His alarm clock wouldn’t go off for another half hour, but Josh Barnes woke when the floodlights in his backyard went on at five o’clock, followed soon after by the not-so-faint furor of barking from his kennel of twenty sled dogs.

Yard lights. The cacophony of the dogs. The revving of a snowmobile starting up as his dad, who lived next door, prepared to deliver the dogs’ soupy slop breakfast. It all marked morning feeding time at the Sourdough Kennel, at least on the days Josh reported for work at the Golden Falls Fire and Rescue Department. Otherwise, he’d be the one loading his snowmobile to feed the dogs, who were kept at the edge of his twenty-acre property, away from the house to lessen their noise.

And oh, the noise.

You’ll never get a wife this way, his most recent ex-girlfriend, Shannon Steele, had chided him one morning, unhappy about being woken so early and in such a manner. The girlfriend before had said much the same thing, adding, You’d never really expect a woman to live out here with a bunch of yapping dogs, would you?

When he’d been serving overseas in Afghanistan and gotten the call from Bruce telling him old man Ferris next door had passed away and his widow wanted to sell the kennel and house dirt cheap, preferably to Josh if he wanted it, women and marriage had been the last things on his mind.

He’d been thinking only of Golden Falls, where it was greener-than-green in summer and whiter-than-white in winter and where in spring the rivers cracked and the meadows bloomed. Before enlisting as a Navy Hospital Corpsman attached to the Marine Corps, he’d considered relocating to the Lower Forty-Eight and seeing what life had to offer down there, but by the time his dad’s call came in, Josh had seen enough. He just wanted to go home.

Some of his favorite childhood memories were helping old man Ferris train the sled dog puppies. He’d drive an ATV in summer, or a snowmobile in winter, and the Alaskan Husky pups would trail after him, learning to follow their leader. He’d have them haul wood on a sled and teach them not to chew the rope lines.

During his deployment, Josh had dreamed of the dogs and he’d dreamed of Denali, the great mountain to the southwest, which was always in his sights as a child and forever fixed in his mind as the image of his true home.

He’d dreamed of being a musher, of steering a sled behind a team of dogs out on the tundra without another person in sight.

He’d dreamed, too, of the Iditarod, the last great race on earth—of its beauty and its brutality, and how racing it would by necessity blot from his brain everything having to do with war and ugly brown deserts and soldiers dying.

He’d thought sled dog racing might help him forget.

He hadn’t been thinking of women at all.

* * *

Josh bought the property.

Bruce Barnes, by then retired as chief of the Golden Falls police force, agreed to help manage the kennel, both until Josh got back from the military and afterwards. Josh came home and was hired on as a firefighter for Golden Falls. He’d since gotten his paramedic license, and the job itself gave him a lot of free time, but his forty-eight-hour shifts meant he still needed a kennel manager, a position his father served.

On a fire shift morning, it was just his dad feeding the dogs in the bitter pre-dawn cold of early November in Alaska’s interior, and while Josh could have gone back to sleep for another half-hour, he instead decided to help him. He turned on the lights, hit the remote to get his electric fireplace going, and got out of bed and did his daily upon-waking pushups. He stopped in the kitchen to get a pot of coffee brewing, then layered up and trekked across the yard to the kennel. It would be dark yet for hours, and Josh always found it a lonely time of day.

“Morning, Josh.” His dad greeted him with a nod, his cheeks ruddy.

“Damn cold this morning,” Josh said. “How’d you sleep?”

Bruce shrugged. “Tossing and turning, as usual.”

“Ditto.”

Josh couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a solid night’s sleep. Certainly not since high school, and probably not since his mom died when he was thirteen. His mind was restless at night; it was when his ghosts came to haunt him. He guessed it was the same for his dad.

They worked together in companionable silence as the dogs barked en masse, excited because they knew food was coming soon. Each dog had its own little dog house to which it was chained, and several began running to the end of their tether and back, jumping on and off their doghouse, over and over. Others simply stood, barking, tails wagging. Josh and his dad went around with slop buckets and gave each dog his portion, and one by one, the kennel quieted as each began to eat.

“I’ve got coffee on,” Josh said.

“Music to my ears. Want to hop on?”

“Nah, I’ll walk.”

“You go ahead, then. I’ll load up the slop buckets.”

Josh was at his back door when Bruce pulled up. Always a relief to step inside, it was doubly nice to be greeted by the smell of fresh coffee. As Josh poured two cups, Bruce took a seat at the table with a groan.

Josh handed his dad a mug and sat at the table across from him. “You okay?”

“My bones feel old on these cold winter mornings.”

“I hear you.”

Bruce smiled. “You’re twenty-nine. What do you know about feeling old?”

“Hey, I’ll be thirty next month.”

“That’s right.” Bruce sipped his coffee. “Speaking of which, your sister wants to know the best day to throw you a party. Any thoughts?”

Josh grinned. His sister Maggie just wanted payback for the state of inebriation he’d gotten her into on her own thirtieth. “Well, we’ve got the race my birthday weekend, so not before then.”

Josh had signed up to race the dogs in the Akpaliki Taurtut, a hundred-mile race sponsored by the city of Golden Falls each December to bring winter business to the area, as a prelude to the Iditarod in March.

“That’s right,” Bruce said. “We do, don’t we?”

“You don’t sound too enthused about it.”

“Winter camping at the age of sixty-one? What’s not to like?”

Josh sized up his dad. For someone who was never one to complain, it sounded quite a bit like a complaint. It sounded, too, like his dad might soon bail on him. He couldn’t blame him. Josh’s older twin sisters lived with their families in the Florida Keys and co-owned a thirty-six-foot sailboat. Why wouldn’t his dad prefer to spend winters there near his grandchildren instead of feeding slop to dogs before dawn in below-freezing temperatures? Josh had been lucky to have had his dad’s help for the past three years, and he well knew it.

“Should I try to find someone else to be my kennel manager? Viktor?” During racing season, Josh had a part-time worker at the kennel, a middle-aged jack-of-all-trades type named Viktor Brodowski who’d worked with the dogs since before Josh bought the place.

“No, no,” Bruce said. “I always keep my obligations.”

“I wish it didn’t feel like an obligation.”

“I don’t mind.” His dad shrugged. “I know how important the dogs are to you.”

“It’s not only the dogs that are important to me, Dad. You and Maggie are, too. Your happiness is important to me.”

“We’re happy enough.”

Maggie was Josh’s other sister, older by one year. An ICU nurse on the graveyard shift, she was also his roommate and arguably his best friend. Their brother Jack, also a firefighter like Josh, lived on the opposite side of town, but there was bad blood between Bruce and his oldest son. To the best of Josh’s knowledge, no one other than the two of them knew why. Josh had grown up idolizing Jack, but he now resented how he’d ruined the family’s cohesiveness. It had been bad enough losing their mom, but losing all the family traditions and holidays had been a second death, a preventable one. So although the brothers worked together at Golden Falls Fire Station One, Josh on the ladder crew and Jack as the engine crew captain, a current of unease still ran between them.

“Speaking of happy, do you have any goals for your thirtieth year?” Bruce asked.

“Just one—not to finish dead last in the Iditarod.”

The race coming up in March would be Josh’s third. The first time he dropped out because of too many dog injuries, and the previous year he’d come in last.

“Third time’ll be the charm.” Bruce peered at him. “And then what? You think you might be ready to get as serious about a woman as you are about racing?”

“You’ve already got three grandkids,” Josh reminded him. “Can’t you leave me in peace?”

He already got those types of comments from the various women he’d dated since coming home from the military. He was a physical guy in the prime of his life, and women thankfully found his medium build, six-foot-two height, and dark hair attractive enough. He liked sex as much as the next guy, the wilder the better, but he began each potential relationship with the same words—I don’t do long-term.

And he meant them.

Still, hookups commenced, one-night stands turned into short-term flings, and all was great until words like love and forever started to find their way into the conversation. And then things got messy, and Josh broke things off and retreated to the companionship of the dogs, who never asked for anything more than food and water and long miles pulling a sled.

“This isn’t about grandkids,” Bruce said. “Young single women are already few and far between in Alaska. I worry that when you’re finally ready to settle down, all the good ones are going to be taken.”

“Maybe I won’t ever want to settle down.” Jack grinned at his dad. “It’s not like I’ve been lonely in the bedroom.”

“No,” Bruce said. “But I think you’ve been a little lonely in life.” The words stung, because his father knew him very well. “And, son, trust me when I say there’s nothing quite like the love of a good woman.”

Josh remembered then it was the anniversary of his mom’s death, and Bruce’s uncharacteristic seriousness made more sense.

“Are you going to the cemetery today, Dad?” he asked quietly.

“Sure am.” Bruce stared at the nearly-gone coffee in his mug and looked so, so tired. “You can sleep at night with a good woman beside you. Did I ever tell you that? That’s how you know you’ve found the right one.”

Josh thought of all the nights spent tossing and turning with a woman beside him, of all the hours he’d spent watching them sleep so peacefully while he lay starkly awake, his body satisfied but his mind as unquiet as ever. He felt most alone those nights.

“If that’s true, then I definitely haven’t found the right woman yet,” he said.

“Which is why you should keep on looking.”

“I haven’t been looking.”

“Okay,” Bruce said. “Then it’s why you should start looking.”