July 20, 1994
Montana Creek, Alaska
Ron and I now agree we can’t pull this off by ourselves. I must begin student teaching in a few more weeks at Mount Spurr Elementary in Anchorage in order to finish up my Master of Arts in Teaching. Since the dogs are a two-hour drive north at Montana Creek, I’ll only be able to run them on weekends and holidays, if then. Ron originally thought he could help me out by running my dogs during the week, but we both realize it’s not feasible.
Ron put out the word on the musher grapevine a few days ago we might need a live-in dog handler. Earlier today the solution to our problem drove up in a battered Chevy pickup. Twenty-year-old Barrie Raper has worked in dog lots in the Big Lake area for a couple of years. She knows Martin Buser and other mushing luminaries and she even has a team of her own.
In fact, she began mushing dogs in Wyoming in her early teens. After high school, she headed north with 15 hand-me-down dogs, a beat-up pickup truck, and her parents’ blessings. Her goal was Alaska and ultimately the Iditarod. Now she will help us in return for a place to live and help in running her own dogs.
Ron has an old cabin on his 120-acre property Barrie can use, and Ron and I commit to food for her dogs as well as some spending money. We also agree to pay her entry fees in some of the local races like the Knik 200. There is no mention of her running the Iditarod, but Ron and I secretly agree to help her enter the race this fall if things work out.
So now we have what amounts to a co-op kennel, with all three of us planning to run the Iditarod, even if one of us doesn’t know it yet. Ron and I understand we’ll be operating on the thinnest of shoestrings, but there’s nowhere to go but onward. I think to myself the adventure has truly begun, and now I’m going to be like every other musher I’ve ever met: permanently broke.
Dogs are hooked up in tandem in front of the sled. The central gangline has a core of aircraft cable and is made in two-dog sections 8 to 10 feet long that can be linked together for any number of dogs. Each dog is attached to the gangline by a tugline at the rear of its harness and by a thin neckline attached to its collar. There is no gangline for the leaders—their tuglines are attached to the previous section, and they are hooked together by a double-ended neckline called a doubler. There are no reins or lines connecting the leaders to the driver—the musher controls the team by voice commands only.
August 15, 1994
Montana Creek, Alaska
There are no shortcuts to the City of the Golden Beaches. The dogs require months of training, beginning well before the first snowflakes fall. Ron estimates we’ll need to put at least 1,000 miles on the dogs before the Iditarod, preferably more. So, the sooner we start, the better.
We’ve been running our teams for a couple of weeks with ATVs on unpaved local borough roads. (Alaska has boroughs, not counties.) This early in the season the runs are very short, only three or four miles long, and serve mainly to get the dogs back into the swing of things after their summer layoff.
The ATVs provide excellent training and the gravel toughens the dogs’ feet, but we must be very careful not to overheat the dogs in the late-summer warmth. We don’t even consider hooking up unless it’s raining or the temperature is below 60 degrees. Naturally, many of our runs are early in the morning or late at night, which greatly amuses our neighbors and the inevitable tourists.
My conveyance for these snowless safaris has so far been a beat-up three-wheeler I got really cheap earlier this summer. My first few excursions were sufficient to reveal why the machine’s previous owner didn’t ask more for it. On my first run, I hooked up half a dozen dogs and careened out onto the trail not knowing quite what to expect. I met approximately the same fate as a raw graduate of a driving school on a Los Angeles freeway.
I quickly discovered the thing is about as stable as a greased unicycle. Moreover, it’s not heavy enough to seriously impede the dogs when they’re in the “go” mode. Even six of them were more than powerful enough to overpower it, capsizing it on the first sharp turn and dragging it 25 yards while I observed helplessly from my sudden perch in the trail-side bushes.
Now I look on the infernal contraption with the same regard as a Bangkok pedicab I once tried to drive after knocking off a bottle of Thai whiskey. Luckily, I’ve managed to convince Bert to loan us a couple of four-wheelers, which are much less likely to assume the inverted position with no prior notice.
Anyway, another use for the ATVs is to establish the dogs’ speed. We help them with the engine until they start to lope and then try to hold them to the fastest possible trot. Loping is faster, but the dogs use more energy. The accepted method to master the endless miles of the Iditarod is a steady, energy-conserving trot, and the art is to set the trotting speed as high as possible. While we might accustom our dogs to trot a steady 10 miles an hour or so, the fast movers like Martin Buser get their number-one teams to trot at 14 or 15.
Speed isn’t really necessary for back-of-the-packers like us. Our dogs aren’t world-class trotters, but they’ll get us to Nome if we can keep everything else intact.
Dog trucks are among mushers’ most important pieces of equipment. They can vary from aging pickups with homemade plywood dog boxes on the back to professionally constructed heavy-duty machines. Dogs can be hooked to chains hung around the truck at races or for enroute stops. Regardless of size or cost, the truck has room for dogs, sleds, and all of the miscellaneous gear necessary to take a dog team on the road.
September 25, 1994
Mount Spurr Elementary Anchorage, Alaska
I’ve been student teaching for about a month, about the same time we’ve been seriously working the dogs. I’m finding it’s not always possible to completely separate the two activities.
In fact, I often can’t tell much difference between my class of 31 third and fourth graders and my dog team. Occasionally I even catch myself admonishing a boisterous kid as if he (or she) were one of my recalcitrant dogs: “Eddie, Sit!” On the other hand, I wonder on weekends if the dogs haven’t learned the kids’ tricks when they tangle up and generally act like jerks.
The kids, of course, are nuts about my dogs and my participation in the Iditarod. Our first read-aloud book of the semester is Gary Paulsen’s Woodsong, his young-adult version of his preparations to run the 1983 Iditarod. (According to the principal, Paulsen has visited our school more than once; indeed, the school library has virtually a complete autographed set of his books.)
There’s only one problem with a book like Woodsong—some of the passages are so emotional I have to stop reading aloud in mid-sentence and regain my composure, to the kids’ great consternation. They can’t understand how strongly I’m becoming attached to my own dogs, and the events Paulsen describes sometimes strike painfully close to home. Fortunately, my host teacher sympathizes, even if he often has the same problem I do. Only half-joking, he tells me our next book to read will be Where the Red Fern Grows; I respond he’d better find somebody else to help him read the last couple of chapters, because I’ll break down completely.
My growing obsession with mushing and the Iditarod is seeping into every facet of my life. I’m not sure what to think, probably because I’m so totally involved in it all. When I confide my thoughts to Ron, he just smiles as if he’s seen this all before. At least the kids have an uncanny ability to bring me back to earth when I get too far out in left field. Come to think of it, so do the dogs….
Village children—and their dogs—are omnipresent spectators at Iditarod checkpoints in the bush. Most towns along the race route let students out of school when the race teams come through.
September 30, 1994
Montana Creek, Alaska
The period after the fall equinox is the darkest time of year in Alaska. It’s also one of the most critical times for training, and we must cope with darkness as best we can.
Unlike November and December, there’s no snow on the ground to increase the albedo and multiply the light from the stars, moon, and
aurora. The Northern Lights rarely come out much before midnight, and the waning harvest moon rises later and later each evening. With an overcast to shut out starlight, darkness at nine or ten in the evening becomes nearly absolute.
Now, at the end of September, days are growing shorter with dramatic rapidity. We lose six or eight minutes of daylight every 24 hours and our headlamps become ever more important. We lay in stocks of D-cell batteries and six-volt bulbs and resign ourselves to wearing the belt-clip battery packs like holstered pistols and the headbands with their attached reflectors like the crowns of some peculiar arctic royalty.
But inconvenience is quickly forgotten. The musher’s headlight is actually a magic scalpel to probe darkness and reveal things from another world—the nighttime world—in which man has never been more than a barely tolerated visitor. It’s not like donning high-tech night-vision goggles that bathe everything in green daylight. It’s not even like a car’s headlights, with their high-wattage halogen-enhanced highway illumination.
Rather, the musher’s headlamp presents its own view of night, strangely different and more focused than the wide-screen panorama humans are used to. It is a pencil of light that follows the gaze, constantly moving and dancing with the slightest head movement. The narrow beam creates an alternate reality in a series of thumbnail images as it dissects the blackness bit by bit. Perspectives alter, shapes mutate, shadows become real.
Easily the most arresting beacons in this parallel universe are the dogs’ eyes. Everyone has seen a cat’s eyes catch light and hurl it back. But not everyone realizes many dogs see as well in the dark as their feline antitheses. Dogs’ eyes in the headlamp beam can be unnerving in their intensity, perhaps because they are often so unexpected.
Most sled dogs have superb night vision and their eyes are among nature’s most efficient reflectors. However, they are keenly focused so they can be seen to best effect only when the illuminating beam originates virtually at the eyes of the viewer. The link between human eyes and canine eyes is established only when the beam forms a bridge of light directly between them. The headlamp becomes a luminous connection between minds, a direct communication pathway between different species in this alternate world of the night.
The dogs in the wheel position, just in front of the sled, are very important in steering. On sharp curves, they keep the sled from cutting across the corner. On twisting trails, they also do most of the actual pulling when the gangline is not straight enough to allow the power of the dogs up front to be transmitted efficiently to the rear.
At the other end of the mind-link, the crystalline intensity of the dogs’ eyes is astonishing. It is startling to those who are used to seeing dogs only in daylight, or in indirect illumination when eyes can at best catch a stray sparkle in their brown or bluish or amber depths. At night the dogs vanish in the probing beam of the headlight, to be replaced by pairs of diamond-bright, prismatically pure lasers radiating with the brilliance of the very brightest stars.
Colors are glimpses into the dogs’ inner beings. Ordinary brown eyes by day become piercing blue or green flames at night. Malemute and husky genes—whether or not they yield the familiar blue eyes—can reflect ruby red. But eyes of gold, glowing amber gems, signature of the wolf and its descendants, seem to shine brightest. They are like distant, powerful, mysterious quasars penetrating from beyond the edge of our familiar, neatly ordered, domestic universe.
Only at night do the dogs’ true selves emerge. Their eyes, in the revealing beam of the headlamp, are their pedigrees, their family trees. Indeed, their eyes are windows to their souls, and it is the rare musher who is not just a little awed by the rainbow-hued constellation of eyes in the night.
It is hard not to feel a primeval tremor from dozens of pairs of radiant eyes staring intently back from the enfolding darkness. It is an echo of our earliest forebears who saw the same gleaming eyes hovering just outside the mystic protection of their new-found fire. And there is no doubt these eyes are focused on us, marking our every move. They are waiting for us to bridge the gap and reestablish the age-old partnership between humans and dogs, waiting for us to renew the mutual bonds of trust and respect without which the lights in the night will remain as enigmatic as they were to our ancient ancestors.
October 6, 1994
Montana Creek, Alaska
I’m amazed how much progress we’ve made in barely a month and a half of serious training. It’s astonishing how quickly dogs get back into shape.
We have almost 300 miles on the dogs now, and they can easily average 10 miles an hour or better on runs of 10 and 15 miles pulling the small four-wheeler. They have completely shed their summer lethargy and are rapidly metamorphosing into first-rate athletes.
Barrie is running my dogs during the week, and I’m trying to hold my end of the bargain by making the long drive north up the Parks Highway every weekend. My Friday-night runs with the team are always late because it takes me so long to get out of town after school lets out for the week. This means I’m out on the roads and trails with eight or ten dogs sometimes well past midnight.
I always run with the four-wheeler lights off, using only my six-volt headlamp. It seems pitifully inadequate to guide a powerful dog team along narrow trails with sharp turns. The narrow beam usually vanishes in the utter blackness not far ahead of the lead dogs. It’s not even much good to illuminate the dogs themselves, and it’s sometimes difficult to see if a dog is having a problem, or if a neckline has broken or a dog is running on the wrong side of the gangline. I have to remind myself their night vision and their noses and their ears tell them far more than I can ever hope to experience even with the finest light.
Hanging on to the little four-wheeler as it bounces crazily through smothering blackness past overhanging brush and across roots in the trail becomes a challenge as the dogs come to understand their own collective strength. Their sense of triumph as they crest a difficult hill is palpable, as is their exuberance as they surge down the other side at 20 miles an hour.
I find it hard to believe I’m part of it, and I must remember I don’t have as much control over the dogs as I’d like to think. If they feel in the mood, they can easily drag the small four-wheeler even in gear with the parking brake set, with or without me on it. They can crack the whip on sharp curves and I swear they laugh when they do it. It is downright scary to think what they will be able to do with a sled, which pulls much more easily than the four-wheeler.
I can use the brakes to suggest to them to restrain themselves going down steep hills or around the sharpest curves, but everything else depends on my ability to talk to them, to communicate with them on a much more direct level. If I don’t have the dogs’ trust, if they won’t listen to me when I tell them to gee or haw or whoa up, I’m not much more than an unwilling passenger on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride.
This is a partnership in every sense of the word, and it demands much from all involved. The team is a finely tuned machine, a thinking organism that can operate with a will of its own. Its individual components require my support for food and training and maintenance, but once assembled and in motion, it is a creature of a very much higher order whose total greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. If I’m very good, I will learn how to become part of the brain of this magnificent entity and thus make it whole.
It’s a sobering experience, but also profoundly satisfying and exhilarating. I may finally be starting to understand how mushers become so completely hooked, and why one-time Iditarod runners are a distinct minority in the Official Finisher’s Club.
October 10, 1994
Montana Creek, Alaska
As the dogs get back into shape in the fall, they expend prodigious amounts of energy. Without a healthy diet to provide the necessary calories and vitamins, all of our training would be meaningless, if not impossible. Therefore, we feed our dogs only the best.
Indeed, we cook for them, which not many mushers do any more. It’s more work, but the result is cheaper, more nut
ritious, and more appetizing (to the dogs). Even by human standards it would probably provide excellent nourishment, and might even be appealing if it weren’t for the inevitable smell from using fish guts and beef innards.
The vehicle for this culinary venture is a so-called Yukon cooker, which is a 55-gallon drum cut in half. A fire of spruce and birch is put in the bottom half (we’ll use a big propane burner later on in the winter) while the upper portion is inverted to hold maybe 25 gallons of food. The meat or fish is cooked first with water to make a steaming soup. As weather turns colder, additional fat goes into the mix to fuel the dogs’ runaway metabolic furnaces, and it forms a rich gravy whose aroma carries all through the dog yard. When the meat and fat are cooked, rice is added as a filler. Rice absorbs several times its volume in water and turns the meat soup into a thick stew.
One cooker load will yield a day’s food for 100 dogs. An hour or two before serving, dry dog food is added to the mix along with more water. The dog-food nuggets provide needed vitamins and absorb still more moisture. The result is a sort of pilaf of meat chunks, fat, rice, and commercial dog food which the dogs find irresistible. (Of course, they also find popcorn, tree roots, old bones, road kill, and even their own harnesses irresistible at times.)
The finished product contains a high water content. This is critical because some dogs won’t drink enough on their own to prevent dehydration when they’re working. This will be especially important on the race, where it will be necessary to ensure they take in water. By eating this moist food, they build good eating habits for the trail.
Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers Page 8