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The weather has warmed up a bit but we haven't had any more snow. In fact, we had a little shot of sleet this morning, but we were lucky--Anchorage got freezing rain most of the day. I'm still running the dogs on the four- wheeler, which may be effective for the dogs but is rather unsatisfying to the driver (and can be singularly hard on the driver's posterior on some of our rutted, frost-heaved trails). I lost a few days trying to get a flat tire fixed, which was frustrating. I finally had to take the tire all the way into Wasilla and waste a whole day to find someone who would work on it. Apparently ATV tires are difficult to take off the rims, and even harder to put back on. I'd consider investing in a spare except that on my old machine the front and rear tires are different sizes, and even the rims are different. I can't wait for enough snow to go to sleds.

Thursday night I finally put Maybelline's pups out on their own chains. They're three and a half months old and are ready to start moving into the "real world". I put collars on them earlier in the week so they'd get used to them. They hardly even noticed anything different. Putting them out on individual tie-outs was quite a different matter, though. This is an absolutely necessary step in a sled dog's development, but it's never easy.

Until now, they've been running free in their pen, playing with each other. They've been aware of the other dogs, but not on an up-close basis. Before they can work in a team, they must learn how to function by themselves and get along with the rest of the pack. They won't be able to huddle with each other. They have to learn to sleep in their own houses and eat out of their own dishes. They must get used to being restrained by their collars, because that's part of running in the team. Most importantly, they have to learn how to interact directly with the musher and with other dogs, instead of just with each other.

Taffy, Screamer, and Earless seem to be doing well now. At first, though, the crying and howling was almost too much to take. I was able to put them next to each other in the big dog yard, but intentionally not within reach. Their mother is right next to them, which I think they realize--but they're still not able to touch. I spent several hours in the dog lot making sure they weren't having any unusual problems and helping them adapt. I'd periodically go over and let them hug me for reassurance but never for too long. Slowly but surely they figured everything out, especially the fact that I was now the central feature of their lives, not each other. As I walked back into the cabin at one in the morning I could still hear them crying, but I was satisfied they were doing fine.

Early Friday morning before I went up to the high school to teach I came out with their food and they had settled down quite a bit. This afternoon they were bouncing around like they'd been on their own for years, responding to the other dogs and generally having lots of fun in their new environment. It always amazes me how quickly dogs can adapt to changing situations. With puppies, of course, the musher has to be the teacher and make sure these adaptations are properly timed and supervised. It's all part of raising puppies and most mushers become intimately involved in it. If it's done well, the pups get over the shock of separation quickly and move on. If not, they can develop serious social problems and may never get along well with people or their teammates. I hope I've gotten these three off on the right foot (no pun intended) because they're likely to be the stars of my team in a couple of years.

This morning I also called to check on Big Mac at the vet hospital down in Birchwood (just north of Anchorage). He's not ready to go home yet, but it looks like he'll get by without an operation. The vet was able to pump out his stomach and give him an enema (under anesthesia, of course), finding a huge mass of sodden straw in his stomach and all through his GI tract. Big Mac must have eaten at least a couple of double handfuls of the stuff all at once and it plugged him up tighter than a well-corked bottle. The blockage might have moved on its own, but it probably wouldn't have and the odds are that he would have died if he hadn't gotten medical attention.

I have no idea why he ate the straw, since he's never done it before, at least not in industrial quantities. One possibility might be that he was "eating grass", trying to make up for something missing from his diet. However, none of the other dogs had the same problem, so I don't really know what to think. Just in case, though, I stopped at Sam's and picked up a half-dozen number-10 cans of cut green beans to mix into the dog food. This is an old musher trick to give dogs some green in their diets and it usually keeps them from eating too much extraneous vegetation. I'll use a couple of cans a week; the beans are less than two dollars a can, so the cost is minuscule in the overall scheme of things. Let's just call it giving the dogs a salad with their dinner.

This morning my neighbor Ron Aldrich and I headed in to Anchorage for a meeting of the Iditarod National Historic Trail, Inc. This is a new private non-profit corporation formed to support the Iditarod Trail. It's sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, or at least has very close ties to that agency, and will apparently have a very strong voice in what happens to the trail in terms of development, preservation, and even how it is used. (The BLM is the federal agency responsible for the overall management of the trail.)

The INHT, as we're calling it for short, is not associated with the Iditarod Trail Committee (ITC), which puts on the race. However, the working relationship between the two will be very close, and the ITC has a permanent seat on the INHT board. The INHT has some start-up funding from the federal government but will rely in the future on membership dues and its own fundraising efforts, particularly among Alaska corporations. The president of the INHT board is Leo Rasmussen, the Mayor of Nome, who has been associated with the Iditarod race since its very beginning and was president of the ITC board for a number of years. The vice-president is Dan Seavey, who ran the second Iditarod (and ran the 25th Anniversary Race in 1997 with me), and whose son Mitch is a perennial top-20 contender. I was elected to the initial Board of Directors and was also named chairman of the Publications Committee.

We're still in the start-up phase but we will be setting up membership packages very shortly. We hope to be able to piggyback on ITC memberships and give a reduced INHT membership rate to anyone who joins the ITC. There will definitely be a special low-cost membership deal for teachers and schools. The INHT will have a newsletter, probably bi-monthly, for members and schools. Yours truly will be the editor, and the newsletter will include a number of historical articles about the trail in every issue, plus news of current projects. The INHT will also have a website within a couple of months, which I'm certain will have a link from the ITC website. The INHT may also help publish some videos and books and guides about the trail and its history. I already know that a former BLM staffer has done a draft of a history of the trail that we're going to look into, and I'm sure I'll have some contributions to make in this area as well. In short, the INHT will become a "resource source" for the trail.

The INHT is already involved in several projects along the trail. One of these, begun by another group of trail supporters, is the placement of new trail markers and mileposts along some sections of the trail. The mile markers have already been erected in several key sections on the Nome end of the trail and will be a tremendous help for mushers in the millennium race. Mileposts will also be put up this winter from Old Woman to Egavik, north of Unalakleet. Of course, mushers must realize that the mileages are for the original Iditarod, which was only 977 miles long, beginning in the seaport of Seward, and the mile markers so far are only on those sections of the race trail that coincide with the old Iditarod Trail. Ultimately the INHT hopes to put mile markers not only on the original trail but also on many of the connecting historic trails that were part of the more-than- 2,000-mile Iditarod trail system in the old days. Many of these connecting trails are now used by the race, such as the Hunter Trail from Ophir down to Iditarod, the old trail from Iditarod across to Shageluk and Anvik, and the trail from Ophir up to Ruby and down the Yukon.

The INHT group will also help recommend projects along the trail to be undertaken by the BLM and other agencies. These include building shelter cabins, putting up interpretive signs, and re-locating and clearing sections of the original trail that have been disused for many decades. For example, the mainline of the trail originally went from Iditarod to Kaltag and never went up the Yukon River (and as the town of Iditarod faded after its big gold rush of 1909 the main trail went directly from Ophir to Kaltag and bypassed Iditarod). The old trail passed through a town on the Innoko River called Dishkaket, which has been completely abandoned since before World War II. This long stretch of the trail hasn't been used for more than 60 years and the INHT and BLM hope to eventually re-open it, even if the Iditarod race doesn't actually use it.

The INHT will also help the BLM in archaeological and historical efforts on the trail. Some sections of the trail were in use for thousands of years before white men ever came to Alaska. For instance, Alaska Natives were driving their dogs over the Kaltag Portage between Unalakleet and Kaltag before the birth of Christ, and settlements along the Bering Sea coastal part of the trail have been documented as far back as 6,000 years ago. Some of the archaeological work will look into more recent uses, such as investigating the old roadhouses along the trail which only date back to the early 1900s.

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The Iditarod National Historic Trail has also been named a Millennium Trail by the federal government, one of only 16 such trails in the United States. This is a very great honor and is the result of a lot of work by several people (not including me, although I'd gladly have helped). The INHT, Inc., is working on special commemmorative events along the trail to celebrate the millennium. One of these may involve a freight and mail run to Nome using the old long freight sleds and big dogs used by the old- timers. Hopefully it will go in conjunction with the 2001 Iditarod (but won't intefere with the race, of course). I'd love to do the freight run, but I'll be running my own team in the race that year. Nevertheless, the board of directors decided I'd be a good chairman for that event, too, even if I don't actually participate in it.

Overall, the Iditarod Trail and its connecting routes is a real cross- section of Alaska's history as well as its geography. Many people focus on the race, but the trail is a unique entity in its own right and has international significance. I'm looking forward to working with the INHT group. All I've got to do is figure out where I can acquire a large supply of 10-day weeks and 36-hour days.....

Finally, after I was done feeding the dogs late tonight (actually it's well after midnight now), I stayed out in the lot for awhile to visit with everyone. I was playing with Maybelline's pups when the dog yard erupted in a racket that probably waked all of the neighbors. I turned on my headlight and scanned the edge of the yard, thinking a dog was loose or a moose was hanging around in the woods outside the reach of the big sodium- vapor lights.

I was also worried that a wolf might be casing the joint for a potential lunch. This happened several times in the Fairbanks area last winter, and wolves actually came into dog yards and lured their victims out where the rest of the pack could finish them off. In one case the wolves managed to get a dog off its chain and out of its collar. However, when wolves or bears are around the commotion has a decidedly different sound and every musher can tell the difference. I've had bears around, but no wolves actually near the dog yard (at least not that I know about).

This sounded more like a fox or coyote ruckus, both of which we have in abundance up here. Sure enough, on a 10-foot-high dirt berm on one side of the yard where the bulldozer pushed back the trees, I spotted two gleaming yellow eyes looking back at me. After a few seconds I could make out the shape of a very healthy red fox, casually taking in the yard. He (or she) wasn't 20 feet from the nearest dogs, and of course they were all about three feet in the air trying to get loose. The fox stayed for at least a couple of minutes in the midst of the bedlam it had caused, with my headlight full on it the whole time, and then vanished into the woods.

My first thought about a fox that gets too brave is that it might have rabies. Losing the fear of man is a sure sign of rabies in a wild animal. However, foxes are crafty critters and this one has certainly figured out my dogs can't get loose to get at it. Foxes can be perfectly friendly to people as well without being rabid. Anyway, I walked out and looked at the tracks, and there was plenty of old sign, which means this fox has obviously been here for awhile, which would explain a lot of the middle-of-the-night commotion in the lot for the past month or so.

I doubt I'll do anything about it, since it's not hurting anything and may actually help sort out the excess of squirrels and mice around my place. There are also plenty of snowshoe hares around this year to keep it occupied. I'll have to make sure to keep the cat inside, though. Anyway, it's all part of living in a semi-wilderness area with a 30,000-square-mile open-air zoo for a back yard. Sometimes, though, I'm not sure exactly who's in the cages and who's doing the viewing....

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