or fleeting it might have been for this other musher, it was nice to know someone else saw our dogs the way we always do.
Horsing Around
Realizing I was no longer alone, I dropped the ax and rubbed my bloody palms on the pant legs of my insulated work bibs. I hadn’t noticed the visitors at first, and now was feeling a little self-conscious about standing at the center of a thick coagulated puddle, and so many scarlet splatters beyond that, making the once-white snow around me look like a homicide scene.
I had woken up early, before the weak winter sun had risen, to begin cutting on the carcass while Cole went to work. Having already skinned it, and carved most of the meat off the bone in huge chunks, I was in the process of using my ax to chop out a rack of ribs when the vehicle pulled up my particularly long, purposefully secluded driveway. In that moment I had to have looked like a murderous lumberjack enthusiastically re-creating the infamous door-hacking scene from The Shining.
It didn’t help that I had barely slowed my swing when they first arrived. I had the radio blasting, so didn’t hear their vehicle’s engine, but uninvited guests always induce a hullabaloo from the dog yard. The explosion of barks announcing their arrival is what caused me to stop my now public display of dismemberment.
Leaning on my ax while I caught my breath and feeling my pulse come down from near–heart attack levels, I could see several well-dressed women and a male teen all nervously talking amongst themselves in a magenta minivan. Finally, after a few minutes, the boy must have drawn the shortest straw because he exited the vehicle and approached with clear apprehension.
Dressed in a dark suit, starched white shirt, and black tie, he walked to within a few yards of me and my carnage and then opened with, “Can I ask what you’re doing?” It was obvious, from his wide eyes and the porcelain hue of his face, he was sincerely asking.
“I’m cutting up some meat for them,” I explained, waving my arm toward the dog yard. “It’s … or rather, it was, a horse.”
He nodded thoughtfully, processing the information for a minute, but must have deduce nothing too nefarious was taking place. His safety secured, he didn’t waste any further time and cut to the chase.
“Do you have a few minutes to talk about Jesus Christ?” he asked.
I thought about it and said, “Sure, if you don’t mind helping me finish this.”
Mushers are many things: resourceful, thrifty, miserly, cheap. Whatever term you want to use, mushers tend to get good at saving a buck because the expense of running even a small kennel necessitates counting every penny. Dog food is exorbitant. And we’re not feeding the run-of-the-mill grocery store chow, but a specially formulated kibble with higher percentages of protein and fat to aid the dogs’ abilities to build muscles and contend with keeping on weight while burning thousands of calories per day from running.
In order to offset the food bill, we’ve had to get creative over the years. We stop by the local food bank weekly for any meats aged past “human grade,” and in summer we hit up canneries and local fishermen to collect salmon heads, which are cast off as waste but actually packed with nutrients for the dogs.
However, of all the free dog food we get, nothing could compare to the mother lode of meat that results from getting a call to harvest a dead horse. These calls can translate into thousands of dollars saved and an equal weight in pounds of red meat once butchered, not to mention all the organs—such as the liver and heart—they relish like a delicacy.
Almost nothing is wasted. We’ll run a hose through the stomach and intestines before offering the dogs a savory meal of tripe. We’ll also give them all the long, white leg and rib bones, from which the dogs first tear off the little strips of still-dangling sinew, and before long, they’ll gnaw down into the deep marrow. They even get the round, black hooves to chew on for enjoyment. Really, the only parts of the animal that will go unused are the lungs, hide, mane, and tail.
Since our dogs that normally eat—in addition to other supplemental meat products—a forty-pound bag of food a day (at a cost of $36 a bag at the cheapest), each horse will amount to a savings equivalent to about twenty-five bags of food (around $900).
Having horse meat also comes in handy once the racing season begins. Out on the Iditarod and Yukon Quest, they can get pretty worn down from running for 1,000 miles. Like us when full-body fatigue sets in, sometimes they’d rather sleep when they stop instead of eat. Other times, they may come into a checkpoint hungry, but become disinterested in eating the same snacks at each layover. Whereas having something novel like horse really excites the dogs and whets their appetites.
This smorgasbord may seem a bit macabre, but true Alaskans are a pragmatic bunch who believe just because an item or individual is gone doesn’t mean something useful can’t come from what is left behind. Perhaps it’s from living in a place with such long winters, where everything must be stretched to last and in the old days not having enough meant not always making it. Or, possibly, it’s that many who come here remember from the city lives they’ve left behind all the problems that can come from wanton waste. It’s tough to say for certain, but in my experience, most horse owners would rather know their dead equine went somewhere besides the cold ground and became something other than worm food.
It’s also not always about ecological efficiency. Sometimes it’s about practicality or staying safe. In winter, the ground freezes deep, and as hard and solid as a bank vault’s door, so any horse owner who hasn’t already excavated a hole for their recently departed equine isn’t likely to be able to do so until spring or even summer. And, as the days get warm enough to finally dig, so too do the bears come out of hibernation, ravenous for any source of protein, which easily includes the decaying carrion of a long-dead horse.
A neighbor of mine had a horse die in his backyard one spring and acted a bit lackadaisical in regard to doing anything about it. As a disclaimer, he was a guy who flourished in a neighborhood without a homeowners’ association. To focus on just the largest items, no less than a dozen rusted trucks sat on his lawn (if waist-high grass constitutes a lawn) all in the state of disassembly they were left in after officially declared “broken down.” So the horse initially didn’t stand out among the overwhelming assortment of junk in varying forms strewn about.
That is until a behemoth of a brown bear boar took up residence right on top of the long-stiff stallion. The bruin ate what he could, then fell asleep across ribs as large as barrel staves, to defend the dead horse from any would-be scavengers, including the humans who lived there and now urgently wanted to remove the carcass. Their attempts were met with bluff charges, popping jaws, and the intimidating swat of a paw with five-inch-long claws—large enough to take a man’s head off. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game finally had to be contacted to resolve the issue.
Our first call for a horse came from a couple looking to avoid such a scenario. They were young, twentysomethings, down from the city to house-sit for the parents of one of them—a reed-thin girl with flaxen hair who we soon found out was by far the more masculine of the two, at least in terms of dealing with deceased barnyard animals.
“We didn’t know what to do with it, so I called my parents and they said call a musher,” the girl explained from the other end of the line.
I was at work at the local newspaper when I got the call, but have always found showing up presentable for an office job a taxing endeavor. I long ago resigned myself to stretching my Casual Friday wardrobe over the five-day workweek, and as such was dressed suitably enough to go straight to the horse. Cole was dressed the same for similar reasons, but wearing her favorite forest-green “Kenai Peninsula 4-H” sweatshirt, so we left work early and headed to Sterling, a rural area where a lot of farmers and livestock owners live.
It was sweltering by Alaskan standards as we pulled into the paddock. The summer days were long, and the sun beat down mercilessly on the chestnut-colored quarter horse now in permanent repose. Hundreds of plump-bodied flies had already gathered and we knew it wouldn’t be long until this horse was giving off a stink capable of chumming in bears for miles around.