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

Of course, the damage is already done and nothing I do now will make much difference. The four pups still on my lot — Bonnie, Clyde, Shorty, and Big Mac — have already been heavily exposed and have apparently worked through it on their own. I’m really no better off than Ron and his fellow dog drivers 20 years ago, despite the advances of modern veterinary medicine.

Te’re off and running again. I’ve been anxious to get moving because the daily training routine will keep me from dwelling on the depressing nightmare of the parvo epidemic. Regardless of what has happened, I still have to get ready to run the race next year.

With Ron’s help, I finally get the long-disused three-wheeler to start after a couple of hours of wrench-bending and some Anglo-Saxon language practice. About 10 o’clock, when it’s good and dark, I hook up the gangline to the handlebars and lay it out in the driveway. I notice the dogs are watching me intently. When I go inside the storage shed and come out with the harnesses, they start barking. When I walk over and put the first harness on Socks, they all go wild.

I pick out five more of the usual suspects and hook them up amid a deafening bedlam. This will be their first real chance to get off the chains and out of the dog lot since last March and they’re all at a fever pitch. As I start the engine, the team goes completely bonkers and gives a bulldozer-strength yank in unison, snapping the four heavy bungee cords I’d put in the line to absorb the shock of pulling the three-wheeler.

The next thing I see is the entire team ripping out of the driveway unencumbered by me or the machine. In my haste I can’t get the three-wheeler to start so I shove it out of the way and run over to my van. I roar off after the dogs, betting (and hoping) they’ve turned back toward Ron’s instead of down toward the highway. I hope Socks will keep them out of too much trouble. This isn’t exactly how I wanted to start the season.

Sure enough, they’re milling around in the entrance to Ron’s driveway like a bewildered six-tentacled octopus. As I walk over to them I’m laughing so hard I can barely stand up. Socks is sheepishly trying to lead them back to my place and they’re all slinking along behind him. I hop back in the van and call to them to follow me as I drive back.

Sensing I’ve absolved them, they line out and trot behind my van like ducklings following mama to the lake. Back in the driveway I hook them up to the three-wheeler again (this time without the bungees), toss them all a biscuit, and let them rest for a few minutes. Then I hop aboard and we pick up where we left off, streaking down the borough road to our normal start-of-the-season turnaround point (an unused circle driveway) a mile and a half away.

Socks seems to remember this place from last year and swings into the darkened turnaround just like the pro he is. Suddenly I see somebody is camping there. Socks runs right past the smoldering campfire, under a tarp, and has his nose stuck inside the flap of the poor camper’s tent before I can get the team stopped. I race up and get Socks turned around and headed back out the driveway before the half-awake and thoroughly befuddled outdoorsman can react.

With a shouted apology for our interruption, we roll back out on the road. As we trundle back down to the dog lot, I laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Then it dawns on me things could have become serious if the surprised camper had decided to start shooting at what he thought might be a wolf or a bear. To have had several dogs inadvertently shot (and maybe even myself) would not have been an auspicious beginning to the season.

But it turns out to be a good run and Socks shows he’s still the number one leader. I’m satisfied — and more than a little relieved — that we’re finally back in the swing of training. No more summertime distractions: now the real goal of finishing the 1996 Iditarod is snapping back into sharp focus and I can make concrete progress toward it every day. Maybe it will be a good training season after all.

I’ve met some interesting people flying for Hudson’s this summer, but I think a pair of young Swedes from the Stockholm area ranks right up at the top.

Nicolas and Johan came over in July — fairly late in the climbing season — to climb Mount McKinley. In fact, by the time they returned toward the end of the month after reaching the summit in 11 days, they were almost the only people left on the mountain.

When we flew them back from the long-dismantled Kahiltna Glacier base camp, they announced they were going to spend the rest of the summer in Alaska hiking the Talkeetna Mountains. After we got over our initial surprise — not many people try the trek across the trailless 10,000-square-mile wilderness of the Talkeetnas — we realized they were serious.

We helped them figure out the best route (or at least one they had a chance of finishing before winter) and then flew them up to the old mining strip at Iron Creek. Then they vanished into the back country and we didn’t hear anything from them until yesterday, when they ambled into our hangar looking like they’d just walked from pole to pole.

They said they’d had a few adventures, such as falling into raging mountain rivers, nearly starving, and dodging bears, but otherwise they’d had a grand time. After 25 days they’d finally made it down the Chickaloon River to the Glenn Highway and hitched a ride back to Talkeetna.

As we pumped cup after cup of coffee into them, the talk turned inevitably to dogs. They allowed as how they’d always been interested in dogs in Sweden, but they’d never had much of a chance to get more involved. When I mentioned the Iditarod, they immediately asked if they could see my dogs. Since they needed a place to spend the night, I said why not — I could hook up the trailer to the three-wheeler and they could ride along when I ran the dogs, and then they could help me feed and give some shots to the puppies.

Back at my place, hooking up nine dogs, I was struck by the trailer’s uncanny resemblance to a tumbrel cart carrying victims to the guillotine. (I wonder if Citizen Robespierre and his henchmen ever envisioned using dog power to haul the ancien régime to the butcher block.) I didn’t mention this to my visitors, but I figured they’d get the picture soon enough.

The dogs didn’t even notice the triple load and surged out of the driveway. Within a mile, they’d managed to flip the trailer on the back trail, spilling my Scandinavian sojourners into the willow bushes. For the rest of the run I used the engine on the three-wheeler to both help and hinder the team as we rocketed down the narrow, bush-lined track.

When we made it back (it was only a three-mile run) the first thing my somewhat-the-worse-for-wear passengers said was “We want to run the Iditarod.” Considering they’d just climbed Mount McKinley and hiked across the Talkeetnas, and one of them had previously biked from Stockholm across Europe and Africa, I had the feeling they might actually mean it.

They asked how much it would cost to run the 1997 or 1998 race; I told them $10,000 to $30,000 if they wanted to rent a ready-to-go team from someone like Joe Redington and show up in December to get their qualifying races out of the way. On the other hand, I mentioned they might come over at the beginning of the season to work as handlers for room and board at one of the big kennels that sends one or two training teams down the trail every year. More than a few young mushers have earned their first trip to Nome that way, breaking in a team of yearlings.

They thought the latter concept might work for them because it would allow them to really learn the ropes and get to know the dogs. They were also concerned about looking like “fire-and-forget” mushers who rent a team for one race and never get on the back of a dog sled again. Given a chance, they want to take up mushing seriously in Sweden and maybe return in the future to run the Iditarod with their own teams.