Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers Read online

  Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers

  Reflections on Being Raised by a Pack of Sled Dogs

  Gary Paulsen

  * * *

  Dear Reader:

  It is difficult for anybody who has not run dogs—has not been with them twenty hours a day, seven days a week for eight years and more—to understand the depth and intensity of the bond that can build between the driver and his dogs. There is love, of course, as many people love and are loved by their dogs—an unassuming love that surely is the most dedicated and pure of any.

  But with the driver and his (or her) dogs it goes beyond love, goes beyond measurement by normal standards. It is a bond of survival, of life.

  And the attachment that occurs between a driver and his lead dog goes even beyond that; there is a mystical quality to it—a love that catches the breath, a true knowledge between driver and leader that makes them singular, makes them one in all things. After a time there is no need to talk, often no need to command a turn or direction. So close are they that a movement, a thought, seems enough, and many times a leader will react before the driver knows what to do, will again and again handle things until the driver (and the team) is simply lost without the leader.

  Such a bond, such a love, I had with Cookie.

  Sincerely,

  * * *

  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego London

  * * *

  Text copyright © 1996 by Gary Paulsen

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

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  address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive,

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  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First Harcourt paperback edition 2007

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Paulsen, Gary.

  Puppies, dogs, and blue northers: reflections on being raised by a pack of sled

  dogs/by Gary Paulsen,

  p. cm.

  Summary: Dog musher Gary Paulsen reflects on the growth—both his own

  and the puppies'—as man and animal discover the world.

  1. Paulsen, Gary—Juvenile literature. 2. Mushers—Minnesota—Biography—

  Juvenile literature. 3. Sled dogs—Minnesota—Biography—Juvenile literature.

  4. Dogsledding—Minnesota—Juvenile literature. [1. Paulsen, Gary.

  2. Mushers. 3. Sled dogs. 4. Dogsledding. 5. Minnesota.] I. Title.

  SF428.7.P38P86 1996

  798'.8—dc20

  [B] 95-18981

  ISBN 978-0-15-292881-0

  ISBN 978-0-15-206103-6 pb

  Text set in Dante

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  To Lloyd Gilbertson:

  Keep the dance going

  Love

  COOKIE USUALLY HAD puppies easily, but they were always so wonderful and special that I worried excessively each time. Considering that she had five litters of never less than eight pups and twice twelve—altogether over forty pups—this constituted a large measure of worry.

  She deserved the effort and concern. Cookie was my primary lead dog for something close to fourteen thousand miles—trapline, training, and one full Iditarod—and had on several occasions saved my life. But more, most important, she threw leaders. Sometimes as many as half her pups tended to lead and a few had, like their mother, become truly exceptional lead dogs; dogs with great, unstoppable hearts and a joy to run. It didn't seem to matter if they were male or female—they were all good.

  And so I worried.

  This time the breeding had been accidental. We had been on a long training run in early fall, and Cookie had temporarily and with great enthusiasm fallen in love with a big, slab-sided half-hound named Rex. Cookie was running lead. It was a first-snow run—the snow was thin and melting rapidly and would be gone in two days, three at most—and it was so warm (thirty degrees) that I was wearing only a jacket and wool watch cap. We were running at night because of the heat (the dogs were most comfortable at ten or twenty below zero) and I had looked down at something on the sled when the whole team stopped dead.

  I knew Cookie was in season and would not normally have run her during her time. But I had young and new dogs—Rex was one of them—and I needed her good sense and steadiness to control them while we ran.

  Cookie, overcome by what could only be described as wild abandon, stopped cold, threw it in reverse, and backed into Rex. If he was surprised, he recovered instantly, and before I could react, they were romantically involved.

  I pulled the other dogs away from them to avoid any fights, tied them up to trees, and made a small fire to have tea. Usually these things took time—lasted five or ten minutes—but with Cookie and Rex both in harness she would be anxious and stressful about wanting to run, and I wanted her to see that I had settled in and wanted to remove some of the nervousness so she wouldn't start to fight.

  Normally I would have controlled the mating situation better, would have selected a male more to my liking. Rex was very much a question mark. I'd only had him a few days and didn't know much about him, and had I known that this would be Cookie's last litter and that it would be seven of the best dogs—two leaders—that I had ever seen or heard of, I perhaps would have paid more attention.

  As it was I ignored them, or tried to. It always seemed to be such a private time for the dogs, the time of mating, and though they were quite open, I in some way felt like an intruder and did not like to watch them.

  I turned away and heated snow for tea. The night was still and, consequently, I heard the dogs more than I usually would have. I "heard" the puppies being made.

  In truth, much of what dogs are is based in sounds. They are quiet, wonderfully silent, when they run; mile after mile in soft winter nights I have heard nothing but the soft whuff of their breath and the tiny jingle of their collar snaps as they trot along.

  But almost all other times they live in sound. They bark, whine, wheeze, growl, and—wonderfully—sing. When they see me come out of the house with harnesses over my shoulder, they go insane, running in their circles, literally bellowing their enthusiasm—some barking, some crying, some yipping, and some emitting a high-pitched keening scream that leaves the ears deaf for hours.

  When it rains there is a song, and when it snows or when they want food or when something dies—sad songs, happy songs, duets and trios, sometimes all the dogs trying to harmonize, except the young ones who think they can sing but can't and throw their heads back to try to look adult but sing off-key and with the wrong timing.

  They live in sound, always in noise. Perhaps because it is so constant, the art of listening to them falls off, and so many things they say are not heard, are swallowed in the overall sound. (An interesting aside: people know the sounds of their own dogs the way mothers know the cry of their babies. At one checkpoint during the Iditarod during a mandatory layover, some seven or eight hundred dogs were all in an area not much larger than a football field. The din was constant, deafening, and yet if a man or woman inside the building heard the sound of his or her own dog in the cacophony—even if the person was fast asleep—they were up and out the
door instantly.)

  But this quiet night with the wind gone and even the fire muted somehow by the dark I could hear, and for the first time I think I truly listened to them.

  There were some growls, low and soft, envy from the young males who wanted to fight and show they had shoulders and thick necks; quiet whines of interest from others; and then, above all, the soft sounds from Cookie and Rex.

  I thought of the word love.

  There are, of course, many who would dispute it, many who would say dogs simply mate and that only people love, and it is perhaps true that I would have said the same thing before that night.

  But the sounds were sweet, soft, gentle—not whines so much as terms of endearment, courtesy, and hope. They made me think of all the good parts of living and loving; how two can honestly become one; how we have made it all seem pointless with posturing and fashion and frills but that it is not frivolous, it is as old and meaningful as time, and it has all to do with the one thing that we are on earth to do—to make more, to make better, to bring new beings into it, into life.

  All there, sitting by the fire while two people—I still cannot think of them as dogs—loved and were, in some way that I could not understand, sacred. All there listening to God making puppies.

  Nativity

  IT CAME IN A WILD STORM, the litter, which did not help to lessen my concern.

  I had carefully noted the day when the puppies were conceived and knew that Cookie was as regular as a clock—sixty-five days—when it came to gestation.

  But sixty-five days put us smack in the middle of January. January in northern Minnesota is—literally—a hard time. Everything is brittle, difficult. It is paradoxically the very best time to run dogs because it is cuttingly cold—which the dogs love and work best in—and the snow is clean and deep enough to be easy on the sleds.

  Everything else is hard. At forty, fifty below, vehicles don't start, tires freeze and break, pipes—even those protected by straw and buried deep—freeze solid. Hot water must be carried to the dogs, who dehydrate in the dry air of winter, and the old water must be literally chopped out of their pans with an ax. The water is mixed with beef blood to lure them into drinking it fast before it freezes again—within eight or nine minutes—and this process must be done twice a day while running team after team to train for the race and cooking dog food each evening to feed the next day.

  And in the middle of January, when it is the busiest, when there is no time, not a minute to spare, and everything is pushed to the absolute limit of its performance envelope—smack in the middle—there came one of the worst blizzards I had ever seen.

  It roared down from the North, driven by a dropping cold front called an Alberta Clipper. The winds kicked up to sixty, seventy miles an hour and the true temperature, with driven snow, dropped to forty below—windchill making it close to a hundred below.

  Just feeding the dogs became difficult, almost impossible. We had forty-some dogs then and I used a snowmobile to pull a freight sled loaded with dog food out to the kennel and run down the rows of dogs to feed them. It was so dark and the driving snow made visibility so bad that twice I missed the kennel altogether and wound up stuck in the woods west of the dogs. It was the kind of storm you often read about but never see—except this time it was real.

  And at the high point, at the very worst peak of the meanest part of the storm, Cookie was due to have her puppies.

  My worry turned to something on the edge of panic. She was in her doghouse, her chain disconnected and fresh straw fluffed in, but the storm was so intense I did not see how she could keep the puppies—they are, of course, wet when they come—from freezing solid.

  I thought of moving her into the house, but it would be too warm and unhealthy. The dogs' winter coats were in full prime by then, and being in a warm room could do worse than sicken them, it could kill a winter dog to bring him in. The heat would be murderous.

  The solution came as I ran the snowmobile past the stack of straw bales by the kennel: If I could not take Cookie to a house, I would bring the house to her.

  It was by this time midafternoon and nearly dark, so I left the snowmobile running to use the headlight and carried straw bales to her circle in the kennel.

  I constructed a "house" from these straw bales. It took twenty-two bales and a couple of flat boards to hold the roof bales up, but when it was done it was snug and out of the wind and large enough for Cookie and me.

  While building I had decided the only way I would get any relief from my anxiety was to stay with her. I smoothed the snow in the bottom of the shelter and spread out fluffed straw almost a foot thick. I had left: an igloolike opening just large enough to crawl through, which I could plug with straw after we were inside, then I went to the house and brought a thermos of tea, another of soup, my headlamp, a book to read, my sleeping bag and foam pad, and we moved in.

  I had some concern that Cookie would not like it, would prefer her own doghouse, but I needn't have worried. She entered, smelled the straw, peed in one corner to mark it, and made a birth bed in another.

  I pulled my gear in, plugged the opening, and unrolled my bag.

  "Nice," I said. "Way better than we're used to..."

  Cookie was busy licking herself and didn't respond—although she usually did. We talked often, sometimes at great length; I frequently explained parts of my life to her, which sometimes helped me understand myself better, and if she didn't know all the words (actually, she did recognize many individual words) she was a master at tones. She could tell by the sound of my voice if I was happy, sad, angry, distracted, worried, unsure, positive, lying, telling the truth, if I truly believed in what I was saying or needed to be argued with to be certain. A hundred, a thousand times a year we "negotiated" differences—when and where to best go—and almost invariably she was right.

  And I was not exaggerating when I said it was better than we were accustomed to sleeping in. We had spent years, thousands of miles alone together, camping in rain and open storms, on ice and mud; sleeping huddled under an overhang of snow or dirt or on a frozen riverbed; and sometimes resting by just standing still for a moment—taking a whole night's sleep standing against a tree for four minutes.

  An insulated straw house was a palace.

  Our combined body heat quickly warmed the inside of the shelter and I feared that it would get too warm. But I opened the straw plug and let some cool air in—kept it at about forty degrees (above zero) and leaned back in the straw to wait for the pups.

  Of course, they did not hurry. When you want them to come, they take forever. They only hurry when you aren't ready, never when you are prepared.

  I poured a cup of tea and leaned back against the straw, my legs in the sleeping bag, my headlamp adjusted down for reading, and settled in to spend the night with Cookie and Anthony Trollope. I had for some time wanted to read The Pallisers and this looked like a good time to at least start.

  It had been a long day, however, and the wind tearing by outside and the warmth (a full eighty degrees warmer than out in the wind) made the little bale house seem even more cozy. My eyes closed, opened, closed again, and stayed closed.

  I awakened some four hours later. My batteries had run down, so the headlamp gave only a soft glow and for a second I didn't remember where I was; then I heard the sound ... and knew.

  Cookie had decided to go on without my dubious aid and was giving birth. I pulled out of the bag and moved over to her in a crouch.

  I'm not sure what I meant to do. She was certainly fine without my help, had done it many times before, and was as I have stated an excellent mother. I was more a hindrance than a help, and I held slightly back to give her room for her work.

  She was on the fourth one. The first three—all a gray color like Cookie—were out and cleaned and dry and working at finding a nipple, making the small sounds of new puppies, the tiny whine-grunt that seems to come more from their fat little bodies than their mouths.

  The smell filled
the shelter. I always thought it smelled new—fresh puppy smell, milk smell, new smell—and I petted Cookie and touched the pups to get man-smell on them so they would come to know it as part of their mother. Many females would not let you touch their pups, would take a piece out of you if you did, but Cookie was milder—at least with me. (I had seen her rip a man's hand when he jumped around the side of her house and said "Boo!" as a practical joke. He took stitches and could never get close to her again without experiencing Cookie's low growl and her lips coming up to show teeth.) But she didn't mind having her puppies handled as long as she could see them.

  I picked each pup up, rolled it in my hand to determine sex—although it didn't matter to me which they were. (Females tend to lead better, males usually pull harder—so it all works out.) So far they were all males, and I put them back on nipples and got ready for the next one.

  Seven pups, all gray and fat and healthy—little Cookies—all smelling new and milky and warm, and then the eighth and last one came, and it was stillborn.

  She worked at it. When I saw she was having trouble I reached in, thinking it hadn't cleared its nostrils or took air too late—I had done miniature CPR on other puppies and gotten them breathing—but it was too late. It must have died in the birth canal or just before, and there was nothing we could do. Cookie licked harder and harder, trying to get it to breathe, her actions becoming more and more frantic.

  "It's no use," I said aloud. "This one didn't make it..."

  She growled concern and it turned to a whine, and I reached one hand to cover Cookie's eyes and with the other I took the pup and moved it near the door opening. Cookie had never had a dead pup before, but with other females I had done this, hidden the dead one and then taken it away and it had worked. They focused on the live ones and forgot the dead one.

  But this was Cookie. I should have known. Cookie was not like other dogs. She was easily the most strong-willed person—and I mean person—I had ever met. Once when she'd taken a load of porcupine quills in her face, I'd rushed her to the vet to have her put out so we could pull them, and she simply would not go down. The vet gave her two full doses of anesthetic and it didn't put her out at all. On the third dose she sat, her butt on the table, but was still conscious and ready to bite any hand that came at her. The vet was afraid to give her more, but the drugs slowed her enough so we could pull a quill, then dodge before she hit us.