Mike Dillingham - Alaska Dogs and Iditarod Mushers - The Adventures of Balto, Back of the Pack, Honor Bound, Rivers

As soon as she senses the biscuit, she bounds over and nuzzles me. I give her the treat and hug her like a prodigal daughter. Then I realize Socks has also smelled the biscuit and has dragged the team and the sled and the log with the snow hook wrapped around it to get his rightful share of the spoils. But all is forgiven as I toss him a snack and hook Weasel back into the team. We’re off in a flash, homeward bound and happy.

I have plenty of time to reflect on the errors of my ways as the team pulls steadily back to the lot. I remember almost every word of Gary Paulsen’s Winterdance , in which he describes his preparations for the 1983 Iditarod. By his account, he made every rookie mistake possible, and a few more for good measure. I read the book just after I decided to run the race and half the time I couldn’t decide whether to roll on the floor laughing or just forget the whole thing and seek competent psychiatric counseling.

Now I see what he was talking about because I’m going through many of the same trials and tribulations. Taken in context, the individual events aren’t as bad as they might sound to someone who hasn’t been there. I’ve been a human weed-whacker, eaten bucketfuls of snow, imitated a Pachinko ball, gotten bit, sorted out dog fights, and nursed sick dogs. I’ve untangled Gordian knots of dogs, sleds, trees, and me. I’ve had to figure out how to keep always-amorous males away from unexpectedly amorous females. I’ve learned how to rearrange dogs within a team to keep harmony and a sense of purpose. In short, this has been more fun and ultimately satisfying than anything I’ve ever done before, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

To look at the individual parts of the picture, any non-musher would question my sanity for continuing such a quixotic quest. But any veteran dog driver will nod knowingly and smile, and I’m starting to understand why. As Paulsen said, it’s a fine madness, this getting ready to run the Last Great Race.

The 20-mile trail beckons again. But if last night could best be classified as a learning experience, this evening is something altogether different.

I take another eight-dog team out with Slipper in the lead. She’s 10 years old, the oldest dog on my team, but still a marvelous runner. She spent five years with Libby Riddles and several more with Bert and has run tens of thousands of miles.

However, she’s what we call a trail leader, and is not a very good command or “gee-haw” leader. She will follow a trail instinctively and will set a blistering pace, but to turn her takes a somewhat different technique from what most people imagine. The usual method involves waiting to see which way she will go when we come up to a turn and then stomping on the brake if she takes the wrong one, accompanied by a loud “Whoa” or “No.”

Actually, it doesn’t matter what I shout, as long as it gets her attention and lets her know I don’t want to go that way. When she finally starts to go the direction I want, I reinforce her decision with a “There you go!” or something equivalent. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s quite sufficient when we’re out on the trail and away from other dogs or congested areas.

Sometimes, though, she can be incredibly stubborn and won’t make a turn no matter what I say. Usually this devolves into a contest of wills while I stand on the brake and try to coax her in the proper direction. Often as not, I have to set the hook and physically lead her the way I want to go. Sometimes even that fails and I simply have to switch leaders, which almost always works. That’s one reason I try to run with several dogs who will go up front, even if they’re not all good leaders.

Regardless, the oldest rule in dog mushing is you can’t let the leader get away with not following your commands. In Slipper’s case, this can sometimes require the patience of Job. But tonight she is responding well enough to get us through the more complicated parts of the trail with only a few near-detours. I keep the sled upright the whole way up to the top of the trail and actually start to enjoy myself a bit.

Like last night, I stop at the top of the hill and admire the view. Tonight, however, I feel much more a part of the team. Without really realizing it, I’ve been able to guide Slipper and the team easily and to handle in stride all of the little distractions. I seem to have crossed a psychological divide that has kept me from feeling secure with the team. As I gaze at the team and out over the silent mountains, I understand I can take the dogs practically anywhere. The team has now become a powerful and exotic instrument of travel and discovery, not just a collection of dogs I must herd over the same trails night after night.

Mount McKinley, called Denali (the Great One) by Alaska Natives, dominates the skyline of central Alaska. The highest mountain in North America, it towers in solitary grandeur to 20,320 feet above sea level. It can often be seen from more than 200 miles away, and is visible along the Iditarod Trail in many places from Anchorage to beyond Takotna.

Instead of returning to the dog lot tonight, I could just as easily keep going up the mountain or on toward Talkeetna. Slipper, for all her quirks, can take me to places most people will never see except in photographs. She and her teammates have turned the winter, which chills more conventional spirits, into a beckoning wonderland for me. I pity the snow-machiners with their noisy, smelly engines, and even the cross-country skiers with their limited range. I have never fully realized how uniquely suited the dog team is to the North Country. It represents freedom of a kind I’ve never experienced before, even with my airplanes.

The ride back to the dog yard is a study in perfection. Slipper, in her special wisdom, seems to know that I, too, now understand and leads flawlessly as if to reward me for my belated insight. I hope there will be many more nights like this.

Be careful what you wish for: it might come true. I’m sitting awake at four o’clock on a Monday morning because I can’t get to sleep, attempting to reconcile the incredible events of the last few weeks. As I review them in my mind I don’t think anyone would believe me if I swore everything was true on a stack of Bibles.

First there was the snow. Lots of snow, even for up here. To be sure, ever since Labor Day we were hoping for enough of the white stuff to start serious training. But we must have punched the wrong buttons when we entered our modest request at Weather God Central, because after our initial few inches we were smacked by a series of major storms that left us with four feet on the ground in barely 10 days.

Of course, our carefully marked and packed trails were inundated until even the most intrepid snowmachiners wouldn’t give them a shot. The dog lot was completely cut off by the first dump (almost two feet in 24 hours) because Ron’s narrow half-mile-long driveway was hopelessly blocked.

Since we didn’t have an operable snowmachine, we hitched up a few teams just to get between our houses and cabins. A couple of vehicles were parked close enough to the borough road so we could extract them and keep them parked on the plowed public right of way, although access to and from them was only by dog team. On top of everything I had to keep driving back and forth to Anchorage during the week to teach; at least the big state plows kept the main roads open.