The yellow leaves of birch and aspen are falling from the sky in the breeze. And my silly dogs are trying to eat them out of the air as they continue running down the trail. My leader has a bladder problem. As in, she can’t control it. Well, I suppose actually she can, because she is stopping every few hundred feet to pee on some cluymop of grass or a root or something only she and the other dogs can smell.
“Line out!” I holler and she strings out the team reluctantly. Her young partner starts hammering into her harness hoping if she lurches hard enough she can break the fourwheeler’s brake free and continue charging down the trail.
Unfortunately, whatever spot she smelled and has now marked is fair game for every dog in the team as they pass so our restart is a slow herky-jerky piss fest.
Eventually, we hit a a straight stretch and the dogs settle down to run easily for a half mile or so and there’s a moment when I watch the taut tug lines and the straight line of the gang-line running down the middle of each pair and think this is it. This is what we are working toward. This moment. And the hope that those tight lines and easy gaits will take us down unknown trails across unknown frozen country.
And then both leaders veer off the trail into a spongy mass of ripped up moss and moose hair and the whole string of dogs pile up on each other in a tangle of lines and fur. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.
