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