Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers Read online

  We climbed the shallow hills out back of the kennel and moved into the forest. I had a plan to run a hundred miles—take twelve, fourteen hours with a rest stop—and see how the young dogs did with a slightly longer run. They had been to fifty twice and I didn't anticipate any difficulty. If they did get tired, I would just stop for a day and play—God knows I was carrying enough extra food.

  I also decided to make it an "open" run and stay away from thick forests or winding trails. Young dogs tend to forget themselves in the excitement and sometimes run into trees on tight corners because they don't remember to swing out. It doesn't hurt them much, but it isn't pleasant and running should, of all things, be fun for them.

  So I took the railroad grades. In northern Minnesota there used to be trains through the forests for hauling wood and supplies to the logging camps and to service the hundreds of small towns. Most of the towns are gone now, and much of the wood is hauled on trucks, but the railroad grades are still there.

  In a decision so correct it seems impossible that government could have made it, they decided to pull the tracks and ties off the embankments and maintain them for wilderness trails. In the summer they use them for bicycles and hikers, in the winter for skiers and snowmobilers and now dogsledders.

  The trails make for classic runs. It's possible to leave the kennel and run a week, hundreds and hundreds of miles, without seeing the same country twice.

  The one problem is the trestles. Minnesota is a land of lakes and rivers and every eight or ten miles the trains would cross a river. They made wooden trestles for the tracks and the trestles are still there. They are open, some of them sixty or seventy feet high, and bare wood—although they took the tracks themselves off so it was possible to see down through the ties.

  Because they were open they would not hold snow so the snowmobile clubs covered them with one-inch treated plywood to close them in and provide a base for the snow.

  The first few times we crossed one, the dogs hesitated, especially on the higher ones, but I took it easy and the older dogs figured it out and passed confidence to the team and it worked all right.

  We had by this time run the trestles many times, knew where each one was, and the dogs whizzed across when we came to them.

  Until now.

  Twenty-five miles into the run, smoking through the moonlight, we came to a trestle over an open rushing river. I had turned my headlamp off to let them run in the moonlight, which they preferred, and was thinking ahead, way ahead, of a place we were going to camp to rest the pups. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen, a quiet brook kept open by small warm springs, winding through a stand of elegant spruce and tall Norway pines. It was a place to make you whisper and think of churches, and I liked to stop there and sit by a fire, and I was thinking of how it would be to camp there and be peaceful when the dogs suddenly stopped.

  Dead in the middle of the trestle.

  I hit the brake with my right foot and almost killed myself. Some maniac had come and stolen all the plywood from the trestle and when I jammed the two hardened steel teeth of the brake down instead of sliding on the plywood surface to a gradual stop, they caught on an open cross tie and stopped the sled instantly.

  I, however, did not stop.

  In a maneuver that would have looked right in an old Mack Sennett comedy, I slammed into the cross handlebar with my stomach, drove all the wind out of my lungs, flew up and over the sled in a cartwheel, hit to the right of the wheel dogs, bounced once on the iron-hard cross ties of the trestle, ricocheted neatly into space, and dropped twenty feet into a snowbank next to the river, headfirst, driving in like a falling arrow.

  All of this occurred so fast I couldn't mentally keep up with it and still somehow thought that 1 must be on the sled when I was upside down in the snowbank. As it was I had hit perfectly. Had I gone a few feet farther I would have landed in the river and probably have drowned or frozen, ten feet sooner and I would have missed the snowbank and hit bare packed ice, which would have broken my neck. It was the only place for me to land and not kill myself, but at the moment I was having trouble feeling gratitude.

  I pushed my way out of the snow, cleared my eyes—it had happened so fast I hadn't had time to close them and they were full of snow—and peered up at the underside of the trestle where I could look through the ties and see the team still standing there, the dogs balanced precariously, teetering over open space.

  "Easy," I called up. "Just easy now. Easy, easy, easy..."

  Cookie had hit the trestle without stopping and run out, thinking that's what I wanted, until the whole team was out on the open ties. What stopped her was the pups. Somehow the adult dogs had kept up, stepping on ties as fast as possible to keep going, but the young dogs had less experience and had tripped and gone down. Thank heaven they weren't injured and Cookie stopped when she felt them fall.

  But the problem was still there. The team was spread along the trestle, each dog on a tie, and it seemed an impossible situation. To swing a dog team around requires a great deal of space. If they are dragged back on top of each other they get dreadfully tangled and tend to fight, and I couldn't imagine a dogfight at night with ten dogs on a narrow railroad trestle twenty feet off the ground.

  An answer did not come to me immediately. I climbed the bank back up onto the trestle. Cookie was frozen out in front of the team holding them, her back legs jammed against one cross tie and her front feet clawed on the one in front, and the snow hook had fallen in the impact of the stop and had set itself in the ties under the sled so the team was held in place while I decided what to do.

  I couldn't turn them around.

  I couldn't drive them over the trestle without injuring dogs.

  "I can't do anything," I said aloud to Cookie, who was looking back at me waiting for me to solve the thing. "It's impossible..."

  You, her eyes said, got us into this, and you'd better get us out.

  Her message hung that way for half a minute, my thoughts whirling, and I finally decided the only way to do it was to release each dog, one at a time, and let them go forward or backward on their own. I thought briefly of carrying them out, one by one, but I had no extra rope to tie them (it was the last run I made without carrying extra rope) when I got across the trestle.

  I would have to let them go.

  I started with the older dogs. I let them loose and set them on the ties and was amazed to see that each of them went on across the trestle—the longer way—rather than turn and go back. They didn't hesitate but set out, moving carefully from tie to tie until they were across. Whereupon they didn't stop and instead, as I had feared, took off down the railroad grade. They had been here before and knew the way home. I let the young dogs go then and they were slower and more frightened, especially when they looked down, but as soon as they crossed they took off as well and vanished in the night as they tried to catch up with the rest of the dogs.

  "Well," I said to Cookie. "It's you and me..."

  I let her loose and was amazed to see her take off after the team. We were good friends, had been for years, and I was sure she would stay with me, but she was gone in an instant.

  "Traitor." I said it with great feeling. The truth is she could not have pulled the sled anyway. It was too heavy for one dog. But it would have been nice to have company. I worried that they would have trouble, get injured somehow, run out on a highway and get hit by a car.

  It was like watching my body leave me, my family, and I gathered up the gang line and unhooked the snow hook and dragged the sled across the trestle. Once I got it on the snow it slid a bit easier and I thought that it must be thirty, thirty-five miles to home the shortest way and it would take me three days—or three miserable days, as I considered it then. I had a thermos of tea on the sled and I took time to have a cup, feeling at intervals sorry for myself and hoping silently that I would someday meet the man who stole the plywood from the trestle.

  I was putting the inevitable off and I finally a
ccepted it and put away the thermos and moved to the front of the sled and put the gang line around my waist and started pulling. Once I broke it free it slid well enough and I set a slow pace. I had thought of hiding the sled in some way and coming back for it later but it was coming on a weekend and the snowmobilers would be on the trails and there were hundreds of them. Surely the sled—boiled white ash and oak with plastic runner shoes—would be too tempting.

  I pulled half an hour on the embankment, trudging along—it seemed like a week—and I developed an updated gratitude for the dogs; their effortless strides covered miles so fast that I felt like with my own puny efforts I was on a treadmill. It seemed to take ten minutes to pass a tree.

  Fifteen more minutes, I thought, then I'll take a break. I had also decided to throw out some of the dog food and let the wolves have it. It was commercial meat and had cost money but at the rate I was moving I wouldn't get it home until I was an old man anyway.

  Ten minutes passed and I said to heck with it and sat down on the sled and was sitting there, sipping half a cup of tea, when I heard a sound and Minto, a large red dog who had a pointed face, came trotting up and sat down facing me.

  "Hello," I said. "Get lonely?"

  He cocked his head and I petted him, and while rubbing his ears another dog, named Winston, trotted up.

  "What is this?" I asked. "Loyalty?"

  The truth is they shouldn't have been there. I had lost dogs several times and had them leave me and run home. Trapline teams, or teams that are lived with and enjoyed recreationally, sometimes are trained to stay with the musher; and indeed Cookie had brought a team to me when I was injured once while trapping. But that is rare. Mostly they go home. And race teams, trained for only one thing, to go and go and never stop, simply do not come back. These were not trapline dogs but race dogs, and while I sat marveling at them four more came back, then one more, then the last two pups and, finally, Cookie.

  I stood and spread out the gang line and hooked up to their harnesses, which were still on the dogs, putting Cookie in first and then the rest, and I wanted to say something and I finally did manage to get "thank you" out. But in truth I couldn't speak. I had a lump the size of a softball in my throat. I stood on the back of the sled and they lined out and took off and I still wondered how it could be.

  I do not know what happened out there—although some of the dogs had slight wounds in the end of their ears clearly made by bites. I did not see nor could I even guess what had transpired.

  I know how it looked. I had been alone, Cookie had run after them, and they had come back. All of them, some bleeding slightly from bitten ears. They all got in harness and we finished the run in good order and when I was sitting in the kitchen later, sipping a cup of hot soup and trying to explain it to Ruth, I shook my head.

  "I know it sounds insane but it looked like Cookie went after them, caught them, and sent them back to me. I've never heard of anything like it."

  "Well, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck..."

  I nodded. "I agree, but it's so incredible."

  "I don't know about that, but I do know one thing."

  "What's that?"

  "You aren't paying her nearly enough..."

  Last Run

  THE STORM WAS WILD, torn from the belly of the Arctic north by two-hundred-mile-an-hour jet-stream winds and dumped down on Minnesota like a scourge. Trees were frozen and exploded when they could not contain the expanding moisture within, the wind snapping them away like straw. Cattle were found dead, deer frozen stiff, horses and moose killed, and people, always some people caught out in it to lose fingers and toes and ears and, for those who were drunk, to die, frozen in a ditch or in their car only ten, fifteen, twenty yards from the house. One young woman is found frozen so solid they cannot get a needle into her arm and somehow, in some miracle nobody understands, she lives with only a finger gone while a mile away a man dies in his car, warm as toast, from carbon monoxide that leaks up through the floor because he is drunk and doesn't know enough to clear away the snow.

  Cookie and I sit in the living room watching television.

  These things have happened:

  On a run not too long in the past Cookie started to limp. I rubbed her feet and looked for cuts and even used a magnifying glass and could find nothing, but the limp persisted. She favored both back legs. I gave it four days without running and when it didn't go away, worrying, I took her to the veterinarian.

  He tested and retested and took X rays and came out of the room and shook his head.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Arthritis. She has a mild case in her back ankles. She'll be fine if you don't run her."

  Don't run her? We had so many miles together, so many rivers and lakes and hills and mountains—she had led for a whole Iditarod, all the way to Nome from Anchorage. I couldn't imagine not looking up and seeing Cookie.

  "Are you sure?" I asked.

  He nodded and held up the X ray. "See here, at the ankle? See this swelling? You'll have to retire her, use another leader."

  I sighed and nodded. "I have some others but I've always run her..."

  "Not anymore."

  And so she retired. It was not easy. I took her out of the kennel and moved her to the house. She had been in the house on only one occasion, when she ate an entire box of Cheerios, swallowing it nearly whole, a partial roast on top of the refrigerator, a full pound of butter in one gulp, and had a leather glove with meat smell on it halfway down her throat when I finally got her outside.

  It took some time to get her adjusted to the newness and temperature. I took her around the yard, introduced her to the chickens (those that had miraculously lived past the puppies), one yard cat, though I couldn't find the other, and then I brought her in the house, where I gave her an introduction to Tudor. This did not go well and Cookie wore the scars of the introduction for the rest of her life, although an uneasy truce was held from then on.

  I made an initial mistake by thinking genetically. I assumed it was all right to show Cookie one cat and tell her "NO!" in a stern voice and she would understand that meant for all cats, the same with chickens and house dogs. I was wrong. Cookie was more specific and the next morning the cat I had not introduced her to was gone. We looked for it for a day and more until I saw a pile of Cookie's stool with the cat's collar in it and knew what had happened. After that I made certain to show her each and every thing she was not supposed to do.

  We had by this time accumulated quite a menagerie other than the sled dogs. We loved dogs in general and people knew this, and almost any dog that was not wanted found its way (often mysteriously left at our door) to our home. We had a small terrier, a Chihuahua, a Border collie, a half-Lab, a rottweiler, a, nondescript farm breed, and a small yellow mutt. Cookie had to meet each of them, understand that each of them was protected and allowed to live in the same house. Once she figured it all out, she moved in.

  It was still not without some difficulty. Cookie had always been the number-one dog and knew it. When she came into the house she "marked" (peed) in the corner of each room to establish her territory, which did not exactly endear her to Ruth. But after some time Cookie learned she could only mark in one spot and I kept a paper there that I threw out immediately afterward.

  "It's this way," Ruth said when it all seemed to be settling down. "As long as everybody—and I do mean everybody—does exactly as she tells them to do at every moment of every day and every night it will be all right."

  "That's how I see it," I said, watching Cookie walk through the kitchen and make Tudor hit the top of the refrigerator and stick to the ceiling. "Pretty much."

  "Well, good then," she said, nodding. "Just so I know..."

  I went ahead and ran dogs with other leaders, trained for what I hoped would be my next Iditarod. Cookie had some trouble when she heard me harnessing for those first few runs. Ruth said she nearly tore the house apart trying to get out the first time. But Ruth gave he
r bits of meat and other treats—she had developed a taste for peanut brittle, which we made often—and after the fourth or fifth run, when she heard me harnessing she just trotted into the kitchen to get a piece of peanut brittle from Ruth and went back to her cedar-shavings bed.

  The training went well, or seemed to, but after a few months I climbed into the middle of one whale of a fight between Minto and William, who had both fallen in love with Frenchy, a little Canadian female given to me by a trapper.

  I grabbed each of them and pulled them apart. They fought to get back at each other and I pulled harder and felt a sudden pain in my chest. I had once ripped my sternum loose and I thought that's what had happened.

  The pain went away, but a week later I had to fly to Boston on business and in the Boston airport for no apparent reason the same pain came back and this time I knew what it was. The tests proved positive. I had heart disease, and the doctor told me almost the exact thing the vet had told me about Cookie.

  "You'll have to hang it up and not run the dogs anymore..."

  And so I retired with Cookie. Initially I had the idea that my life would be sedate. I found someone to take the dogs (and he is still running them) and I moved into the house. I mistakenly thought I would have to sit a lot, and for the first time in eight years I bought a television set and a satellite dish to help pass what I thought would be monotonous hours. The truth was I couldn't watch it. I tried. I would sit on the couch and turn the thing on in the evening and Cookie would come and sit next to me—she loved it and kept trying to look in back of the set and see where the people were—and we would try to watch it together. I had come to know greater things in my life, however, and television had become so appallingly awful that I simply couldn't watch it (and still can't).