The other painful possibility is, of course, that sleddogs really do not give a damn about losing their driver, even though drivers are acutely affected by losing their teams. Perhaps they actually think it's more fun without the human element. Or perhaps for them a run in harness is really just an extended hunting party, an activity of theirs into which I have intruded with my harnesses, my ganglines, my dogsled and my silly commands -- a private canine party that I've crashed. In which case, when I fall off and get left behind, to them it may be sheer poetic justice!
You may well say at this point that I'm projecting, that I'm anthropomorphising. That I'm attributing to these sleddogs thoughts, feelings and motivations that I've created out of whole cloth, ideas that are alien to the dogs themselves. You may be right. They may only be behaving according to their instincts and habits, quite mindlessly. But if so, then once again we are headed towards "They do not live in the world,/ Are not in time and space," etc. (Edwin Muir, "The Animals" -- see SledDogBlog 27 October 2003). I don't want to go there!
The whole affair has left two conclusions in my mind. My first conclusion is, no more eight-dog teams with Evita at co-lead. I may have to hook Evita and Happy with two steady strong wheel dogs and do a few 4-dog runs where I have complete control, really getting on their case about going off-trail.
My second conclusion is that this spring, I'm going to set forth with spade, axe, pruning shears, .22 rifle and similar implements of destruction, to wreak total havoc on four or five major squirrel dwellings alongside our training trails -- starting with the one at the edge of the pine woods. And I'm really going to enjoy doing it. Petty? Perhaps. But you know what they say about payback...
Losing your team is a nerve-wracking, confidence-destroying experience. As I said, it happens to all of us at one time or another. That doesn't make it any the less traumatic. Anything can happen to an unsupervised loose team. A massive dog-fight could conceivably take place (though that's unlikely with Seppalas). Individual dogs can get tangled, dragged, injured, even strangled. A loose team might find its way onto the highway and get hit by an 18-wheeler or a gravel truck. It could end up in a neighbour's yard, causing all sorts of problems with poultry or livestock. Your mind invests endless scenarios of disaster as you trudge along doing the March of Shame.
So when you arrive back at the dogyard, dog-tired from walking for half an hour in heavy snowboots over a piece of trail they can run in 6 minutes, then to discover that they arrived in perfect order 12 or 15 minutes ago, having done just fine without their driver's executive presence, two conflicting feelings well up. The first is enormous relief that they are all in the kennel where they belong, uninjured and none the worse for the mishap. And the second is wild indignation -- that they would just go off and leave you lying in the snow, that they would put you through such excruciating mental agony when they might so easily just stop and wait for you to catch up, that they could manage to complete the difficult course perfectly well entirely without your participation. And both of these feelings, I can assure you (if such an incident has never befallen you) are very strong emotional experiences. (I knew one woman who switched from Siberians to Alaskans immediately after such an incident. Apparently another dog driver convinced her "that would never have happened if she'd been driving Alaskans." (HAR-DE-HAR Har Har! Rolling On The Floor Laughing!)
I've managed to convince myself that these dogs are my friends, even that some of them "worship me" -- co-leader Happy among them. Now Evita may be a recently-acquired yearling nitwit who isn't yet closely bonded, who doesn't really count. But Happy is very close to me, is 5 1/2 years old and has led for me all her life. The other six are from 6 to 9 3/4, all home-bred and trained, having spent their working lives being driven only by me.
What goes through their little doggy minds as they make their way home minus the musher? Do they experience not one shred of remorse or reluctance at leaving me lying prone in the snowbank, injured for all they know, to carry on their carefree little romp without me? This is a question -- and a stark reality of dog driving -- that is a bit difficult to face up to squarely. It's very easy to let your ego run wild with this, conceiving great resentment against your dogs.
I think the key to understanding this must be found in the group psychology of sleddogs. AS INDIVIDUALS, running free, out of harness, any or all of these dogs might show more concern. Any of them might turn back to investigate, might even sit on their haunches waiting for me to pick my battered, shaken self up, dust the snow off, and resume the excursion. But AS A TEAM they are entirely unable to do such a thing. All their experience of running in harness has been to run together, all doing the same thing, going in the same direction at the same speed, and always to keep going except for brief and grudging "rest" stops of five or ten seconds. Therefore, harnessed as part of a working team, any individual dog who thinks, "but what about BOSS, I think maybe we lost him back there," is powerless to do much about it. Sleddog team conformity dictates that he must do what the rest are doing, must move on ahead or risk being tangled or dragged. And even if several of the dogs should have doubts about contiinuing, they could hardly manage to organise a co-ordinated "haw-come" 180-degree turn to go back for the fallen driver. Few dog drivers encourage their teams to learn this manoeuvre, because it's too easily used by the dogs to terminate longer runs prematurely and spontaneously.
So maybe -- just perhaps -- the eight m.p.h. return home may be taken to represent a faithful team trudging along, most of them thinking, "poor Boss -- I hope he's okay -- I wish he was still on the sled behind us," but collectively unable to do anything other than to continue on in an orderly fashion at a sedate pace following the familiar route. In order to maintain my own trust in my dogs this is what I have to believe. At least none of them can tell me otherwise. That's good -- because anything else might be too painful.
It happens to every dog driver now and then -- getting suddenly and violently separated from your dog sled and team. Maybe it wasn't so smart of me to take a nitwit trainee lead dog out in an eight-dog hookup on Friday the Thirteenth of February -- but then, who's superstitious!
Evita (the nitwit) is just a yearling. I acquired her in partial satisfaction of an unpaid debt, only because I thought I might be able to make a leader out of her. Evvy's not a Markovo-Seppala -- she's one of these "Elvira" types, a "percentage-Seppala" with Canadian Kennel Club papers. Supposedly a registered Siberian Husky, she looks exactly like an Alaskan Husky, has an Alaskan's thin, open coat and tipped ears, is put together rather like an Alaskan, acts like an Alaskan -- and probably is just that in at least some of her ancestry. Here's her photo -- you be the judge! Evvy's spayed, because she blew out her vagina and part of her uterus for no good reason, a few days after she arrived here. I'm told these vaginal prolapses are common in certain bloodlines; in twenty years of breeding Seppalas, I had never seen one until Evita's arrival.
Evvy's sweet, friendly and eager. She goes like the clappers when she goes at all. But she has no focus, and very little sleddog ethic. If she's thinking about running, she runs. If she's thinking about the dog behind her, she bounces around looking over her shoulder, trying to promote a donnybrook. If she's thinking about hunting, she darts off the trail to the nearest brushpile or squirrel tree. If she's thinking about the guy who lives in that shack, 50 yards off the trail, she runs straight up the path to the door. And you just never know what Evvy's going to be thinking about at any given instant!
So on Friday the Thirteenth Joe Muggins here hooks Evvy at co-lead with Happy, the usual co-leader of my senior eight-dog team -- the team of six- to nine-year-olds that Tonya has traditionally led as command leader. But Tonya's trying to help me train two younger teams, and the rest of my senior leaders are now retired. Tonya shouldn't be expected to do it all... The thing is, Happy is a known, admitted Alaskan-husky cross, sired by Terry Streeper's old leader Hop, out of Tonya. They tell me Alaskans don't hunt on the trail; if I believe that one, they will tell me another one, I'm sure. Happy, anyway, loves to hunt just about as much as she loves to run. I think she sometimes knows a few commands, but she's pretty uncertain about following them. She's a darn good leader as long as she's co-leading with her dam Tonya, who does the heavy intellectual stuff.
Evvy won't yet stay "out front" at hookup -- she turns around and comes back to visit the dogs being hooked in the team. So for now we hold her out front with a leash and snow anchor. On the Thirteenth, once all the dogs were hooked, Isa went up to release Evvy from the restraint. She immediately began to wander, so Isa grabbed her tugline and held it, unfortunately standing in front of the point dogs. As I pulled the quick-release, Isa didn't hear my go-ahead command -- and the point dogs knocked her galley-west. If I were superstitious, I might have seen that as a portent.
Off we went, going like the clappers. We traversed the flat, crossed the road, reached and crossed the creek, and turned into the northeast bush trail in a near record 5'57". Here and there I had to urge Evita on as various thoughts crossed her mind, but mostly we were doing great. About 13 minutes out, we hit a straight, boring stretch -- and suddenly Evvy was off the trail, evaluating an uprooted spruce stump as potential game habitat. She and Happy then turned back alongside the point dogs and stood there facing me. I unsnapped my safety line, set the snowhook, rushed forward to extract Happy and Evvy from the tuglines of the point dogs, threw them back out front -- and caught the sled as it came rushing past me. (It's a tossup whether the snowhook will stay set long enough to sort out any given situation, actually.) Twenty yards further along, I hooked down again to untangle Evvy from her own tugline.
We then ran the better part of our interesting (not to say challenging) 12-mile trail rather successfully. I continued to remind Evita occasionally to stay on the trail and keep running. But I was congratulating myself on having a well-started young leader, I confess.
We were only around two miles from the dogyard when we turned into the pine woods just west of the creek crossing, going home. We had been out about 45 minutes. This was Evvy's first twelve-mile run; up till then she had been in a young team that was doing sixes and eights. Maybe she was getting tired, or maybe she was bored. Fifty yards in, where the trail turns left to exit the wood and parallels the creek, there is a major winter squirrel den, with its squirrelly dinner-table of spruce cones set on a large dead spruce root just beside the trail. BANG -- Evvy and Happy stopped cold, checked out the root, turned left, and threaded themselves between two threes to look for the squirrels. I unsnapped my safety line, hooked down just short of the turn, ran up and yanked them backward out from between the trees before we had a hopeless mess. Both little huntresses let out indignant growls of surprise at being jerked backwards. I tossed them back onto the trail, headed north; grabbed the sled (still headed east!) pulled the snowhook and yelled them forward. The sled hit the tree in the corner of the turn and tipped over. I had a death-grip on the driving bow -- but my grip was promptly and cleanly broken when the dragging sled hit the next tree really hard.
Overturned sled, dragging snow hook and eight dogs accelerated smoothly away as I, lying comfortably on my side at full stretch in the loose snow beside the trail, hollered, "Oh, SHIT!!!" (That's the traditional thing that you always yell when you lose your team. "WHOA, dammit!" is another good option, but it never does the slightest bit of good.) That was the last I saw of the sled and the eight dogs for awhile. I wear the safety line just to prevent this sort of mishap. But one has to release the safety line in order to go forward and sort out schemozzles caused by nitwit trainee leaders...
You tell yourself that the overturned sled or the dangling snow hook will surely foul in the brush at the next turn in the trail, or at the creek, or in that tricky S-curve just beyond the creek -- and you'll catch your lost team. What actually happens, though, is that the sled promptly rights itself as it goes around the first curve, while the hook drags harmlessly along upside-down, clawing at the air.
So for two miles -- and twenty-five minutes -- I did the March of Shame: the sullen, snow-booted trudge of the musher who has been dumped in the bush, abandoned by his faithful dog team. Along the creek, across the little bridge, through the S-curve, up the little hill, down the winding trail through the aspens to the road crossing, across the road, along the road allowance, down the trail to the flat, and all the way across the frozen, wind-swept flat (in full view of the neighbours and passers-by on the highway), up the long steep hill, and finally down the lane to the kennel. Stopping frequently to listen for the sound of a halted, tangled dog team. Not knowing for sure whether they had crossed the local road -- or turned to follow it out to the dreaded highway, until I saw the sled parked beside the dogyard and Isa rigging her own sled to take a team out "to look for your broken body," as she said.
Isa reported that the team arrived at the kennel exactly one hour after we started out. They arrived with the sled upright and no dogs tangled! Isa said she didn't notice that I wasn't there for the first few moments...
I got back from my two-mile March of Shame only 12 minutes after the team returned, apparently. I suppose I was walking about 4 miles per hour. Now our teams normally cover that same stretch of trail in 6 to 10 minutes (depending on whether they are eagerly going out doing 3-minute miles or coming home tired doing 5-minute miles). I probably wiped out around the 45-minute mark, so it took them 15 minutes to get home without me -- at a suspiciously leisurely 8 miles per hour!
What took them so long? Did they stop to look both ways at every trail intersection? Did they hold a little powwow about whether to turn around and go back for the Boss? Did they have another little hunt or two on the way home? More probably, I guess they just relaxed to enjoy the scenery without the monkey on their backs.