and mask, crisp and contrasting, but without the big-dog build. Instead, the pup had a more slender frame, slight stature, and a sleek rather than furry coat. Based on its small size and still-present milk teeth, it appeared around four months old.
“So, what’s its backstory,” I asked the shelter manager, trying to sound more indifferent than I felt.
“It’s a female; came in overnight. We found her in the after-hours drop-off cages with five littermates, but the others were so feral and frightened, there was no way to put them up for adoption so I put them down,” he said as casually as if asking how I take my coffee.
“There was a note, too. Left by a musher, that’s why I thought it might be a good fit for you. Lemme see if I can find it,” he said, and departed briefly. When he returned he handed me a wrinkled piece of loose leaf on which was scrawled the crude handwriting of either a near-illiterate person or a young child. The sparsely punctuated sentences read, “All of them are sled dogs very loving dogs need to be trained … very smart good sled dogs … please do not put down! Will be good for musher.”
The plea moved me, deep to the marrow of my bones. Cole seemed equally entangled in emotion when I brought the dog home, because despite her vow that this should be the last pound pup, her sternness quickly melted away when I passed the newcomer over and the cute critter softly licked her chin. Cole didn’t say anything, but as she ran her fingers through the pup’s coat, I saw the intrinsic calmness that comes from petting a dog engross her. I knew we were in agreement that I had made the right decision.
“So what’s this one’s name?” she inquired after a few minutes.
“I was thinking ‘Six,’” I said. It seemed appropriate for her, but also to somberly remember her five siblings who weren’t so fortunate.
I think the reason saving Six was so important to me, and all the dogs that came afterward, stemmed from a childhood experience that was out of my hands. I was probably seven years old at the time, living with my mom and a stepdad, a real hard-ass, at least with me. Neither of them was ever really “doggy,” but they made an attempt to meet my needs for having a canine companion by bringing home a mutt from the pound.
They picked it; I wasn’t consulted at all, resulting in one of my first life lessons: beggars can’t be choosers. But still, I marveled at the sight of this, my own dog. He was colored like an old penny, and bore all his proportions perfectly out of whack. He had an elongated torso and stubby little legs. His head was big, and his coat short. He looked like a cross between a Welsh corgi and an Irish setter or Labrador.
I fell in love immediately.
We called him Corky, although I can’t remember if he came with that name or one of us picked it for him. Despite how friendly he acted with every member of the family, and how smitten I was with him, my parents had a firm no-dogs-in-the-house policy. Relegated to the backyard, Corky became bored, and rightly so, since I still spent most of my days at school. He tunneled relentlessly, not only making the rear lawn an unsightly mess, which my parents weren’t keen on, but when he dug all the way under the fence to freedom, he’d go on the lam for extended periods, something else which they frowned on.
After a few weeks or so they had a change of heart about keeping Corky. Just outside my bedroom door, they spoke in voices loud enough for me to hear about their decision, but when the step-douche came in, for some reason, even at that young age, I needed him to say it to my face.
“Could you hear our conversation?” he asked.
“No,” I lied, knowing he knew I had.
“We’ve decided to take Corky back to the pound. You’re just not showing enough responsibility,” he said, blaming me, like the classic cliché of the bad carpenter who blames his tools. I showed as much responsibility as I had been taught, but—then and now—I don’t think the decision had anything to do with me.
“Oh,” I said, emotionally crushed, but refusing to give the man who hurt me then—and my mom thirty-five years later with his infidelities—even one tear. My first courage, perhaps.
He peered at me, expressionless, for a few seconds, then walked out without saying another word. The next morning Corky was gone from my life, but lingered in my memories, haunting me for years.
I felt guilt, initially questioning if I should or could have done more to keep him, but as I grew older, it was not knowing what had happened to Corky and the helplessness of it all that bothered me. In all likelihood, he was euthanized for failing in a second home; I hoped that wasn’t the case, but had no way of finding out his fate for certain. I was a kid; they were the adults. They made all the decisions, including that one, because they lacked the commitment to honor the covenant of care between themselves and the canine they agreed to adopt. But as an adult, I swore to myself if I ever got another chance to save a dog, I would do my best to do better than they did.
…
Over the next few years—after scrimping enough to purchase our own parcel of raw land—we accumulated so many rescues, runts, and rejects from other kennels, it became a defining theme for our operation. As a result, we settled on “Rogues Gallery Kennel” for the formal appellation of the motley crew we acquired, all of which seemed to come to us through serendipity more than conscious selection.
Next came two males from Salcha, a rural mosquito-riddled area roughly forty miles south of Fairbanks. The story of them joining the kennel began after we received an urgent call for help from the neighbor of Martina Delp, a thirty-three-year-old fellow dog rescuer from those parts. Delp, a proudly independent woman who served in the Alaska Air National Guard, lived alone with the exception of her thirty-seven sled dogs—all rescues from the local animal shelters—along with horses, a cat, and an exotic lizard.
After she didn’t show up for work one day, friends alerted authorities who checked on her welfare and were greeted with a grisly sight. They found Delp’s lifeless body, and the cause of her death—as these responders pieced together from the scene of her repose—a tree she had been chain-sawing clipped a power line as it fell. The live wire instantly electrocuted her.
Lynx and I enjoying a typical day in our life shared with forty dogs. What kid wouldn’t want to grow up like this?
Other than exchanging a few rescue related e-mails with Delp, we didn’t know her at all, but we could ascertain—with absolute certainty—that thirty-seven dogs were a lot to find homes for quickly in even the best case situation, which this wasn’t. Delp’s family, who lived in the Lower 48 and Europe, were unable to accept responsibility for so many dogs. Also, Delp wasn’t a professional racer, so her name didn’t bring in the usual folks, eager to take home a dog as a connection to a famous person, glomming on to a bit of their limelight. Furthermore, these were dogs that had already been given up on once, considered damaged goods of a sort by most, so we knew from our own experiences that people would not be beating down the door to take them home.
Dogs aren’t the only ones that run in packs, though. So, too, do dog rescuers. We linked up with a few others who homed huskies in our area and made the ten-hour drive north in a convoy of pickups carrying crates we knew would be filled with dogs on the return trip home.
We arrived near the end of the day. Despite it being late evening, it was mid-May, so the sun still hovered above the horizon, an orange ball giving off plenty of light and warmth. We cut to where the dogs were located in the backyard, ambling through a wild bouquet of blooming lupine coming into full violet-petaled pageantry.
