An Aussie dog handler’s Arctic (mis)adventures

There are few things more dispiriting than falling off a sled and watching your dog team run away from you. You lie in the snow as your ‘loyal’ buddies take off down the trail, wagging their tails merrily, totally ignorant of the fact that you’re not with them anymore.

Probably the only thing more dispiriting than that is when you don’t own the dog team and you start to wonder how you’re going to get them back without calling your boss.

Then you remember that you can’t call your boss because he’s currently on the Iditarod trail.

This is the waking nightmare of a dog handler and the situation I found myself in a few weeks ago while working for veteran Iditarod musher Linwood Fiedler.

It’s a job that I never expected to have.

I grew up in Sydney, Australia, a place that is a little different from rural Alaska. The population tops out at 4 million, the summers hit 110 degrees and the winters are considered brutally cold when there’s a light frost on the ground.

I had come to Alaska with my girlfriend to volunteer with Alaska State Parks and have some summer adventures. We fished, we canoed, we saw bears and we learned that moose are both terrifying and delicious.

We couldn’t leave, and after a wonderful winter working at recreational kennel I was ready for the big leagues, dog handling for an Iditarod musher.

Losing a dog team was not in my job description.

I was meant to be training a couple of puppy teams, doing chores around the kennel and — as is typical for a dog handler — inadvertently causing minor amounts of property damage.

Most days were not so disastrous.

I would normally wake up early to join Linwood and my fellow handler Alison to carry a few 5-gallon buckets filled with sloppy thawed meat and kibble to feed 60 barking sled dogs.

Scooping poop would then be followed by a million other possible jobs: clipping toenails, treating injured dogs, grooming trails with a snowmachine, repairing doghouses, driving in to town to buy dog food, trying to repair some of the property damage I had caused, cutting meat for the dogs.

The list went on.

Then I would take out one of the three dog teams I trained.

There were two teams of adolescents who were being prepped for next year’s race team.

And then there was one team of four-month old puppies. It was my job over the course of the winter to take these guys, with a few older veterans acting as teachers and disciplinarians, from their very first walk wearing a harness to comfortably pulling a sled 10 miles at a time.

Training these three teams of young pups meant that there were some inevitable behavioral issues: some minor harness chewing, some minor humping and a couple of memorable fights.

For the most part, the runs were pleasant and uneventful.

Until something went wrong

Which was often.

There were the many times the temperature unexpectedly dropped and I ended up not wearing enough clothing, shivering and cursing every life decision that had led me to mush dogs in Alaska.

There were those other times where dogs got tangled, legs all over the place, growling at each other with me cursing as I tried to work out what connected to where and how.

And then there were the really memorable runs.

There was the time I was mushing at night, 20 miles from home with the mercury at 25 degrees below zero. My team of teenagers was rocketing along a narrow trail between thick groves of birch trees. I hit a bump causing a borrowed headlamp’s battery pack to jolt out of my pocket and sever a cable. I was engulfed in darkness. I reached for my phone but due to the crippling cold, the battery had died prematurely.

I considered stopping the dog team, lighting a fire and waiting out the night.

Putting my ‘Survivor’ fantasies to bed was the fact it was January and that it wouldn’t be morning for 12 hours. As I stood there a while and let my eyes adjust, I realized that it was bright enough that I could squint and still make out my leaders. I tentatively got the team going and managed to get them home safely, fondly remembering the run as an otherworldly trip through the semi-darkness.

Then there was the time when I had just left the dog lot and immediately saw a fully-grown moose cow standing right in the middle of trail. I put all my weight on the brake, screamed ‘whoa’ to command them to stop and waited to see whether Mrs. Moose would put her head down and attack.

For non-mushers, trying to stop a dog team 50 feet in to a run, when they’re at their most excited and most uncontrollable, is difficult. Imagine a group of 8 year-olds at a sleepover who have just consumed their weight in refined sugar. Now imagine trying to get them off to bed. That’s what it’s like to try and stop a 10-dog team that can see, smell and practically taste the moose standing in front of them.

Mrs. Moose sensibly sidled off before we crashed in to her.

And then there was the time that I was left standing on a frozen swamp watching my dog team running in to the distance without me.

So what did I do to get them back?

I started trying to run after them, which failed for two reasons.

One, a dog team comfortably runs at nine miles an hour for days on end. I don’t share this ability.

Two, the mushing clothes that keep you warm at 25-below aren’t ideal for jogging. You end up hunched over after a few feet, bathed in sweat, feeling like you’ve teleported in to the Florida Everglades.

Thankfully, I was able to get cell service.

I called my fellow handler Alison, who was also out mushing. She then called a few other people who could get on snowmachines and rescue the team. In the meantime, I jogged in the direction I last saw the dogs, looking like a horribly embarrassed Michelin Man.

I also felt worried. A 10-dog team without a musher to moderate speed can end up careening out of control and killing dogs.

I was doubly worried because the run had started with two of my best teenage males fighting. The dogs, named Qué Pasa and Quantum, had growled and nipped at each other while I was hooking up.

As we left the kennel, they snapped. Teeth plunged into necks, biting, growling and me unable to find a safe place to stop. When I finally did break them up, I could see Qué Pasa was bleeding from the mouth. I separated the two dogs and thought that Qué Pasa’s injuries were superficial. A few miles on and I could see something serious had happened — he was still bleeding heavily.

It was then, with my hand deep in the wet recesses of Qué Pasa’s mouth, that the dogs all burst forward and popped the snow hook out of the fluffy snow.

For non-mushers: a snow hook is a giant two-pronged hook that looks like what Captain Ahab might have used if he went fishing for Moby Dick. It’s big and it looks mean. You drop it in the snow and if the snow is packed you can stop your dog team from running away. If the snow is light and fluffy the dogs can pop the snow hook and flee.

As the dogs ran toward me, I managed to grab the sled, tip it over and end up being dragged down the trail. I righted the sled, tipped it again, and got dragged repeatedly until I couldn’t hold on anymore.

So that’s why I kept running and why I kept imagining that the my team had started methodically killing each other in some sort of canine version of ‘The Hunger Games.’

Miraculously, a musher who I had never met turned up behind me. She stopped her team and casually offered me a lift. I hopped on her sled and she told me that a fellow musher was coming in the other direction and had probably stopped the team.

For non-mushers: the likelihood of losing a dog team and then meeting two mushers 5 minutes later is like coming back from 25 points down at the Super Bowl.

It just never happens.

We could hear them before we saw them. They were clearly excited. In my worried mind, it was because they’d just feasted on the innards of a smaller member of the team.

We rounded a bend and there they were, stopped by my savior’s friend, all happy and all alive. I quickly thanked them both, jumped on the sled and got the team home, feeling as if I’d just survived a coronary.

After all these disasters, it’s probably a little perplexing that I would go on and recommend working as a dog handler to anyone wanting an unforgettable winter and an authentic Alaskan adventure.

You’ll get to spend a good portion of your days in the backcountry, noiselessly passing over pristine Alaskan wilderness.

You’ll also regularly be forced to learn patience, humility and that 99% of the problems you encounter are down to musher error.

Because I didn’t heed the obvious warning signs, Qué Pasa broke a canine.

And if you’re lucky like me, you’ll get to watch a team of 4-month old puppies evolve from a bunch of goofy kids into a tightly disciplined dog-mushing machine, ready in a couple of years to run to Nome or away from their next unsuspecting handler.

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