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

Bear, another of my big horses, tries the Rocky routine but with his own variation: he actually won’t get up when the team starts. I have to stop even before we get moving and haul him upright by his harness. Then he will go maybe 50 yards and fall down, allowing himself to be dragged like a sack of rice until I stop the team again.

As I walk up to him I can see him watching me out of one eye, pretending to be completely exhausted. Once again I grab his harness and lever him onto his feet, admonishing him about his responsibilities to the team. Then it’s like he’s been reborn. He’s positively jumping to go and pulls for all he’s worth as we move out again. It’s his little game and he gets me to play it every time we leave a checkpoint. I can’t imagine what onlookers must think.

The old and the new rub shoulders in Alaska’s bush villages. Here the modern snowmachines of the trail sweeps are parked next to the old log-built Kaltag town hall, practically in the shadow of the village satellite earth station.

Then there are the “blondes;” every musher has a couple of these. These are the ones who, if they were human, would get stuck on an escalator for two hours if the power went out. They manage to cause more tangles and general mayhem than the rest of the team put together. They like to go visit other dogs in the team and even to go visit other teams if any are handy, regardless of the confusion they cause.

Lisa Moore has at least one of these; her ditzy dog is named Buckethead. Mine are Wild Thing and Maybelline. And not only the ladies qualify for the “blonde” label: Kisser, one of my males, fits the criteria perfectly even though he thinks he’s God’s gift to every female on the trail.

Even when the team is ready to go I can often find the blondes turned around gawking or casually sitting chewing on their toenails. Sometimes it seems I have to send them an engraved invitation to get their attention. When Lisa or I have to stop out on the trail all we have to say to fully explain the situation when the other pulls up is, “Blonde trouble again.”

Lisa says being a blonde is a state of mind; I think it might be a result of having no mind. Indeed, there are times I’m sure if I look in one of Maybelline’s ears I’ll see daylight out the other side. Sometimes I wonder what I’d do with them if they weren’t fast runners — and if they didn’t follow Socks anywhere like schoolgirls with a crush on their teacher.

On the other side of the coin is Silvertip, my wolf and onetime personal pet. He likes to run in the back of the team where he can be near me and if I put him up front he spends most of his time looking back to see if I’m still there. When we’re preparing to move out he’s not only up and ready, he’s jumping up and down and jerking the sled and howling to go. He pops his tugline so hard I’m worried it might break.

He’s so big and strong he sometimes pulls the hook all by himself. When I stop out on the trail I have to be careful to securely anchor the sled because he’ll yank the hook when I least want him to. I only wish he would keep pulling with such enthusiasm after we’re 20 or 30 miles down the trail, when he starts to goof off and I have to stay on his case to remind him he’s working for a living these days.

And then there’s Socks. He’s the consummate leader who has pulled out of so many checkpoints over half a dozen Iditarods and Lord knows how many shorter races I think by now he does it in his sleep. Like Rocky, he’s basically an inanimate object until it’s time to stand up.

But he’s got a built-in “go” switch that automatically activates whenever I step on the runners. It doesn’t matter whether the rest of the team is ready or not, or who’s playing games or looking the other way: Socks goes. And he’s big enough (a healthy 60 pounds and strong as an ox) to drag the whole team if he has to, which is sometimes the case. But with Socks up front we always move out, even if we have a few fits and starts as things get worked out.

Of course, Socks has to make his one, defining gesture to remind me he’s actually running this show: he will always wait until we’re a half-mile out on the trail and will then simply stop and unconcernedly relieve himself. I think he likes it even more if I’m shouting at him at the top of my lungs for stopping in the middle of the trail or coming down a hill. When he’s quite finished, he’ll look back at me as if to say, “This is how we do things in MY team — any questions?” And then we’ll be off for a steady run of 50 or 100 miles.

I think any musher will admit sometimes you’re not sure exactly who’s running the team. But when you’ve got a foreman like Socks you’re more than willing to put up with a few quirks, especially if he keeps order in the rest of mobile zoo in front of the sled.

This morning as I get ready to pull out, the checker and some of the local kids are cleaning up the straw piles from a week’s worth of teams and the janitor is sweeping out the community center where we were sleeping only a few hours ago. There’s little doubt the race is a closed book here and I’m starting to feel like a footnote.

Andy departs a half-hour ahead of Lisa and me, and Lisa passes me within a mile after we leave town. I’m also overtaken by the trail sweeps on their high-powered snowmachines pulling heavy sleds, who will certainly play a more prominent role in the race for us if the weather turns bad on the coast.

Slim and his crew are old pros at shepherding tail-enders up the trail and it’s good to know they’ll be around if anything really serious blows up. Of course, they still can’t offer any assistance to mushers which is prohibited in the rules, but they can certainly help in other ways no less important or effective. More than a few back-of-the-packers over the years owe the trail sweeps a debt of gratitude.

One of the benefits of running behind the trail sweeps is their big machines and sleds act as first-rate groomers, especially when there’s enough fresh snow to resurface the chewed-up trail. I can’t complain about the trail condition today as my guys pull steadily through the thick forest and occasional open meadows up the 15-mile incline to the 800-foot summit of the Kaltag Portage. The only problem is the bright sun, which heats up the dogs’ dark coats and necessitates frequent brief cooling stops.

When we reach the summit a few hours later we take a break. The panorama down the long, straight valley stretching away to the southwest is impressive. I’m far from the first dog driver to see this view. This portage has been used for thousands of years as a route linking the great interior highway of the Yukon River and the coast, with its rich bounty of marine resources.

Dog teams have probably been traveling through here for a millennium or more; non-Native mushers — and the Iditarod Trail — are very late arrivals in this part of the world. Indeed, our goal of Unalakleet at the western end of the portage has been continuously inhabited for at least 2,000 years, as have several of the coastal villages through which the race runs.

My immediate goal is the Tripod Flats shelter cabin, 35 miles from Kaltag. It and another cabin at Old Woman, 50 miles out, are commonly used by mushers, snowmachiners, and hunters. They are useful progress checks on this third longest leg of the race, and if the snow flurries I see drifting in over the mountains from the south get much heavier the cabins may be welcome refuges.

As we move slowly down the valley the snow is occasionally heavy but the showers are moving quickly and the sun still dominates the scene. However, I don’t like the idea of a south wind in this area because it often portends a storm. The weather out here is notoriously — and all too often fatally — fickle. No one takes it for granted.