Don't do a musher any favours.

First of all: if you are ever thinking about offering a favour to a musher, or anyone that has a few dogs, be careful. Us mushers are a tied-to-the-house lot and when an opportunity arises to spend some time away from the house and have our dogs taken care of, we tend to take it. Secondly: be careful what you volunteer to do for said musher or dog owner, because we don't generally ask our friends to help us move or to help build a shed or even help cut our firewood. We ask them to scoop poop.

A while ago, during the winter, a musher friend of mine offered to look after my dogs for the weekend, while Jenn, Hunter and I went down south to visit my parents. So when he asked me if I would be able to help him out while he went on a vacation, I was happy to return the favour. Since my friend already had somebody arranged to feed his dogs, and this is someone who has been looking after these dogs for many years so the feeding method doesn't have to be explained to me (we are also a fussy lot) I get to make sure they all have water and a poop-free area. It's nice though, to be able to see someone elses dogs in their yard and compare similarities and contrast the differences. It is also a good way to get another perspective on things, like better tie outs (more on this later) or ground cover and things that probably don't interest anybody but the mushers I know. In fact, I have discussed at length about water pails/cans/buckets and the merits of each with my dogsledding friends. "At length" read: over an hour. Most people would perhaps tend to think "It's a container. With water in it. End of discussion... what's for lunch?" but there are many nuances that escape the non-doggie set and so, to finally conclude my thought, it is nice to see how other people do things.

Lou's Dog yard:

It is also nice to spy. My friend has a dog (Boris) in his yard that is a pretty much a 'who's-who' of sled dogs. He has both Pluto and Burner in his pedigree, which, trust me, are great dogs. There are many, successful mushers who agree that any winning teams in either sprint or mid- to long distance have these two dogs in their bloodlines. I am keeping my eye on him because he is going to be the father of our next one, possibly two litters. The spying comes into play because my friend already has two litters of puppies from Boris and a female of great athleticism and intelligence and I want to more or less gauge their growth and development. This way, Jenn and I can choose who best to breed Boris to when next spring rolls around. We have a few dogs in mind, but with my new position on the inside, perhaps we will be able to control the results more. Boris is a larger dog than I like to have in the yard, but all his offspring seem to be fairly small, due to the size of the mother. If this is the case and his pups stay small, then we will for sure choose one of our better, smaller females to breed.

Boris

Boris, again.

Some of Boris' pups

I guess that is enough of the future plans for the kennel: any further writing and I'll start talking about coat, feet and genetics, so it's best left where it is, for the sake of any readers who are still here and for the sake of brevity.

Jenn and Hunter came with me to my friends place this morning. I will be doing this for a week and since I start work in the afternoons, I wanted to make sure I left myself enough time to get to work. In all, it takes me about an hour and half to do the rounds. This includes watering the dogs, as well. Hunter was pretty excited to see all the new dogs; my friend has about forty currently, having sold a few after the racing season was over. This friend is a very good racer and his dogs are sought internationally. How sought after? He sold a lead dog for $10, 000 (!) Once Hunter and Jenn had said hello to all the dogs, they went to look for frogs down the trail while I finished.

Looking for Frogs

I mentioned earlier in this post that I would expand on tie-outs and a better system. Here goes: I finish work at around 23h00 and get home half an hour later. Since I am away in the evening, but Jenn isn't, she feeds the dogs their evening meal. This particular night, she was expecting to be late and so when I arrived home and saw the truck parked all funny, with the lights facing the dog run, I just figured that she had arrived home later than expected and wanted the lights of the truck to shine so she could go to the run and feed the dogs. Odd, though, I thought, because I have lights in the dog yard for just this reason and I know Jenn knows this. Oh well. I went in the house and Jenn met me with the whole story. Dart (is it ever anyone else?) got loose that afternoon and was running around the yard until Jenn came home. He had actually pulled his post out of the ground (I buried them three feet deep) and was dragging it all over the place: in the dog yard and out. She wasn't sure what to do with him, so for lack of any better ideas, she put him in the free run for the night. That held him until about 01h30 in the morning when I heard the dogs barking and went outside to find Dart, loose again. This time, I untied one of our pensioners, Bug, and put Dart at her spot and brought Bug in the house for the night. It was now 02h00. Hunter woke up at 06h00 so I had a short night. I went outside to feed the dogs and to fix Darts area by driving a six foot long, 2 5/8" around, nearly solid steel section of drill-rod in to the ground and hooking his chain in a loop around the base. In just over four hours, Dart had nearly pulled Bugs post out of the ground as well, and he might have succeeded had it not been for his misfortune of wrapping himself around a tree. He has been at his newly improved tie out for almost a week now and it seems to be holding. For now.

Jenn and I finished off the day by worming our dogs. That was a chore and a half to be sure. Our wormer is a liquid and has to be fed to the dogs directly; it can't go on their food, so imagine holding a dog with one hand, trying to put a syringe in it's mouth with the other and all the while the dog is squirming like a stoker with a hot coal in his pants. The dogs don't get much of the liquid, either, so it is important to make sure they get it all. We were covered in mud at the end of it, but it was more or less a success.

I drove the new to me, old to the world tractor for the first time today, but since there are no pictures I think I'll leave that for another post.

One last shot of Hunter, looking around the corner of the dog barn: