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It's been a busy week here. I flew Monday, taught at the high school Tuesday (and then flew the mail to Gold Creek after classes), flew again Wednesday, and was back teaching Thursday and Friday, with another afternoon flight to take supplies out to a mine west of Talkeetna after classes Thursday. Somewhere in there I ran the dogs half a dozen times and made a couple of trips to Wasilla, plus a visit to John Barron's place to pick up two more dogs. I also gave away seven more of my second-string dogs to friends for their recreational teams. And I lost one handler to injuries and lined up another one from the Lower 48.  

My lot is now down to 43 dogs, which includes 24 "A"-string runners in training, 7 two-year-olds, 4 nine-month-olds, Maybelline's three four-month-olds, a few pets and retirees, my old leader Polar Bear, and my wolf Silvertip. The goal is to have the two dozen mainline dogs ready for the Copper Basin 300 on the second weekend in January. The Copper Basin has a 12-dog limit, and I think I can put together a very creditable team for it. The two-year-olds and the nine-month-olds will be getting training as I can find time, but I fully expect them to be capable of starting the 2001 Iditarod--and several more Iditarods after that.

In short, I've finally moved up from being a beginning driver using somebody else's mostly second-hand dogs to a self-sustaining kennel relying on some dogs I've bred myself plus selected dogs from other mushers--like the ones I've been getting from John Barron. Of the 24 runners in training right now, six were born on my lot. By the 2002 Iditarod, a dozen more should join them. This is about the middle of the spectrum for most mushers at my level. I have to say that running dogs I've raised from pups and trained myself is immensely satisfying--and to take some of them down Front Street in Nome, as I did with Clyde and Squeaky this year, has to be the ultimate for a non-professional musher like me.

I've got some good talent on the lot now, and some good young prospects for the next few years. I can honestly say I've got the makings of good teams for the next four or five years, provided I can train and run them the way they deserve. It's taken quite awhile, but I guess I can finally call myself a serious musher, if not a professional one.

For the moment, running the dogs is more work than I'd like it to be. The four-wheeler is a far cry from a sled, although it does have its strong points. On some of the trails I'm forced to run, however, its strong points all seem to be bashing me about various parts of my anatomy in rapid succession. A couple of miles are like an endless bounce down the Capitol Steps. At times the little four-wheeler has all four wheels completely off the ground as the dogs drag it at 15 miles an hour through the woods across frost heaves, roots, and ruts. Control is a relative term most of the time, especially with snowpacked roads where brakes are often wishful thinking.

But just getting onto the trail can be interesting sometimes. At this stage of the season, the dogs are frantically eager to run, and hooking them up is always a cross between a rodeo and a sumo contest with a touch of mob control thrown in for good measure. Every musher will agree that the hardest part of any run is hooking up and then making it through the first few miles in one piece until the madness wears off.

It doesn't help if the musher isn't on the ball either. Tonight was a good example: I somehow forgot that Shane is a ferocious chewer when she gets excited and that her teeth must have been the inspiration for the Ginsu knife people. I already use cable necklines for her so I can at least delay things. Normally I hook her up last so we'll be moving before she starts looking for things to slice and dice, like the tug lines of the dogs in front of her, which aren't cable. Tonight I had her in second swing, two rows back from lead, and she chewed her partner's tugline plus both tuglines ahead of her in about two nanoseconds while I was across the lot getting another dog. Then the dogs in front of her could reach the leaders' tuglines, which they munched just as quickly. The whole team then unraveled like a badly made shirt when you pull on the wrong thread.

I heard the lot get very quiet for half a minute, like a room full of second graders who have just watched the class character do something behind the teacher's back that will certainly result in nuclear retaliation. I got back with the next dog and found Maybelline and Rondy standing next to the truck tire I use to anchor the leaders, watching Nepo the Wannabe Wolf Dog (who was in swing) lead everyone else on a journey of exploration into the puppy pen and my spare dog boxes. It took fifteen minutes to get everything sorted out and install five new tuglines, plus get Scissorhands Shane back on a regular chain in the lot while I got everyone else hooked up. Not surprisingly, the run was rather anticlimactic.

Hopefully I'll have some help to train the dogs this year. The handler who had agreed to work with me injured his back last week and won't be able to help much. He'll still come up from Anchorage now and then, and I can certainly use all the help I can get. Luckily, I was able to find someone else ready to come up from the Lower 48 to help out. Even better, this particular person has worked with me before, prior to my first Iditarod in 1995. In fact, she started the 1995 Iditarod herself but, like me, had to scratch.

Those who have read my book "Back of the Pack" have already figured out who's on the way up--Barrie Raper, from Pinedale, Wyoming. She went back south a few months after the 1995 race and has been active in Wyoming mushing. She finished the Wyoming Stage Stop Race last year, a respectable feat in itself. Now she's looking to have a go at the Iditarod again, maybe in 2001, and she's bringing her dogs up with her to train and run a qualifying race or two. (She qualified for the 1995 Iditarod, but her qualification expired after two years.) I'm really looking forward to her help, since she's a pretty fair dog driver herself. In return, I'm going to try to help her get her qualifying races done. Maybe we'll both run the 2001 race and complete the trip we started in 1995. We'll certainly keep the trails busy around here this winter between her team and mine.

One of the things we'll do in the next few weeks is harness-break Maybelline's three pups. We can't do this until they've been tied out on their own for a few weeks and have gotten completely comfortable with the concept of collars and chains and restraint. Harness-breaking is nothing more than putting harnesses on them for the first time and hooking them up to the sled or four-wheeler for their first run. Naturally they'll be with older dogs so they'll have some role models to emulate. Most mushers try to harness-break their pups at four to five months of age. Experienced drivers can usually tell very quickly if a pup will make a good sled dog on these short runs. Pups that don't make the grade may wind up with another musher who can spend more time with them, or they may end up as someone's pet. I'm not too worried about Maybelline's crew--they're already trying to take off after the teams when I leave the yard.

We still don't have any more snow around here, and it's starting to get boring out on the four-wheeler on the borough roads. However, my runs might be enlivened by a large black wolf that has been reported prowling in our area. A number of people have seen him, and he mangled somebody's pet dog last week three miles north of my place. He's apparently by himself, a "lone wolf" who has left his pack for some reason. Of course, not all of the sightings have been valid--someone just down our road claimed to have seen him but it turned out to be my neighbor Ron Aldrich's yard dog Gidget, who is occasionally loose.

We also have a wounded bear roaming our area. Some moron apparently shot a sow grizzly in the face with a shotgun loaded with birdshot three weeks ago. That was about seven miles north of my place and the bear--and her two small cubs--have since been seen around here, including one sighting not 500 yards from my dog lot a few days ago. Yesterday she was spotted about a mile from my place near the now-closed campgrounds along Montana Creek on the Parks Highway. Witnesses say one side of her head is in pretty bad shape and she's not particularly friendly. The local Fish and Wildlife Protection state trooper has been checking around the area for the past couple of days, but the sow and her cubs seem to be staying out of sight.

This is definitely not usual for this area. Wolves we can understand because we have several packs around here and they occasionally do the power lunch thing with careless people's pets. However, the bear should have been in winter hibernation weeks ago, and probably would have been if she hadn't encountered the idiot with the shotgun. It's forced me to dust off my sled gun, a rusty old .44-magnum Virginian Dragoon single-action revolver that weighs about a ton and has a barrel as long as my arm. I've fired it maybe half a dozen times since I've owned it, and most of those were straight up in the air. I felt like some kind of Wild West desperado as I cinched on my gunbelt this evening to run the dogs. It's a good thing I didn't meet the bear because I'd probably have shot my foot off before I could even get it out of the holster.

On the brighter side, I got Big Mac back from the vet yesterday. In fact, the vet, Dr. Joe Grohs of Alaska Equine and Small Animal Hospital in Birchwood, even brought him up here enroute to a snowmachine trip out to the family cabin west of Talkeetna. I was particularly impressed by the way Dr. Grohs handled Big Mac's life-threatening problem without automatically resorting to surgery. After a few days of observation and preparatory treatment, he was able to put Big Mac under anesthesia and give him a thorough stomach pumping followed by an enema, which did the trick. (As I'd suspected, Big Mac was indeed full of straw and his entire G-I system had shut down because of it.) Unlike after an operation, Big Mac didn't require a lengthy recovery period and I was able to hook him up tonight for an hour's run. A benefit for me, of course, is that the cost will be much less than for surgery, and saving money is always welcome, especially when it's a result of first-rate treatment for one of my dogs.

Odds and ends: I was half-watching the television tonight before I went out to run the dogs and I saw something that looked familiar. The Burger King commercial I worked on last month is already on the air. They certainly work fast on these things. Much of it was obviously done in the studio after the production crew went back to Hollywood, but the dogs are all there doing their thing up in the Talkeetna Mountains. (By the way, there's a neat Subaru commercial out with Crocodile Dundee and a sled dog team. I don't know where it was filmed, but it looks like it might have been fun.)

Science Note: The good citizens of Barrow will see their last sunset of the millennium this Friday. The sun will rise in the south just before one in the afternoon, peek above the horizon for about thirty minutes, and then slide out of sight again a little more than half an hour later. It won't rise again until January 23, 2000. Of course, it won't be completely dark all winter in Barrow. They will still have a bright twilight every day for a few hours. But you can be sure they won't be selling a lot of SPF 50 at the local stores for awhile.

Trivia Question of the Week: How many sled dogs does it take to pull a 110,000-pound semi-trailer truck? Would you believe 230 dogs is more than enough? It happened in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, a couple of weeks ago, during a fund-raising exhibition for the thousand-mile Yukon Quest sled dog race. The idea was for the dogs to pull the truck for a thousand feet down the town's main avenue. According to the Anchorage Daily News, the dogs not only got the truck moving, but got it going so fast they outran their mushers and handlers and the truck driver had to stay on the brakes for most of the trip to keep things under control. They did the same thing last year, only with 210 dogs pulling an 86,000-pound truck.

Finally, a fellow back-of-the-pack musher has written what appears to be a pretty good book about running dogs. Brian O'Donoghue of Fairbanks is the only musher to have taken the Red Lantern in both the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest. His new book is about running the 1998 Yukon Quest, when he fought his way to last place. It's called Honest Dogs and is being published by Epicenter Press. It definitely looks to be worth a read.

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