WE ARE WELL INTO AUTUMN in the Yukon now; about half the leaves on the aspens and willows are yellow. Today is brilliantly sunny after two days of dark and rain. Isa and I thought this afternoon would be an ideal time to sit in our big exercise yard that encloses a tall stand of older aspen poplars and to give our young Seppalas a leg stretch. So we had a succession of dogs running free in the e-yard: first a mating pair who are nearing the end of their romance -- breathaking in their agility, speed and synchrony as they pursued each other around the perimeter, heart-warming in their graceful, funny courting games. Then, a four-month-old single late-winter puppy and his mother. She (Alana) is a lithe, graceful smooth runner, fast as quicksilver, and her growing son (Echo) couldn't begin to catch her, though he never gave up trying.
Then, finally, The Nine -- our two all-girl winter litters, now seven months old and growing their first adult winter coats. Instead of getting gawky and clumsy as they grow up, these young ladies just go on getting more beautiful. They are all in good flesh, the new coats are smooth and silky.
As they ran 'round the enclosure, paralleling the perimeter fence, or drifted through the aspens, repeatedly something would stop me, my breath caught in my throat with a feeling of wonderment and unfamiliarity. For an instant I would see them as they are, in all their strange semiferal, semidomestic beauty, and think, "What ARE they? They are so lovely!"
How is it that, after so many years of living with and breeding Seppalas, they can still hit me with that feeling of something newly discovered, something strange, beautiful, utterly unfamiliar? Surely it cannot be something that they alone possess -- I'm sure at least a few other breeds, perhaps desert-bred Salukis or Chart Polski, have it, too -- but I suspect this is given to few dog-breeders to experience. This elfin, ethereal and evanescent beauty among the aspens, as nine young Seppalas, no two alike, chase gracefully through the closely-growing saplings in the yellow sunlight of an autumn afternoon in the Yukon.
Posted by jjeffrey at August 28, 2005 03:18 PM