If deciding to sell Aunt Gretchen’s old house and buy the place on Busted Axle Road weren’t enough, there was another event that day that seemed minor at the time but was to prove to be a big turning point. Tiffany came home from class that afternoon and announced her fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Clark, had said there was a show on TV that evening that the kids might like to watch.
It was an interesting show, about a woman by the name of Susan Butcher, who raced sled dogs across Alaska. Tiffany thought it fascinating, decided then and there that she’d been put on earth to run sled dogs and race them herself, and immediately started campaigning for a dog team, or, at the minimum, a sled dog to start one with.
Mike and Kirsten wrote it off to the normal enthusiasms of a ten year old, but on reflection, the idea of having a dog team had at least a little merit. After all, there would continue to be the problem with the road being plowed out, and Mike had already started thinking about getting a snowmobile to get to work on bad days, though he wasn’t thrilled about it. Training and running a dog team might give the kids a little responsibility and it would be fun and provide some exercise.
By now, Mike was getting burnt out on volleyball. He and Kirsten had actually lost in the finals of the city mixed doubles championship to Gil’s son, Danny Evachevski and his girl friend, and it was clear that the younger kids were just going to get better while he and Kirsten got older.
When he got down to the Spearfish Lake Café the next morning, he got to talking with Mark, about the prospect of becoming neighbors, of course, but it turned out that Mark had seen the same TV show, and was thinking the same sorts of thoughts.
Mark was coming at it from a somewhat different viewpoint. Though he enjoyed being active, getting out and backpacking occasionally, doing some trail work now and then, cross country skiing and the like, most of his work and most of his avocations had become pretty sedentary. He still did astronomy, like he’d done since he’d built his own telescope in Junior High. He had the observatory out back, with a couple big telescopes, and was involved in variable star observing. He still flew his old Cessna and his rebuilt sailplane on occasion, and had other hobbies and interests, but nothing that would really help him keep in shape. His main job of telephone maintenance did give him a little exercise, but not as much after the lines had been mostly buried in the last part of the seventies. Now, with the exception of occasionally having to run a wire, it was mostly technical work that kept him in one spot, usually sitting down, and his sideline job of computer maintenance was even worse in the lack of activity department.
He and Jackie had reluctantly taken up jogging to try to keep somewhere near being in shape, but they soon realized it was something they had to do, rather than something they enjoyed doing. Besides, Mark was the kind of guy who had to have a new challenge or a new interest every few years to keep from getting stale. It had been several years since a new one had come along – the Toivo expedition was really the most recent major one, but little was new with that and there hadn’t really been anything else new in some time. He’d recently gone off the board of the Baptist Church, not because he and Jackie were any less religious, but because the board work had become dull and unchallenging, and he thought it was about time someone else had a shot at the job.
Mike and Mark talked about dogsledding off and on over breakfast for the next couple months. Besides the interest and the challenge of something new to learn, they thought they might do some day tripping, maybe some winter camping, maybe even enter a race or two if they could find one to run. Perhaps one of the biggest appeals the idea had to them was there was no one else in the area that either of them were aware of who did dogsledding – it would be something totally different and unique, which made it more challenging. It was not a small consideration.
Since Mike was in the middle of moving, he didn’t have the time to deal with it just then, but once the move was completed, the two of them decided to get a few dogs and find out what they could about dogsledding.
They were helped by an old village council member in Warsaw, Jim Horton, who had been about the last person in the county who had run dog teams in the old days, before snow machines became popular. He loaned them a small dogsled he’d once used on a trap line, and soon there was the sound of power saws and planers out in Mark’s shop in the barn behind Jackie’s sign shop.
Jackie and Kirsten had been friends in high school if not real close friends. They’d drifted apart after high school, when Kirsten was in the dark years over Henry, and Jackie was settling in with Mark, and pretty much withdrawing from much to do with people she’d known in school. Now, living close together and having their husbands becoming friends brought the two of them together for the first time in fifteen years, and within a few months they had become very close friends, with the four of them often doing things together. It was a little strange for each of them, but it helped each couple cast away of some of the shell they’d erected around themselves.
One of the home improvements that Mike and Kirsten had written into the mortgage on the new house was a hot tub; they’d long wanted one, but there hadn’t been the place in the city. Now, it was proving to be a big comfort to her in the last months of her pregnancy, when her back was giving her a lot of trouble. Kirsten and Jackie were soaking in it one early summer evening when it became clear just how serious this dogsledding business was. “It’s all talk,” was her opinion to Jackie. “Just guy talk, maybe a little midlife crisis thrown in. Nothing’s gonna happen.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Jackie said, not all that crazy about the idea herself. “They’ll keep pushing at each other, and the next thing you know there’s going to be dogs everywhere you turn.”
“I can’t believe it,” Kirsten smiled. “Our guys aren’t that bad.”
“You haven’t been out in the shop,” Jackie said. “That’s not one dog sled that’s going together out there. It’s two.”
“You’re right,” Kirsten agreed. “This is serious.”
By then there wasn’t much they could have done about it without some serious drawing of lines. Besides, Tiffany was absolutely delighted at the development. She hadn’t changed her mind in the slightest about wanting to have a dog team of her own, and Kirsten wondered just how long Mike was going to be able to keep her off the back of the dog sled.
Kirsten and Mike had decided from the beginning that if the baby were a boy, it would be named Michael, Jr., but they were undecided about the name for a girl. Kirsten was sort of leaning toward Cassandra, but as an indication of just how serious Tiffany was, she held out for Susan – after her hero, Susan Butcher, the Alaskan dogsled racer. Given what was going on around her, Kirsten was a little reluctant, but while home for a visit, Gil and Carrie’s oldest daughter, Jennifer, sort of talked her into it – and just in time. The baby started to come in the middle of the conversation and Carrie and Jennifer wound up taking Kirsten to the hospital while Webb frantically called around looking for Mike, who managed to show up just in time.
By then, Mike and Mark had already started running dogs, mostly ones they rescued from the local humane society, along with a couple of strays that showed up looking for a job that fed well. They started small, with only three dogs; they had to teach the dogs to run as a team at the same time they were learning to run one dog. Tiffany was a lot of help, and spent a lot of time working on basic obedience training and commands with Mark’s first dog, Cumulus, who showed a lot of intelligence. It was probably her work with Cumulus that gave them enough of a head start to be able to make a team of the dogs at all.
They had their adventures that first summer. One of the most memorable came when Mark and Mike decided that their first dogs were finally ready to try running as a team.
Unlike Mike and Kirsten, who weren’t churchgoers, Mark and Jackie usually went to church on Sunday mornings, although they didn’t let going to church get in the way of a nice day for flying or some other good reason. With this Sunday morning beautiful and with things to be done, it was considered a good reason.
Mark had an old ATV that they planned to use as a training cart, and while Jackie sat on the fence and watched, Mike and Mark harnessed the dogs up to it. They’d worked with the dogs by ones and twos before, sometimes having to play lead dog themselves until they got the hang of it, but there was still a lot they didn’t know.
A couple of the things the two hadn’t come to realize was that the dogs represented more power than they’d imagined, and the dogs tended to be a little wild until they got the initial run out of their systems. This situation, by itself, wouldn’t have been so bad, except for the fact that Mark hadn’t checked the brakes on the ATV, and they were nowhere as good as he thought they were.
“Well, here goes nothing,” Mark said, once he was firmly in the seat. “Mike, if you’d point Cumulus down the runway.”
Mike took Cumulus by the collar, and slowly turned the dog team around to the left, saying, ‘Come haw, come haw’ — another command they’d have to learn, to turn around. In a few seconds, he had the team pointed more or less in the right direction.
““Jackie, the life insurance policies are in the safe deposit box. OK, boys . . . HIKE!”
It would be hard to say the dogs took off like they were shot from guns, but the acceleration was pretty good. He was jerked back in the seat of the ATV, and only a grip on the handlebars kept him from falling off. After the initial burst of acceleration died out, Mark looked down at the speedometer; the dogs were pulling hard, going about fifteen miles an hour, which was pretty fast, when you stopped and thought about it — a lot faster than he could run. “Whoa!” he yelled, in an effort to slow them down, but it didn’t make a lot of difference. “Damn it, I said Whoa!’” he yelled, and then remembered the brakes. Halfway down the runway, he managed to slow the dogs down enough to try a turn. Amazingly enough, the haw turn went fairly well. As the edge of the runway approached, all Mark had to do was give another little ‘Haw’ and Cumulus had them pointed back toward the house.
“Might as well let them run for a bit,” Mark thought. “That’s what they really want to do, anyway.” He let up on the brakes, and let the dogs run. They shot back up the runway, without Mark trying to do much but steer the ATV, raced between the house and the shop and out to the road. The next thing Mark knew, the dogs were racing down the gravel road, the ATV bumping along behind, while Mark mostly tried to hang on.
Kirsten, Tiffany and Henry were walking up the road to see what was going on when the dogs towing Mark and the ATV fairly burst over the top of the hill, with Mark yelling, “Whoa! God damn it, Whoa!” and not getting much response. They scuttled past in a cloud of dust, with Tiffany jumping up and down with glee, as Mark raced down the hill and past Kirsten and Mike’s driveway. Up the hill, they could hear Mark yelling, “Haw! Cumulus, you son of a bitch, Haw!” as he tried to get Cumulus to make the turnaround in Mike’s yard.
A few seconds later, Mark’s pickup, with Jackie driving, came screeching to a stop in a cloud of dust. “Missed your driveway,” Jackie yelled. “He’s going to need help to turn ‘em around, if he can get them stopped by the time he gets out to the state road!”
“We’ll be back!” Mike yelled, from the back of the pickup where he was riding, as Jackie took off in a cloud of dust.
“Mommy, did you see the dogs?” Tiffany asked as the pickup roared off. “Wasn’t that great?”
Mark was getting close to the state road, with the ATV fishtailing from the locked up tires, before he got the rig slowed down and finally stopped, his heart pounding, the sweat rolling off him. He’d been caught in a thunderstorm in a glider towplane once, and this easily had to be the wildest, most uncontrolled ride he’d had in the many years since. He was squeezing hard on the brakes, trying to catch his breath, when he realized Jackie and Mike were with him. “Figured you’d need help turning around,” Mike said, going up and grabbing Cumulus by the collar. “Come haw,” he told the dog quietly. Cumulus wagged his tail, and gently lead the other dogs in a tight left turn.
“Thanks,” Mark said. “I think we’ve learned one thing.”
“What?”
“When these dogs get together, they go nuts.”
“Yeah, really.”
“Why don’t you ride this thing back?” Mark suggested. If you can’t get ‘em to turn into the driveway, just let ‘em run. It’s a couple miles up to where the bridge is out, and the river might cool ‘em off. We’ll pick up Kirsten and the kids along the way, and follow along.”
There was no graceful way for Mike to back out. While Mark held onto the brakes, Mike climbed into the seat. He got settled in, let go of the brakes, and yelled, “OK, guys, HIKE!” and was off in a cloud of dust.
“I think I’ve learned something, too,” Jackie commented as the team and the ATV shot down the road.
“What’s that?”
“When you men get together, you go nuts.”