Dogs

Dogs are not a single, stable symbol in the novel: they belong to Greenlandic work and skill, to a remembered collision over what counts as civilized domestic life, and to Smilla’s fear in Copenhagen. Their changing roles make visible a difference between inherited practical knowledge and the assumptions carried into an unfamiliar place.

Cultural Encounter and Misrecognition

When Greenlanders first began arriving in Denmark in the 1930s, one of the first things some wrote home was that Danes were pigs because they kept dogs in their houses. The remark turns an ordinary domestic arrangement into a sign of cultural distance: what Danes might take for familiar companionship reads, to these visitors, as strange and repellent. The contrast introduces dogs as part of the daily life through which people judge one another, rather than as a neutral detail in the background.

The novel returns to that gap in the opening encounter between Smilla and Isaiah. Hearing something moving on the landing below her apartment, she first thinks it is a dog. She sees instead a child and greets him with hostility. The mistaken identification lasts only a moment, but it places an animal expectation between the two characters before their relationship develops. Dogs are associated here with the stairway’s unwelcome disturbance, while the child who appears in their place will become someone Smilla cares for.

Greenlandic Knowledge and the Sled Team

In Smilla’s recollection, her mother’s relationship with dogs is a matter of authority grounded in daily practice. Before nylon ropes became common in the 1970s, their family used sealskin harnesses as towlines. Other teams chewed through their harnesses; her mother’s dogs did not touch theirs because she had forbidden it. The detail makes her skill specific: she can set a rule that holds even when the harnesses are vulnerable to the behavior of other dogs.

That account sits alongside other memories of her mother’s hunting and travel, including paddling a kayak and carrying meat home. Dogs are part of the practical world in which those skills matter, not an emblem detached from work. The mother’s command does not make every dog harmless or every person at ease with them. It instead marks a learned competence that Smilla herself does not share.

Smilla’s Fear in Copenhagen

Years later, Smilla approaches a factory surrounded by a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed wire. She has chosen a rear door near Kalkbrænderi Road and the railway tracks, but she has not noticed the sign warning that Danish Watchdogs are on guard. When she kicks the door experimentally, a dog appears at the gate within five seconds. Its presence stops her from attempting the entry: she turns back along Strand Boulevard and takes a cab home.

Smilla explicitly distinguishes herself from people who have a way with dogs. Her mother had one; Smilla says she was born afraid of them and has never overcome it. The recollected sealskin harnesses therefore sharpen the contrast: the same animals that belonged to her mother’s confident working world become an obstacle that can redirect Smilla’s movement through the city. Her retreat is a consequence of fear, not evidence that she does not understand what the dog is doing.

The Guard Dog and the Drugged Liver

Smilla returns to Kalkbrænderi Road later that night with a pound of cod liver taken from Juliane’s refrigerator. In Juliane’s bathroom she has also pocketed half a bottle of Halcion. At a streetlight beneath the viaduct facing the Free Harbor, she crushes the pills into the liver, then throws it over the fence for the guard dog. She worries that the animal might smell the medicine, but it eats the liver quickly.

The dog has been waiting for her return, hoping for more food. Smilla waits too, to see what the drug will do. A car from Danish Watchdogs arrives, and a uniformed man takes the now-weakened animal out to the sidewalk on a leash. It growls at Smilla, then its legs turn rubbery and it nearly falls; the handler looks anxiously at the dog, which looks back at him mournfully. This is not a scene of Smilla mastering her fear through the kind of command her mother possessed. She uses food and a drug to disable the guard, and the animal’s vulnerability becomes the means by which she gets past the barrier.

An Unequal Knowledge of Animals

Across these episodes, dogs are encountered through concrete relations: as indoor companions judged by newcomers, as members of a working sled team governed by a hunter, as a threat to Smilla’s attempted entry, and as a guard rendered helpless by food laced with pills. The scenes resist reducing the animals to one meaning. The working dogs’ obedience reflects a particular human-animal relationship; the guard dog’s behavior and physical distress belong to the immediate circumstances of the attempted intrusion.

The contrast also clarifies the limits of Smilla’s own knowledge. She can read snow and ice with expertise, but dogs inspire fear rather than confidence. Her mother’s authority over them is remembered with admiration, while Smilla’s city encounter turns that inherited difference into a practical problem she solves by exploiting the guard dog’s appetite. The animal is neither merely a symbol of danger nor simply a tool: its distinctive presence, and the harm done to it, remain visible in the scene that enables Smilla to continue.