When I met Suka for the first time, she was working as a sled dog in the north of Finland. I was working there too.
It was a hard, physical lifestyle, but it had its consolations. The dogs began to howl for their breakfast at four or five in the morning, as we lugged heavy sledges laden with meat through the dark. I didn’t see daylight for more than a month, but the sky was a shifting wall of technicolour: a pink and purple dawn teasing the sky for hours, never quite spilling into sunrise. Blood-red noons. The moon hung heavy in the sky, burnt orange, and at night, the stars blazed with a fierce intensity. The aurora in veils of green and gold.
This was the winter of 2012. I’d taken the kennels job as an escape route from a life in the city that had been making me sick. What had begun as urban ennui had metastasised into a more malignant form of depression, one I had never experienced before. By the time I left London for the Arctic, I’d had the uncanny sensation of watching my life unfold as if through glass for a period of six months or more.
I’d known instinctively that the harshness of an Arctic climate and a challenging manual job w
