South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
‘It’s a lot like sailing’
Mushing is a canine-human bond that was centuries in the making
Our dog-sledding guide had already released three sets of dog teams hauling gear and inexperienced tourists into the Maine winter wonderland. It was my turn. I felt clumsy in my multiple layers and a bit worried that I wouldn’t remember the recently shared instructions about how to handle my team of dogs.
As the guide unhitched my sled, he issued a final warning: Remember the brake!
And then we were off. A sudden jerk, a crunch as I released the brake. Except for the faint hiss of sled runners on snow, the whole world went silent. Twelve paws padded soundlessly on the snow ahead. There was the white-and-black leader, Olga, surprisingly small for her big job, followed by Teslin and Layla, both bigger and brown and black.
For a few hours, our little band of dog-sledders carved a canine-human calligraphy across the snowy white canvas of Lake Umbagog in southern Maine. A line from “The Night Before Christmas” came to me: “As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly/ when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky. /So up to the house-top the coursers they flew/ with the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.”
My coursers, they flew.
Anyone who has watched a dog rolling in fresh snow must agree with 19th-century social reformer Henry Ward Beecher’s observation that the dog is the god of frolic. Who doesn’t need more of that particular god in the plague season? During the long lockdown months last winter, I mainlined canine joy by getting my Border collie to pull me around on my skis, unaware that this is an actual Scandinavian sport called hundjoring.
It turns out that dogs and humans have a long history together in the snow. Some scientists argue human survival in the Arctic would have been impossible without them. Dogs were crucial to human migration to the Americas, over the ice between the Siberian peninsula and what is now Alaska 25,000 years ago. Sled dogs probably evolved in Mongolia between 30,000 and 35,000 years ago, according to the American Kennel Club. Archaeologists have found dog remains with harnesses in Siberian sites from 6,000 years ago.
The snowmobile has largely replaced the dog in Arctic zones. Climate change is diminishing the icy territory of many Arctic inhabitants, from polar bears to walrus to Indigenous people. Sled dogs are now mostly bred to race (the Iditarod is the most famous, although even it is melting away) and for recreation. Tourists can hire outfitters in Alaska or the Yukon who run seven-day mushing trips under the aurora borealis. More kid-friendly, afternoon sled-dog excursions are available in New Hampshire, Vermont, Quebec and Maine.
In early January, my husband, Erik, and I opted for a mushing middle ground — a two-day, out-and-back camping trip by dog sled near the town of Newry, Maine, which is on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest.
Driving seven hours north of New York City, we arrived on the frozen shores of Lake Umbagog. Gusts of wind lashed the frosted lake. Ghostly snow devils, hundreds of feet tall, twirled down the sides of the piney mountains nearby.
If you want to go dog-sledding, you have to get good and cold. Parking, we noted the dashboard exterior temperature had dropped to 4 degrees.
Our Maine guides, Kevin Slater and Polly Mahoney, the owners of Mahoosuc Guide Service, went north as young adults, and have decades of expedition experience in the Yukon and eastern Canada, north of Baffin Bay. Since the 1990s the couple has been breeding and training sled dogs on their farm in Newry. They keep a kennel of active sled dogs and another for their retirees. A cemetery with wooden markers near their farmhouse commemorates the lives and personalities of dogs that have “walked on,” as Kevin put it.
Sled dogs are large — on their hind legs, some stand, eye to eye, at 6 feet. They’re also surprisingly soft and cuddly, with an inner coat of fur, which they shed in summer. They seem to live to have their ears and backs stroked. Affability is no accident: Mushers select dogs as much for responsiveness to humans as strength.
“It’s a lot like sailing,” Polly explained, as she arranged the complicated rope-and-harness system on the snow, and we started latching the dogs. The dogs were clearly anticipating takeoff. Even harnessed, they were rolling over, coating themselves in the cold white powder.
Before we set off, Polly unloaded a rapid-fire mushing primer that could be boiled down to “never, ever take your hands off the sled.” Many a selfie-snapping recreational musher has fallen off and lost the team while Instagramming.
Eventually, we pulled into our camp, unloaded and hitched the dogs to low posts in a circle around the campsite. We laid fresh hay for each one. Curled on their nests, two dozen pairs of eyes watched us walking back and forth collecting buckets of icy water from holes in the lake, cutting wood, starting fires in the stoves.
As we settled in for the night, the Mahoosuc Mountains, across the lake, turned pewter against a pink sunset.
It was only 8 p.m., but I was ready to ignite my borrowed mukluks. We retreated to our surprisingly elegant tents with white canvas walls and a thick carpet of soft pine boughs on the floor, packed wood into the little stoves and zipped ourselves into double sleeping bags. I woke up once during the night.
I thought of the dogs, cryptic, soulful, loyal animals, warm in their pelts, just outside. Tamed by and allied with humans, but wild enough to know better than we what lurks in the dark.