Mark and Jackie had never had any children of their own, but her half-brothers were young enough to have been theirs; Josh actually came along after she and Mark were married, so she and Mark had been sort of an extra set of parents to the boys. Josh was in high school now, and interested in his own things, but as the summer progressed he began to get interested in the dog-related craziness out along Busted Axle Road, with Tiffany making a fourth. As the summer progressed, they acquired more dogs, and worked hard at training them. By the time snow was on the ground in November, their plan was complete – the handful of dogs that they’d spent the summer and fall training were far enough along to form them into two teams.
The first snowfall was a memorable time, with an early-morning run out to Turtle Hill and back on the freshly fallen heavy, wet snow. By then, Josh was coming along as a musher, and they’d let Tiffany solo a team of as many as five dogs, but only after they’d had a chance to run off their initial burst, which they never did entirely cure the dogs of doing.
One of the downsides of living in the country that Binky Augsberg hadn’t mentioned was the kids faced a long bus ride to school, and some days both Mark and Kirsten had to leave before the bus came. Tiffany was old enough now to be granted some responsibility about getting herself and Henry out to the bus stop along the highway on time. One such morning right after the first of the year, they’d made it out to the bus stop on time, but the bus had a substitute driver that day whothought it would be a good idea to make an early start since she wasn’t real sure of the route. The kids waited and waited, getting colder, and no bus, and finally Tiffany realized there would be no bus. They went back up to the house, and Tiffany called Mrs. Gravengood – but there was no answer.
Tiffany knew her parents were depending on her to get herself and Henry to school on time, and she was nothing if not resourceful. The two kids went back outside, and Tiffany, with Henry’s help, harnessed up a five dog-team with Mike’s reliable little leader Ringo in front, and, quite nonchalantly, drove the dog team to school and picketed it in the front yard. Mike was out of town, but the junior reporter, Pat Varner, heard about it and made it to the school while the kids were still getting the picket line set up, and the photos were on the front page of the next week’s Record-Herald. After that, there was some question of just whose dog team it really was.
But, it really was Mike’s, at least then, and Mark and Mike had taken a fair amount of good-natured teasing about their new hobby. Some of the teasing came from Ryan Clark, who’d gotten stuck by the Chamber of Commerce with chairing the winter festival committee, and he needled the two into doing a dogsled race demonstration the next month, a hundred-mile round trip out to Warsaw and back. It wasn’t really a race, but a publicity stunt, so Mike and Mark took an easy night run out to Warsaw during the festival. However, Mark took sick with the flu along the way, and they almost hung it up right there. But, Josh Archer was there, and they decided to let him run Mark’s team back to Spearfish Lake. All went well until they were pretty close to town, within a couple miles of the house. It turned out that Mike was getting sick with the flu, too, and finally he collapsed and fell off the sled.
Josh was a pretty resourceful kid himself. At the top of his lungs, he shouted “RINGO, WHOA!!!”
The smart little leader looked back, saw that Mike was missing and brought the team back to where he lay. Josh put Mike in a sled, rerigged the two teams into a single ten-dog team, and brought Mike and the extra sled home.
They got Mike inside, and Josh asked Tiffany to help him put the dogs away, but she had a better idea – why shouldn’t she fill in for her father, the way Josh had filled in for Mark, to finish the last few miles of the race? There were some serious misgivings going on, but in his delirium, Mike decided they might as well; after all, Josh knew what he was doing and would be with her.
The two went out, rigged the dogs back into two teams again, and started for the festival. Everything went well, and about a mile from the festival, Josh suggested they actually race the last bit, just for the sake of putting on a show. Even after a hundred miles, the dogs were going well, and the two had a mad dash across the ice. It was a close finish; it took careful study of a videotape to decide that Tiffany, at the age of ten, had won the first dogsled race she’d ever entered. It would not be her last.
The next one, in fact, came not long afterward. Mike and the Record-Herald didn’t often get scooped on events in Spearfish Lake, but, what with having the flu and all, this time he did. There was a reporter-photographer from the Camden Press at the festival, looking for interesting stuff, and she took a nice photo of the finish, and an even better one of Tiffany petting Ringo after the race; both wound up on the front page – after all it was a pretty special thing for a ten-year-old to do. Mike didn’t even know about it until a couple days after the race, when he received a call inviting them to the state dogsled sprint championships – and to be sure and bring Josh and Tiffany, who at the moment were the most famous dogsledders in the state.
Mark and Mike had not at that point heard of any other dogsledding activity in the state – they’d basically been on their own, with some help from Jim Horton. Now they discovered there were other dog teams in the state – not many, and compared to their two well-trained teams, not very good, either. Mike wound up winning the five-dog sprint; Mark took third, mostly from having taken a wrong turn. Tiffany won the three-dog championship, Josh the seven-dog, and Jackie, who’d been on a dogsled perhaps five times, took the musher’s wife’s race, giving the Spearfish Lake mushers a clean sweep. It was all good camaraderie and good fun, and no one from the Camden Dogsled Association was very upset about it, and there was a lot of good-natured talking and tale-telling afterward.
But during that post-race fellowship there was some scheming going on. Tiffany still wanted a dog team of her own, and it was pretty clear that her folks weren’t interested in her having it any time soon – they felt like they had enough dogs around the house. But, there was a dog team there that day, a fairly good one, in fact, that one of the Camden mushers was giving away since he’d been transferred out of town. Tiffany heard about it, and went to Josh, who had the bug about as bad as she did.
Josh was then a junior in high school, and more or less planning on going to college, so if he were to get the team, he’d only have a year to run it, and then he’d have to pass it on. Josh’s mom wasn’t interested in having a dog team at their house in town, but Tiffany, ever resourceful, told Josh that if he could arrange to keep the dogs at Mark and Jackie’s, she’d take them over when he had to go to college. Maybe in the meantime she could help with the training – come on, Josh, pleeeeease?
It was the start of a beautiful friendship, in fact, a beautiful partnership, between the sixteen year old boy and the almost eleven year old girl, one that would see an awful lot of training and racing miles over the years, a full trophy case, and eventually, long after the rest of the events of this story, a wedding ring.