the dog in the Harry Nilsson song “Me and My Arrow.” I also secretly hoped she would one day fly straight and true down the trail for us, and a few years later—after growing into a strong, but lean and lanky-legged runner—she did.
Cole signed up for the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest, known as the “Toughest Sled Dog Race in the World,” an annual run between White-horse, Yukon Territory to Fairbanks, Alaska. It traverses some of the most pristine and last true wilderness areas in North America, following late 1800s Klondike gold rush routes and historic sled-dog-delivered mail trails. Teams must be self-reliant while navigating as much as 200-miles between some checkpoints, where challenges routinely include temperatures of forty below, savage winds smiting in excess of 100 miles per hour, soul-crushingly steep mountain ascents and descents, lonely and desolate labyrinths of winding frozen rivers and creeks, and all during a time of winter when nights are seventeen hours long.
Prior to this race, all the dogs had put in thousands of miles of rigorous training and conditioning, and Cole had won a few and done well in several 200- and 300-mile races around the state. However, all of these previous events had twelve-dog maximums, and the Quest allowed up to fourteen dogs. Cole knew starting with less than the required amount just meant more work for the other dogs on the team, so to have a full complement of fourteen she would need to take some unproven athletes. She decided on a yearling, Kawlijah, that had always been outstanding despite his young age, and Arrow, who had never raced before.
It was a tall task, but Arrow rose to the challenge. At every checkpoint, I’d be anxiously waiting, my bottom teeth raking my upper lip raw, fully expecting Cole to drop Arrow from fatigue, but each time she didn’t I’d be pleasantly disappointed. To be honest, Arrow did appear bone-deep tired upon arrival, but after lapping up a hot wet meal, and getting a few hours’ rest, she would leave with pep in her step.
In the end, Cole and the team finished twelfth out of twenty-nine teams that started the race, Arrow still there with her, still pulling, still contributing to the whole, and that was a truly noteworthy accomplishment. She had hauled a heavy load for 1,000 miles, something many dogs have tried, but not as many have succeeded at, and some that have succumbed to injury, illness, or exhaustion were dogs specifically bred for the task by some of the most recognizable names in the sport of mushing.
Sure, Arrow wasn’t on a first-place team, but she wasn’t on the last-place team either. Even if she had been, though, wouldn’t it still have been an amazing feat? To put it in human terms, isn’t the last person to cross the finish at the Boston Marathon or the Ironman World Championship triathlon still succeeding at an endeavor few people could achieve even if they dared try?
To me, it’s not that pound dogs don’t have worth, or to be more specific, inherent worth as sled dogs, it’s just that to succeed with them you have to be open to finding their very individualized skill sets, and that’s what we did with all of our rescues.
Pong, while she can’t sustain sprint speeds for very long, can break trail at slightly slower speeds for hours. Ping’s digestive processes move at a glacial pace, so much so that I think she could put on a few pounds from just a whiff of the food bucket, and this proved valuable when racing in deep-minus temperatures when dogs with higher metabolisms shiver off too much weight. Six, while small, can remember any trail after having only run it once, which I relied on whenever I grew disoriented or got lost from time to time. Rolo developed into an amazing gee-haw leader, turning left or right with precision whenever we gave the commands, which also helped all the dogs in line behind him learn the meaning of these words and the importance of listening to the musher. Ghost excelled at leading of a different sort, running at the front of a team chasing another, which is also useful for not burning out gee-haw leaders. Coolwhip’s character trait of perpetually acting over-caffeinated made her invaluable as a cheerleader, where an always-barking dog late in a run can, and does, spread enthusiasm to the others. And Old Man, well, he was a bit too decrepit to ever contribute much to the team, but he always made me smile when I came out to feed the yard and saw him excitedly carrying around his food bowl, and that was enough to earn his keep.
There is elegance to seeing any dog team coalesce, and even more so when pound dogs are involved. People expect them to fail, or at the very least not succeed. Working through and watching them overcome this stigma is a reward far beyond bragging rights, prize money, or trophies for the mantle.
To me the process mirrors a mathematician working through a complex equation, sorting the fractions and getting the decimals in the right place, all the way to its end. It’s not the simple things you stumble on, like fitting all dogs with the correct size harness and booties, although there are nuances to these tasks and satisfaction as well in learning who takes what piece of gear. The more exacting process is having the patience to learn their idiosyncrasies, to work through the socialization issues, to overcome their physical deficits, and figure out what role or which position in the team best suits them.
Basically, the formula for success requires—demands, really—truly getting to know the dogs on such a personal level that when you look at them, you begin to look past the flaws and see what their strengths are and create success with what you have, not what you wish you had. You don’t see tools that are disposable; you see teammates that are indispensable and irreplaceable.
Because of all these intricate variables, there are a million ways for it to go wrong and only one way for it to go really right. But when it does, when you begin to feel mastery where once only mayhem existed, and everything finally fits into its proper place, it’s like Einstein’s theory of relativity. It all works and makes sense. And if there is one main difference between sorting out a math computation from a mushing conundrum, it’s that with the latter the sum ends up being far greater than the whole of its parts. Numbers merely change, but dogs transform—from hurt, to healed, to heroic.
Doubter and Goliath
Initially building our kennel from rogues, runts, and rejects from other mushers and the pound, we were getting pretty used to the petty comments and second-guessing of skeptics regarding our ethos of running the motley crew of dogs we had gathered to the best of our—and their—ability. Never, though, had someone so directly nay-said one of our beloved brood as just before Cole won the Gin Gin 200 Sled Dog Race.
The dig came the night before the competition. Cole already had a lot on her mind, knowing the next day she would be vying for victory against some of the biggest names in dog driving, several with egos even bigger than their race résumés. We had driven all day and into the night, and booked our accommodations at the banally named Paxson Inn, along with nearly the entire race field. While the somewhat shabby hotel could be critiqued on many things, its reputation for welcoming dog mushers was beyond reproach.
A cavalcade of dog trucks pulled in all evening, parking one beside another, and left idling for many hours to keep the murmuring engines warm and working in the minus thirty temperatures. These trucks would eventually be turned off late in the night, and then plugged in—using special cold-weather heating features—to keep the battery and oil in the pan at least lukewarm. In the meantime, the extended tailpipes—running vertically up the back of the truck to vent above the boxed dogs’ breathing areas—belched clouds of thick fumes into the cold night air.
We had all the dogs tethered to the truck by way of drop chains, long lengths of which ran along each side of the vehicle and attached at anchors on the front and rear bumpers. The dogs get clipped to individual, roughly one-foot lengths, that extend from these main lines. The dogs stay in the locked dog boxes during transport and to sleep at night, but are let out and put on the drop chain during the breaks on the commute to stretch, eat, and relieve themselves. This system keeps them safe on road trips.
Our dogs were all tethered and eagerly lapping at their dinners, brimming bowls of blood-soaked kibble and ground beef, liver, and tripe. Another
