Swordwhale Walking: Illustration, stories, photojourneys, videos

You don't have to live in the frozen north to enjoy the fun art of mushing! You can learn about mushing from sleddogcentral, or the Yukon Quest or Iditarod sites. You can pick a team and follow them on facebook, their websites, or the official sites for various races. You can find sleds, scooters, rigs, harness, and other gear at Resha and sleddogcentral. The race sites have teaching tools for classrooms, and pages just for kids. You can find a book, a video or a musher to help you learn how to train your own dog to pull a scooter or mountain bike. You can find lots of videos on youtube of people doing "urban mushing" or "dryland mushing" (dogs of all breeds pulling mushers on skateboards, rollerblades, bikes, scooters or rigs). You can follow that dog with GPS trackers on satellite maps on the race sites, or do a virtual flyover of the Yukon Quest. Have fun exploring! 

It's not Call of the Wild anymore:
If you read that classic of the gold rush days, you met some colorful, caring, and cruel, characters of the North. Modern mushing is different, it's all about the dogs; are they fed the best food? Vet checked? Hydrated? Rested? Happy? Afraid of the speed of the more experienced members of the team: they ride in the basket. Did they get their foot (shoulder, wrist) massage? Does the x-back work better or the H-back? Do they need a blankie? Booties?

Mushing breeds run and pull because that's their nature, a Force of Nature harnessed. A couch husky is not a happy husky (unless he's run 30 miles earlier). Modern mushers use positive reinforcement. Many breeds other than northern dogs also run and pull hard. Tired of going for a drag with Marmaduke or your Dalmations? Harness 'em to some wheels and go along for the ride. But train them first... gently.

Here's some links to great sites to learn more about sled dogs, follow your favorite team, or teach your Pit Bull, Lab or Boxer to mush. Click on the pics of my dogs to go to the sites. The address and site name will appear at bottom left of page.

click on the pic for more on dogsleds

What did you do on 10-10-10? We hitched up our sled dogs in Micheaux State Forest, southcentral PA, and had a blast. The colors are just coming out on the trees, the air has cooled enough to make the dogs madly enthusiastic to run.

"Women Who Run With the Wolves" is a terrific book by Clarrissa Pinkola Estes PhD, this psychologist/storyteller looks at myths, folk tales and faerie tales and shows how they still have meaning. Living with any northern breed, training and running them requires us to step back in time, to think from a different point of view, where dog and human helped each other survive one of the world's toughest environments.

Years ago I met my first sled dogs: on a tiny island off the coast of Virginia, Chincoteague. Heather Hanna has huskies, and has had them since she was eleven, and considered responsible enough to care for a dog. She loved Kipling's "Jungle Books" (as I do, though Bagheera was always my favorite), and wanted a wolf. Of course wolves belong in the wild, not in your living room, so the next step was what dog most looks like a wolf? There are lots of northern breeds and herding breeds that are wolflike, and some, like the Afghan hound, who have many wolf markers in their DNA. Heather decided on Siberian huskies, bred by the Chukchi people (relatives of North American "Eskimos") of SIberia. I admired her dogs, but she spent a lot of time explaining that they weren't for everyone. Unlike a Golden Retriever, they do not come when called, they take a message and get back to you. They laugh at four foot fences and tunnel under taller ones (unless watched or foiled by earthworks like a foot of wire below ground), they laugh at "invisible fences". They'll eat your cat (they can be trained, but don't ever let them alone with a prey item), your hamster, your guinea pig. Perhaps ferrets could hold their own, but I'm not sure. They're great watch dogs: they watch the burglar come in, and help him carry stuff back out. They're not very dog aggressive, but have a strong sense of pack order inherited from their (very close) wolf ancestors. They shed. Not just foozles and fluff; great wads when they blow coat, wads that drift through the house like ghost hamsters. Not dust bunnies, dust tyranosaurs.

And you can never, ever, ever let 'em off a leash.

So, of course, I've ended up with half a dozen of them (so far) over the last dozen years or so. The first, Nikki, got my goat (the goat lived, and eventually found a better home). When Nikki passed on, she sent me a new Siberian friend. "Chasseur" was rounded up trying to catch someone's goats. Chasseur was the name of a privateering vessel (sharp-built schooner or Baltimore Clipper) of the War of 1812, and she is definitely a sharp little pirate chick who'll do stupid pet tricks as long as there are bikkies involved.

Anyone can do a little mushing. A couple of thirty to seventy pound dogs (any athletic breed) hooked to a mountain bike (with a proper gangline and sledding harnesses, stupid cheap online) work well. Larger, well-trained dogs might still work on a bike; or use a rig, a scooter, or skate or ski behind them. Even toy dogs can do weight pulling with a special harness (probably twenty Schipperkes or Beagles would pull a rig nicely). Sleds can be found used, and most parks have user-friendly hiking/ski trails. Of course, you have to train your dogs, and there are a number of good books out there. The basic commands are gee: right, haw: left, whoa: stop, and the most important (besides good brakes) is ON-BY!!!! (leave the chipmunk/skunk alone, or "you did not really see an entire dead deer up there on the trail"...).