Alaska - Page 3

Okay, so, last time I promised you Mary Shields. Mary was the first woman to complete the Iditarod sled dog race, back in 1974; that was the first year women competed, and Mary was one of two. She's been in Alaska since 1965. These days she doesn't race, but she spends the summer tourism season giving tours of her kennels, garden, and home, then goes out in the winter and travels all over the state. She's a really, really nice person, and she's got books and videos and everything, and I freely admit that I wouldn't know any of this about her if it weren't for one simple little thing:

I am an absolute sucker for dogs.

That having been said, here's the trip for you. This was 5 September, 2003.

Mary's dogs live in small cabin-like doghouses raised a little bit off the ground. Their food and water is served in bowls attached to the side of the house, and when it's feeding time or time for sleep, she has them all hop up on the house roofs and fastens their chains so that nobody starts running around causing trouble while she distributes stuff. She changes their residences every few days to keep them from getting territorial or violent; this is a dog team, expected to work together, and there's not much room for dominance challenges.

The black dog in the foreground is named OJ, after a woman Mary knows. He was part of 2002's crop of puppies, and as of this photograph weighed around seventy pounds. Mary's dogs are bred for endurance and freight hauling rather than speed- Iditarod dogs these days weigh around 35 pounds more often than not.

Mary's current lead dog is visible on the house at the far left, in the back. His name is Kiddo, and he weighs ninety pounds.

And this is him. Unless I'm greatly mistaken, that's Jane from Canada in the red coat. She was about 5'6", I think. Kiddo is not only Mary's lead dog in the winter sledding team, but is basically pack leader; when Mary let the dogs off their chains to socialise for a while as she talked, Kiddo wasn't tussled with once. It was like watching a father thundering at his kids not to make him stop the car.

I wish I could remember this dog's name. He was standing on top of his house, as was the dog behind me. Kept trying to get his nose in my ear.

Same dog. Note: in Alaska, 'husky' is not a breed, and neither is 'malamute' really. The words are more in the way of job descriptions. If a dog is big enough and strong enough and willing enough, they'll hitch it up and see how it performs, and if it works out well in harness, then bam- it's a husky. So, yeah, for all I know this dog could be part German Shepherd or something. I know Mary's lead dog in that first Iditarod was part Labrador retriever- it's in one of her books. As long as the dog does the job and is suited to it, no big deal on ancestry.

This is Mary herself, explaining how she used to use the tent in the background when she was out on sledding runs in the Alaskan bush. The item in her hand is a pan that she used to heat up the dogs' frozen food on the bucketlike stove in front of her, outside the tent thank you very much. (It was a small tent, and even with that pipe you can see on it, it heated up fast.) The man to the left with the shiny shoes is Jim from Canada. I wasn't reckoning on reflective stripes on the shoes when the flash went off.

Shortly after the demonstration of the stove, Mary demonstrated something else. On nights when she and her dogs were out on the trails and there was no one else for miles, Mary found that if she started howling, the dogs would quickly follow suit. She encouraged us to give it a try, and we found that yes, her dogs- though in their kennels for the evening, out of sight behind some trees- were still more than happy to launch into all kinds of howls at a little encouragement from the humans. I think the older people on this tour were a little embarrassed, but eh. Their problem, not mine. I was happy to howl, and the dogs sounded lovely. When we stopped, they kept howling; they were probably having quite a bit of fun. It was interesting, though; when they stopped, they all stopped at the same time. Very peculiar to hear silence descend so quickly.

Here I must spare a few moments for a lengthy sigh. You see, Mary told us quite a bit about dogsledding in general when she was demonstrating the stove. One thing she said was that, while the sport is called 'mushing', the word isn't actually used. Most mushers get their dogs to start moving by yelling something like 'gee-yup' or 'let's go'. She then said, "Other than Sergeant Preston, no one actually says 'mush'. The word comes from Canadian French, 'marchez' - does anyone here know if Sergeant Preston was French-Canadian?"

Given that I was the only person on this particular tour who was too young to have seen the TV show "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon", I found it kind of embarrassing that I was also the only person able to say, "No, he wasn't." I never saw the TV show or read the comic, but I do own the complete run of the radio show "Challenge of the Yukon" as MP3 files on CD. The lengthy sigh is because when this picture was being taken (that's Mary's old wooden dogsled- she uses one made of aluminum and plastic now), I was thisclose to shouting, "On, King! On, you huskies!".

Right. Moving on...

Mary participated in a goodwill race with some Siberian mushers a number of years ago, when old Cold War tensions were still floating around. The Siberians were very happy to participate in a nice friendly competition, and I believe, although I am not sure, that they won. As a token of gratitude and friendship the Siberian musher who knew Mary best offered her his reindeer skin parka and reindeer-and-wolverine-skin hood. She didn't quite know how to respond, but decided to give him her Gore-tex parka in return. He was thrilled. Mary now brings out the parka for visitors; she asked for a model. This is what fur looks like when it's made for people who actually need it to survive.

Finally, this is Mary herself. We got to buy her books if we wanted, and she autographed them for us. I have a copy of Sled Dog Trails that she signed for me just after this picture was taken. Despite the fact that central Alaska routinely gets temperatures in the vicinity of -40 degrees, I do find myself kind of tempted to go up there some winter and see what dogsledding is like when it's actually the right season... not just now, but someday. We'll see.

Alas, that is it for the day. Tomorrow will include my trip to the UAF Large Animal Research Station. It's got musk-oxen in.