It was premature of me to have adopted the dog, so I had no one to blame, just a new mouth to feed. We named her Ghost, partially due to her all-white color and partially due to the circumstances of her third-party adoption—that like an apparition—briefly manifested then disappeared.
Rowdy and all-white Ghost, another dog we adopted from the pound, lead a team around an ice-covered lake. Ghost excelled at leading the chase team.
Coolwhip followed a few weeks later, again from the shelter, but this time they called us. During past adoptions, I had mentioned in passing we already had a dog who suffered from an unusual medical condition, technically known as congenital laryngeal paralysis, informally known in Alaska as “wheezer” disease.
Pups with this inherited condition are born with a dysfunction in the nerves that control their larynx. Rather than moving normally, opening the airway during breathing, and closing to prevent choking on food and water, the throat muscles of a wheezer remain fixed in place.
In severe cases, nursing pups die when they are just days old, either from suffocation or by drowning from inhaling their mother’s milk. In milder cases, pups survive and grow but have a raspy, wheezing sound to their breathing, and when playing or exercising will collapse in a gagging fit, their tongue and gums turning blue from lack of oxygen.
We had taken our other afflicted dog—Shagoo, given to us by another musher who couldn’t afford to have her throat fixed—to the vet for the best corrective surgery that could be done at the time, at a cost of roughly $2,000 dollars. We couldn’t afford it either, but paid the bill through the magic of maxing out credit cards. She came though the procedure breathing healthily enough to live life as a normal pet dog, but not quite capable enough to contend with the cardiovascular challenges of sled-dog training and competition.
“I figured since you had experience with this condition, you might be able to help this one too. Her owners brought her in after getting the wheezer diagnosis. They said there was no way they could afford to fix her,” explained the shelter manager.
The dog he was referring to was an attractive young husky, a female, with a white coat splashed with numerous gray blotches and freckles on her muzzle, but based on her expression, she appeared to be suffering from mild mental retardation as much as impaired breathing. At all times a pink tongue dangled sideways from a big, open-mouth grin and her eyes, bright and blue as two robin eggs, were fixed wide open and goggled about. She seemed dumbstruck, as if having just seen the most amazing thing in her life, even when nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
“Why does she have a look like this is the greatest day of her life?” I asked.
“Maybe because it is,” said the shelter manager, before walking away to leave me with what at this point was becoming an all too familiar decision-making process. He was clearly savvier than I first suspected. How had he missed an obvious calling to hawk used cars, I wondered.
Once home, I realized my initial psychological profile of the pup, which we named Coolwhip, was not that far off the mark. Inexplicably, she sometimes spent half an hour kangarooing in place on her hind legs and always with her tongue perpetually flapping in the breeze. Her hyperactivity, even as huskies go, exceeded normal levels. She embodied an exotic exuberance for life, like a zoo monkey that revels in throwing feces at spectators. She also belied the breezy being of a total free spirit, which is dog-owner-speak for a pup that lives by its own rules, not yours. Coolwhip listened selectively, responding to what she clearly perceived as verbal “suggestions” less than half the time, particularly when it came to being recalled when off leash.
When we brought her to the veterinarian for her initial post-adoption checkup, X-rays revealed in addition to her wheezer disorder, Coolwhip suffered from a separate condition known as megaesophagus, which is not as megacool as it sounds. Basically, the pipe used for gulping down food was oversized and too large to actually swallow food, even if her throat muscles worked properly, which they didn’t. As a result, for the first six months of her life with us, we had to feed her while she stood upright, balancing on her hind legs, so gravity could transport the food downward to her stomach. Fortunately, as Coolwhip got older, she outgrew the engorged esophagus, but she remained a wheezer.
Being devoted to not just providing the best quality of life we can for our animals year-round, but also believing in doing what we can to contribute to the continually growing body of scientific knowledge about sled dogs, we volunteered Coolwhip for a study involving an experimental procedure. Not only would veterinarians—one flying in from Australia and the other from Germany—attempt to correct her wheezer condition, but taking part in the study allowed us to treat her at no cost.
Knowing Coolwhip was a wild child, for weeks before the surgery we kept her in the house in an effort to calm her down so she didn’t hurt herself during her post-surgery recuperation. Everything had been going swimmingly until the night before her surgery, when the master of disaster made a mad dash.
Cole and I were in the kitchen making an evening meal when one of our house dogs, keen to paw the handle of the front door to let himself out, did so on this occasion. Without hesitation, Coolwhip launched herself off the couch, gleefully galloped out the entrance, and kept on going into the darkness of night as we ruefully looked on.
“Now what?” I asked rhetorically.
“We have to find her,” said Cole. “The vets are only here this weekend. That’s it. There’s no way to reschedule.”
I knew she was right, so begrudgingly and without dinner, we suited up in our coats, boots, and headlamps and began what would be a bushwhacking search through the spruce stands that surrounded our home. Hours later, just past midnight, we gave up. We never got a hand on Coolwhip, but came tauntingly close a few times in what was for her surely a spectacular game of hide-and-seek. Hearing her loud, heavy breathing in the woods whenever she paused for air, we could zero in on her location, but by the time we thrashed through willow thickets and over downed deadfall, she would have caught her breath and tore out again. This happened dozens of times during the search; it was like playing a game of Olly-olly-oxen-free with an obscene caller.
We adopted from the pound Coolwhip, a hyperactive husky with a dismal diagnosis. With surgery, she overcame her condition, but this wild child’s tongue flapping in the breeze was incurable.
The next morning we woke at 5:00 A.M. and after seeing no signs of Coolwhip we stuck to our original plan, which entailed running three teams of dogs before making the three-hour drive to Anchorage, since we knew the kennel would be shut down from training while we endured the city for a few days for post-operation monitoring of Coolwhip … should she return.
The deafening ruckus the dogs make during hookup can be heard miles away and is often enough to draw in even the most distant run-aways, and we hoped Coolwhip wouldn’t be the exception. Our plan worked, but not when we needed it to. Just as we launched from the yard, with no way to stop the two twelve-dog freight trains for longer than a few seconds, Coolwhip sprouted from a thick copse of cottonwoods in front of the lead team.
Ecstatic at the idea of being chased once again, she took off down the opposite trail we were hoping to take, and our teams followed. This alternate route was too narrow for turning around and added another half hour to the run, which meant, even if we could miraculously get our hands on Coolwhip, we would surely be late to the surgery.
In a stroke of luck, Coowhip exhausted herself over the course of the training run, the result of intermittently leaping from the woods
