gun shy

With the return of night to the north country and the subsequent dip in morning temperatures, the dogs are growing restless. Sawyer, after a quiet summer, has taken to shrieking with the smallest provocation and Norrin's howling has reached a fever pitch. Without enough dogs (or cash) for an ATV for fall training and far too many cars around for free-running, the only option left to ease the building tension was hooking the dogs up to my bike.  But I had my reservations.

Pico at five months

Two years ago, when Pico was eight months old, I was attempting to harness train him. We were in Texas at the time - I was finishing up my Paramedic internship - but I was determined to have my pound pup ready for the trails when we returned to Alaska. I dutifully found sticks logs and chains for him to haul around on our late-evening walks in the sticky Texas heat. He took to his harness like a fish to water, but even with me running along behind him he was getting bored with my slow human pace. I borrowed a bike from my cousin and set us up to bikejor, so he wouldn't lose his drive. Our first run was perfect. Pico tore around the loop like a seasoned sled dog, staying up front and relishing the speed he'd been craving all summer. Just as we circled back around the house, a white tail deer sprinted across the road. Without missing a beat, Pico took a hard right, tearing after the deer with every ounce of power and speed in his lanky half-grown puppy body, slamming the bike into and then over my ankle and leaving me in agony on the side of the road before I was even sure what had crossed our path. The sprain was the worst I've ever had, my ankle turning black and swelling to the size of a football. When I finally went for an x-ray when I still couldn't put weight on it eight days later, the doctor was as surprised as I was that there were no broken bones under all the stubborn swelling. Months later, I was still nursing the very sore and unstable ankle.

I was understandably a little wary about hooking dogs up to a bike again. But it has been a long, hot summer and Norrin's discontented howling has torn me up. On Tuesday, with mid-morning temperatures hovering at 55F, I enlisted a very skeptical Peter to help me get the bike and dog hooked up and lined out. Norrin, despite his restlessness, was about as excited as Peter. He wouldn't line out, and kept looking back at me (and the bike) with palpable anxiety. I have no idea if he's ever been hooked up to a bike before, but I was starting to wonder if he'd had some previous bikejoring experience as traumatic as mine. With a good deal of cajoling and lots of false starts, we made it to the end of the driveway. The quarter-mile downhill ahead of us got him moving on his own, but no matter how slow I went he was still leaving slack in the line, trotting slowly and taking time to sniff clumps of grass and mark them at appropriate intervals.

At the bottom of the hill, a loose dog appeared in a driveway. This helped pick up the pace a bit, and my heart started racing as Norrin finally took up the slack and started to pull. I braced for a crash or a dogfight, but when we reached the dog Norrin stopped dead but didn't give chase. With a little encouragement, he moved on past the driveway. Now he'd had a taste of tension on the harness, he picked up the pace as we rounded the corner onto a three-quarter mile straightaway. A second dog appeared, but he passed her without breaking stride, suddenly focused on the road. He broke into a ground-eating lope and I gently rode the brakes to keep the lines taunt but let him stretch his summer-stiff muscles in the cool morning air. We turned around about a half mile out, and Norrin's tongue was hanging to the ground by the time we got home. We'd need to start much earlier in the morning for the next round.

Wednesday morning, the temperature was 45F at sunrise. I reconfigured the bike and hooked Sawyer up next to Norrin, thinking having her alongside might help with his confidence and help encourage him to keep the lines taunt. I also believed that her steady, focused run would help mitigate some of the fear I had at adding a second dog's power to the potential disaster equation.  Once we got going down the driveway, this instinct proved up as Sawyer moved forward long before Norrin and stayed ahead of him, pulling him along by their neckline to the end of the driveway. At that point, he bucked up, took up his slack and pulled steadily for the rest of the mile-long run. Sawyer, for her part, was ecstatic to be out and about, but she was certainly not planning on doing any work. As soon as Norrin started pulling, she dropped back to his shoulder and no amount of cajoling or braking on my part could get her to take up her slack.

So after day two I was left with Norrin, who clearly needed another dog to give him the encouragement and confidence to run and motivation to work and Saywer, my small, old girl perfectly happy and steady next to Norrin but not working if she could help it. Saywer's age also gave me pause, as I was hesitant to make her run at an all out sprint to keep up with Norrin's long easy stride or push her to go too far, pulling or not.

I had one other possibility to try: Pico, my lanky, energetic, distracted three-year-old boy who spent the winter trying his best to drag the entire team off the trail at every possible provocation. My ankle ached with the thought.