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

I’m sleeping very badly out of worry for my pups and from trying to come to grips with losing what I’ve come to think of as my own kids. Little Bonnie seems to know something is wrong and she’s started howling late into the night. Often she’s joined by Clyde, and the adult dogs pick up their plaintive cry. It’s clear they can somehow sense the loss of their own. Their song is mournful and haunting; it echoes through the birch woods in the misty half-light of the midsummer midnight. I lie awake listening and silently join them in their lament.

This is a sad beginning to what I’d hoped would be an enjoyable training season. Moreover, it’s a body blow to my future in mushing, because these pups represented my long-term commitment and were going to be the core of my team a couple of years down the road. I’m starting to wonder if it’s all been worth it. There’s nothing more I can do now except wait and watch — and grieve.

They’re all gone but four. The parvo has taken almost all of my pups.

First Belle, then Pretty Boy, then Kate, then Little Guy, Beetle and Mac. Then all six of Black Ace’s remaining six-week-olds died within 18 hours of each other, the last three only eight hours after I had left them bouncing and eating happily with their mother.

But the most heartbreaking loss of all was little Skeeter, my favorite of all the pups. She had already learned to recognize her name and would come when I called; she was nervous when I wasn’t around and would cry when I put her back in the cage with her littermates when I went to work. Then she’d find a way out, no matter how I tried to mend the wire of the cage door, and would be waiting for me in the driveway when I returned at night.

She stopped eating last Friday and became listless the next morning; I knew what was coming but vowed to fight for her against this insidious, faceless evil. I spent three days feeding her electrolytes every hour or two and cleaning up after her when she couldn’t keep down any of the liquids. I kept her warm in bed next to me at night and stroked her to let her know somebody was there.

But it wasn’t any use. She got steadily weaker and began losing fluids faster than I could get them into her. By Monday night she could barely move and I stayed up all night trying to keep her hydrated. She finally died Tuesday morning after trying to get out of the airline kennel in which I’d had to isolate her. All I accomplished with my efforts was to prolong her agony for a day or so, and the thought makes me unspeakably depressed.

I know it’s easy to sound maudlin at times like this, but the pain is very real. When Skeeter finally went, I broke down and cried as I haven’t for many years. It is almost beyond my capability to see the spark of young, vibrant life drained away by a seemingly unstoppable and wanton killer that first tortures its victims — and those who care about them.

Somehow I feel I have failed. I was unable to save my puppies, my commitment to the future. I feel it was my fault, that I didn’t do something I should have, that I may even have unwittingly been the agent of destruction. As I take a long, slow walk through the murky forest at three in the morning to get away from the dog lot for awhile, I am prosecutor, judge, and jury for my own case, and I find myself guilty. I wanted these pups brought into the world for my own purposes and I am therefore responsible for their lives — and deaths. I’ll have to rethink everything over the next few weeks.

For what it’s worth, the vet says we’re having a parvo outbreak throughout the region, and the standard vaccines aren’t completely effective. It’s wiping out puppies and older dogs in kennels in this part of the state; Ron has lost nearly a dozen pups already. Everyone says there’s not much to do but keep vaccinating the survivors and hope the vaccine will give them at least a fighting chance.

I’ve become an instant expert on immunology and viral infections. Parvo (actually, canine parvovirus) is one of a family of viruses that includes distemper in cats and minks. Apparently the canine strain is a mutation that jumped species perhaps two decades ago, most likely from the mink distemper virus. It’s easy to imagine how big commercial mink farms offered a perfect laboratory for such a virus to perfect its transmogrification.

While vaccines are usually effective against parvo, there is a major hitch: puppy immune systems aren’t fully developed until they’re about 16 weeks old. For this reason they initially receive natural immunity from the mother’s milk. These maternal antibodies begin to diminish after six weeks, but may hang on until four months. While they are present, they inhibit vaccines from stimulating the pup’s own defenses.

So, even if a pup is being regularly vaccinated, it may fall victim during the vulnerability window while the mother’s protection fades away but before the pup develops its own resistance as a result of the shots. Worse, a puppy’s immune system may not be able to stop the infection once it has taken hold. This means an infected pup may not survive even with intensive care at a well-equipped veterinary hospital, like my Belle, Pretty Boy, and Kate.

Once the virus is at work, it will continue to replicate itself like a mindless robotized assembly line. As with all viruses, there is no antibiotic-like cure once a dog is infected. The only course is to treat the symptoms until the immune system has a chance to rally itself, just as for a human viral infection like flu or the common cold.

In the case of parvo, the virus attacks fast-dividing cells, and a growing puppy offers many targets. Usually, the critical nourishment-gathering cells lining the intestines are the ultimate victims; the end of an unsuccessful struggle against parvo is marked by bloody diarrhea and extreme dehydration as these cells die and slough off. The virus is present in unthinkable numbers in these discharges, which are the chief route by which other dogs are infected.

Ron explained to me how parvo decimated dog lots in Alaska back in the seventies before the disease was fully understood. He said mushers were thankful if even one or two pups in a litter survived. In an attempt to develop a parvo-resistant strain of dogs, the survivors were bred over and over, with some success. But still, without the development of good vaccines it’s unlikely mushing would be where it is today.

By coincidence, last week I picked up a copy of The Hot Zone , which details how the Ebola virus and its cousins emerged from the African rain forests to make devastating but luckily localized attacks on humans. The last part of the book covers an outbreak of Ebola in a monkey importing company’s holding facilities in Reston, Virginia, in late 1989. My first shock was the realization I was living barely 10 miles from Reston when the incident occurred and actually drove past the building while it was happening.

The second and more sobering jolt was the eerie similarities between exotic viruses like Ebola and the canine parvovirus that devastated my puppies. Indeed, parvo is the Ebola of the canine world. Like Ebola, it jumped species with terrifying results, wreaking widespread carnage before anyone really knew what it was. Parvo spreads much like Ebola, and is even more long-lived outside its hosts. It is just as lethal to puppies as any of the terror viruses are to humans, and kills just as quickly and as terribly.

Human viruses like Ebola are treated by the experts in the same manner as an enemy biological warfare attack, with precautions like those in Andromeda Strain . Unfortunately, I don’t have a space suit or a Level Four containment facility, so all I can do is load up my garden pump sprayer and dispense bleach by the gallon while I try to keep up the vaccinations on the ones who are left.