for hours on end. Unlike some puppies who would thrash the inside of a vehicle if left alone, Goliath didn’t mind the solitude, and would only cause damage if Cole or I forgot a morsel of food somewhere in the cab. He demolished a bag of Doritos once in the few moments I stepped away to pump gas. All that remained from his nacho-flavored lapse in judgment were tiny crumbs showered across the driver’s seat and telltale neon-orange whiskers on his muzzle. Another time I tried to ward him off from woofing down my lunch by putting a six-inch sandwich in the center console, but like a termite dining on dry pine, he chewed his way through the interior upholstery, boring a big enough hole to get at my pastrami.
In the evening, when we turned our attention to conditioning our dogs, we were able to channel Goliath’s energy in a more positive direction. As with the workday, it was too risky to leave him home alone with Shagoo, but Goliath was too young to be put in harness, so we let him freerun alongside the adults. By four months old he would pace the team for twenty miles, smiling the whole way, his pink tongue flat and dangling from the side of his mouth. By six months old he seemed to understand the older dogs were connected to the gangline, so he started to actually try to insert himself into the team by squeezing between two dogs, pacing them.
Goliath developed into a strong and sturdily built dog, similar in appearance to a small timber wolf. He never weighed in at more than fifty pounds, but had a boxy muzzle, deep chest, muscular haunches, and a luxuriously thick coat even for a husky, complete with sable-coloring and a plume tail.
Goliath is an Iditarod and Yukon Quest veteran, but despite his racing resolve, he relishes curling up on the couch, especially when he can cuddle with the family.
When not running, his favorite pastime is to share couch space with me or Cole, and there he exudes contentment. Reclining lengthwise on a love seat in the living room, it has become an evening ritual for Goliath to warmly drape across one of us like some kind of comfortable quilt. All is right in the world for him as long as I run my fingers through his lush fur, and to be honest, when his comma-shaped nostrils flare and his soft cheeks puff with each snoring exhale, all is right in the world for me too.
More than any other member of the kennel, for the first year of his life Goliath spent almost the entirety of his days with us, and slept through the night at the foot of the mattress on the ground we called our bed. As he grew old enough to officially train by pulling in harness, it became clear—perhaps from being inseparable for months—that Goliath’s devotion to us was absolute. He displayed a strong sense of loyalty and an unwavering need to please.
Being one of the thickest-coated dogs in our kennel, he did struggle several times—mostly on hot days—as any marathon runner likely would if forced to exercise in a heavy parka. But Goliath never let himself fall behind the other dogs, never lost his will to continue pulling. He kept his tug line as tight as any of the other shorter-coated dogs.
The same held true as the runs got longer and more arduous, and he began to make the cut for several 200- to 300-mile races. He developed a self-assuredness about him, particularly when in lead. His niche seemed to be out front, exploring new trail, listening for commands to gee or haw. This confidence in him built incrementally with each run, and over the years it began to bleed into other areas of his personality, the culmination of which came when he finally cultivated enough courage to stand up to his lifelong bully.
It happened while Goliath intoxicatingly gnawed on a long femur bone from a moose, a treat we had given him after a hard day of running. Shagoo swaggered up and stared Goliath down expecting him to flee in fear as he always had done, but instead he locked eyes with her, curled a lip to bare his sharp white teeth, and emitted a guttural growl that even made the hair on my neck stand up. Shagoo read the message loud and clear: Goliath was no longer a little pup she could pick on, and they both knew it, from that day on.
Like his courage, Goliath’s endurance also became nearly inexhaustible as the years passed and he grew into the prime of his athletic life. Even in those rare instances when we could read fatigue beginning to build in him, he never slowed down or gave up until the job was done. He always found that last gear and rallied to the finish line. Sure, there were a handful of times he had to be picked up late in a race because he was too tired to continue, but we made the decision in his best interests. He never quit on us.
Goliath’s willingness to perform was tough to spot to the casual observer though. At hookup, a time when the excitement level of most dogs reaches critical mass, Goliath seemed to keep his excitement in check, internalizing his emotions.
While the dog next to him would be shrieking in frenzied excitement, springing vertically into the air with cappuccino-thick foam bubbling from its mouth, Goliath would grab a mouthful of gangline and quietly tug on it in eager, albeit subdued, anticipation while simultaneously leaning as far away from his running partner as his lines would allow. He felt as jazzed as any other dog in the team, he just showed it differently. He had vigor and skill, and his own distinct style, all of which could be said about most of our dogs. But Goliath had more than that even, a trait the others didn’t. He had couth.
All of this is what made the loudmouthed musher’s disparaging comments a jab in my side, and Cole’s too, but we fought back our initial urge to bludgeon him with the feeding ladle in our hands and kept our cool. We casually looked over at this guy’s own dogs, made up mostly of German short-haired pointer crosses: hybrids known to be fast, but with the trade-off of thinner coats and less body fat, two things that can really keep a dog warm.
Much like linear algebra and interpretive dance, this is something I’ve never understood. Why when racing in some of the most inhospitable weather on the planet—where the mercury routinely plummets to hellish depths where the burn is a cold one—would anyone intentionally breed for speed at the cost of a thick, potentially life-saving, coat of fur?
“Yeah, his coat is a bit thicker than what your dogs have got, but he’s a finisher in these kinds of cold conditions. You’ll see tomorrow,” I said, trying to make it sound more like a compliment to Goliath than a challenge to this musher.
“We’ll see,” he said without the slightest note of interest, then snickered in a patronizing manner and went back to minding his own business, not a moment too soon for us.
The next morning we were greeted with a race report that seemed quite pleasant in terms of our experiences with this event in the past. The trail was said to be hard-packed and fast, the winds calm, and the daytime temperature predicted to be a comfortable minus twenty for the start, with a dip to minus forty-five at night for the portion of trail that ran along the frozen Susitna River where the denser, colder air always settled.
This prerace narrative promised a much better situation than Cole and the dogs faced in the past. She had competed in three of the previous four years, including the brutal 2008 race, when the weather was nothing short of a maelstrom. Hurricane-force winds combined with savage cold to make a windchill of minus eighty-five. It was a race where Cole really cut her teeth as a musher.
From the beginning of that race, the wind moaned in an eerie, unearthly manner. Foreboding snow dunes had been carved and their wild, sinuous shapes erased all signs of the packed trail along with the lathes marking the way. Some mushers became disoriented or disheartened and turned around before the halfway point. A few had to be rescued by Army National Guardsmen who happened to be volunteering for the race to practice their own cold-weather training skills.
Other teams were literally picked up by the wind and blown down into an easily fifty-yard-deep couloir with other racers that had suffered a similar fate. There, past the precipice, huge tangles occurred that required the dangerous task of taking hands out of mittens to unclip and re-clip dogs into the ganglines in order to straighten them out. In those temperatures, flesh becomes frostbitten in a matter of seconds.
Many of those who were skilled—or just plain lucky enough—to eventually make it to the finish, didn’t do so unscathed. Some had minor frostbite to their faces or fingers, and at least one musher with improper boots cold-burned both his big toes black as coal, and eventually had to have them amputated to prevent gangrene.