I’m not a cat person. Neither am I a small dog person. I like dogs with a certain presence, filling the space around you. I like a dog that is big enough to be noticed, whether it’s the shadow as it passes from one room to another, the scratch and sigh as it settles, even those eye watering farts that let you know they are around.

Okay, maybe I can live without the farts, but you know what I mean.

Big dogs are just there, and you can’t miss them.

Nansen was a big dog. All of our sledge dogs were big. Except for Simba. She was half the size of Nansen. Even  though all of our dogs – and all the dogs on the island – lived outside, year round, our dogs were still pets more than working dogs. It was a fine balance, but it worked.

I’ve already mentioned our walks on the mountain and on the sea ice. I’ve posted lots of pictures about them too. But this post is less about what I could see and more about what I could feel.

We’ll start with the teeth.

Adult sledge dogs have big teeth. The canines are huge, and appropriately so. We fed our dogs a mix of dried or frozen fish. They had frozen seal meat and bones too. I gave them squares of seal blubber when the temperature dropped below -18 Celsius, and a dry food mix soaked overnight in water to give them plenty of liquid. They also had lots of fresh fish and other meaty “stuff” which you won’t want me to go into. So the diet was varied and the teeth had to cope with a lot of gnawing and biting. They were sharp, but nothing like the needle teeth of a puppy.

Damn.

Sharp!

Tongues were long and sticky and more than a little eurch! I’m not a big fan of being licked in the face by a sledge dog – or any dog for that matter. When you’ve see what they lick then you won’t want that tongue anywhere near you. Then there’s the diet I mentioned. Plenty of interesting smells associated with the different foods going in. So let’s just move swiftly past the tongue, shall we?

A sledge dog’s fur is thick. It’s often greasy and clogged and matted with all kinds of muck, blood, blubber, grease, and good old Greenland dirt. If you’ve got a dog, you know they like to roll in stuff, and the smellier the stuff is, the better. This is bad enough in England, for example, where a dog might roll in cow muck. But when out on the sea ice, the things they can roll in include the insides of pretty much any fish or sea mammal you can think of. Nansen had a thing for rotten whale, and rolling in that made for some seriously interesting clumps of stuff, not to mention the smell. But this post is about what you can feel, and petting a sledge dog can be just as interesting.

Claws… A sledge dog’s claws are often sharper in the summer as they don’t move around so much. I took mine for lots of walks, so they kept their claws in good shape through constant use. I never had to clip them, but each time they stood on their back legs to paw my clothes I wondered if I should. In the winter the claws are “managed” and looked after through activity as they run on the ice.

About those paws… If you can avoid the tongue, one of the best sledge dog experiences is a sledge dog hug. I always enjoyed a good hug from the team. Taking Nansen as an example, when he stood on his back legs and placed his front paws on my chest, his head was high enough that he could tuck his chin on my shoulder, or slip down into the crook of my arm. It’s difficult to get a hug from a lapdog. It’s just not the same.

Which brings me to leaning, the title of the post.

Even when not hugging, Nansen and the other dogs would lean when standing next to you. I’m sure you’ve experienced it too, but there’s nothing quite like the feel of a big dog pressing it’s body against you, leaning, as if just letting you know it’s there, needing the contact, but not necessarily wanting anything more than the contact. There’s something very reassuring about a lean. It could be the equivalent of holding hands, that gentle physical contact that confirms that they are with you, that they don’t need to speak, but they’ll listen if you want to talk, or not, but let’s be close, let’s lean, just a little while longer.

And then they see a ptarmigan, and they’re off for a bit of a mad chase. Or, worse, when Nansen caught the scent of a female in heat and he was off, off, off! I thought I had lost him, thought I would get into trouble for letting a sledge dog loose among the teams tethered to the rocks around the island of Uummannaq.

But then he was back, huge tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth with a sheepish look in his eye as I took a firm grip of his collar. I had all kinds of words for him, plenty that I wanted to say, only to forget every single one of them as Nansen wriggled to one side to press his body against my leg and lean.

Chris