blue suit and old dress shoes without heels, he carried his livelihood on his head: a metal tray stacked with bright plastic goods — soap holders, sandals, knives and forks, buckets, knitting needles. He explained that everything he had was already spoken for, so he couldn’t sell us
anything; that walking was the worst part of his job; and that it was a good job anyway because many of his aged customers couldn’t get up and down the mountain every time they needed supplies. He also said that though it was a hard choice, some of them had quit their nomadic ways and now lived in the yaylars year-round. “Hos‡a kalin,” he said, stay happy, and then turning
his head slowly so as not to lose control of the tray, he went on.

As we climbed, picking out the third yaylar against the rocky hillside from a distance was like trying to spot a bird’s nest in the grass. It was still obviously nomadic, the stone work much cruder and closer to the earth, with no windows and few doors. Again we walked from one end to the other without seeing or hearing anything but the echo of our footsteps and the clicking of
hundreds of shiny black grasshoppers hitting stone walls as they tried to get out of the way. It was a little spooky, as if we were walking through a ruin full of spirits, a place we didn’t belong in and didn’t understand. Trekker said he knew a man at the far end of the yaylar who might invite us in for the worst tea we’d ever have in Turkey. But if he was home, he didn’t come
out. Instead, a stout woman knitting a sock appeared, and after planting herself decisively in our path and peering hard at us as if searching for something she couldn’t quite remember, she began, without dropping a stitch, to shout something over and over.

Trekker shrugged. “Try giving her a lolly,” he suggested. I dug out a candy from my pocket and offered. She eyed it from the side, the way a bird will study a worm, then dropped it in the toe of her half-knitted sock and, still knitting, marched to a low wooden door, which she opened, entered, and shut hard behind her.

A few minutes later, trekker stops in a field of wild roses, forget-me-nots, and foxglove. “Wait a minute,” he says. He removes his Turk’s cap, rubs hard at his dreadlocks, and puts his cap back on. “Did I just dream that, or did it really happen?”

Maybe it’s the openness of these highlands or the way the light falls, so clean and clear, or the fact that we’ve walked through three villages almost without seeing anyone, but Trekker’s right. Things feel…different. The land feels as if it’s moving, rushing under our feet, almost like something breathing. I turn to the hillside, thinking what we need is a few minutes’ rest,
and that’s when everything quits. Not 15 feet away, sitting so silently I’d never know it was there had I not turned in that exact direction, is a huge, wheat-colored Kangal.

There’s nothing between us this time — no river, no fence, no trees, not even a decent boulder. His face is black, his body rake-thin, his feet as big as lion paws. He could take all three of us.

“Weird,” says Steve. “A dog.”

It’s not just a dog, you idiot! Run! Then I look over at Trekker and he’s not running either. Nobody’s running! We’re going to die!

“Hey there, Bob,” says Trekker. He turns to me. “It’s OK. It’s Bob.”

I can barely speak. “You know this dog?”

“Sure, everybody knows Bob. Here, Bob.” He holds out his hand. “Come, Bobby. Here, boy.”

The dog stares at Trekker, then looks away.

“But…Bob?” I stammer. “How did he…?”

“Look at his ears when he turns.”

I look and the animal turns to look at me, turns as if his neck works on a screw. His ears have been bobbed, cut off at the skull, leaving open holes into his ear canals. Like little manholes without covers. I suck air through my teeth. “His owner did that?”

“Lots of Turks do that to their dogs to make them meaner. But Bobby doesn’t have an owner now. He’s wild.”

Two hours later Bob’s still with us. He walks at a distance, either ahead or behind, never close enough for touch. As he walks, he snacks on grasshoppers, snapping them out of the grass. If I ignore his visible ribs, his coat as dull as straw, and the oozing sores around his mouth, he’s a handsome dog, long and graceful, his eyes a strange clear yellow, his heavy tail a
counterbalanced pendulum as he walks. He has a deformity, an enormous double dewclaw on each hind leg, like a two-toed eagle talon, and he has the healthiest-looking gums and teeth I’ve ever seen on a dog.

But he’s not a dog to be taken lightly. Trekker and Steve call him to come closer, which he does only when they’re not calling. He is with us but is not with us. He moves quietly, like a wolf. When we stop to eat, he sits apart. I’ve assumed he’s sticking with us only so he can cash in at lunchtime, but now that we’ve brought out the food, he’s watching clouds roll in, he’s
watching the view. One by one, we bring our gifts, humbly proffering them between his enormous paws. He’s willing enough, after a moment, to taste a bit of feta, and he doesn’t mind olives; but when Steve holds out a hunk of sausage, Bob sighs with boredom and heaves to his feet. Then he sits down and looks at Trekker’s daypack. Looks at it as if there’s a rabbit in there.

Trekker laughs. “All I got in there is lollies, Bob,” he says. He holds out another piece of sausage.

But Bob doesn’t move. He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t wag his tail. He just stares at the pack, waiting for it to open. Because he lacks ears, he has nothing more than the depth of his gaze to communicate desire, but if a dog can turn a stare into a physical vibration, Bob is doing it now.

“All right,” says Trekker, unzipping his bag. “See for yourself. There’s nothing in there for dogs.”

Which is how we find out what keeps Bob’s teeth so white. Lollies.

Ten minutes later, still chewing on a piece of taffy, Bob gets to his feet and walks off. Instead of following the trail, he heads straight uphill, moving quickly, as if someone’s calling him. “There’s nothing up there, Bob,” yells Trekker, but Bob keeps moving, drawn by unseen spirits, and again I feel the chill go through me. We all feel it. Without talking about it, we start
packing up to leave.

But we need to discuss whether to keep going or start heading down. The clouds are frothing overhead and off to the west, dropping in like sea spray through a crack in the black curtain of rock. The question is not do we want to get wet, but for how long. As it stands, we’re an hour from shelter, much farther if no one at the yaylars takes us in.

“So, Trekker,” I say carefully. “What do you think?”

He tosses a stone in the air and catches it. “I think we ought to run guts and pull cones.” When we don’t answer he grins. “It’s a Kiwi river guide’s saying. It’s what you do when your life revolves around living. It means we ought to ask Bob.”

Bob is heading up the ridge, almost in the clouds, picking his way through a patch of wild rhododendrons toward a snowfield in a saddle of rock. We all start calling him. Bob! Bob!

He stops and looks back over his shoulder, as if pausing to ask, What? Then he turns back and starts climbing again.

And though I can’t explain it really, that’s why we started following him.

By the time we got to the snowfield, the clouds had dropped around us in a wall of white. Gone were the jagged ridges of rock above, the vast green sweep of the Kiramet Valley below, and the gigantic sense of openness and space. We were closed inside a fog so dense we couldn’t see more than 50 yards. Black boulders stuck out of the snow like gravestones, and after we passed
those it was white everywhere, the whole world white, no separation between land and air and sky. We heard a river running under the snow, but it only added to our sense of free-floating.

“You seen Bob?”

“Not yet. You?”

“He’s probably around here somewhere.”

We all turned at the same moment and found him waiting, barely visible in the fog, his black face watching us, chin flat to the snowfield, butt high in the air. For most domesticated dogs, such a gesture is an invitation to play.

“What’s he doing?”

“I have no idea.”

And then we heard him bark, a single deep bay of a bark, and in a twisting leap that took him clear off the ground, he landed low and lunged forward into a full charge, his earless head forward and low, mouth open, tongue flapping like a little red necktie over his great grin of teeth. He was charging us, he was charging me, and if I didn’t flinch it was only because I knew it
was useless. I believe I closed my eyes, but I don’t know because there was so much white everywhere.

“Look at him go!”

So I looked and turned and there was Bob, braking and leaning for the spin, skidding, spraying up snow like a skier under his claws, then heading straight for Trekker. He faked out Trekker by inches, then went for Steve. Then for me again. One after the other he charged us, around and around and around, his big yellow eyes rolling in their sockets, his sides heaving, his
scythelike claws scraping for a hold as he spun to come again. What’s that quote by Virgil? “Death twitches my ear. ‘Live,’ he says, ‘I am coming.'” We all felt it. We cheered him on, we flagged him through, we chased him down. A rabid wolf, a killing machine.

The Terrible Turk!

Laura Hendrie is the author of the novel Stygo.

Photographs by Stephen Alvarez