at the front of a team chasing another, which is also useful for not burning out gee-haw leaders. Coolwhip’s character trait of perpetually acting over-caffeinated made her invaluable as a cheerleader, where an always-barking dog late in a run can, and does, spread enthusiasm to the others. And Old Man, well, he was a bit too decrepit to ever contribute much to the team, but he always made me smile when I came out to feed the yard and saw him excitedly carrying around his food bowl, and that was enough to earn his keep.
There is elegance to seeing any dog team coalesce, and even more so when pound dogs are involved. People expect them to fail, or at the very least not succeed. Working through and watching them overcome this stigma is a reward far beyond bragging rights, prize money, or trophies for the mantle.
To me the process mirrors a mathematician working through a complex equation, sorting the fractions and getting the decimals in the right place, all the way to its end. It’s not the simple things you stumble on, like fitting all dogs with the correct size harness and booties, although there are nuances to these tasks and satisfaction as well in learning who takes what piece of gear. The more exacting process is having the patience to learn their idiosyncrasies, to work through the socialization issues, to overcome their physical deficits, and figure out what role or which position in the team best suits them.
Basically, the formula for success requires—demands, really—truly getting to know the dogs on such a personal level that when you look at them, you begin to look past the flaws and see what their strengths are and create success with what you have, not what you wish you had. You don’t see tools that are disposable; you see teammates that are indispensable and irreplaceable.
Because of all these intricate variables, there are a million ways for it to go wrong and only one way for it to go really right. But when it does, when you begin to feel mastery where once only mayhem existed, and everything finally fits into its proper place, it’s like Einstein’s theory of relativity. It all works and makes sense. And if there is one main difference between sorting out a math computation from a mushing conundrum, it’s that with the latter the sum ends up being far greater than the whole of its parts. Numbers merely change, but dogs transform—from hurt, to healed, to heroic.
Doubter and Goliath
Initially building our kennel from rogues, runts, and rejects from other mushers and the pound, we were getting pretty used to the petty comments and second-guessing of skeptics regarding our ethos of running the motley crew of dogs we had gathered to the best of our—and their—ability. Never, though, had someone so directly nay-said one of our beloved brood as just before Cole won the Gin Gin 200 Sled Dog Race.
The dig came the night before the competition. Cole already had a lot on her mind, knowing the next day she would be vying for victory against some of the biggest names in dog driving, several with egos even bigger than their race résumés. We had driven all day and into the night, and booked our accommodations at the banally named Paxson Inn, along with nearly the entire race field. While the somewhat shabby hotel could be critiqued on many things, its reputation for welcoming dog mushers was beyond reproach.
A cavalcade of dog trucks pulled in all evening, parking one beside another, and left idling for many hours to keep the murmuring engines warm and working in the minus thirty temperatures. These trucks would eventually be turned off late in the night, and then plugged in—using special cold-weather heating features—to keep the battery and oil in the pan at least lukewarm. In the meantime, the extended tailpipes—running vertically up the back of the truck to vent above the boxed dogs’ breathing areas—belched clouds of thick fumes into the cold night air.
We had all the dogs tethered to the truck by way of drop chains, long lengths of which ran along each side of the vehicle and attached at anchors on the front and rear bumpers. The dogs get clipped to individual, roughly one-foot lengths, that extend from these main lines. The dogs stay in the locked dog boxes during transport and to sleep at night, but are let out and put on the drop chain during the breaks on the commute to stretch, eat, and relieve themselves. This system keeps them safe on road trips.
Our dogs were all tethered and eagerly lapping at their dinners, brimming bowls of blood-soaked kibble and ground beef, liver, and tripe. Another musher, famous for his own winning race record as well as being a bit arrogant, parked next to us and while feeding his own hungry huskies, he glanced over.
“Don’t tell me this is one of your racing dogs,” he condescended, while looking down his nose at Goliath. “There’s no way—no way—this dog could be good. Look at that coat!”
We were aghast at the statement. As Leonhard Seppala (a legendary musher who played a pivotal role in the life-saving 1925 serum run to Nome) once said, “In Alaska, our dogs mean considerably more to us than those ‘Outside’ can appreciate and a slight to them is a serious matter.”
In mushing, if not all sports, there prevails an attitude that until you’re a somebody, you’re a nobody, so having this stranger act overtly rude to our faces was nothing new. What irked us more was his disbelief in Goliath—based on a mere glimpse. The piercing comment questioned the character of a dog that had for years dutifully served as one of the pillars of our race team, and whose unwavering endurance often made the difference between our success or failure.
To be fair, Goliath’s humble appearance and shy demeanor can be a bit misleading, and over the years many had read his introversion as synonymous with athletic impotence. Even Goliath’s original owner had cast doubt on him from the start, deciding to give his whole litter away while they were still tiny youngsters.
“I wouldn’t expect much from ’em, I had an accidental breeding on Iditarod and neither the female, or male that bred her, was that impressive,” the musher said, as we looked into a makeshift pen where several small pups were enthusiastically gnawing on the rib cage of a moose carcass from the inside out. They looked like a bunch of prisoners trying to chew through the fleshy-red and bony-white bars of their cell. Not expecting this litter to mature into up-and-coming champions, it appeared the pups were being fed modestly, making due on scraps such as the ruminant’s remains.
We feared for the future of these unplanned pups in an already overcrowded dog yard, especially since Cole and I were just starting to build a race team back then. To us the idea of getting a pup from dogs that made the cut for an Iditarod team seemed like better odds than what we were getting at the pound, where the sire or dame of some of our dogs—based on their adult appearance—had genetics ranging from greyhounds to malamutes, and several breeds between.
“We’ll take them,” we said.
As it turned out, the musher had already promised several of the dogs to other people, so we ended up with only one: a small, smoke-gray little fuzz ball with eyes as sweet and brown as root beer.
Despite his ignoble inception, we had high hopes for the dog he would grow to become. In those early years, until we learned to look for each dog’s individual strength and then utilize it, we longed for the type of hard-charging husky superstar we perceived existed in every successful kennel. In Goliath’s case, when he came into our lives, I was reading a book by Jane Goodall and in those pages lived a chimp named Goliath who, while small, was extremely brave. Hoping our new addition might one day display a similarly noble personality characteristic as this ape, we dubbed the dog with the same name.
We fell in love with Goliath immediately, but some of our other dogs took convincing. Shagoo, one of our cantankerous house dogs, greeted him in her usual manner: by promptly biting him in the muzzle, opening a huge gash. The wound eventually healed, leaving a scar he still has to this day, and like many traumatic events, the memories lasted longer than the injury. For months afterward Goliath gave Shagoo a wide berth, and fearfully whimpered and whined whenever she menaced him with her sinister appearance. In order to stay safe from the canine equivalent of Hannibal Lecter that he lived with, Goliath spot-welded himself to me, and an inseparable bond became forged.
At first it was about protection for Goliath, and he sat in our lap for safety, but over time his presence became commonplace regardless of where Shagoo lurked. During the workday, he rode shotgun with me when I went to the