Читать книгу Life with Forty Dogs - Joseph Robertia - Страница 7

Introduction

Alaska—untamed, unrestrained, the edge of the wild. It’s been said this Last Frontier is made up of people who don’t fit in but fit here better than anywhere else. I can’t speak for everyone, but this maxim certainly resonated with my wife, Colleen, and me. In the Lower 48 we always sensed something was wrong. Not with us, but with everyone else. The get-ahead materialism, the I-need-more consumerism; we believed life was about doing—and being—so much more. We felt a calling, a hunger not satiated in a world addicted to lattes and laptops, governed by traffic and time clocks, and constructed of concrete and steel. This mutual feeling brought us north in search of something, but to what, we didn’t know at the time.

Where we’d settle remained undetermined, as was how long we would stay, or what we would do for income. We only knew we were drawn by a deep aspiration to live a more purposeful life, closer to nature, and filled with adventure. In a stroke of serendipity, the first place we secured was a stamp-sized cabin with no running water in a tiny town called Kasilof. Little did we know, the area we moved to—and have since called home—was a mushing mecca.

Soon after settling in, we discovered teams of sled dogs blew by several times a day—their paws churning up the fresh powder, their pink tongues dangling, and hot breath billowing into the cold air. We quickly learned that within three square miles of our new home lived half a dozen mushers, cumulatively owning more than 300 huskies between them. Sitting on our porch at dusk, the wails washing over us were more than a wave of sound; we felt flooded by the tidal surge of full-throated howls from the various dog packs.

As lifelong animal lovers, we were immediately awestruck by the camaraderie between human and dog pack, intrigued by the joy of purpose they both seemed to share, and inspired to learn more. Within a few months we were apprenticing under other mushers and had gotten our first few sled dogs, primarily rogues, runts, and rejects from other kennels, as well as several pups from local shelters. We’ve never bought a single one, and initially we got what we paid for. They were a motley bunch of untrained and nearly uncontrollable hyperactive huskies. We had no leaders and to gain any kind of forward momentum, one of us had to run down the trail in front of the raucous mob.

But, over time, they learned. Leaders emerged, their conditioning improved, and a team coalesced. Within a few years we consistently had forty dogs living with us (and a high of forty-five at our peak, before a few old-timers passed on). Vacations ended and the bank account drained as every penny we had went to specially formulated kibble, veterinary care, and inordinate amounts of cold weather gear and mushing equipment. Every moment we weren’t at work we spent in the company of our huskies.

We forged the life we longed for, one spent almost entirely outdoors and that moved with the rhythm of the seasons—a simple life, but far from easy. In spring, we tilled the soil and sowed a garden, as well as felled trees, cut the logs into rounds, and stacked the lumber to feed our woodstove when the weather turned cold. In summer we turned to the sea, setting gillnets to snare salmon, stocking chest freezers full with the silver slabs that we and the dogs dined on as our major source of protein. Fall was spent hunting, harvesting our vegetable crops, and picking berries and boletes, followed by days of jarring, jamming, and storing away as much of the wild edibles as we could fit into our larder and whatever space remained in the freezers.

Winter was the season we lived for most though. Despite subsisting in a land where nights are so long the darkness lasts much of the day, we relished the intimacy that developed through months of traveling with our dog teams, more often from sunset to sunrise than the other way around (due to maintaining day jobs to support our dog habit). Whether in the slanted light of day, or under every phase of the moon and the enormous star-crowded skies of the evening, we journeyed hundreds—sometimes thousands of miles—each year with our canine companions, exploring the backcountry that makes up the bulk of Alaska.

Together, we stared out over snow-blanketed mountains, their blue-hued ridges fading lighter the further each fold of the landscape stretched to the horizon, then traveled the range from end to end. In the lowland valleys between them, we snaked along the serpentine curves of icy rivers and traversed seemingly endless expanses of frozen lakes and buried muskegs. Our faces, confettied in the cold, white currency of the season, hid the smiles beneath.

Whenever weary, we’d hunker down in the silent stillness and shelter provided within forests of dense spruce, basking for a few hours in the crackle and orange glow of a makeshift campfire before eventually curling up with the dogs, sleeping together for warmth and comfort.

Despite the perpetually inhospitable cold and the miles that separated us from more civilized society, in the hours and days of self-imposed isolation where we shared space only with each other and our dogs, we felt like we were in the best place we’d ever been or would be. In these far-flung locales where the only audible utterances of life were the soft panting of husky breath and the voices in our own heads, we were in our element. We felt happiness, experienced what it meant to us to be alive, and we found what we had come so far north searching for: our true selves.

This doesn’t mean our lives as mushers were always bliss. All dog owners have their fair share of problems, and at times our struggles seemed compounded fortyfold. It’s understandable that most folks tend to stay tight-lipped about the minor calamities and major catastrophes that constantly occur. Sure, tales are legion of all the things that can go wrong during the Iditarod, but few and far between are all the sordid stories that begin to accumulate from a life shared with forty dogs the other fifty-one weeks of the year.

Still, I believe it is the misfortunes of our dog-filled lives that define us, the misadventures we remember most vividly, and the mishaps that become the funniest stories to share with others. This book will divulge these embarrassing details, which at the time we wished had never happened but now are cherished and fondly retold for their humor, or significance, or for truths they reveal.

The driving force of sharing these stories is to give readers a glimpse of what it’s like to truly live a half-feral Alaskan lifestyle as we have and still do, so they can vicariously experience and comprehend the magnitude of responsibility, and all the joy, pain, and myriad other emotions that come from the fabric of a life threaded through and through by the fur of forty dogs.

We don’t own our dogs; they are a part of us, our lives inextricably intertwined. For those who spend more time around people than animals, this is a tough concept to comprehend. Looking at a yard full of high-strung huskies, most outsiders to our world don’t see the individuals, distinctly dissimilar from each other. To most folks, they’re merely different sized and colored canines. They don’t see what we see. They don’t understand the unique personalities or our shared histories with each one. But this is a chance to see it all.

This isn’t just a rare opportunity to experience remote areas of Alaska without having to rough it, to know white-knuckle excitement without ever leaving the living room, and to briefly be part of the fraternity of the fur-clad without feeling the sting of Arctic air or ever fearing frostbite. More than that, these stories detail the dramatic communion between humans and canines, and in a way that is honest, authentic, and at times raw to the bone.

Through my words, I want people to see the puppy we caught at birth, seconds old, still wet and wriggling, but quickly growing within weeks to yip and yap to get us to play longer no matter how much frolicking we had already done. To witness the scared pup shivering in the corner of the sterile chain-link stall at the animal shelter, that prior to adoption was too afraid to even make eye contact with us, much less believe we could be the bearer of a new lease on life. To learn how awkward and gangly they all were once, tripping over their own paws the first time we harnessed them up and ran them in a team. To experience seeing the dogs that went on to excel at what we trained them to do and exceeded our expectations when their own primitive instincts and prowess for the outdoors took over.

With forty dogs comes forty deaths. You can’t have the yin without the yang. In the following pages, readers will also come to understand you don’t just pay heavy emotional dues; you take out a second mortgage on your heart. To feel the concern when the dogs’ internal fires begin to burn down, their muzzles turn gray in retirement, and muscles that once bulged and rippled are replaced with a stiffness so painful we have to lift the dogs from their cushy beds and carry them outside to relieve themselves. To undergo the anguish and heartbreak that comes from standing by helplessly as a companion you’ve known, and seen, and cared for everyday for a lifetime finally bears the breadth of elsewhere. To not only lose that friend, but have them die in your arms while you look into their eyes and unabashedly whisper in their ear how much they meant.

This book is an invitation to understand the essence of life with forty dogs in its entirety, and through that comprehension to truly appreciate what we see every day, and never take for granted how special it is. This is my goal, my purpose, my need—to share the intrinsic nature and indispensable quality that determines each dog and defines their unique character and personality. Not everyone can sacrifice their spare time, salaries, and sanity to get to know so many characters—from the well-mannered to the wily—but this book will reveal the endless adventures and misadventures that come to those, like us, who have made a life-changing canine commitment.