Red Dog Farm

by Nathaniel Ian Miller

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

An atmospheric coming-of-age story about a young man's transformative year on his family’s struggling Icelandic cattle farm as he falls in love, discovers the purpose he’s been missing, and seeks to connect with his stoic father, who remains haunted by a tragic past.

Growing up on his family’s cattle farm in western Iceland, young Orri has gained an appreciation for the beauty found in everyday things: the cavorting of a newborn calf, the return of birdsong after a long winter, the steadfast love of a good (or tolerably good) farm dog. But the outer world still beckons, so Orri leaves his no-nonsense Lithuanian Jewish mother and his taciturn father, Pabbi, to attend university in Reykjavík.
 
Pabbi is no stranger to cycles of life and death, growth and destruction. He is pursued by the memory of a volcanic eruption and its aftermath, and so many years of hardscrabble farming have left their mark. Jaded, and no longer able to find joy in his way of life, Pabbi falls into a depression soon after Orri goes away to school. Orri, feeling adrift and aimless at the end of his first semester, comes home.
 
For the first time, Pabbi allows Orri to help him run the farm. Despite their conflicting attitudes, Orri and Pabbi must learn to work together. Meanwhile, Orri meets a kindred spirit on the internet: Mihan, a part-time student. Over time—and countless texts and phone calls—their connection deepens. By year’s end, Orri must decide whether he wants to—or should—return to university, and what a future with Mihan would hold, if she’ll have him.

With his signature blend of humor and tenderness, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is about the bonds forged and tested between family, friends, and lovers—and the act of building a home, together.

Release date: March 4, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 256

Sample

Every few years—we get itchy if it’s been too long—Iceland remakes itself. The land may look stony and immutable, but without fail a fissure opens and the earth’s hot blood comes bubbling out, sometimes in a jet and sometimes an ooze. Smoke fills the air, tourists fill the airport. When it’s all over, we lean forward to behold the new landscape. Maybe a mountain where a town once stood, or an island where before there was only ocean.

It’s an Icelandic paradox: The very stubborn nature of the place is change itself. Not always adaptation but alteration. It’s written into our rocks and our bones.

I believe the same could be said of my father and, perhaps, of me.

We don’t all become our parents, but their lives and wounds built the houses we live in. Theirs are the hammers and rough chapped hands that hung every window and lopsided door. Whether the rain rots our clapboards eventually, whether the flying red sand pries loose our metal roofing and sends it off to Greenland or leaves it dull, dented, and intact, that’s a reflection on their work. I mean a metaphorical house, of course—my pabbi and mamma’s construction skills were limited to rudimentary things: a coffee table, a fence, a paper airplane.

I’ve been a farmer for over twelve years now. It no longer feels presumptuous to say, even though the old-timers around here will persist in treating me like a novice and giving unsolicited advice until they’re finally croaking out, “Orri, the thing to do is—” in a death rattle and I have to lean in close and ask them to repeat it but they can’t because they’re dead.

They counsel me about child-rearing too. My own kid—a daughter, I’m told—is soon to be born. I intend to ignore all the advice until it suits me not to. I intend to abjure bows and skirts and frills in favor of rubber boots and leather gloves, to have her changing oil filters and filling bovine syringes by the time she’s three, so she recognizes all those ubiquitous farm-themed children’s books as absurd and asks, “Why aren’t they filthy like our place?” and if she ever says she wants to work the farm herself, to “be a farmer,” she’ll know precisely what she means.

I’m not going to say the farm has been a success. I don’t know yet, I can’t make so weighty a determination and that would be unlucky. Besides, in farming, you hemorrhage cash even when you’re making it, so these things can be very hard to tell.

My father, my pabbi, taught me to farm. His father was a farmer too, and yet Pabbi managed to slither out from under his father’s heavy shadow. I’m not like that. I don’t define myself in opposition the way Pabbi did. Every day I become more like him, and like Mamma too. I might have, say, a cursory exchange with a slaughterhouse employee, and I feel that same implacable silence coming out of me, a void in the air as I refuse to chat or remark on the weather, and I don’t hate it, this emptiness between us, though the slaughterhouse employee surely does.

And I am changeable, like Pabbi. I make adjustments, adhering to as few principles and dogmas as I can, including his. He would approve, I think. To change is to embody one of his finer parts, though decades of friction against the mean left him raw and abraded. Maybe it was harder for his generation. Or maybe the cold truths of farming are, at their core, undeniable.

So there’s this difference between us: Despite Pabbi’s great love for my mother and me, and his genuine fondness for animals, he experienced life as a slow leak, a gradual drying out of hope. I think I’m otherwise. Or trying to be. I see the same furrow lines converging across my brow like spring-flush rivers when I look up from spitting toothpaste. I see, just like his, the corners of my mouth dipping toward the earth when I’m engaged in something menial, something decidedly non-cerebral, like chipping ice from beneath a frozen gate or ladling turds from a water trough. But resembling a bitter old farmer—we age prematurely, it’s established—is not the same as feeling like one.

And Pabbi’s well of hope was never so deep to begin with. If it was already filled in halfway with mud and sharp igneous rock by the time he left the Westman Islands, that wasn’t his fault. If my own well has the greater reserves, or is always so stocked with clear glacial melt that I don’t notice it’s leaking, that’s only because my parents dowsed and dug it with their bare hands so it would endure like Írskrabrunnur, the Well of the Irish.

A farmer needs to endure a great many things.

I witnessed the birth of Dagmar, gentle lady. She became our herd boss.

It’s not my first memory. My first would’ve been around 1997, when I was five years old, though maybe it’s just the memory of someone else’s memory. I know that I drank an ounce or two of brennivín after mistaking it for water. I can still bring to mind the pervading sense of shock, like my palate and esophagus were on fire, and then onward throughout my digestive tract. I coughed extensively, but I kept it down.

“You survived the Black Death!” Mamma liked to say. Some parents enjoy recollecting the near misses, provided they were not too near.

It was an unlikely occurrence, brennivín being rare in our house. If Mamma felt like spirits, she generally stuck with her potato vodka—only potato, mind you, cold and torpid in the glass or the bottle, whatever receptacle was nearest at hand, she would countenance nothing else.

“If I wanted to smear rye bread with moss and then liquefy it,” she’d say, “well, I wouldn’t.”

Pabbi was the brennivín drinker, for old times’ sake, although not by nature picky with his alcohol, and he’d mostly abandoned the strong stuff by March 1, 1989, Beer Day, when Iceland finally legalized beer after its ridiculously long prohibition, and he never looked back.

So Dagmar is my second memory. Later that same year, or thereabouts. The sweet, slightly fetid smell of fermenting hay in the barnyard. The cow prone, breathing heavily. And then the tiny yellow hooves, so incongruous, and all at once the calf squelching out onto the ground.

Pabbi, next to me, exhausted from his endless watch but happy, I think. Mamma laughing, a little grossed out. And me, in my shrill delight, “She pooped it!”

They say it’s usually the heifer calves who rouse first, and Dagmar was on her feet almost immediately, tottering around, getting licked and unslimed by her mother, who was also on her feet, finding the best teat within five minutes in this world, sucking contentedly, tail wagging like a dog’s.

And we made this a tradition. Two years later I saw Dagmar’s first calf born, a massive sweet-natured bull with one lopsided scur on his head, and because Dagmar was so calm and easy and would often allow herself to be led into a clean stall before calving, sometimes even in the final hours of her labor, I saw almost all the rest of her children born too, always hale, always thriving, never the hint of a problem.

That was our very first calving season, Pabbi and Mamma having moved to the farm only a year or two before, and of course it posed its challenges. The next calf after Dagmar was a bull who ran straight through a three-strand barbwire fence in abject terror when he saw Pabbi for the first time, had to be tackled and dragged up the hill—he was fine—and another calf never came to be; it was aborted spontaneously about a month before, deposited in the corral looking for all the world like a wet cat. The mother had somehow contracted a parasite that we later learned would be passed from cow to heifer calf ad infinitum, causing lesions on the placenta, and the whole line had to be culled.

And a decade later, despite her many good years as imperturbable boss, Dagmar left us. She bloated out when she lay down in a small ditch and couldn’t get back up for several hours, smashing her head on the ground so many times in an effort to stand that her wits were never quite the same, and neither was her reproductive system. She couldn’t get pregnant again under any circumstance, and who could blame her, but she had to be culled too, and that was a hard blow for everyone, Pabbi most of all.

And maybe I wasn’t always the best farmhand. I liked fetching tools for Pabbi, learning a socket wrench from a pair of locking pliers, but he said I moved too slowly at times of need and complained whenever I had to use a leg muscle in any way whatsoever.

Adults ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, and for a long time I said “farmer.” But Pabbi took pains to disabuse me of romantic notions, and if I thought a task was at all difficult, and I expressed this dissatisfaction, he was bound to remind me that farming was made up of unpleasant tasks, one after another, and eventually I stopped saying it.

I didn’t really know the place, the work. That wouldn’t come until much later: 2013, the year I turned twenty-one. Maybe I arrived late. Maybe I took too long to understand, to mature—it’s a maxim about bull calves, why shouldn’t it be true for bull children? But a kid takes his surroundings for granted. He’s not aware of the labor, the sacrifices, or even that a farm is something singular, a world unto itself. How can he embrace the thing when he can’t see well enough to wrap his arms around it? And there was no guarantee that I ever would. Farm-raised children don’t grow up to farm much more often than farm-raised eggs grow up to be chickens. Anyone who spends more than a moment looking backward knows that inevitability is a fiction. No Norns, just opportunity, blood, and choices.

But still, in those bright, snow-blind early days of Dagmar and her ilk, there was a great deal of life, and an abundance of care, and the two seemed to intermingle successfully more often than not. We took a lot of photographs. Mamma took the best ones, she didn’t even need a filter, and the cows always came right up to her because cows prefer women to men, it’s a universal truth. People liked our beef, they liked knowing where it came from, they said, and we liked it too—I was raised on it, after all—but we liked the animals even more.

I was young. It seemed that farming could be simple. It certainly seemed that it could be beautiful.

Spring 2012. I was home on furlough. Mamma is the one who called it “furlough,” self-imposed. She said it with empathy, knowing too well the ways academia could grind a person down, or preserve them in a state of suspended discontent. Pabbi called it “fucking off.”

I’d made it much of the way through my first year at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík, studying who knows what. A bit of psychology, a touch of law. Certainly not a career path of any kind. Other kids from our part of the country often took a year or two off to figure their lives out between high school and the loftier halls, if they ascended at all. Many didn’t. I jumped straight for it with unclear but trite motivations: feeling stifled by the rural life, by the weekend farm labor, by the fact that we never went anywhere. Or maybe just because it was expected that I would.

Mamma understood. She never pushed, or even subtly intimated that I should study at Bifröst University, where she taught. It was fifteen minutes away, after all, and I could live at home and help Pabbi out in the mornings and evenings. But she knew the city was pulling me. She said it would be worth the price of tuition—admittedly very modest for locals and EU members—just to live in a place where one could eat sushi or pho every week. And I could stay with my grandmother, Amma, rent-free in her elegant, austere apartment. She didn’t approve of every youthful indiscretion, and that meant some lecturing and judgmental looks, but she doted on me, forgiving most minor trespasses, and besides, she hadn’t retired yet so was often away at work.

But to my shock, I missed home terribly. I quit sleeping that first semester. Or rather, I lost the ability to conjure sleep, which I’d always taken for granted. On the farm, there was perfect silence at night if you didn’t count the wind, the intermittent banging of a gate or a chain, the ragged bellowing of a weaned calf. And even in the dead of winter, we didn’t keep a single outside floodlight switched on, as most farmers did. Pabbi found them annoying—said the cows don’t give a damn, they can smell their way from feed to water to bed and back again. I had to agree. And so, with blackout curtains for the summer sun, I grew up sinking into an inky pool every time I closed my eyes to sleep. Now faced with streetlights shining in every window, and drunk people laughing, and neighbors shouting, and all sorts of unwelcome nighttime stimuli, I was forced to conceptualize sleep for the first time, to analyze its necessary conditions and components, which is the very worst way to succeed at conjuring. For what is sleep but magic?

Amma tried to help. She saw me decompensating when I’d been in the city for only a month or two. The lights and sounds never bothered her—she grew up in Vilna, after all—but she tried to adapt the apartment to my needs, buying heavier shades, turning certain obnoxious household items off and others on. Nothing worked, and I proceeded to lose my mind. I stumbled around in a miserable daze and fell asleep in class. As evening approached, I became seized with anxiety, dreading the very sight of my restless bed. I was Tantalus and night the false promise, extended again and again. In the end, nothing worked but downers. Amma, a physician at Landspítali, pulled a few strings and got me a benzodiazepine scrip from her friend, the chief of Psychiatry. Possessing the unique faith in medicine—and her own ability to dispense it—that most doctors seem to have, she didn’t think it necessary to consult a sleep specialist or a psychiatrist, and neither did the psychiatrist himself. She was right, of course. Sedatives were the knock upon the head that I apparently required for city living.

By the start of the second semester, having recovered my senses somewhat over the winter break, I was sleeping better, mostly coping without chemical assistance, but still fundamentally lost. Neither Amma nor Mamma proposed that I follow them into their respective fields. It’s not that I didn’t have the head for it, more that I lacked the ambition. The sum total of the knowledge I acquired in Reykjavík, the self-growth of a baffled young adult, was that I missed the company of animals—their pace and uncomplicated needs. Many farm kids know from early on that they want out, and when they finally achieve it, the liberation is gratifying, even if their illusions of a bigger, faster life turn out to be just that. Others fall into the cliché of only realizing what they love once it’s in the rearview mirror. I was one of those.

So I was primed for exodus when Mamma called the apartment that night in late February 2012. Amma answered, speaking Yiddish for a minute, and then handed it to me.

“I’m worried about Pabbi,” Mamma said, after receiving her usual reassurances about my health. “He seems depressed.”

“Did he say he was depressed?”

“No, but I can tell when he is. His voice turns into a mutter, and he won’t look me in the eyes.”

“Doesn’t he often mutter?”

“I guess. Not like usual, though. I can’t understand him.”

“It’s that Vestmannaeyjar accent,” I said. “He sounds like a pirate.”

“He does!”

We laughed a bit, as mothers and sons can do together even when things seem dire, and Mamma made a remark in Yiddish, but whispered it, as though the secret language—secret from Pabbi and me—were insufficient, its meaning divined if overheard.

Then Mamma asked if I was still planning to come home for my weeklong holiday in March. Of course, I told her, I wanted to help with the calving.

“Good,” she said, and she sounded genuinely relieved. “Two weeks? That’s not so far off. He’ll be happy to see you.”

I tapped my toes on the floor and glanced across the room at Amma, who was looking at something on her laptop, pretending not to listen.

“I could just leave tomorrow,” I said, sort of to both of them. “Then I’d be home for three weeks instead of one.”

Call it a family emergency—my professors wouldn’t really care, so long as I kept up with the reading and turned everything in on time. That part was simple. And by then I had my own car, an old salt-fuckered Renault Twingo with two brash holes in its muffler and a rear hatch that wouldn’t open under any circumstances.

Mamma didn’t think there was any harm in it, and Amma conceded that maybe her lunatic uncultured son-in-law, whom she adored, could use a boost.

So I drove home the next morning, and for the first two days I was back, Pabbi seemed tolerably well. He showed me some small machines he’d brought into the shop—one had its carburetor excised, cracked open like a complicated fruit and spread across the floor. He was pleased about a brand-new heifer calf, Vinur, who had arrived earlier than expected on a brutal night but stood and nursed within minutes, before she was even licked dry. In winter, most newborns are sluggish, especially the boys. Vinur had a ferocious will and was untroubled by matted, shit-covered fur and engorged teats.

We chored together, Pabbi and I, taking our time as one should in winter, leaning against the wind, me entertaining him with a few lengthy monologues about the idiosyncrasies of town folk and him occasionally holding forth in his laconic way. I searched his eyes when they were focused on other things. I may as well have searched the sky.

Mamma was an immigrant—a first-generation Icelander and a Jew—genetically disposed to be in touch with her emotions. Pabbi, on the other hand, came from a long line of Icelandic farmers, dating as far back as you’d care to look, and Icelanders like to look, though they make it hard for themselves by insisting on patronymics instead of family surnames. Most farmers, despots and subjects of their little realms, have a degree of stoicism, but Icelandic farmers take this predisposition even further, battered as they are by meteorological cruelty from one day to the next. They prefer never to acknowledge their vulnerabilities, even if they are bleeding out on a hillside somewhere.

But Pabbi was different, somehow. He appeared more threadbare, as though wind were getting through the cracks. It could’ve been simply that I’d gone away and come back and was seeing him with new eyes, as when you don’t notice a dog growing, or a child, until you stop watching it for a day or two, and then you look again and say, My, how big you are, or in this case, My, Pabbi, how tired you are. In my lifetime he’d seldom seemed happy—that was not a word one would use to describe him—but maybe Mamma was right, maybe he was unhappier.

Finally I asked him outright whether he was depressed, and of course he said no. I thought, He is lying, but couldn’t be sure, as parents are very good at lying, they have to cultivate the skill from the moment you’re born or they risk killing you with exposure. They must be pillars, and so they are, right up until the moment you realize that they’re not.

Always a bitter morning when the calves drop. The mercury stoops overnight to its late-season nadir, and the rising sun has no discernible effect. The ground, the air, the machines—all intransigent. And somewhere in there, about two or three hours before the farmer gets up to check on everyone, the cow finishes her long labor. The typical response to this obnoxious timing is to blame the cow. Clearly she has done it out of spite, going into labor just as soon as the farmer has turned his back for the night, reluctantly, of course, because if he could make do without sleep he’d keep watch forever. So he retires, leaving his pregnant patient either out on the hard frozen ground, where the calf will begin dying as soon as it emerges, or, if the farmer is endowed with luck and foresight, in a marginally warmer, hay-bedded barn stall, where the calf will land nose-first in a steaming pile of shit and then get stomped by its oblivious mother.

You can avoid the March–April calving nightmare if you are talented at coordinating bovine intercourse, but there are downsides to every time of year, and centuries of farmers, who can never agree on anything, mostly seem to have agreed that frozen ground, on the heels of winter’s worst abuses, is preferable to the poisonous muck of a thawed barnyard, or to flies.

This is how it goes. Or so Pabbi has said, anyway, on many occasions, I am basically quoting him. My own experience was too intermittent, and too colored by childhood curiosity, to produce such a jaded outlook. But Pabbi kept a great deal from me. He wavered perpetually between a desire to keep farming joyful—to protect me from its wounds—and a compulsion to rob me of my illusions.

He waffled as usual, on that morning in March, when Fús got dystocia. Fús was a first-calf heifer, and you always have to keep a closer eye on those. But her labor ended before dawn, and by the time Pabbi got outside, the calf was stuck, only halfway out and all the way dead. Pabbi was out there for a while, and then came back inside with his head down. I had slept a little late, as kids do when they’re home from university, and was just slouching down to some breakfast when he came into the kitchen with hay chaff on his socks.

“Everything okay?” Mamma said. She tried to hand him a cup of coffee but he wouldn’t take it. His eyes wandered around the room and wouldn’t meet hers.

“No, everything is bad,” he said, and then muttered the particulars. “Can . . .