Truck Days

My days with Jodi are full of dogs and dirt and kibble, tuglines and harnesses, tire chains and trailer hitches, sawed, stewed meat, gray jays picking at the scraps and squirrels in the awnings waiting their turn. There are voles in the dog food bags, fat and happy, not even scrambling to get away from the human hands dipping in with their scoopers for the next meal. There is firewood to be chopped and brought in, stoves to be stoked, water to be hauled. The clouds hover around the foothills of the Whites, promising snow, refusing to follow through. The temperature is below freezing now, hopefully for good.

In the mean time, the work of early season training goes on. With the trails nearby too icy and rutted for decent quad runs, we switched to truck training on some nearby* BLM roads that are unmaintained and therefore sufficiently snow covered in early winter.  This involves quite a circus of mid-morning activity as Jodi and I chain up her truck tires, hitch the dog trailer, play “catch-and-release” (or really release-and-catch, but the other way has a much nicer ring to it, no?) to shuttle dogs between the dog yard and the trailer to load up. My experience with my own dogs bolting into the woods to chase whatever scent or bunny/deer/moose/grouse is at hand leaves me vaguely nervous for this part, but her fantastic team has proven reliable to sprint around for a minute before heading to the trailer to load up for the run. Packed up finally, we head out, unchain once we reach the highway, and make our way to what has become our trailhead. Once there, the trailer is unhitched and the dogs are unloaded, harnessed and hitched to a gangline attached to the front bumper of the truck. They look fantastic, lining out and settling into their runs like professionals. Even the young dogs are figuring out the routine and sliding seamlessly towards being a part of the team. Watching the team line out, lean into their harnesses, lunge forward at the call to go, swing gee and haw through the turns, take their breaks and launch back into the run with the joy and enthusiasm they are born to is beautiful to see.

The other thing that’s beautiful is the landscape around this network of roads in the foothills of the mountains. It doesn’t take long to leave the (mostly deserted anyway) highway behind and top out a long climb into 365 degree views of mountains, spindly northern forests with her Charlie Brown Christmas Tree spruce scattered across the lower elevations, ridgelines with ominous rock outcroppings, the weathered landmarks of centuries and on the near horizon, snowcapped peaks rolling into further distance. There is wilderness in every direction, and even on blustery, overcast days with just the dim blue sub-arctic light glowing below the clouds, the views and the stomach churning vastness of it all, of being in the midst of such wilderness, makes me catch my breath a little.

But of course, the real and immediate thing is the dogs. Their smooth, ground-eating trot over the landscape, ears perked towards ravens overhead or grouse in the bushes even as they follow the command to continue ahead and not give chase. Their eyes bright as they sidle up for a quick scratch during a break and foot check. Their tails flagging back and forth happily after a run, each leaning in for a back scratch as we go up and down the line taking off harnesses, dolling out praise and compliments, then loading dogs back into warm, straw-filled boxes for the ride back to the kennel and  a warm dinner of meat stew and kibble.

It goes without saying that mushers would rather be on sleds, sliding along trails through the mountains and not stuck on the backs of quads or in trucks, the miles suddenly interminable without runners and handlebars and snowhooks and trail. Oh, good trail! But these early season runs are still something I look forward to each time we head out. They are full of strong, happy dogs and a fantastic wilderness that I still have to pinch myself sometimes to believe I’m trekking through. Snow will come, trials will solidify and sleds will be pulled out. But in the mean time, this foundation is critical – both for the dogs and for me as Jodi and I talk about routes and mileage, dog gaits and habits, injuries and booties and feet, feeding (oh, the endless talk of food – ours and theirs!) training and conditioning. These conversations won’t be possible later, at least not in the volume we are privy to now with so many hours in the truck behind the teams, so I’m trying to make the most of what we have for now – truck training may not be ideal, but it is nothing I’ll turn my nose up at. Especially given the alternative.

* Alaskan “nearby” here referring to something closer than an hour away if the roads are decent.

First Dew Claw Day

Outside the barn, next to the woodshed, half of one fifty gallon drum sits atop another. In the bottom drum, a roaring fire makes short work of the logs fed into its voracious belly. Above, soup for the thirty-some dogs in the dog yard below bubbles and steams. Jodi flips the lid off the top drum, and I flinch a little as the sharp black ears and then dull lower teeth and lolling tongue of a horse’s head bobs to the surface, turns once, and sinks again. The smell of a bland beef stew permeates the chilly fall air and my mouth waters a little in spite of myself. I knew that horse’s head stew was on the menu for the dogs this morning, but seeing the beast’s muzzle surface and dive was another thing altogether. I stood by as Jodi measured out kibble and meat into buckets for the dogs, then scooped the fragrant, steaming broth over top. I tried hard to pay attention to the number of scoops in each bucket, the level of water, the relative proportion of meat chunks, but the black pony’s muzzle kept bobbing to the surface of my mind. Jodi sent me with two buckets back up to the house to fetch water to refill the soup pot, and when I returned we made our way down the slick driveway – so thankful for her extra pair of spiked overboots, as mine were back at my cabin an hour and a half away – to the dog yard where a chorus of anticipation met us and the buckets of steaming, kibble-laden equine soup. Jodi dished out breakfast – a substantial kibble meal for the retired dogs and a lighter fare for the working dogs about to hit the trail – and we proceeded to carefully scoop the yard clear of dog shit while the now silent team inhaled their breakfast.

Between the tour of the kennel, including the walk-in freezer with stacks of salmon and horse quarters arranged neatly along one side, the shop with its nearly finished dog-box project, and piles of errant equipment, chains, gloves drying over the barrel stove, coils of spare runner plastic, benched sleds, mountains of booties and first aid equipment for man and beast alike, it was late morning by the time we were done. We retired to the cabin where Guppy, the sweet grey and white lead dog that broke her ankle on Iditarod years ago and has been a house husky ever since, met us to solicit an ear rub and some cuddles. Jodi talked about the kennel, feeding, mushers we both know, as she threw together a kefir smoothie with bananas, blueberries and bee pollen to get us through the next part of the day (her triple-B smoothie, she proclaimed.) It was truly the tastiest, most refreshing thing that has passed my lips in months if not years. We bundled up again, despite the unseasonably warm weather that was quickly turning the trail heading away from the cabin and towards the White Mountains into an ice chute, and headed back to the dog yard.

Jodi’s yard, like many serious racing kennels in Alaska, consists of dogs they have carefully bred over years for the qualities they need to populate their team; a solid physiology, a adoration for people, an insatiable drive to run and an appetite to match. Many of the litters of brothers and sisters look nearly alike, some black with blue eyes, some grey with white-edged ears and muzzles, others brown-flecked. Each dog eager to be chosen to run today, all running into a muddle of fur and ear and wet black nose in my mind. How will I learn so many names, with such subtle differences between siblings (his head is a little more square than his brother’s, and see, she has a tiny bit more white under the chin than her sister.) I have no hope, at least today, with my addled brain already full of harness sizes and kibble proportions and the ingredients of horse-and-salmon stew. I don’t try very hard, yet, and instead fetch one dog at a time, harnessing where Jodi points, hooking up a team of thirteen along the line from her four-wheeler to the trailhead at the top of the yard.

The trail is icy, but uphill, and the dogs pull hard for a hundred yards then a few stop to relieve themselves after the excitement of hookup. We pause, then head up the trail again, pause, then begin the slow climb up a 4x4 hunting trail into the low rolling foothills. After a mile, Jodi stops and I hop off the quad. There is a scramble as we realize we have forgotten the bear spray carefully set aside in the barn for this part of the afternoon – she hands me instead her .45 and calls the dogs to head on up the trail. I am alone among the paper birch and fox tracks in the snow. I start walking back down the trail towards the kennel, hefting aside loose rocks that will tear up the trail groomer later in the season. Behind the birch trees, the sky is a clear blue, cloudless and perfect. The sun is bright and I quickly shed layers as I make my slow meander back down the hill, flinging rocks into trees and humming into the echoing silence of the forest. There could not have been a more beautiful day for an amble in the woods.

Too soon, I hear a quad coming back down the trail, but instead of a dog team and Jodi, there is a lone, bearded man, a trailer of firewood behind him and a shotgun slung across his back. Jodi had warned me that I might run into Trapper Jon, and here he was, heading home after a morning in the woods. He stopped his machine and remarked on the beautiful day, pointed out marten tracks in the snow, talked about the windstorm that had blown in the trail with downed timber for weeks last winter. He showed me the two grouse he had just shot, and explained how each part would be part of a trap for a different animal, the breast meat for himself for dinner, the tail feathers saved to sell to a girl in town who used them for some kind of crafting. He talked about his respect for Jodi and Dan and their operation with the dogs, their care for the trails. He talked about the recent crash of the mouse population and how that effected his marten trapping, but how the numbers are coming back – he can see by the tracks already criss-crossing the woods around us that it’s going to be a good year for marten. He talked about the opening of beaver season and how he’s already bagged two animals, how this will bolster his trapping already for the bait they provide. His eyes crinkle in the bright sunlight, and after a while he bid me a nice walk and continued on town the trail, firewood in tow, towards his own cabin and lone hound waiting for him there.

Just before I had reached the cut-off to the house, Jodi and the team came down the trail behind me. The icy downhill proved difficult and she couldn’t stop the quad until a flat place in the trail further down. The dogs, tails wagging and faces grinning even at the end of their eleven mile workout, barely let her stop long enough for me to clamber aboard for the short ride back to the yard.

Jodi declared the trail too icy for venturing out with a second team, and instead we spent an hour catching up with visiting friends who stopped by the cabin while I let my own dog out to stretch her legs and go through her obedience paces. Late in the afternoon, Jodi made short work of the horse’s head, breaking up the bones for  the older dogs to gnaw and filleting the meat from them with a skill and efficiency I could not hope to match. I took the easier task of slicing frozen salmon with a meat saw to add to the soup for the next morning’s brew and fetching more water from the cabin. We fed and scooped the yard again, built up the barrel fire and put away the quad. My arms were sore with the unaccustomed work, and I was glad it had been a warm day for it, this first foray into the day in the life of a working kennel, the first of many this fall.

We took turns showering and I hopped on the internet to catch up on some email while Jodi cooked dinner. Dan came home from work and headed to the shop to continue working on the dog box, then joined us a delectable turkey-and-sourdough casserole. Later that night, I left the cozy warmth of the cabin perched on the side of the mountain to drive back to town under the eerie glow of northern lights along the horizon, dancing in long green streaks in the clear night sky.

Two years later ...

I am spending the fall in Fairbanks, and spending several days a week at Jodi Bailey & Dan Kaduce's Dew Claw Kennel. Although I've had a chance to attend a couple of lower-48-style mid-distance races in Minnesota over the last two years, I've missed Alaska and her unique mushing subculture badly. Although I can't put together my own team for just a few months - and there won't be enough snow for sleds for most of the time I'm there anyway - Jodi has been generous enough to let me moon around her kennel & dogs, getting my fix and learning about the inner workings of an Iditarod team deep in fall training for the big race in March.

So I'm opening up this blog again for the fall to keep track of the lessons learned and stories gleaned from a few months back up north. In the mean time, I'm writing again over at my old blog Entelechy about everything else is going on during my brief return to the north country on the ground and in my snow-addled brain.