Saturday, March 14, 1998
Copyright 1998 Anchorage Daily News
Canine lust hampers trip to Nome
By DOUG O'HARRA
Daily News reporter
OPHIR - She wore a glossy black coat with a cunning white mark down the middle of her nose. Her slender front legs were dressed in leggings of white fur. A white belly. And sleepy, dog-yard eyes.
Luxuriating on her straw bed in the sunshine outside the log cabin at Ophir - 677 miles from Nome - the husky named Wesley wiggled on her back and stretched open her legs, oblivious to the lust she had inspired in the nine males of her 14-dog team.
Wes - one of Moose Pass musher David Lindquist's favorite dogs - had gone into heat, ready to mate over 450 miles of trail.
"It's been a little bit of a problem," Lindquist said as he boiled water and chopped patties of frozen horse meat for the team's lunch. "I've got some male dogs who can lead here, but I can't put any of them in lead because they'll turn around."
Every dog in the team except sweet Wes belonged to Seward musher Mitch Seavey - basically Seavey's puppy team. A longtime friend of the family and an avid recreational musher, Lindquist had taken time off from his job with the Alaska Railroad to mush the young dogs to Nome in the 26th Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
Raised in Chicago, the 41-year-old Lindquist came north to the Seward area in 1974 and stayed. He got into mushing in 1976, encouraged by Dan Seavey, Mitch's father and a three-time Iditarod veteran.
Lindquist and his wife, Irene, keep 14 dogs of their own, including Wes.
When Lindquist got a chance to drive Seavey's second string to Nome, he included the 21/2-year-old Wes, a budding leader in his own kennel.
"I just wanted to take her on this trip and see if she could make anything of herself," he said.
Though Wes could be a bit jumpy at times when home, Lindquist figured she would eventually warm up to the new team.
She did.
Thursday night, as Lindquist drove the team down the frozen Kuskokwim River toward McGrath, he halted to move huskies around, giving a few of the males a turn at leading. They would run for a minute, then wheel around and guide their end of the team right to the lovely Wes.
Lindquist ran through Blitz, Groucho, Viper - "I tried just about every dog in the team," he said. "I was on the river changing dogs every hundred feet."
Then Lindquist laughed. Even with with Wes taking her brethren's minds off the trail, Lindquist said he's been having an excellent trip to Nome. In the warm morning sunshine at Ophir, it was easy to believe him.
Other dog teams lazed on straw, as the checkers worked at packing up old dog-food bags and cleaning up trash. "Welcome to the last day of Ophir," one of them called out.
The checkpoint centers on a log cabin built in 1936 by a gold miner but owned for the past 30 years by Dick Forsgren and his family.
The ghost town of Ophir lay abandoned a few miles away. The cabin was ringed with solar-powered electric fencing - to discourage bears. "We were broken into for the first time last year," Keith Forsgren said.
Wasilla musher Chris Lund arrived about 11:30 a.m. and bedded down his dogs on straw, laid out plastic bowls in a row and began cooking.
A few yards away, Lindquist said his dogs have been moving steadily - but they always perk up as they approach checkpoints.
Apparently, the urge to eat is as strong as other urges.
Outside McGrath, the team caught sight of a light on a radio tower and "really started cooking."
"They know what's going on in this race," Lindquist said. "And once they come into a place with buildings and lights and people, they put thehammer down."
Sometimes, Lindquist said, he even has trouble holding them with a snow hook if they think straw and food lies ahead. "There's no brake in them," he said.
For now, Lindquist was happy with his position near the rear of the Iditarod field.
"Just chuggin' along," he said.
His only problems have been minor - one sore dog that had to be dropped, a bumpy ride across the Farewell Burn. And the budding love-life of the alluring Wes.
As the black dog lay on her back, tossing straw off her muzzle, Lindquist said he had one regret - that he wasn't at the front, parked by the teams run by champions and record-holders.
There would be plenty of suitors for the coy young Wes.
"If I was at the front end, I could scope things out when everybody was asleep," he said.