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

After five minutes I’ve got everyone ready and am rather pleased with myself for restoring peace and harmony. At that exact instant the team shoots forward, popping the sled upright and ripping out the useless snow hook like a bent safety pin. Rank rookie that I am, I’m caught completely by surprise and miss the handlebar as the sled rockets by. I shout at Socks to whoa up but he’s not listening to me or anyone else. He and the team are heading down the trail like they’re supposed to, with or without their inconsequential human baggage.

This is the unthinkable thing I’ve always feared — I’ve lost the team. Dumbfounded, I stare after them for a minute or so. Then I start walking down the trail. There’s nothing else to do. I know Barrie is out on this trail somewhere and my best hope is she will see the runaway team and stop it, and maybe even hook it to her sled and lead it back.

Failing that, I know Socks will probably continue around the 20-mile loop and I can grab the team as he brings it back by in a couple of hours. Of course, there are also any number of less pleasant possibilities. He might make an impulsive wrong turn or chase a moose and wrap everyone around a tree. Even on the main trail, the sled could overrun the team on one of the steep hills and injure the wheel dogs.

There’s also one thing I don’t even want to think about. The trail is partly on the borough road system and there is a chance the team will meet a vehicle. Fortunately, the roads we use don’t see much traffic, and most of the locals are used to seeing dog teams. In fact, a concerned motorist might even stop the team and tie it off — it’s happened plenty of times before. Still, the thought of a vehicle running into my team is too frightening even to think about.

I trudge up the trail and onto the road. After a few hard miles and an hour or so I finally flag down the first vehicle I meet. The driver says he hasn’t seen the team; since he came up from the highway, I assume Socks has kept to the 20-mile trail and hasn’t turned down toward the heavier traffic.

I impose on my surprised Good Samaritan and ask him to run me up to the end of the plowed road to see if the team has made it that far. We race the three miles to the end of the road; my team isn’t there, but Barrie is just coming down off the back trail. She says she met my team almost an hour ago on the borough road only a couple of miles past my unscheduled debarkation point. She tried to grab the leaders as they shot by and missed them. Then she turned her team around and chased the runaway train back up the trail for several miles.

Because my team was only dragging the empty sled, she knew she didn’t have a prayer of catching them unless they tangled up. She says they stayed lined out and just kept moving, widening their lead. She finally turned around when it looked like they would make the whole loop before she could get back to cut them off on the lower road.

I decide to wait and see if my team reappears while Barrie takes hers back and picks up my van. If my team doesn’t show up by the time Barrie returns with the car, we’ll try to go find someone with a snowmachine to backtrack up the trail. As I stand there by myself in the overcast twilight I feel totally helpless and utterly stupid. I play the scene over and over in my mind — Why didn’t I realize Socks was going to go as soon as I finished untangling everyone? Why didn’t I let them continue 100 yards or so where I could have tied the team off on a swamp spruce alongside the trail? Why didn’t I see the turnoff coming in time to keep the tangle from happening in the first place? I promise myself and any deities who might be listening never to lose the team again if I ever get it back in one piece.

In the end, something like this is the musher’s fault and I know it. The dogs only do what they’re trained to do — run. A few mushers have the luxury of a leader who will stop and check to see if the driver is still aboard, but Socks doesn’t work that way. It’s strictly up to the musher to stay a step ahead of them and anticipate things like this. There is no excuse, and I call myself every name in the book and worry myself sick about my team as a light snow starts to fall.

All sleds have some kind of brake; usually, the musher steps on the brake bar to drive metal points into the snow or ice. Most also are equipped with a drag, a piece of old snowmachine track that can be dragged behind the brake when needed. The musher steps on the drag for varying amounts of braking action. The snow hook is used to anchor the team when the sled is stopped. Many mushers use two hooks for insurance, as well as a snub line with a quick-release snap that can be looped around a tree or rock.

After maybe 15 minutes I catch a glimpse of movement up on the hill that materializes into a team. In another few seconds I can see there is no driver, and I can make out Socks and Yankee and Silvertip and all my other misplaced puppies. They’re running as if nothing has happened, lined out smartly and making at least 15 miles an hour over the soft trail.

I’m so overjoyed I almost forget to catch the sled as it comes by. As the dogs slow a bit to go over the berm where the plowed road starts, I swing aboard the sled like a tourist grabbing a San Francisco cable car. As we continue down the road I see to my astonishment absolutely nothing is amiss. I’ve been incredibly lucky. (I find out later our neighbor John Barron and son Will were out with their teams and got mine turned around almost 10 miles up the trail.)

A few of the dogs casually look back to acknowledge my presence and immediately refocus on the run. For a minute I feel they could do everything without me. It’s a chilling realization. Then my gathering depression is replaced by a certain pride — I’ve apparently trained them well enough to function smoothly even when I’m not around to oversee their every move.

As we head back to the dog lot, I realize I’ve just learned an extremely valuable lesson for the long races which are rapidly approaching. The dogs will keep moving even if I get tired or disoriented or injured, and I can trust them to do so even if I’m not capable of controlling them. Their built-in autopilot will see the team — and me — through all manner of problems. After all is said and done, I understand we really are a team and the dogs are equal partners in this enterprise, even if it has taken a profound blow to my ego to drive home this fundamental fact.

Today is my first real race as a reasonably serious dog driver. I’ve been looking forward to this — and dreading it — for weeks. In a manner of speaking, this is my semester exam, and if I can get through it in one piece I’ll consider myself to have passed with flying colors.

The Sheep Creek Christmas Classic is staged by the local lodge every year as a sort of prelude to the regular long-distance racing season in Southcentral Alaska. It’s not a lengthy race, only 40 miles or so on Saturday with another heat over the same trail the next day. However, it usually draws some of the top mushers in this part of the state and is a good opportunity to see how my dogs will react around other teams and lots of strange people.

Naturally I don’t expect to win anything. I know my dogs aren’t even remotely a match for some of the big names who usually enter, or even for most of the smaller names, for that matter. All I want to do is finish honorably, with the dogs all intact, and without taking so long as to require a search party. Hopefully I’ll learn something from watching the other mushers and from talking with them between heats.