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See Related File
See related pages:
http://www.adn.com/pf/mushing
http://www.iditarod.com/
http://www.adn.com/iditarod/
Until the team went for a dog named Storm, Iditarod musher Dan Dent had never seen a full-fledged dog fight in all its bloody intensity. Such fights are rare these days when mushers go to great lengths to socialize their dogs, but they still happen. A dog team is a constantly shifting mix of personalities and social positions much like the average office. Some days everyone gets along. Other days nobody's happy. And occasionally, things get ugly. When that happens in a dog team, the blood flies. Why it happened this time, Dent doesn't know. It was Sunday evening, the first night of the 1,100-mile race to Nome. The 15 dogs were fresh and well-fed. They had left the restart in Wasilla without a problem, breezing past the tasty smells of the tailgaters along the Knik-Goose Bay Road and sliding onto the trails that would take them out onto the frozen Susitna River. Dent's lead dogs momentarily lost the trail there, wandering into a spider web of snowmobile tracks. Dent stopped. The 57-year-old Maryland investment counselor was running his first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, and he wanted to stay close to the marked trail. So he braked the team and ordered the leaders to gee back to the main trail. They started the turn without a hitch, he said. "Then we got into some softer snow, and that just sort of started it," Dent said. The dog named Storm stumbled. Puker - Storm's teammate on the gangline - snarled and grabbed with his teeth. "They started it," Dent said, "and ... it just got bigger and bigger." Momentarily transfixed in shock, Dent watched. Half the team was snarling and snapping to get a piece of Storm. Blood started to fly. Dent had never seen anything like it. "This is an experienced, veteran ... team," he said. "This is the last thing I would have expected. I never had a fight before. Every now and then a dog will snap or growl, but nothing like this. "They were all going at him (Storm) like a bunch of hyenas. They were all going for the kill. It was a pretty ugly sight. "My whole life I've been around (dogs), and I've never seen anything like this. I was just watching the other dogs trying to eat Storm alive. "I realized that if I didn't get in there, Storm was going to get killed." So Dent waded in. It was not the best place to break up a dog fight. The off-trail snow was waist deep, limiting Dent's mobility. He started pulling dogs apart. "You could pull a couple off," he said, and others would jump in. That was when Dent made a fateful mistake. He took off his gloves so that he could undo a harness snap to free Storm from the gangline. His unprotected hands ended up among flying fangs. By the time he finished breaking up the fight, his hands were a bloody mess of punctures and slashes. "The thing I don't think you can understand is how lightening fast they are with their teeth," he said, and how indiscriminate. When a dog fight escalates to this point, the dogs are out of control, attacking anything and everything. "I should have left my gloves on," Dent said Tuesday. He was by then in a bed at Providence Alaska Medical Center. A Demerol drip eased the pain in his torn hands, but the emotional pain still weighed heavy. Once the swelling goes down and the wounds begin to heal, the doctors believe his hands will be fine. It may take longer to heal his psyche. This Iditarod meant so much to him. After the dog fight, he loaded Storm in his sled (the dog had suffered puncture wounds through its abdomen and into its intestines), pulled on his gloves and pressed on 12 miles for Yentna Station, the next checkpoint. "My gloves," he said, "would fill up with blood, then freeze up." Veterinarians at Yentna were prepared to deal with the injured dog, but not with Dent. An emergency medical technician tried to treat his mauled hands, but the sight was too much. "She collapsed," Dent said. "She passed out. My hands were just hamburger." After she was revived, Dent persuaded her to stitch him up so he could press on to Skwentna. He still had hopes of going to Nome. The pain, he said, "was not too much then." A race judge at Skwentna saw Dent trying to unload a dogfood cooker from his sled using only his forearms. They had a talk. Dent was told not only that he was badly hurt, but that he should not go on if he couldn't properly care for his dogs. He thought about that for a time, worried about how he would bootie and unbootie his dogs, and finally decided he'd have to quit. "All along the way," Dent said, "I was losing rather than gaining use of my hands. I can hardly do a thing with them now. "The physical pain, that's tolerable," he added. "That's not bad at all, and then there's the other hurt, the whole situation with the race. Missing the race is intolerable. I really can't deal with being out of the race. It hurts too much. "I've really spent the last five years preparing for this. It's been a major sacrifice for my family. I've been a missing person, essentially, for the last six months. "This ended so horribly, I can't put them through this again," Dent said. "It was a nightmare." His only hope of consolation rests now with a dog that is still under the care of Anchorage veterinarians. "We're working on saving Storm now," Dent said. "It was 50-50 last night. Now, he's doing better. I'm convinced, at least, that I definitely saved the dog's life." * Outdoors editor Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com
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