Читать книгу Life with Forty Dogs - Joseph Robertia - Страница 8

A Rogues’ Gallery

No more stories at the pound,” Cole pleaded, as I walked in cradling the newest addition to the kennel, one of several in recent months to join our ranks after being abandoned or surrendered at the local animal shelter.

My wife’s statement came partially in jest, since I always consulted her by phone beforehand, but like me, she found it difficult if not impossible to say “no” to a dog once we had actually experienced face-to-face contact. The animal’s anonymity dissolved, no longer a static mugshot on a computer screen or newspaper ad with the words “For Adoption” over its picture. Peering into the eyes of a hopeful inmate at the pound—in fur and flesh—made them more real, made their plight more painful to ignore, made their prospect for living or dying an at-hand decision. In these moments, disregarding the opportunity to save a dog was inconceivable. “We’re running out of room,” Cole said.

She wasn’t wrong. At the time we didn’t even own our home or property. We were living on half an acre of land, renting a cabin with the same interior square footage and charm of a small submarine. In that one-room residence existed all our worldly possessions: a frameless futon mattress that served as the bed; a folding card table with two metal chairs for eating dinner and hosting company; a twelve-inch television that picked up (if you squinted) one channel; one pot, one pan, one teakettle, two sets of silverware, and a box with all our clothes.

In addition, we already allowed half a dozen dogs to live inside with us, including Ping and Pong—two others who originated from the pound a few weeks earlier. While working on a story about pet adoptions for the local newspaper, I spied the tiny pup we would later name Ping at the back of one of the sterile runs made of chain-link and concrete. Fuzzy, gray, and seemingly oblivious to the mere days she had left to live if not adopted, I felt my heart not so much melt as turn gooey with empathetic emotions. Her appearance also reminded me—almost exactly—of Goliath, a dog we had acquired a few months earlier, but whose cookie-sweet personality had won me over.

The pup we later named Ping stares longingly out of her cage at the Kenai Animal Shelter. We adopted her and her mother, whom we named Pong, the day after this picture was taken.

At the close of the workday I sped home to plead my case to Cole. She capitulated, but when I returned to the pound the next morning the tiny pup now snuggled with a full-grown but otherwise identical version of itself, which to my dismay I found out was its mother.

“Yesterday, we had them separated briefly for cleaning, but they came in together,” said the shelter manager, a lanky, mustached man with a 1,000-yard stare I assume he developed from the same post-traumatic stress that causes it in soldiers—seeing too much death.

“They’re not a package deal, but it’d be great if they went together,” he added.

I stood dumbfounded, time pooling in the present as my mind worked through the decision it now had to make. I hadn’t come for two dogs, nor did I desire to leave with two, but how could I live with myself if I only took home this pup, severed the bond between it and the only creature that unconditionally loved it till that point, and potentially doomed the mother to death by lethal injection should she hit the end of her allotted time span for adoption?

I knew I couldn’t, and by the gleam in the shelter manager’s eye, I think he knew it too. I called Cole to briefly explain these new circumstances.

“Well, saving the pup and killing the mom isn’t my definition of a rescue,” she said.

With that approval, not only did Ping come home, so did her mother, whom we named Pong.

Weeks later, when I returned to the pound for a follow-up story, I distinctly felt like a mark whose emotions the shelter manager knew could be played like a fish on the end of a line.

“Well, while you’re here, take a look at this one. She may be a good fit for your program,” he said, his arm on my shoulder, steering me to my future furry acquisition.

This time, the dog cowering at the back of the run seemed much more aware of the severity of its situation. I’ve seen circus elephants less sad than this pitiful pup. Its pelage was a traditional black-and-white Siberian husky pattern and mask, crisp and contrasting, but without the big-dog build. Instead, the pup had a more slender frame, slight stature, and a sleek rather than furry coat. Based on its small size and still-present milk teeth, it appeared around four months old.

“So, what’s its backstory,” I asked the shelter manager, trying to sound more indifferent than I felt.

“It’s a female; came in overnight. We found her in the after-hours drop-off cages with five littermates, but the others were so feral and frightened, there was no way to put them up for adoption so I put them down,” he said as casually as if asking how I take my coffee.

“There was a note, too. Left by a musher, that’s why I thought it might be a good fit for you. Lemme see if I can find it,” he said, and departed briefly. When he returned he handed me a wrinkled piece of loose leaf on which was scrawled the crude handwriting of either a near-illiterate person or a young child. The sparsely punctuated sentences read, “All of them are sled dogs very loving dogs need to be trained … very smart good sled dogs … please do not put down! Will be good for musher.”

The plea moved me, deep to the marrow of my bones. Cole seemed equally entangled in emotion when I brought the dog home, because despite her vow that this should be the last pound pup, her sternness quickly melted away when I passed the newcomer over and the cute critter softly licked her chin. Cole didn’t say anything, but as she ran her fingers through the pup’s coat, I saw the intrinsic calmness that comes from petting a dog engross her. I knew we were in agreement that I had made the right decision.

“So what’s this one’s name?” she inquired after a few minutes.

“I was thinking ‘Six,’” I said. It seemed appropriate for her, but also to somberly remember her five siblings who weren’t so fortunate.

I think the reason saving Six was so important to me, and all the dogs that came afterward, stemmed from a childhood experience that was out of my hands. I was probably seven years old at the time, living with my mom and a stepdad, a real hard-ass, at least with me. Neither of them was ever really “doggy,” but they made an attempt to meet my needs for having a canine companion by bringing home a mutt from the pound.

They picked it; I wasn’t consulted at all, resulting in one of my first life lessons: beggars can’t be choosers. But still, I marveled at the sight of this, my own dog. He was colored like an old penny, and bore all his proportions perfectly out of whack. He had an elongated torso and stubby little legs. His head was big, and his coat short. He looked like a cross between a Welsh corgi and an Irish setter or Labrador.

I fell in love immediately.

We called him Corky, although I can’t remember if he came with that name or one of us picked it for him. Despite how friendly he acted with every member of the family, and how smitten I was with him, my parents had a firm no-dogs-in-the-house policy. Relegated to the backyard, Corky became bored, and rightly so, since I still spent most of my days at school. He tunneled relentlessly, not only making the rear lawn an unsightly mess, which my parents weren’t keen on, but when he dug all the way under the fence to freedom, he’d go on the lam for extended periods, something else which they frowned on.

After a few weeks or so they had a change of heart about keeping Corky. Just outside my bedroom door, they spoke in voices loud enough for me to hear about their decision, but when the step-douche came in, for some reason, even at that young age, I needed him to say it to my face.

“Could you hear our conversation?” he asked.

“No,” I lied, knowing he knew I had.

“We’ve decided to take Corky back to the pound. You’re just not showing enough responsibility,” he said, blaming me, like the classic cliché of the bad carpenter who blames his tools. I showed as much responsibility as I had been taught, but—then and now—I don’t think the decision had anything to do with me.

“Oh,” I said, emotionally crushed, but refusing to give the man who hurt me then—and my mom thirty-five years later with his infidelities—even one tear. My first courage, perhaps.

He peered at me, expressionless, for a few seconds, then walked out without saying another word. The next morning Corky was gone from my life, but lingered in my memories, haunting me for years.

I felt guilt, initially questioning if I should or could have done more to keep him, but as I grew older, it was not knowing what had happened to Corky and the helplessness of it all that bothered me. In all likelihood, he was euthanized for failing in a second home; I hoped that wasn’t the case, but had no way of finding out his fate for certain. I was a kid; they were the adults. They made all the decisions, including that one, because they lacked the commitment to honor the covenant of care between themselves and the canine they agreed to adopt. But as an adult, I swore to myself if I ever got another chance to save a dog, I would do my best to do better than they did.

…

Over the next few years—after scrimping enough to purchase our own parcel of raw land—we accumulated so many rescues, runts, and rejects from other kennels, it became a defining theme for our operation. As a result, we settled on “Rogues Gallery Kennel” for the formal appellation of the motley crew we acquired, all of which seemed to come to us through serendipity more than conscious selection.

Next came two males from Salcha, a rural mosquito-riddled area roughly forty miles south of Fairbanks. The story of them joining the kennel began after we received an urgent call for help from the neighbor of Martina Delp, a thirty-three-year-old fellow dog rescuer from those parts. Delp, a proudly independent woman who served in the Alaska Air National Guard, lived alone with the exception of her thirty-seven sled dogs—all rescues from the local animal shelters—along with horses, a cat, and an exotic lizard.

After she didn’t show up for work one day, friends alerted authorities who checked on her welfare and were greeted with a grisly sight. They found Delp’s lifeless body, and the cause of her death—as these responders pieced together from the scene of her repose—a tree she had been chain-sawing clipped a power line as it fell. The live wire instantly electrocuted her.

Lynx and I enjoying a typical day in our life shared with forty dogs. What kid wouldn’t want to grow up like this?

Other than exchanging a few rescue related e-mails with Delp, we didn’t know her at all, but we could ascertain—with absolute certainty—that thirty-seven dogs were a lot to find homes for quickly in even the best case situation, which this wasn’t. Delp’s family, who lived in the Lower 48 and Europe, were unable to accept responsibility for so many dogs. Also, Delp wasn’t a professional racer, so her name didn’t bring in the usual folks, eager to take home a dog as a connection to a famous person, glomming on to a bit of their limelight. Furthermore, these were dogs that had already been given up on once, considered damaged goods of a sort by most, so we knew from our own experiences that people would not be beating down the door to take them home.

Dogs aren’t the only ones that run in packs, though. So, too, do dog rescuers. We linked up with a few others who homed huskies in our area and made the ten-hour drive north in a convoy of pickups carrying crates we knew would be filled with dogs on the return trip home.

We arrived near the end of the day. Despite it being late evening, it was mid-May, so the sun still hovered above the horizon, an orange ball giving off plenty of light and warmth. We cut to where the dogs were located in the backyard, ambling through a wild bouquet of blooming lupine coming into full violet-petaled pageantry. Not even a kiss of a breeze presented itself and the forest beyond the dog yard was briefly—until the dogs barking at our presence drowned out the sounds—alive with the whistles and warbles of chickadees. It would have been a pleasant day by Alaska standards, had we not been there to peruse the pets a dead woman left behind.

We found the experience painful but educational. We had never considered what would happen to our own dogs should we meet an untimely death. We assumed family members would come forward to take home what they could, but we had never made these plans formally, or even more important, legally. Fortunately for Delp’s dogs, she showed foresight and filed a last will and testament detailing her wishes for her brood, but she had taken all knowledge of who was who to the grave with her. Her dogs’ names, their ages and physical descriptions, and their medical histories were all unknown.

All the dogs looked healthy and well cared for, and they displayed the usual array of personalities. Some were overtly gregarious and completely overjoyed at meeting newcomers, wagging their tails so excitedly, they whipped themselves right off their own doghouses. Others were so timid that they refused any form of hand or eye contact and trembled in terror inside their house whenever we stepped near.

“Which ones should we take,” Cole asked, over the drone of biting insects.

On the drive up we had agreed on two as the maximum we could financially afford to add to our kennel at that time. It seemed like so few, but a harsh reality of rescuing dogs and one that becomes a mantra for anyone who does it for any length of time is: you can’t save them all.

“I think we should go for the ones least likely to find homes with anyone else,” I said.

“Well, that rules out these guys,” Cole said, gesturing with her hands in Vanna White–style over a pen of puppies roughhousing and chewing each other’s ears in the elation of us standing so close.

We knew they’d be the first to go so we scanned the dog yard, staring past those literally jumping with joy, to essentially look for omega animals: any gimps, cripples, misfits, or weirdos. In the back corner of the kennel we found a likely prospect—an ancient, mole-dark male with a build as bizarre as a Salvador Dali painting. He had a head like a boar and a barrel chest to match, but his hips and stubby hind legs seemed half the size they should be.

“He looks like a weight lifter who does too much upper body, but totally neglects working out from the waist down,” I joked.

“Looks more like the Tasmanian devil from the old Looney Tunes cartoons to me,” Cole said.

The circle where he was tethered looked like a Word War I trench. There were long deep ruts where he clearly dug for many hours a day. There were a couple of huge, heavy equipment tires in his spot too, possibly to slow down his digging or divert him from the activity, but from the jagged rubber chunks all around the circumference, it was plain to see he chewed on them extensively. The filthy-looking animal also paced feverishly with his food bowl clamped in his jaws, staring more through us than at us. All of these behaviors added up to a dog with obsessive-compulsive tendencies. As if that weren’t enough, we deduced after slapping mosquitoes next to his head without him taking notice, he was also completely deaf.

“I’d say he’s a keeper,” Cole quipped.

“Indeed,” I concurred dryly, and with that, the dog joined our ranks and was from then on dubbed “Old Man.”

“So who else?” Cole asked.

This time, our eyes searched past the messy mounds of freshly dug soil to a spot that barely looked like a dog lived there at all. Tall grass grew in the circle where he was tethered, indicating a cowardly creature that spent most of its time hiding in its house. The dog cowering at the back looked a lot like a coyote and exhibited a similar disposition: wanting to avoid human contact at all costs. Despite our best efforts to coax him out of his fear-induced catatonia, he wanted nothing to do with us. We were forced to manually, hand-over-hand, reel his chain in to bring him near. Like an anchor, he had to be dragged every inch of the way, his limbs locked up tight in resistance, as he was petrified stiff with fright.

“Looks like we found another addition,” I said.

“At least he’s younger than the other one,” Cole said, since the dog appeared to be around two years old. This panic-stricken pup we named Rolo, due to his pale, caramel-colored coat. Our friends who drove up with us also took home seven dogs between the three of them. In the end, not all of Delp’s dogs were able to find homes, but most of them did through the efforts of kindhearted people.

The nobility of these selfless deeds should not be understated. The bearers of bleeding hearts acknowledge it as both a blessing and a burden. Those who rescue dogs know an occupational hazard of compassion is that you eventually begin to deteriorate, deep within yourself, from seeing so much animal suffering firsthand.

Sure, there is joy and satisfaction from liberating a dog from an acutely awful situation, but those feelings are short-lived. Replaced by the dread of knowing there will be others, or worse still, the ones you can’t save. There just isn’t enough time, enough money, enough room, to save every dog in a bad way, which is why 2.7 million animals are euthanized in the United States annually.… I repeat, 2.7 million killed, each and every year, at the taxpayers’ expense.

This number weighs on me, my conscience and my soul, till I feel like a dead man under six feet of soil. I dwell on this loss of dog life to the point I can’t sleep at night, and when I do I have nightmares. My days are also filled with depression, which turns to cynicism and judgment, not just of those causing the suffering and their capacity to be so cruel and callous, but also of those who turn a blind eye to the hurt and dog deaths. If only people acted altruistically, if only those who aren’t providing for dogs properly or adopting those without homes could be moved to act, if only more people would simply care. If only …

Then, just as my thought pattern of how humans could be so inhumane reaches near-obsessive proportions, others will come forward—as with adopting Delp’s dogs—and show they too care. Suddenly, there is someone else who understands sacrifices—like eating chips and salsa for dinner for weeks to afford premium-grade kibble—because they have also surrendered similar staples to provide for a dog in need.

It is then that I realize Cole and I are not the only ones who appreciate the underappreciated. We have kindred spirits—few and far between, but still out there—and knowing that these people exist, and are genuinely doing their parts to help animals, gives me the strength to go on saving lives.

…

Next to join our mosaic of mutts was Ghost, another female from our local animal shelter. She became permanent entirely by accident. I had been at the pound for a story when I spotted the gorgeous girl pacing in one of the runs. She had a short coat, white as the full moon, the only exception being her mauve-colored nose, the lightest of light blue eyes, and the black stencil that bordered them and her lips. Images of her exquisite appearance still echoed in my mind later that day when I visited our veterinarian with one of our other dogs, and I involuntarily described her during the appointment.

“I know someone who is looking to get a pet dog, and she sounds like a perfect fit for this person,” he said.

Knowing time is of the essence when it comes to dogs on death row, and with the prospects of a home lined up, I shot back to the pound immediately. Getting there just before closing, I filled out the paperwork, forked over the adoption fee, and took the dog home. It was too late that day to make it back to the veterinary clinic before it closed, but I drove there the next day with the dog riding shotgun.

To my dismay, the veterinarian told me he had informed his friend of my find, but she had already made a doggy discovery of her own. It was premature of me to have adopted the dog, so I had no one to blame, just a new mouth to feed. We named her Ghost, partially due to her all-white color and partially due to the circumstances of her third-party adoption—that like an apparition—briefly manifested then disappeared.

Rowdy and all-white Ghost, another dog we adopted from the pound, lead a team around an ice-covered lake. Ghost excelled at leading the chase team.

Coolwhip followed a few weeks later, again from the shelter, but this time they called us. During past adoptions, I had mentioned in passing we already had a dog who suffered from an unusual medical condition, technically known as congenital laryngeal paralysis, informally known in Alaska as “wheezer” disease.

Pups with this inherited condition are born with a dysfunction in the nerves that control their larynx. Rather than moving normally, opening the airway during breathing, and closing to prevent choking on food and water, the throat muscles of a wheezer remain fixed in place.

In severe cases, nursing pups die when they are just days old, either from suffocation or by drowning from inhaling their mother’s milk. In milder cases, pups survive and grow but have a raspy, wheezing sound to their breathing, and when playing or exercising will collapse in a gagging fit, their tongue and gums turning blue from lack of oxygen.

We had taken our other afflicted dog—Shagoo, given to us by another musher who couldn’t afford to have her throat fixed—to the vet for the best corrective surgery that could be done at the time, at a cost of roughly $2,000 dollars. We couldn’t afford it either, but paid the bill through the magic of maxing out credit cards. She came though the procedure breathing healthily enough to live life as a normal pet dog, but not quite capable enough to contend with the cardiovascular challenges of sled-dog training and competition.

“I figured since you had experience with this condition, you might be able to help this one too. Her owners brought her in after getting the wheezer diagnosis. They said there was no way they could afford to fix her,” explained the shelter manager.

The dog he was referring to was an attractive young husky, a female, with a white coat splashed with numerous gray blotches and freckles on her muzzle, but based on her expression, she appeared to be suffering from mild mental retardation as much as impaired breathing. At all times a pink tongue dangled sideways from a big, open-mouth grin and her eyes, bright and blue as two robin eggs, were fixed wide open and goggled about. She seemed dumbstruck, as if having just seen the most amazing thing in her life, even when nothing out of the ordinary was happening.

“Why does she have a look like this is the greatest day of her life?” I asked.

“Maybe because it is,” said the shelter manager, before walking away to leave me with what at this point was becoming an all too familiar decision-making process. He was clearly savvier than I first suspected. How had he missed an obvious calling to hawk used cars, I wondered.

Once home, I realized my initial psychological profile of the pup, which we named Coolwhip, was not that far off the mark. Inexplicably, she sometimes spent half an hour kangarooing in place on her hind legs and always with her tongue perpetually flapping in the breeze. Her hyperactivity, even as huskies go, exceeded normal levels. She embodied an exotic exuberance for life, like a zoo monkey that revels in throwing feces at spectators. She also belied the breezy being of a total free spirit, which is dog-owner-speak for a pup that lives by its own rules, not yours. Coolwhip listened selectively, responding to what she clearly perceived as verbal “suggestions” less than half the time, particularly when it came to being recalled when off leash.

When we brought her to the veterinarian for her initial post-adoption checkup, X-rays revealed in addition to her wheezer disorder, Coolwhip suffered from a separate condition known as megaesophagus, which is not as megacool as it sounds. Basically, the pipe used for gulping down food was oversized and too large to actually swallow food, even if her throat muscles worked properly, which they didn’t. As a result, for the first six months of her life with us, we had to feed her while she stood upright, balancing on her hind legs, so gravity could transport the food downward to her stomach. Fortunately, as Coolwhip got older, she outgrew the engorged esophagus, but she remained a wheezer.

Being devoted to not just providing the best quality of life we can for our animals year-round, but also believing in doing what we can to contribute to the continually growing body of scientific knowledge about sled dogs, we volunteered Coolwhip for a study involving an experimental procedure. Not only would veterinarians—one flying in from Australia and the other from Germany—attempt to correct her wheezer condition, but taking part in the study allowed us to treat her at no cost.

Knowing Coolwhip was a wild child, for weeks before the surgery we kept her in the house in an effort to calm her down so she didn’t hurt herself during her post-surgery recuperation. Everything had been going swimmingly until the night before her surgery, when the master of disaster made a mad dash.

Cole and I were in the kitchen making an evening meal when one of our house dogs, keen to paw the handle of the front door to let himself out, did so on this occasion. Without hesitation, Coolwhip launched herself off the couch, gleefully galloped out the entrance, and kept on going into the darkness of night as we ruefully looked on.

“Now what?” I asked rhetorically.

“We have to find her,” said Cole. “The vets are only here this weekend. That’s it. There’s no way to reschedule.”

I knew she was right, so begrudgingly and without dinner, we suited up in our coats, boots, and headlamps and began what would be a bushwhacking search through the spruce stands that surrounded our home. Hours later, just past midnight, we gave up. We never got a hand on Coolwhip, but came tauntingly close a few times in what was for her surely a spectacular game of hide-and-seek. Hearing her loud, heavy breathing in the woods whenever she paused for air, we could zero in on her location, but by the time we thrashed through willow thickets and over downed deadfall, she would have caught her breath and tore out again. This happened dozens of times during the search; it was like playing a game of Olly-olly-oxen-free with an obscene caller.

We adopted from the pound Coolwhip, a hyperactive husky with a dismal diagnosis. With surgery, she overcame her condition, but this wild child’s tongue flapping in the breeze was incurable.

The next morning we woke at 5:00 A.M. and after seeing no signs of Coolwhip we stuck to our original plan, which entailed running three teams of dogs before making the three-hour drive to Anchorage, since we knew the kennel would be shut down from training while we endured the city for a few days for post-operation monitoring of Coolwhip … should she return.

The deafening ruckus the dogs make during hookup can be heard miles away and is often enough to draw in even the most distant run-aways, and we hoped Coolwhip wouldn’t be the exception. Our plan worked, but not when we needed it to. Just as we launched from the yard, with no way to stop the two twelve-dog freight trains for longer than a few seconds, Coolwhip sprouted from a thick copse of cottonwoods in front of the lead team.

Ecstatic at the idea of being chased once again, she took off down the opposite trail we were hoping to take, and our teams followed. This alternate route was too narrow for turning around and added another half hour to the run, which meant, even if we could miraculously get our hands on Coolwhip, we would surely be late to the surgery.

In a stroke of luck, Coowhip exhausted herself over the course of the training run, the result of intermittently leaping from the woods to briefly lope alongside us until out of oxygen, at which point she’d disappear back into the brush to suck wind till she caught her breath. When we rolled back into the yard, she stumbled in with us, and collapsed in utter exhaustion. Cole and I, almost in unison, set our brakes and then pounced on her.

Rather than relief, a wave of nausea overtook us. Coolwhip reeked from an all too familiar odor. Living next door to several commercial salmon fishermen, they will often—illegally and unethically—dump flounder, Irish lords, and any other by-catch that ends up in their nets, in a big pile at the outer edge of their property, right on the line between us and them.

Any loose dogs get chummed to the stench, to do what is perhaps the most mysterious of all their behavior: rolling around in the rotten pile and seemingly relishing the act of doing so. The funk Coolwhip came home with ranked somewhere between day-old road-kill and unwashed butthole. We knew it would constitute a sacrilege to operating-room sterility to arrive for a preplanned and majorly invasive surgical procedure with her coat so thoroughly contaminated.

We gave her not one, but two baths, extra heavy on the suds, and still there lingered a slightly noxious, breath-of-vulture-bouquet, but at this point we were so late for the procedure, there was nothing more we could attempt. We called the veterinarians, plead our sob story, and assured them we would be there as soon as we could.

As it turned out, other than the doctors’ eyes watering up a bit from Coolwhip tainting the breathable air in the operating room, the surgery was a success. Coolwhip healed quickly over the next few weeks, and her breathing sounded almost indistinguishable from any other dog. Within months we were able to work her into harness and eventually she trained side by side with the best dogs in our kennel, and for many years afterward.

From a clumsy, breath-sputtering, inferior specimen, Coolwhip changed. It took a trained eye to see the subtleties of the strength embodied in her, much like how the average person can’t detect how soft and flabby a caged lion looks compared to their wild counterparts who are more buff and bulging with muscles from chasing down dinner still on the hoof. Post-surgery, from the excessive exercise (that still never seemed like enough for Coolwhip), her physique developed a sculpted appearance, her chassis became chiseled, the muscles under her fur felt stony hard to the touch. Her whole demeanor evolved as well, once she realized running in harness with a pack was the perfect place to get her runner’s high. She took to her position in the team with pleasure. We hadn’t so much tamed her restless spirit as shifted it to our advantage.

As a pet parent, seeing Coolwhip’s total transformation served as a testimonial for not giving up after even the most dismal diagnoses. The only analogy I can make would be seeing a small child afflicted with chronic asthma beat their condition and go from barely able to play sports to attaining a first-string position on the varsity team. It’s more than joy, or pride, or satisfaction. It was a feeling of fulfillment for seeing something through to the end that in the beginning seemed so irreversible and impossible, but became realized, imaginable, and—hopefully to others with hopeless cases—inspirational.

…

For the next few months I avoided the animal shelter, knowing our passion for saving pets far exceeded our income, but heartless human acts aren’t contained to one location. Two more dogs, brothers in fact, became incorporated with our doggy conglomeration after their original owner gave up on them and all the dogs in his kennel. He just walked away and abandoned them. I’d love to say this kind of thing isn’t common in Alaska, but a sad reality is it happens every few years. Caring for a kennel requires a tremendous dedication of time, energy, and financial resources, and a lot of people leap into owning or breeding lots of dogs before they have thoroughly researched all the hard work the commitment will entail. Some quickly find themselves in over their heads, and will try to adopt out a few dogs. Others, of less conscience, will cull their numbers or bring them to the pound. And then those with no scruples will abandon their kennel, leaving the dogs to either starve to death or fend for themselves.

It was this latter type of human (and I use the word generously in this case) that brought the brothers into our lives. Several mushers with moral fiber better than his banded together to take in as many of the abandoned dogs as they could. Some had gone weeks without food and clean water and were in such a severe state of emaciation, euthanasia was deemed the most humane course of action. Other neglectees reverted back to a more feral state, and acted dangerously aggressive to those there to help. Several of these dogs were also put down.

Perhaps saddest of all, a litter of puppies had been born in the interim. Already a couple months old and with no human contact, they had developed hair-triggers. Scared out of their wits by two-legged intruders to their world, these whelps sprinted at such breakneck speeds they couldn’t be caught by hand. Instead, landing nets, typically used for securing salmon, were required to capture the panic-stricken pups. Like the older dogs, some were deemed too feral to risk rehabilitating, but three little pups that curled into fetal balls from fear rather than attempting to snap and bite were granted the gift of their lives.

A rescuer who knew we had a track record of taking on huskies with tough or troubled backgrounds called, asking if we could take them. One pup, a coffee-colored female, was already spoken for by a young woman who assisted in the rescue, leaving two males. We agreed, sight unseen, to take them.

They arrived a few hours later, both with sunken brown eyes and thick matted coats as black and dirty as potting soil. The smaller one Cole named Boo—a nickname she called her little brother growing up. The other pup, slightly larger and with one floppy ear, I named Klaus—for no other reason than I liked the ring of the Germanic word.

After weeks of trust building, both came out of their shells, but entirely different personalities emerged. Boo exhibited affection and an eagerness to please. Off leash he tended to move in tandem with me, much like dogs that have gone through obedience class and stick to their owner’s calf, step for step. He picked up fetch quickly and ran on such high octane that he could spend an hour sprinting without growing weary of it. Once he started training in harness with the rest of the kennel, he displayed a total lack of fatigue. His pure, gut-driven power quickly led to a permanent promotion running with the core race dogs.

Klaus also warmed into being very soft-hearted and friendly, but when off leash would spend a lot more time interacting with other dogs than us. He also enjoyed pulling a sled, but wasn’t gifted with the same fitness and stamina as Boo. He never quit or ran with a slack line, but he fatigued earlier than the other dogs, struggled to keep up, and his body language at the end of a run epitomized a dog totally out of gas. We kept conditioning him for several years, but when it seemed he was just as happy spending time on the couch, we decided to retire him from running and gave him to Cole’s mom and dad. He now spends his days in Massachusetts where he roughhouses with their other dog, a German shepherd, who like Klaus has a zero-tolerance policy for squirrels in their yard.

One of our greatest successes with a dog adopted from the local animal shelter became apparent when the gutsy gal made it the furthest, literally and figuratively. At this point, when working on a story at the pound, I dropped all pretenses of leaving without a dog.

“What’ve you got for me this time?” I asked the shelter manager upon arriving.

“Funny you should ask,” he said with a sly smile, and led me to the back where a small female pup suspiciously eyed me at a safe distance from the front of the cage.

Wary and untrusting at first, my kissy noises and fingers waggling through the chain-link proved too much for her to resist. She leaned in broadside and let me scratch on her back. Her coat was thick and black with the exception of a white star on her chest, white toe tips, and a white wisp on her chin. Without protest I adopted her and unlike some pound spooks, this pup displayed an affectionate personality from the second she hopped in the cab of my pickup. She cuddled in my lap and nuzzled my beard the whole drive home.

This addition we named Arrow, like the dog in the Harry Nilsson song “Me and My Arrow.” I also secretly hoped she would one day fly straight and true down the trail for us, and a few years later—after growing into a strong, but lean and lanky-legged runner—she did.

Cole signed up for the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest, known as the “Toughest Sled Dog Race in the World,” an annual run between White-horse, Yukon Territory to Fairbanks, Alaska. It traverses some of the most pristine and last true wilderness areas in North America, following late 1800s Klondike gold rush routes and historic sled-dog-delivered mail trails. Teams must be self-reliant while navigating as much as 200-miles between some checkpoints, where challenges routinely include temperatures of forty below, savage winds smiting in excess of 100 miles per hour, soul-crushingly steep mountain ascents and descents, lonely and desolate labyrinths of winding frozen rivers and creeks, and all during a time of winter when nights are seventeen hours long.

Prior to this race, all the dogs had put in thousands of miles of rigorous training and conditioning, and Cole had won a few and done well in several 200- and 300-mile races around the state. However, all of these previous events had twelve-dog maximums, and the Quest allowed up to fourteen dogs. Cole knew starting with less than the required amount just meant more work for the other dogs on the team, so to have a full complement of fourteen she would need to take some unproven athletes. She decided on a yearling, Kawlijah, that had always been outstanding despite his young age, and Arrow, who had never raced before.

It was a tall task, but Arrow rose to the challenge. At every checkpoint, I’d be anxiously waiting, my bottom teeth raking my upper lip raw, fully expecting Cole to drop Arrow from fatigue, but each time she didn’t I’d be pleasantly disappointed. To be honest, Arrow did appear bone-deep tired upon arrival, but after lapping up a hot wet meal, and getting a few hours’ rest, she would leave with pep in her step.

In the end, Cole and the team finished twelfth out of twenty-nine teams that started the race, Arrow still there with her, still pulling, still contributing to the whole, and that was a truly noteworthy accomplishment. She had hauled a heavy load for 1,000 miles, something many dogs have tried, but not as many have succeeded at, and some that have succumbed to injury, illness, or exhaustion were dogs specifically bred for the task by some of the most recognizable names in the sport of mushing.

Sure, Arrow wasn’t on a first-place team, but she wasn’t on the last-place team either. Even if she had been, though, wouldn’t it still have been an amazing feat? To put it in human terms, isn’t the last person to cross the finish at the Boston Marathon or the Ironman World Championship triathlon still succeeding at an endeavor few people could achieve even if they dared try?

To me, it’s not that pound dogs don’t have worth, or to be more specific, inherent worth as sled dogs, it’s just that to succeed with them you have to be open to finding their very individualized skill sets, and that’s what we did with all of our rescues.

Pong, while she can’t sustain sprint speeds for very long, can break trail at slightly slower speeds for hours. Ping’s digestive processes move at a glacial pace, so much so that I think she could put on a few pounds from just a whiff of the food bucket, and this proved valuable when racing in deep-minus temperatures when dogs with higher metabolisms shiver off too much weight. Six, while small, can remember any trail after having only run it once, which I relied on whenever I grew disoriented or got lost from time to time. Rolo developed into an amazing gee-haw leader, turning left or right with precision whenever we gave the commands, which also helped all the dogs in line behind him learn the meaning of these words and the importance of listening to the musher. Ghost excelled at leading of a different sort, running at the front of a team chasing another, which is also useful for not burning out gee-haw leaders. Coolwhip’s character trait of perpetually acting over-caffeinated made her invaluable as a cheerleader, where an always-barking dog late in a run can, and does, spread enthusiasm to the others. And Old Man, well, he was a bit too decrepit to ever contribute much to the team, but he always made me smile when I came out to feed the yard and saw him excitedly carrying around his food bowl, and that was enough to earn his keep.

There is elegance to seeing any dog team coalesce, and even more so when pound dogs are involved. People expect them to fail, or at the very least not succeed. Working through and watching them overcome this stigma is a reward far beyond bragging rights, prize money, or trophies for the mantle.

To me the process mirrors a mathematician working through a complex equation, sorting the fractions and getting the decimals in the right place, all the way to its end. It’s not the simple things you stumble on, like fitting all dogs with the correct size harness and booties, although there are nuances to these tasks and satisfaction as well in learning who takes what piece of gear. The more exacting process is having the patience to learn their idiosyncrasies, to work through the socialization issues, to overcome their physical deficits, and figure out what role or which position in the team best suits them.

Basically, the formula for success requires—demands, really—truly getting to know the dogs on such a personal level that when you look at them, you begin to look past the flaws and see what their strengths are and create success with what you have, not what you wish you had. You don’t see tools that are disposable; you see teammates that are indispensable and irreplaceable.

Because of all these intricate variables, there are a million ways for it to go wrong and only one way for it to go really right. But when it does, when you begin to feel mastery where once only mayhem existed, and everything finally fits into its proper place, it’s like Einstein’s theory of relativity. It all works and makes sense. And if there is one main difference between sorting out a math computation from a mushing conundrum, it’s that with the latter the sum ends up being far greater than the whole of its parts. Numbers merely change, but dogs transform—from hurt, to healed, to heroic.