I was somewhere between nine and ten when I was nearly devoured by a team of sled dogs.
My actual predicament might not have been as potentially lethal as I remember. My uncle in upstate New York raised sled dogs in addition to growing a garden roughly the size of a national reserve. If you left the back porch and wound through the trail between Cretaceous-sized squash and tiger lilies, you would end up at a pen with a team of gorgeous Siberian huskies. I'd been fascinated with huskies since seeing the wolf-dog on Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman, and I would just sit and watch the dogs as they lazily blinked their blue eyes back at me.
Can I just say that Hollywood has left me with completely unrealistic expectations of how humans and animals are supposed to relate? There's supposed to be this beautiful moment where Lassie communicates that Timmy's in the well, Beethoven stops the evil scientist, and Iron Will gets his dog team to beat the bald guy with the frosbite. Either way, whether it's Lassie, Benji, or the frickin' Incredible Journey, animals always manage to have this transcendent moment where they realize the need of the human and come to that person's aid.
That instinct is fiction.
I had one dog out of his individual pen and in the larger fenced-in area. The dog came up past my waist, and was not used to taking the instructions of a seventy-pound weakling. When it came time to put him back in his pen, he lazily blinked at me while I attempted to drag him.
I pondered this, then went to the cage of a white sled dog who I assumed was the leader because... well... a snow-white Siberian husky looked pretty badass. I crouched down and stared into the white dog's eyes. “You'll get him to go back in his pen, right?”
Balto would have shooed the disobedient member back into his pen.
As soon as I opened the gate, the dogs went from Dr. Quinn to Jack London in half a second. The two dogs charged each other, snarling, yipping, and (in my young mind) attempting to kill each other. I waited for one of their jugulars to gush blood, like when Buck bested Spitz and took control of the pack.
I freaked out.
And naturally let out another dog. Clearly, this dog would straighten out these other two. I'd seen this in every animal movie I'd ever watched.
Stupid Hollywood.
My uncle followed the noise of three dogs fighting while I clung to the back of the fence, frightened out of my mind. It took him about ten seconds to send every dog back to their pens, each one calmly blinking as if they hadn't been in a bared-teeth frenzy a few rapid heartbeats ago.
I wish I could say my naivete died that day, but every so often, I still find myself trying to close doors with the Force or expecting supermarket shoppers to burst out into choreographed song and dance. Every so often, I want this twenty-one year old weakling to be able to control the sled dog. Every so often, I expect people to behave more like Balto and less like a real dog.
