One important item of early-winter business for the dog driver is the harness-breaking of young stock. In this particular case, last December brought two litters of pups who now will soon be yearlings. It's high time for them to be learning their trade.
Harness-breaking is no big deal at Seppala Kennels. If the pups involved are fairly young, we sometimes start them one by one, harnessing the puppy and letting it pull a short length of snowmobile track down the trail, controlled by a twenty-foot line. Or if they are older and it's already snow time, we quite often just hook a special team for the purpose. Such a team will be led by steady, experienced leaders -- including, if possible, the puppies' dam. If we are pretty sure of the pups, we may hook four pups with two experienced female leaders in front. If a puppy is a strong leader prospect, we might hook two strong wheel dogs, and put the pup double lead beside its dam or another bitch it knows well. If we think certain pups might haul back on the neckline or be otherwise uncertain, then we hook experienced leaders, experienced wheelers, and just two pups in the middle.
We don't use our regular trail, which is a little too challenging for beginners. Instead, we get out the snowmobile and lay a special, easy looped trail to a nearby field, total distance about a mile and a half. If a puppy seems really apprehensive or negative, then that pup gets individual harness-training with the line and drag (as described above) before it ever gets hooked in a team.
This year, we had one litter we felt very confident about, whose sire and dam were both good leaders. We just hooked those four as a team, with main leader Tonya and her sister Kolyma (the pups' dam) at lead. We took everything slow and easy, spending a lot of time harnessing and hooking up, talking to the pups and encouraging them. Then off to a slow start with my foot holding down the drag brake until the young ones realised what was happening and that all movement had to be in a forward direction. Before we had gone half a mile, all four were pulling strongly. At first they all tried to run on the right side of the gangline, but quite quickly the left-side pups realised it was easier to run on their own side. We swooped around the small turnaround loop, and the trip home was twice as enthusiastic as the trip out. Back in the parking lot, all four little tails wagged gaily as they enjoyed their dishes of warm baited water after the run. The whole thing was a positive experience.
The other litter, five in number, we broke into two groups, using the same general procedure, with a very similar result. A couple of rather nervous pups quickly decided there was nothing to be nervous about here, that this was quite a lot of fun, actually.
It isn't very spectacular. There's not a lot of chaos. There's no yelling and screaming from us. Things never get out of hand, because it's always just three to six dogs, never more; if any of them are particularly large or rambunctious, they will be the ones in the three or four-dog teams. We can control the whole situation physically, if need be, all the more so as the snow is deep on our puppy trail.
The idea is to make success for the green pup as easy as possible, and to nip any problems in the bud before they escalate into chaos or discomfort, let alone pain or fear. Then, on future training runs, we repeat the successful runs on the puppy trail, building further success on early success, building confidence -- until the green-broke pups are ready to tackle longer runs on the main trail, two by two in six-dog teams with four experienced dogs. Easy success brings further success, and success builds on success, resulting in sleddogs who know they can do this thing because they have never experienced a situation they could not handle.
Now, I just finished reading another musher's narrative of his attempt to introduce green dogs to teamwork, using a powered 4-wheel ATV and a twelve-dog hookup. It amazes me that people do things like this. In that particular instance, his run quickly turned into a nightmare that went on and on as the chaos escalated and the driver completely lost all control of the situation. It started with a sliced neckline and escalated from there until the driver lost the entire team not once, but twice, with one green dog being dragged and seriously frightened. Some drivers just laugh off experiences of this sort. Okay for them. I assure you that the dogs involved do not laugh it all off so easily. In chaotic, out-of-control training sessions using large numbers of dogs, the green dogs learn things like, "I hate being hooked up to run -- I get so frightened I freeze and get dragged, and it hurts -- I hate it" or "I can create an uproar anytime I want to, just by slicing the gangline with my nice sharp teeth." OK -- if that's what you want your green dogs to learn.
People who operate that way go through a lot of dogs. And people who buy their castoffs soon find out they have been burned! Or else the gentle, kindly musher just shoots the poor, confused green dog whose mind has been all messed up by the driver's stupidity and laziness. It isn't supposed to matter -- because this kind of person will have moved on from sleddogs to dirt bike racing or something of the sort, in less than five years.
It's one reason I am not keen on selling dogs, especially to racing drivers, who always seem convinced that they don't have the time to train their dogs in small teams, even when breaking young stock to harness. Nope, it's always a 12 to 16-dog hookup on a damned ATV, pitting green pups against hard, conditioned, fast mature adults running free in front of a powered rig. I hate like hell to see dogs of mine get into this kind of situation. I think too much of my dogs as individuals.
Two years ago I pissed The Great One off mightily by refusing to hook my dogs in with his high-speed 16-dog ATV team. He stormed, "Why the hell did you bother bringing your dogs here if we can't see them run and find out what they are made of?" This guy has wrecked other people's dogs for them, time and again, with this little number. He was really angry when I refused to fall for it. I guess it all comes down to whether you consider a dog as an individual, a sentient being with feelings -- or just as an interchangeable "power unit" for a racing team. My dogs are my good friends. You don't let somebody drag your friends around a dirt track by the neck at 20 mph.
The mild winter we have so far experienced this year in the Yukon has brought several nice snowfalls with it, though some of the accumulated snow melted with the most recent chinook wind. Nevertheless, I looked out yesterday and saw that there was enough snow on the ground to establish a trail. So I broke my 20-year-old SkiDoo loose from the icy ground, pulled about thirty or forty times on the starter rope and finally got it going.
Last year's access route to our hinterland trails was a nightmare, going right across the neighbouring sod farm's sod flat, an open, unprotected large flat where the wind obliterates all traces of a trail within fifteen minutes. We had to mark the route with spruce boughs so that I knew where to go, and all our leaders save old Tonya had major problems -- all the more so since an irrigation ditch created overflow problems in the middle of the field. By season's end, we vowed, "Never again!"
So this year the access has been re-routed to take advantage of shelter belts of willow, alder and aspen poplar -- at the cost of going across a pretty bumpy bog and then an awkward right-angle crossing of the offending irrigation ditch. It's still tricky, but I hope not so daunting for the leaders.
Recent high winds had left trees down across the trail, some of them ten and twelve inches in diameter, so I had an afternoon's chainsaw work just to section and remove the trunks where the trail was obstructed. The dogsled bridge across Horse Creek had to be repaired.
Other than that, the trail looked great! In the hinterland there were no nasty surprises with sufficient snow everywhere to pack a reasonable base for a trail. More snow needs to fall -- and will. What's important is that the packing process begins when there's around four inches on the ground, so that a firm base gets established and the dogs never have to wade around in major accumulations where they can't feel a trail bottom.
I broke out the eight-mile circuit and came back home -- and got stuck in the awkward ditch crossing, unable to ascend the sharp bank. Isa heard me and came to help; together we horsed the machine up onto the bank so I could do
the last quarter-mile to the kennel. The dogs will have little trouble with that crossing, but until more snow blows into that ditch and smooths out the angle of its banks, it's a snowmobile trap!
I hate snowmobiles anyway. They are a cold, uncomfortable, noisy, smelly mode of winter transportation, and unreliable enough to be dangerous in the wilderness. I mean, if the damn thing quits and you are thirty miles from shelter and warmth, you may have a nasty time getting out. Dog teams don't quit like that. They don't create noxious fumes. They make very little noise. And standing on the runners is much warmer and more comfortable than sitting or kneeling at low level on a steel-and-plastic contraption. The only use I have for this machine is to create a visible track that the dogs can follow and to pack the trail when the snow gets a little too deep.
This weekend, serious training starts for nine unbroken puppies, a dozen second-year dogs, and a variable number of older experienced sleddogs. It looks like it's going to be a good winter at Seppala Kennels.
Seppalas are pretty perverse sleddogs, in that the females largely insist on coming in season in late autumn or early winter, thus having pups at the height of the dogsledding season. Many pure Seppala bitches do not even have a springtime oestrus season.
It's a heavy responsibility, trying to raise winter litters and train three or four dog teams at the same time. Especially when the bitches all came in season at the same time (yea, female solidarity) and therefore those that are bred whelp their litters within days of one another. Maybe I'm just getting too old for the whole thing, but it wears my energy away trying to care for two or three nursing mothers, stay up all night doing whelpings, then train teams as though that were the only thing I had to do . . .
But it's at breeding time when the beautiful Seppala nature comes to the fore. Especially their co-operative nature!
(We oversee all breedings at Seppala Kennels. Others may just throw them in a yard and go away and forget the whole thing. SOME others even play pin-the-sire-on-the-litter-after-the-fact because they haven't the slightest idea who bred that bitch! This is called running a serious racing kennel. It's called being more serious about performance than about pedigrees -- by those who do it, that is!)
We oversee each mating. And believe it or not, the stud dogs appreciate this greatly. Take Pyotr, for example. Pyotr knows a bitch can take a dislike to him and try to take a piece out of his face when he gets close. He knows that some bitches, when "tied" by the stud, may not only go off their feet, but might even turn over on their backs and start ripping with their claws! So Pyotr comes to the breeding pen, runs around checking the place out, sniffs everything, pees on whatever's standing still, and just boogies around -- until he sees me squat down with a leash on the bitch, holding her by the collar. THEN he runs over and immediately mounts her! Pyotr is truly an artist in the mating pen. He doesn't flog blindly around like most studs. He mounts and carefully feels around until he has found the exact right spot -- only then does he thrust hard, and invariably he has got her in one or two tries.
Nyura the red-sable bitch is an extreme feminist. We're breeding her to Pyotr, who's an utter gentleman. But Nyura just plain hates males! Left unguarded for even a few seconds, she will lunge at him and try for a chunk of fur out of the ruff or a piece of ear! She trembles when brought to the mating pen, because intellectually she hates the whole idea. However, once she has been restrained with my hands on her collar, and her tail pulled to one side (she keeps it firmly clamped down over the goodies no matter what the stage of her cycle), she stands quietly and gets bred. Once she has been tied, it's like "Oh, well. Too late now to do anything about this," she isn't trembling, she doesn't struggle, she's relaxed as can be. Her body is pretty positive about this mating thing, I think. Once the tie has broken, though -- once again she's willing to try for a chunk of fur. Go figure!
Sire Zaki is ten years old. Little Lara is two. They are being mated; it's the first time for Lara. She has fallen head over heels in LOVE with Zaki. She jumps on him with her forepaws, kisses him, wriggles all over and wags her tail, romps, plays, and follows him everywhere. Each time I pass her stakeout in the morning, she shrieks, "TAKE ME TO MY LOVER BOY!!!" and nearly pulls me flat on my face going to the mating pen. Zaki is dignified, affable but reticent. Very willing, though. Would you believe, these two have been "doing it" for eight successive days??? Today we finally called it quits -- her discharge is dark brown, she has to be finished. Zaki is still willing. She's still in love, and would probably let him do it if I restrained her a bit. But I just turned them loose in the yard to run and play and rejoice, which they did. (BTW, Seppala bitches often "celebrate" the mating once the tie has broken, by running in small circles barking and hooting, wagging their tails at the stud dog and the helpful people.)
Every single day for eight days, at each mating, Zaki gently laid his head across little Lara's withers and closed his eyes while we all waited out the tie. Here's a snapshot of the loving couple, a closeup I took while Isa knelt with them on a sunny Yukon afternoon.