Call of the Tame
Yipping, yapping, yelping, yammering mutts assault the eardrums. Hundreds of doggie throats fling forth every conceivable hysteria effect worked up during I million years of canine evolution. Yowls and howls and whines and whimpers combine in madcap adrenalin jubilee.
To me it was music. To me the bedlam meant only one thing: The mushers were here! Trucking thousands of miles across the snow belt, the mushers had descended on yet another obscure, frigid burg to test themselves against one another and the elements.
And I, drawn by the inevitable press release, was here, too, come to this yellow-stained, snow-packed parking lot surrounded by mushers’ trucks from North America’s coldest states and provinces, nimbly dodging sleds zipping to the starting line, come to plumb the secrets of our continent’s least understood — in fact, hardly even noticed — pastime, come to answer the Call of the Tame.
Ah, dog-sled racing. Or was it sled-dog racing? Even the name was mysterious. And the motives: Who were these rugged mushers, their beards no doubt encrusted with ice? Why did they mush? What was the nearly sacred bond between them and their noble beasts? And — most important — did this story have the potential to be turned into a major motion picture and make me rich?
Lord, I hope so. I’m so sick of not being rich. I would find the top dog, the mightiest musher extant, and tell his stirring saga to the world.
Nome, Alaska: Finale of the race of races, the heart-stopping Iditarod. Eleven hundred miles of open tundra. Thirteen days from Anchorage to Nome, just man and dog and nature’s fury. At the finish line, a scene of tumultuous drama. A siren blows to summon the townfolk. Out of the packed saloons they swarm, bored, tough, ugly men stamping in the cold. Spotlights illuminate the trail as the first team charges out of the deep, Arctic dark and a roar goes up from thousands of besotted, entertainment-starved brutes…. . . .
However, I am not in Nome. I am in Saranac Lake in upstate New York, where a professor from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine named Dr. David Kronfeld is giving me an earful of Nome at a reception for mushers and press in the lobby of the Hotel Saranac. Immediately, I realize that Nome is where I should have gone to truly fathom the great, soon-to-be-famous sport of dog-sled racing. Why am I always in the wrong place at the wrong time?
”I’ve been to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and I was overwhelmed emotionally,” says Kronfeld, who favors flashy suspenders, speaks with a New Zealand accent, claims to be part German, part Jewish and part Samoan and is said to be one of the world’s leading experts on bovine nutrition. ”But the feeling there is less intense than at Iditarod.”
Damn! Rats! Well, Saranac Lake isn’t Nome, but it will have to do. At least the place has an authentically weird history: It used to be a huge tuberculosis ward. Sickies from all over, some as famous as Robert Louis Stevenson, would trek up here to sleep outdoors, hoping the dry mountain air would cure their TB before freezing them to death.
And it has Harris Dunlap. The name is ubiquitous hereabouts. Harris Dunlap, a three-time dog-sled champion, the man to beat here at the Alpo International Championships. I must find the immortal Dunlap, king of the dog men, musher supreme.
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