I didn’t want to let Verlyn Klinkenborg’s column in the New York Times get away without comment:
I listen to the one-way singsong between Murphy and his dogs, encouragement and caution and admiration. I watch the driving legs ahead of me — 28 of them — on dogs whose frames are small and light, nothing like the creatures I’d imagined. And as we cut through the white ash swamp, hissing across the ice, I find myself wondering, why do sled dogs run?
It is not a matter of driving them. All the work is in pacing them, restraining them. When Murphy stands on the brake and sets the snow hook — a two-pronged anchor — the gangline quivers with tension. The dogs torque forward again before he can shout, “Let’s go!†All the one-word answers to my question are too simple: love, joy, duty, obedience.
As a sometime musher I can say with fair confidence what makes sled dogs run. It is what they were bred for. What they were born to do.
Finding what you were born to do and doing it. That’s a joy I can’t begin to understand.
