A dog's life
I live and work in Greenland with my huskies: 17 males and one female. Her name is Girly and she’s very popular. Home is a permanent base camp where everything revolves around the well-being of my dogs. From here, journeys are spawned and prepared and trained for.
The word ‘husky’ is a generic term for any mutt that pulls. I favour Greenland dogs because everything about them is vast and strong. They despise physical and mental cowardice, and they are aggressive in their appetite to do what they’ve been bred to do, which is pull massive payloads in terrifyingly cold temperatures.
For more than 2,000 years, the selection process for these dogs was simple: if you pulled hard, you lived. The result is a breed of incredible canine athletes with unique traits: powerful, dominant dogs that are extremely strong-willed. They are the Panzer tanks of the dog world. Greenland is home to more than 20,000 working dogs – they are living cultural icons.
Leader of the pack
October to July is my snow season. This is the time to condition my team, train yearlings and travel. My dogs work as a pack, and consequently there’s a hierarchy. Challenges can lead to fights of varying degrees of unpleasantness. If there’s no submission from either combatant, they will fight to the death if left unchecked.
Knuckle is my boss dog. He’s hard, but fair. Ultimately, however, I’m the boss, and the dogs know it. Where I live, the law states that if a dog from a team bites a human, the entire team is shot dead, so control is vital. I use whips, but rarely for discipline; they’re essentially a directional tool. In general, however, I favour voice commands.
Lead dogs are the brains: without them, the team goes nowhere. Outstanding lead dogs, such as Loads, send out an invisible thread – they do what I want without being told.
I never run a puppy in a team until it’s at least a year old, when it will be harnessed for the first time beside a dog such as Knuckle. He teaches the new dog what not to do and I don’t interfere. For example, they must learn not to chase polar bears, which make for thin ice, open water or icebergs when pursued by dogs.
Be prepared
Sometimes I’m away from home for three months. When I return, kennel work is dominated by getting dogs journey-fit through feeding, conditioning and training. Worming is paramount. Bayer’s Drontal Plus treatment is the only drug that rids dogs of harmful tapeworms, hookworms and whipworms.
I use a Panasonic Tough-book to organise a year’s supply of food and gear. Two icebreaker resupply ships visit each year. Their cargo includes my 2,000 kilograms of dog feed. I feed the dogs kibble (pellets) once or twice a day. It’s fit for human consumption; I survived an expedition by eating it. This is supplemented with wildlife. A visiting friend yelped when she saw Hot Dog chomping on a seal flipper – she thought it was a human hand.
I love the cold but hate being cold. I average 3,200 journey kilometres every year, running 12–14 dogs in a team, sometimes pulling 500-kilogram loads in brutal cold. I love Arktis all-in-one base-layer wool suits.
I ski beside my sled, or use snowshoes to break trail in front of my dogs. East Greenlandic dog sleds are like no other, and I use nothing else for long-haul journeys. We make our own: they’re four metres long with a 90-centimetre by three-metre packing surface. Runners are shod with high-density plastic over steel, and I use a small block planer to maintain slickness.
My sled bag includes an emergency grab bag, a sack with
a draw-rope neck for an injured dog and spare H-back and X-back harnesses. On long-haul trips, it’s smart to pack different harness types in order to prevent strain injuries. I make all of my own dog traces and pack spares. I dehydrate a lot of my own journey food, especially meat for summer trips.
My belt kit includes knives, a Recta compass and a Gerber multitool. I pack an axe and a toq (a four-centimetre-wide chisel mounted on a three-metre-long handle) to test the thickness of ice, open up seal holes and set nets under the ice.
I always pack an Arva shovel; with smaller blades you shift more snow. I dig each dog a pit and build them a low windbreak wall. Feeding my dogs can be seriously ugly with wind pummelling at a breathtaking velocity. Sometimes it brings me to my knees and I drag myself through dog crap along the stakeout.
I spray my tools bright red: this shows up best when dropped in the snow. My medical kit contains treatments for obvious conditions, sedatives and an anaesthetic. Everything can be administered to man or dog, including skin glue, which hurts less than a paramedic’s staple gun. I keep my sewing kit in a felt roll. The awl is for dog-harness repairs and the hide is for mending mukluks (reindeer- or sealskin boots).
When I travel on foot, I do so as the ancient Inuit did during summer, crossing rivers and tundra with dogs. My pack contains supplies and the dogs carry their own food; a trained and conditioned Greenland dog can carry a third of its body weight. For long journeys, I get my resupply depots out by boat, snowmobile and aeroplanes.
Taking the dogs on chartered aircraft involves removing all of the passenger seats and securing the dogs on chains. Alternatively, they are placed in flight crates.
Ice to see you
My house is on a riverbank, 200 metres from the Denmark Strait. My dogs are spaced and secured along a stakeout chain. On journey nights, I use the same technique. The chain is secured at either end with ice screws, Seattle Manufacturing Corporation’s I Pickets, Tubbs’ snowshoes as improvised deadmen or grinder-sharpened 20-centimetre bolts that I pound into frozen dirt.
I have no plumbing at home and haul all of the water for my dogs. On journey nights, I use my MSR WhisperLite Internationale stove to repeatedly melt 90 litres of snow to boil 12 litres of water to rehydrate us. Some things can be improvised on the Arctic Ocean; a stove can’t. In extreme cold, it sustains life.
Naphtha paste leaves residue that eventually clogs and hinders stoves. Before firing them up, I prime my stoves with pure alcohol. I mix diethyl ether with white spirit at a ratio of 1:25 to get a fuel that will ignite at –60°C. The stove is quiet enough to allow me to listen out for a loose dog, fighting or incoming bears. My dogs’ reactions to each of these circumstances differs and I want to hear them.
From mid-November, we have 56 days of total polar dark. Temperatures fall low enough to turn spit into ice cubes. Out on the sea ice, airborne tundra stones sometimes pummel me. I wear a contact lens/ski goggle combination that protects my peepers from chronic tear flow, spindrift and stones. A head torch enables me to negotiate bad ice, check my dogs’ paws and study gaits and tails (which act as dog mood indicators).
Handguns are illegal in Canada. In Greenland, they’re illegal for residents, but not for non-residents (no, we don’t get it either). Canadian and Alaskan bear sprays temporarily blind and asphyxiate, but they’re also banned in Greenland. So it’s full-bore rifles all the way. This isn’t a big problem as rifles are more versatile anyway: you can start a fire, hunt and communicate with them.
Sunglasses are mandatory during the 70 days of perpetual daylight, unless you want burnt retinas or snow blindness. I wear them for protection against blinding water glare, too.
So, there you have it – equipment basics. There’s a pervasive attitude that money will buy you everything. With gear, it will, but when it comes to dog respect, it won’t. And there’s something else: travel long enough with dogs and a combined gear failure could one day turn your circumstances into a desperately harrowing hellhole.
March 2009
The word ‘husky’ is a generic term for any mutt that pulls. I favour Greenland dogs because everything about them is vast and strong. They despise physical and mental cowardice, and they are aggressive in their appetite to do what they’ve been bred to do, which is pull massive payloads in terrifyingly cold temperatures.
For more than 2,000 years, the selection process for these dogs was simple: if you pulled hard, you lived. The result is a breed of incredible canine athletes with unique traits: powerful, dominant dogs that are extremely strong-willed. They are the Panzer tanks of the dog world. Greenland is home to more than 20,000 working dogs – they are living cultural icons.
Leader of the pack
October to July is my snow season. This is the time to condition my team, train yearlings and travel. My dogs work as a pack, and consequently there’s a hierarchy. Challenges can lead to fights of varying degrees of unpleasantness. If there’s no submission from either combatant, they will fight to the death if left unchecked.
Knuckle is my boss dog. He’s hard, but fair. Ultimately, however, I’m the boss, and the dogs know it. Where I live, the law states that if a dog from a team bites a human, the entire team is shot dead, so control is vital. I use whips, but rarely for discipline; they’re essentially a directional tool. In general, however, I favour voice commands.
Lead dogs are the brains: without them, the team goes nowhere. Outstanding lead dogs, such as Loads, send out an invisible thread – they do what I want without being told.
I never run a puppy in a team until it’s at least a year old, when it will be harnessed for the first time beside a dog such as Knuckle. He teaches the new dog what not to do and I don’t interfere. For example, they must learn not to chase polar bears, which make for thin ice, open water or icebergs when pursued by dogs.
Be prepared
Sometimes I’m away from home for three months. When I return, kennel work is dominated by getting dogs journey-fit through feeding, conditioning and training. Worming is paramount. Bayer’s Drontal Plus treatment is the only drug that rids dogs of harmful tapeworms, hookworms and whipworms.
I use a Panasonic Tough-book to organise a year’s supply of food and gear. Two icebreaker resupply ships visit each year. Their cargo includes my 2,000 kilograms of dog feed. I feed the dogs kibble (pellets) once or twice a day. It’s fit for human consumption; I survived an expedition by eating it. This is supplemented with wildlife. A visiting friend yelped when she saw Hot Dog chomping on a seal flipper – she thought it was a human hand.
I love the cold but hate being cold. I average 3,200 journey kilometres every year, running 12–14 dogs in a team, sometimes pulling 500-kilogram loads in brutal cold. I love Arktis all-in-one base-layer wool suits.
I ski beside my sled, or use snowshoes to break trail in front of my dogs. East Greenlandic dog sleds are like no other, and I use nothing else for long-haul journeys. We make our own: they’re four metres long with a 90-centimetre by three-metre packing surface. Runners are shod with high-density plastic over steel, and I use a small block planer to maintain slickness.
My sled bag includes an emergency grab bag, a sack with
a draw-rope neck for an injured dog and spare H-back and X-back harnesses. On long-haul trips, it’s smart to pack different harness types in order to prevent strain injuries. I make all of my own dog traces and pack spares. I dehydrate a lot of my own journey food, especially meat for summer trips.
My belt kit includes knives, a Recta compass and a Gerber multitool. I pack an axe and a toq (a four-centimetre-wide chisel mounted on a three-metre-long handle) to test the thickness of ice, open up seal holes and set nets under the ice.
I always pack an Arva shovel; with smaller blades you shift more snow. I dig each dog a pit and build them a low windbreak wall. Feeding my dogs can be seriously ugly with wind pummelling at a breathtaking velocity. Sometimes it brings me to my knees and I drag myself through dog crap along the stakeout.
I spray my tools bright red: this shows up best when dropped in the snow. My medical kit contains treatments for obvious conditions, sedatives and an anaesthetic. Everything can be administered to man or dog, including skin glue, which hurts less than a paramedic’s staple gun. I keep my sewing kit in a felt roll. The awl is for dog-harness repairs and the hide is for mending mukluks (reindeer- or sealskin boots).
When I travel on foot, I do so as the ancient Inuit did during summer, crossing rivers and tundra with dogs. My pack contains supplies and the dogs carry their own food; a trained and conditioned Greenland dog can carry a third of its body weight. For long journeys, I get my resupply depots out by boat, snowmobile and aeroplanes.
Taking the dogs on chartered aircraft involves removing all of the passenger seats and securing the dogs on chains. Alternatively, they are placed in flight crates.
Start the slideshow (10 pictures)
Ice to see you
My house is on a riverbank, 200 metres from the Denmark Strait. My dogs are spaced and secured along a stakeout chain. On journey nights, I use the same technique. The chain is secured at either end with ice screws, Seattle Manufacturing Corporation’s I Pickets, Tubbs’ snowshoes as improvised deadmen or grinder-sharpened 20-centimetre bolts that I pound into frozen dirt.
I have no plumbing at home and haul all of the water for my dogs. On journey nights, I use my MSR WhisperLite Internationale stove to repeatedly melt 90 litres of snow to boil 12 litres of water to rehydrate us. Some things can be improvised on the Arctic Ocean; a stove can’t. In extreme cold, it sustains life.
Naphtha paste leaves residue that eventually clogs and hinders stoves. Before firing them up, I prime my stoves with pure alcohol. I mix diethyl ether with white spirit at a ratio of 1:25 to get a fuel that will ignite at –60°C. The stove is quiet enough to allow me to listen out for a loose dog, fighting or incoming bears. My dogs’ reactions to each of these circumstances differs and I want to hear them.
From mid-November, we have 56 days of total polar dark. Temperatures fall low enough to turn spit into ice cubes. Out on the sea ice, airborne tundra stones sometimes pummel me. I wear a contact lens/ski goggle combination that protects my peepers from chronic tear flow, spindrift and stones. A head torch enables me to negotiate bad ice, check my dogs’ paws and study gaits and tails (which act as dog mood indicators).
Handguns are illegal in Canada. In Greenland, they’re illegal for residents, but not for non-residents (no, we don’t get it either). Canadian and Alaskan bear sprays temporarily blind and asphyxiate, but they’re also banned in Greenland. So it’s full-bore rifles all the way. This isn’t a big problem as rifles are more versatile anyway: you can start a fire, hunt and communicate with them.
Sunglasses are mandatory during the 70 days of perpetual daylight, unless you want burnt retinas or snow blindness. I wear them for protection against blinding water glare, too.
So, there you have it – equipment basics. There’s a pervasive attitude that money will buy you everything. With gear, it will, but when it comes to dog respect, it won’t. And there’s something else: travel long enough with dogs and a combined gear failure could one day turn your circumstances into a desperately harrowing hellhole.
March 2009
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