The Wild Dogs of Iceland

The trail along the edge of the world

They chased me: for miles, for hours, from the moment I set my feet on the trail that morning. I walked, and they followed. No matter how fast I hiked, I heard their snorts and growls behind me, their claws clicking over rocks. That’s the problem, I suppose, when you try to outpace what you carry with you.

I carried much that morning. My hiking pack was stuffed with sleeping bag and tent, spare clothes and more food than I could reasonably eat in four days. Since I was in Iceland, I carried local delicacies: dense rye bread (a little moldy but mostly good); a half-kilo brick of marzipan, which most grocery stores sell; that regional staple of chocolate-covered licorice (which turns out to be a combination I abhor); and the obligatory fish. I brought two large bags of freeze-dried cod. Salty and rich, it tasted less like any earthly food and more like a gift bestowed on humanity by some forgotten Icelandic god. Two bags, each large enough to last a sane person a week—that was all I had. I rationed it strictly.

I’d spent the night before in my tent, behind a natural earthen windbreak on the headland that borders Nordfjordur in the extreme east of the country. With most of my gear packed, I made final preparations. I tucked a few granola bars in the pockets of my pack’s hipbelt. Those would be my first breakfast, which I like to eat while moving. I’ve never known what to have for lunch when I’m hiking, but after many years and thousands of miles, I finally struck upon the obvious: no one could stop me from doing away with the meal altogether. Instead, I now eat two staggered breakfasts, then snack until dinner. To prepare for second breakfast, I poured dry oatmeal into this little pot I carry, added water, and sealed the lid. It would rehydrate as I hiked, and by the time I was ready for it, it would be ready for me. Just before I set off, I swallowed my morning pills. That starts the timer: once they go down, I have fifteen minutes to get walking and eat something or I’ll throw up. I flicked my trekking poles into the air with my toe and caught them during that brief moment when they hung in front of me. It’s a little trick I’ve perfected, and pulling it off always makes me smile. I climbed out from behind the windbreak, tightened the hipbelt of my pack, and scrambled upslope to the trail. With a breath of clean morning air, I turned east and began to walk.

I walked, and they followed, like wild dogs who’d picked up my scent, who’d sensed I was near but didn’t bother looking for me because as long as they waited by the trail, I’d come to them. They must have hidden themselves at first, perhaps in the long shadows cast by the low arctic sun. Perhaps behind the tussock where the plover called its warning before running off to cry again from a farther mound. They waited for me to pass then padded silently along. Dogs with human faces, they padded, breathing hot steam behind me.

I wish I could tell you the precise form they took that morning, the exact faces they wore, but the truth is I can’t remember. So many times have they followed me, hunted me. So many hours and days have I spent stolidly pressing on, not so much in the hope of outrunning them as wearing them down through my slow, brutal persistence until they finally turn away panting, feet cut and bleeding, to settle on easier prey. I may not be particularly quick, I tell myself, but I excel at obstinately enduring.

Perhaps they wore, as they often do, the face of my high school English teacher, the one who was always smiling, smiling as if it hurt, the one whose smile could theoretically mean she was pleased but more often meant she was mocking us or simply too bemused not to smile. “I cannot remember a time I was as ignorant as you”, she told us once. She would, I’m sure, give me that same smile if she saw me now, attempting to write, writing clumsily while hoping desperately I write well. When they wear her face, the dogs that follow don’t have to make a sound to bring me to my knees. They simply have to stare and allow that same smile to crease the corners of their mouths. She of impeccable credentials. She who enumerated the ways I fell short. She who would only offer a solution if an insult wasn’t forthcoming.

Or maybe they took the face of that chemistry professor who told me I should settle down and find myself a technician’s job. Maybe I could be the person who visited laboratories, to calibrate their balances, say? What did I think of that? I’d get to travel—I’d get to see the world! I’d even get to brush up against the places where real scientists did real science. I could stand near serious people as they did their serious work. That would be good, wouldn’t it? To be near, to be in the next room over as science unfolded. And—though she didn’t say this outright—it was the best I could really hope for.

Or maybe the wolves, hunting in a pack, would each assume a different face and become the professors who haunted me through grad school. The faces that laughed, concealing hearts that fed. Professor J. who encouraged people to speak up when they broke something in the lab. He’d call them a dolt he said, but after that, everyone could move on. His lab meetings were full of brittle silence. Then there was Professor D., who oozed paternalistic charm, who always knew better than you, and who, my roommate concluded, was probably scared of me because I was smarter than him. Apparently, he went on to warn other professors away from me.

Or Professor H., whose eyes sparkled with a degree of spite few chose to see.

How poorly I handled myself around them! Around those men with voids in their chests where their humanity should have been. And though I haven’t seen them, haven’t heard from them in years, they continue to remind me of my failures. They remind me how justified they were in hating me. They remind me of it—and I know it to be true. I should have done better. I know the situation was terrible for me, but still. I should have dealt with it better. I should have swallowed myself, should have smiled through insults and never—never!—felt insulted. How easily I feel slighted! That is a dangerous flaw, I remind myself, so dangerous it’s called a sin. I was guilty of it then, the sin of pride, of ego:

What of the time I worked deep into the night, trying and failing and trying again to revive an ancient laboratory furnace? I went home defeated and returned only a couple hours later, as the sun contemplated rising.

Professor H.’s face flushed red when I told him. “Why didn’t you finish?” he said, his voice rising.

I bristled. There, I want to whisper in my own ear. There is your problem! You are a student after all—you have not yet earned the right to even frown. But I couldn’t help it. I bristled. Just like I couldn’t help defending myself. “I was here until 2:00 AM,” I said.

“Good!” He roared. “You should be!”

And yet other people managed. They did well, even, whereas I struggled. What is the common factor in all these situations? The through line to search for if we are to discover why they happened? Is it not me, the single through line? At its most basic, the problem is me. Maybe I’m too little. I have too little patience, too little capacity to indulge or suffer quietly. Or maybe, the problem is not so much that I’m too little. Maybe it’s actually that I’m too much, too proud, too quick to take offense, far too sensitive. Maybe the problem is, at its root, this: I’m just too much myself. What do I think of that? I think I’d be anyone else if I were able.

But those are just one type of dog that follows. Even worse are the docile ones, the ones who wear the faces of friends, of people who believed in me or fought for me—only for me to somehow betray that trust or belief or affection. These are the animals who whimper because I’ve managed to kick them, usually without quite realizing I was doing so until later. These poor creatures! I ache for them, these ones who follow me precisely because I did kick them. They follow, tails between their legs, to remind me of what I did, what I do to people who help me. They remind me of who I surely must be.

I cannot say precisely which of them—or which assemblage—followed me that morning as I walked over grass and heath, alongside the languid arm of that glimmering fjord. Oh, and how glorious that morning should have been! A clear blue sky, warmth on the air—sun and warmth in Iceland? I wore short sleeves as I walked, and yet I dragged behind me these creatures that blackened my mind.

The coast of East Iceland (of most of the island, in fact) looks as though some giant fingers raked the edge of the land when the Earth was still soft. Those gouges filled with water, making an endless series of fjords that extend miles inland, separated from each other by steep green headlands. From above, the edge of the island looks like the sea and land are intertwining their own fingers. Traversing the coast therefore entails long straight stretches as you mirror the edge of a fjord—followed by abrupt u-turns when you reach the end of the Earth and duck back to follow the next fjord on its long inland march. This also means your feet take you through every point of the compass eventually, across shaded north slopes and into that tropical Icelandic sun on south faces. Cool to warm, and the vegetation changes: moss, short grasses, low-crawling heath give way to broad leaf shrubs that reach the full dizzying heights of your knees. Oh, but these shrubs? Within them something special may grow. They are not plants so much as gifts, blessings for the one so lost he he finds them.

I made the turn around the slope of the headland that morning, the turn from north face to south, cool to warm. They turned too, the dogs with shifting faces. They followed, never more than a pace or two behind. I walked fast, and I walked, oblivious. The flowing blue glass of the fjord, the waves and foam rising, crashing, falling, rising, falling, rising, a hundred feet below. In the air, rigid vees, unmistakable, the shape of arctic terns, a bird I always longed to see for its name alone, a name that conjures images of vast and desolate places. I balanced on the edge of the Earth, a wondrous, mythical line where land turns once and for all to sea—I walked along that rim, and I saw none of it.

I saw none of it, I heard none of it—until, that is, I tripped into broad leaves and fell, but only to my knees. The branches of those shrubs, thin as wire, held my weight. They are, I suppose, used to far greater abuse from the wind and rain and snow (recall: Iceland). The dogs that followed were obliged to stop as well lest they overtake their prey. They had to wait for me to stand again, brush off the leaves and twigs, and exhaling heavily, beckon them to follow once more. They had to wait for me to think about them again. Oh, but don’t despair for them: they are horrifyingly adept at waiting. They sat back on their haunches, curled their tails around their paws, and for once said nothing. I, meanwhile, wedged myself against my trekking poles and was about to lever myself up to continue my distracted miserable morning when I saw it: a blue so dark it was black. A black so rich it gleamed. Within those shrubs, the sort that tripped and tore and bruised and always made hiking a battle, resided a blessing.

Crowberries.

Gathering wild berries is something of a national sport in Iceland, an activity so zealously undertaken, it’s earned its own name: berjamor. Crowberries are only one type that grows wild on the island. They’re a small, glossy berry so blue they’re black, and when you’ve been stumbling blindly for hours and miles, trying to tire yourself into forgetting things long past—when the morning sun strikes those berries at the perfect angle, ah then look: do you see it? How they shine, iridescent as black pearls.

It wasn’t much, really, the berry patch I stumbled into that morning. The berries weren’t even good—they were tiny and shriveled, full of bitter seeds and mealy flesh so dry it stole the moisture from my mouth. They were, objectively, terrible. But viewed objectively, little about that morning made sense. Iceland has no wild dogs of any sort, human-faced or not. it has no predators larger than the arctic fox. I’d thrown objectivity away long ago. And so I clawed through the bushes. I picked out from the handfuls of berries bits of twig and leaf and the seed heads of faded grasses. Then I dumped the berries into my mouth. My fingers came away stained with juice so purple it was black. My mouth must have as well. I only paused when I needed to spit out a wad of seeds too hard to be chewed. Then I returned to my frantic berjamor. When I'd exhausted what I could reach, I swam over the waxy leaves to a new stand. I let myself sink. I let myself drop from the brave posture I’d maintained all morning. I let myself rest, unaware until then how deeply the morning’s flight had tired me. But once more, those kind shrubs intervened: they caught me in my fall. They kept me from ever striking the ground. They held me, their wire branches suddenly tender. I leaned back, and still they held, held with a force superior to any weight I carried.

Eventually, I came to learn one of the fundamental tenets of berjamor: there is a hard limit to the number of berries the human stomach can hold. In a flash of inspiration, I emptied the pockets of my hipbelt and collected every granola bar wrapper I could find. I folded each into a little foil packet to hold more berries. I gathered what extra I could in my purple-stained fists before finally tripping my way off trail to a boulder overlooking the fjord. That, I decided, was where I would sit to eat. I emptied my fists and all the little foil packets of berries into my oatmeal. The result must have been a slush of iridescent black interrupted by the occasional oat.

I ate what I could then lay back against the sun-warmed slope of stone. The sun! Ah, that sweet Icelandic sun, all the dearer when it shines for how shy it is. The rise and fall and crash of the fjord: I heard it all now. I heard the sea breathe, and the salt it exhaled freshened the air. And the call of birds—I opened my eyes. Those were terns, weren’t they? The rigid vees with straight tails that only looked black when framed by the sun? They would circle around and transform into something whiter than snow. Arctic terns—I’d seen them at last. And I lay below them, bathed in sun and sound and delight, at the edge of the Earth.

So content was I to close my eyes, to drift as if already dreaming, that I utterly forgot what I’d left behind. Dogs with shifting faces? Smiles that hurt and hearts that fed?

The wind blew across my cheek. The grass and the shrubs rustled, and I was alone again. Alone for miles.

Crowberries at the edge of the world