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

Others, especially those whose gene pools include breeds less adapted to cold weather, can run into problems when the weather turns really cold. Martin Buser said an old Native musher once told him the best indication of a dog with insufficient insulation is to look at the size of the hole melted in the snow underneath it in the morning: the bigger the hole, the more heat the dog is losing. It’s been estimated a dog can consume as many as 2,000 calories a night shivering on below-zero ground. This is not insignificant when the dog in question is already burning several thousand calories a day, as is common in training.

The net result of any calorie shortage in dogs is the same as in humans: an inevitable drop in weight as fat and muscle must be metabolized just to break even in the daily calorie battle. On an extended race, when the dogs need up to 10,000 calories a day and every calorie is critical, a cold-induced deficit can quickly spell major trouble.

Sometimes on the trail, dogs can simply curl up and let falling or blowing snow cover them up. They sleep very comfortably in their natural snow caves, which serve admirably to insulate them from the outside air. However, there are surprisingly few places on the trail where this kind of refuge is available. All too often the snow is too thin or the wind too strong.

Another partial answer is the use of dog blankets, which cover everything from the neck to the tail and wrap around underneath. The dogs can wear these while running; they’re especially useful in windy conditions when even the best-insulated dogs can lose heat at astounding rates and can risk frostbite as well. However, dog blankets have limitations: they’re expensive, they can be tight enough to restrict a dog from curling into an energy-efficient ball, and some dogs will simply eat them if given the chance.

The best solution to combat calorie loss when the dogs are at rest is a good old-fashioned bed of straw. Of course, the insulating properties of lowly straw are certainly not a new discovery — humans have been using it for everything from bedding to roofing since prehistory. More recently, it’s been conclusively proven that a dog can sleep very comfortably on even a little straw, with or without a dog blanket, at 40 or 50 below zero.

In fact, every big race provides straw at the checkpoints, or allows mushers to ship it out for their teams. The Iditarod ships huge amounts of straw to the checkpoints. Much of it is mailed, but every bale for the remote locations has to be flown in: I personally flew 45 bales into the frighteningly short strip at Rohn Roadhouse for the 1994 race (back before I took leave of my senses and decided to see everything from the ground). But the effort is worth it and it’s most gratefully received by dogs and mushers alike; more than a few exhausted mushers have grabbed a quick nap next to their dogs on an inviting pile of straw.

However, there’s something more to straw that seems to have a special appeal to dogs. Maybe it’s the hint of all the various life forms it has encountered on its journey from the golden fields of autumn to the depths of winter. Perhaps it’s the unexpected, explosive scent of summer in the bleak olfactory wasteland of the long subarctic night. Whatever the reason, introducing sled dogs to fresh straw is like turning kids loose in a toy store. They will nose it, sniff it, poke it, turn it, toss it, roll in it, bounce in it. Ultimately they will circle and circle like their wolf ancestors and finally plop down with the canine equivalent of a sigh of contentment.

Tonight I decide it’s time for new straw for everyone. The dogs can somehow sense when I intend to straw them before I break open the bale. They become even more excited than at feeding time, regardless of the temperature. As soon as I shake out the first armful into the first doghouse, the clamor becomes earsplitting. They all know what I’m doing and they all want their share immediately.

I stop and watch each dog’s reaction to the gift, even though I know I’m keeping the others impatiently waiting. The old veterans are predictable: because they bed down on straw at checkpoints on the long races, they have come to regard it as an omen of respite from the rigors of the trail. Their pleasure is plain to see; they savor the straw almost like a gourmet lingering over a particularly notable meal.

Some of the younger dogs play in the straw in a sort of instant reversion to puppyhood. They drag it completely out of their houses, spread it out, nudge it back into a pile, and jump into it. Whether the straw is in the doghouse seems to be purely secondary, and they are just as likely to sleep on it out in the open.

The puppies — now seven and eight months old — simply go ballistic. They don’t yet really know what straw is, but it’s obviously something different and fun to play with. Considering some of my pups haven’t even figured out what their houses are for and actually seem to enjoy camping out in the cold, I’m not surprised at anything they do.

Their straw ends up scattered to the four winds (which are mercifully absent at the moment), along with their feeding dishes (which they enjoy stealing from each other) and even their houses (which they push around like hockey pucks on icy ground). I make sure some of the straw winds up wherever they seem to be sleeping, usually while they tie me up with their chains and try to lick me to death and chew my boot laces. For the pups, I guess strawing time is really just another excuse for them to play with their most favorite toy of all — me.

A strange game, this mushing business. We learn to take pleasure from the simplest and most unlikely things. Whoever would have thought humble, common straw could lead to such an entertaining and ultimately satisfying experience. I guess it all goes back to the most fundamental rule I’ve learned so far: if the dogs are happy, I’m happy.

The musher’s alcohol cooker is one of the most important items carried on the sled. An outer metal bucket with ventilating holes encloses a special burner and supports a three- to five-gallon pot in which snow or water can be melted and heated. Most mushers fuel their cookers with automotive-variety HEET or equivalent products. Cookers can boil several gallons of water in ten to fifteen minutes under most conditions. The hot water is poured into a plastic bucket containing dry dog food and frozen meat; most mushers normally don’t actually cook in their cookers because of the potential for bacterial growth.

My place is barely a mile from the Alaska Railroad and I can easily hear and even feel the trains rumbling by. As I feed the dogs tonight, the evening fast freight is thundering north to Fairbanks. Listening to its whistle moaning through the snow-covered forest, I have to think anyone who genuinely likes trains must appreciate dog teams.

I’ve been a train nut for years; I owe that to my father, who used to take me down to the Frisco yards in my home town in Arkansas to watch the last of the grand old steam engines working out their days on switching duty. When I went to college in Colorado, I spent many weekends exploring ghost towns and the hundreds of miles of abandoned railroads that once linked them. I became intimately familiar with long-gone names like the Rio Grande Southern, the South Park, the Colorado Midland, and the Silverton Northern. And I fell in love with steam engines, spending hours watching them wind through the mountains in one of their last redoubts along the Colorado-New Mexico border on the Denver and Rio Grande Western’s Durango narrow-gauge line.