Nobody liked the packs of wild dogs that roamed the town after dark, but no one wanted to deal with them either. Mornings held that condo trash would be scattered across parking lots, and someone’s pet poodle would be found torn to shreds, but local sheriffs maintained the wild dogs were just part of living in a small mountain town.
This was ski country in Idaho, where the rich and sometimes famous flew in from the west coast for a weekend of rowdy 3D’s: dining, downhill and drinking. Private helicopters dropped skiers off high above the timber line to ski spots unreachable to the locals, then picked them back up with waiting tequila shots or lines of coke, then whisk them off again to try another speed run down the couloir.
We boys were never invited to that party, and that was good, but we knew of the wild dogs. We knew they bred with the pedigrees that were left behind by their rich owners, producing a winter crop of feral litters every year. Those cute puppies grew up mean, street smart and massed in packs of ten or fifteen, sometimes more, harassing anything they could get their teeth into. It was winter in Ketchum, biting and dry, and left you wiping your nose from sudden nosebleeds.
We hired in as maids at Sun Valley, mostly for the benefit of a free ski pass and the right to call ourselves ski bums for the season. My buddy Jim was the leader. Tall, lanky, and rugged, he was an adventurer, and he talked me into taking a quarter off college and heading west in a VW van to shake off our sophomore blues. We had no money, the kind of no money that ordered hot water and used the ketchup on the table for a lousy version of tomato soup and if we were lucky, a nice waitress that gave us crackers.
Between shifts at the resort, snow piled up. So did the tourists. Wave after wave of them poured in and cut loose in their rooms, trashing them usually, and leaving trays of luxurious room service laying outside hardly touched. We didn’t want to be in college, but a meal plan back at school looked pretty good after a shift of cleaning rooms paid for on daddy’s credit card. We were putting on a good face, hanging through the holidays, but watching spoiled skiers spend money willy-nilly was a dismal prospect. With mid-December feeling heavy, we loaded our skating gear in the van for a night of free Broomball, a polite version of hockey, at the resort’s skating rink.
“Oh, here we go again!” Jim snarled as he slowed the van and reached up to get the frost off the inside of windshield. Our heater had broken somewhere in Nevada on the way out to Sun Valley.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I said, peering out. “They’re everywhere. And they aren’t moving for us.”
“Can you believe this? I’m only a foot away,” Jim said and inched the van closer. A lazy gathering of dogs, all sizes, had strewn themselves about the street and barely looked up at us.
“Look at that silver one,” I said, then added cynically, “He thinks he is king of the road. Rrruuff!”
“No fear at all, these dogs,” Jim added rolling down his window. “Git! Git outa here!”
The silver one circled around our van, slowly as if eyeing a possible kill. It was eerie, like being stalked by a woken zombie.
“Time for a different plan,” Jim said under his breath, his usual patience running thin.
And we were running late to Broomball. He didn’t like wasting time or gas money, certainly not on a bunch of wild mutts. With a long blast on the horn, and we made one final attempt to make a path through, but none of the dogs budged. We were being stared down with rows of white teeth that shone in our headlights.
“I oughta just run ‘em over,” Jim said, but put the VW in reverse.
It was the way everyone felt. The dog packs, brazen and mean, lay in the open road all the time, challenging anyone to make them move out of the way. One barked as we backed up, but it was a smug and stuffed-up bark, as if the dog was taking a chunk right out of the frigid air. Another joined in with a howl. This air was theirs to bite, as often as they wanted.
By the time we made it to the ice rink, the temp had dropped to single digits, and we ran in late to grab a stick broom by the fire pit and gliding out on the ice to blow off our steam. We were drifters like those dogs, away from our own kind, away from some other life we dumped back in college, and most of the time disdainful of it. We had something in common with those dogs. Loners, out on our own, on thin ice, looking for a free meal ticket. That was us and the dogs.
Raised in northern Ohio, Jim knew hockey, but Scottie, the third stooge in our trip, was the real deal, a gifted skater. When he was sixteen, a car accident had thrown him across four lanes of traffic. Until then, Scottie was headed for the Canadian pro hockey circuit, he was that good. On land, he steps were hampered, and his brain damage forever tripped up his speech, but on the ice, he could move like a butterfly and skate circle around any of us. Me, I was fast but clumsy on the ice, an embarrassment really, but I travelled with two nimble northerners who vouched for me and got me through the gate for broomball.
“Lean..on the… in…inside.. of your skate, then….ppppush down,” Scottie told me when he saw I couldn’t skate in reverse.
His car accident had stripped him of smooth speech, and in the mornings before work, Jim and I had to help him with his coat buttons.
“You can’t…play…the….puck…always going…f..ff…orward,” he stuttered, and he taught me the virtue of holding the puck and setting up a play by passing back. Jim was more aggressive, a master of the poke-and-jab, and spent time teaching me how to stop without falling over the rails. That maneuver separated the skaters from the goats.
Nearing Christmas, a crowd of partyers had gathered with their colorful drinks and hired dates to watch us around the open fire pit. Scottie left early after the first half, leaving our team with a man down, and when the buzzer went off ending the game, our beards were encrusted with ice from our hard, frozen breath. Using a broom and a volleyball wasn’t real hockey, but it passed for entertainment when home was two thousand miles away.
“Good cross JB on that last goal,” Jim said as we carried our gear back to the van. He was a natural coach, patient, and ribbed me about my lack of skills without making fun.
“My big claim to fame tonight!” I replied. “Let’s face it, Jim, I’m pretty much just a warm body out there. I can’t get that stopping thing down to save my life. I spend more time on my rear end than on my feet!”
“Yea, you could leave some ice on the rink,” laughed Jim.
We walked stiff legged to the van, our soreness sinking in as some nasty, probably illegal, body checks began to ache. Our usual fare of mac and cheese awaited us at our flat, then a hot shower before hitting the hay. That thought changed when our van’s motor let out a couple dry coughs, then wouldn’t even do that, leaving us staring through the windshield, out across a frozen landscape.
Jim looked at me. “How’s your thumb working?”
“Yea, right. This stinks,” I said. “Maybe if we hoof it outta the resort we can get a lift. It’s still early.” But at six degrees, I knew that was wishful thinking.
A perfectly clear and infinite night sky lay between us and the five miles home. The only thing passing us was a shooting star, so we gave up on hitchhiking, put our heads down to block the wind, and walked without conversation. Packed snow muffled our steps and buried any sympathy. We never heard the truck behind us, and it barreled past, too suddenly for us to wave it down. A huge billow of icy sparkles went into the air as the pick-up took a curve, leaving a snow cloud hovering in front of us, lingering like a string of arctic Christmas lights.
We slowed for a moment, to take in the beautiful vapor drifting down against a midnight-blue background, but as the air cleared, we saw the black silhouette of a feral beast revealed in the fog, square shouldered and unflinching, and looking…at us.