spring trails :: part I

It is ten in the morning on a Sunday. It is overcast, and the air is heavy with rain that is not yet falling. As I drove home from work this morning, I did so through a bank of mist solid as a wall, slowing to a crawl on the highway off ramp for fear of invisible brake lights just beyond the white. It is fifty degrees outside, but it feels like eighty. I am sitting in front of a fan, stripped down to a t-shirt and soaking in an oily slick of insect repellant and sweat. It has been a bad year for mosquitoes.

It is ten in the morning, and Norrin is howling at the rain clouds. Sawyer pitches in every few minutes for a measure, but he is carrying the melody this time. Unlike Sawyer, who sings with contentment and peace after a good run, Norrin wails out his sorrows when he is frustrated or restless. Or perhaps simply uncomfortable in the sticky heat. His heavy winter coat is just now beginning to shed, and I am hot enough in my own skin.

It has been many long months since February. The Yukon Quest started in earnest under clear skies with perfect trails out of Whitehorse and turned into an epic race with upset after upset once the mushers crossed the border into Alaska. Instead of taking the week of the race off to follow it in my car, as I had planned, a faulty transmission forced me to stay in town, chomping at the bit and spending every spare minute of daylight and dusk on the trails with my own crew, thinking all the time of the teams on the race trail. A veteran favorite stalled in a vicious blizzard on American Summit. Two mushers went through deep overflow on Birch Creek at forty below. Frostbite dogged top contenders, forcing some out of the race. Several teams balked climbing Eagle Summit, a few scratched, others carried their dogs, one by one, up the slope and into the saddle, then hauled their sleds up by brute human will to stay in the running.

I slid over my little ten or fifteen mile loops of trail, enjoying the flat and the lack of wind and the ponds and creeks frozen solid underneath my runners. I lost sleep and my temper over Pico’s increasing insistence on attacking every team we encountered on the trails. I worried over Dottie’s increasing fatigue at the end of our runs. I welcomed the fast increasing daylight of the coming spring.

At work one day, I got a call from the owner of my three loaner dogs. She had a female in heat, and wanted to take Leo back for a few days to breed him. I sent Peter to meet her handler at the vet and turned him over. She assured me we’d be able to pick him up in a few days. I had no idea that I wouldn’t see Leo again this winter. In the blink of an eye, my leader was gone.

After weeks no word on Leo’s whereabouts, I made two ineffectual attempts to run Pico up front, alone. We made it barely two miles each time, stretching the short run out over an hour of balking and tangles stall-outs. In the end I was left hoarse from yelling, shaking from exhaustion and disappointment. My carefully laid intentions of a spring trip running the team to remote cabins in the White Mountains had evaporated along with Leo’s calm, dark face.

The Iditarod came and went. Temperatures warmed, daylight increased. We bought a house and farmed all the dogs out while we spent a week moving truckload by slow truckload to five acres and running water on the edge of endless trails northwest of town. In the midst of the chaos came an early morning call – Leo was available, but I had to pick him up within the next two hours or he would be heading to the mountains for the remainder of the spring season. We had no dog houses moved yet, no yard, no tie-outs. Our life was in boxes and heavy-duty trash bags. There were only two or three weeks of good snow left in the valleys. I turned him down.

We began to settle in. Dottie and Sawyer were still staying in my friend’s dog-yard back in Goldstream. And then I got a call about a dog …

… to be continued …