Alaska News

Reading the North: Sled-dog driver Olesen, grizzly trade

Kinds of Winter

By Dave Olesen; Wilfred Laurier University Press; $19.99

The blurb: After a 15-year career as a musher, Dave Olesen turned his focus away from sled-dog racing and set out to fulfill a lifelong dream. Over the course of four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the four cardinal compass points — south, east, north and west — and home again to Hoarfrost River.

His narrative ranges from the personal and poignant musings of a dog sled driver to loftier planes of introspection and contemplation. Olesen describes his journeys day by day, but this book is not merely an account of his travels. Neither is it yet another offering in the "wide-eyed southerner meets the Arctic" genre. Olesen is a firmly rooted northerner, having lived and traveled in the boreal outback for more than 30 years. Olesen's life story colors his writing: educated immigrant, husband and father, professional dog musher, working Bush pilot and denizen of log cabins far off the grid. He and his dogs feel at home in country lying miles back of beyond.

This book demolishes many of the cliches that imbue writings about Bush life, the far north and dog sledding, blending armchair adventure, personal memoir and thoughtful down-to-earth reflection.

Excerpt: As the sun went down in late afternoon on the 28th of February 2003, I raised my voice above the roar of wind, calling out gently to the team of huskies stretched ahead of me: "Who-o-oa there now, who-o-oa." The low tone of my command was muffled by the ice-encrusted hood surrounding my face, and it did not carry far. The dogs heard me but they hardly slowed at the sound. "What? Surely he's not thinking of making camp here?" I stood heavily on the sled's steel brake claws, forcing them deeper into the wind-packed snow. Our momentum fell off and 10 frosty dog faces turned back, baffled, to see what I was going to do next. "Whoa," I said again, and dropped the snow hook. I kicked it down with my thick mukluk. "That'll do. Home sweet home."

It was time to camp, and the blank white sweep of tundra offered no shelter. The northwest gale had dominated our day, howling at us head-on, shifting slightly, probing for weakness like a tireless sparring partner, hour after hour. The rush of air had dropped perceptibly at day's end, but it still packed a wallop. With the temperature near 40 below zero, the wind was still eager to freeze any skin I might carelessly expose. I moved forward up the team and unhooked the toggle at the back of each dog's harness. Now my intentions were clear to them all and as they felt the toggles come free. They each pissed, shook, circled, and curled up on the snow — tail over nose, furry shoulder turned toward the brunt of the wind. Work done, day over... call us when supper's ready, boss.

The dogs and I were about halfway between the upper Thelon River and the east end of Great Slave Lake. We were westbound for home, with about a hundred miles to go. It was time to stop the day's marching, dig in, pitch the tent, cook food for us all, and rest for the night. We would find no oasis of spruce trees on these rolling plains. One barren hillside was as good as the next and darkness was coming on.

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I started the chores. The dogs would sleep in harness that night, stretched out in pairs across a smooth blank slope, so I only had to secure the forward end of their gangline to one of the stout aluminum pickets I carried in the sled. I walked to the head of the team again, poked the 30-inch stake into the packed snow, and made the gangline off to it. That done, I set up and lit the two-burner camp stove, heaped big chunks of snow into a square cooker kettle, then sheltered the cooker and stove with a sheet-metal windscreen. Over the next half-hour or so that snow would grudgingly become hot water. With that hot water I could melt big blocks of frozen fat, then pour the water-fat soup over the dogs' dense kibble. I moved up and down the team, putting a bright blue windbreaker on each dog and taking off the cloth booties that they often wear on long runs in deep cold. Next I staked out and raised my red tent alongside the sled, only a few feet away from Jasmine and Schooner, the two wheel dogs at the very back of the team. Every time I set something down I secured it somehow or threw something heavy on top of it, and by doing so managed to make camp that night without losing any bits of my gear to the wind.

Through the two hours of dusk and deepening twilight I worked steadily. Finally, with everything done outside and the dogs all fed, I could retreat to the tent to cook and eat my own supper — a steaming kettle of caribou meat, rice, and butter, seasoned to simple perfection with salt and pepper. An hour later I could begin to get ready for sleep. This is a laughably laborious half-hour project when tent camping in winter: change clothes, arrange bedding, prepare the stove for quick lighting in the morning; wriggle into double mummy bags with their confounding tangle of drawstrings, cord locks, snaps, and zippers. At last I rolled sideways in my cocoon of goose down and synthetic fluff and blew out the candle.

Pure blackness. The incessant wind still battered the fabric of the tent. Almost at my elbow Jasmine shifted in her snow bed, and sighed as she settled again. I marveled, as I teetered on the brink of consciousness, at how utterly alone a man and 10 dogs are in such a place on such a night. A warm glow of deep rest crept up and down my limbs, then deep, dreamless sleep.

And suddenly dawn — the first morning of March. Daylight tinged orange by the red-and-yellow fabric of my tent. And — could it be? — silence! For the first time in four days the wind had calmed.

Once I had the stove burning full bore I made a brief foray out from the warm tent. Tundra and sky all around, shaded pink to the east-southeast where the sun would soon rise. Forty-one below zero, according to the little thermometer slung from the handlebar of the sled. Dogs all drifted in, some completely invisible beneath the snow, and not one of them even stirring at the sound of my footsteps. After a couple of minutes outside in that ever-astonishing cold, I dove back into my little nylon haven and the comforting hiss of the camp stove. Just as I sat down and began to fuss with making coffee, one of the dogs barked, and another: short barks of alarm which told me something was amiss, something was moving or approaching our little camp. Reluctant to leave the warm tent again, I poked my head through the door flap.

Eighty yards or so beyond the lead dogs stood a truly enormous white wolf, thick with frost on his mane and pelt, staring at the camp and the dogs as if transfixed. A second wolf, tawny grey, stood just behind the white one. All the dogs were on their feet now, some with clumps of snow still clinging to the sides of their heads, shanks, and nylon jackets, giving them a disheveled, just-woke-up look. No one moved or made a sound. A third wolf, white and slightly smaller than the others, probably a female, trotted in from the northeast. By then the tips of my frost-battered ears were going numb, and I pulled back into the tent to fetch my hat. When I stuck my head out again the two smaller wolves were ambling away, but the big white fellow still stood and stared. Finally he turned, stepped away, paused once more to study us, and slowly followed his comrades out of sight over the rise. I crawled back into the tent as the dogs settled into their beds again.

Grizzly Trade

By Dale Brandenburger; Luminare Press; $14.95

The blurb: Escape to the Last Frontier and find out what life on the edge is really like. Sliding seamlessly between poignancy and laugh-out-loud fun, "Grizzly Trade" is a romp through the Alaskan wilderness. Red just wants to be left alone in his Alaska retreat, but when the taciturn Vietnam vet starts to find dead bears in the forest with their paws hacked off, he is forced to wage war once more. Tim Branson is a gregarious small-town reporter, looking for a news story that sizzles. Despite their differences, they are forced to become allies when a methamphetamine addict and an unemployed lumberjack start selling bear gallbladders and paws on the Asian aphrodisiac market. While trying to track down the poachers, Red and Branson discover toxic chemicals dumped on the pristine salmon fishing grounds. Accusations fly and the entire town takes sides. Tim's job and Red's sanity are at stake as they try to find the connection between the bear killings and the environmental disaster. As they follow the money trail, the unlikely duo must deal with an array of eccentric characters, including a lethal ornithologist who enjoys arson as much as bird watching, an aphrodisiac-gobbling cruise ship captain with a woman in every port, and an egotistical state trooper who couldn't pour warm piss out of a boot if the directions were written on the heel.

Excerpt: A week had passed since Red found the corpse behind his cabin and called the state trooper. He didn't have a phone in his dilapidated shack. He had to drive five miles down a rutted dirt road to use the pay phone that hung on the wall outside the ferry terminal.

Red knew what it was straight off; murder for profit, plain and simple. A large caliber bullet had pierced the brown bear's skull just below her right ear, ricocheted off some bone, and exited from the left side of her neck. A precise incision, probably made with a razor-sharp hunting knife, slit the bear's hide, and the gall bladder had been removed. All four paws had been hacked off with a bone saw, leaving the flesh ragged, the bone splintered. The coagulated blood was crusty, the color of burgundy wine, and crawling with black flies. Driving to the payphone, wedged behind the wheel of his tiny Datsun pickup truck, Red scratched at his curly red beard and wondered how much a bear gall bladder and a set of paws fetched on the aphrodisiac market in China.

Seven long days had passed and he was still having trouble getting the grisly image of the carcass out of his head. Crouching in the shadows beneath a huge spruce tree, listening intently as the breeze whispered lightly through the branches close to his head, he gazed out at the gray beach. A tendril of mist swirled ghost-like over the water. He smelled the spruce buds and heard the water gently lapping at the shore. Red tried to see, hear and smell everything around him at the same time, hoping that by focusing his attention on every detail, he'd stop thinking about the mutilated bear.

He slung his rifle over his shoulder, leaned into a spruce branch until it snapped, then cranked it back and forth, wrestling it from the trunk of the tree. He used the bough like a broom as he walked backwards across the beach, lightly sweeping his footprints from the sand. When he reached the water's edge, he hopped onto a log and swept away the last set of tracks. Anyone who hiked down this rugged stretch of the coast would not see where he had entered the forest. Better safe than sorry. It was bad enough that the state trooper had come to his cabin. Although he was smart enough to never leave anything incriminating at his cabin, he didn't like cops in general and that cop in particular. He scampered along the log, surprisingly nimble for a large man in his 40s. Living in the Alaska forest for the past 20 years had kept him strong and agile.

The back of Red's neck began to tingle. He looked over his shoulder and scanned the beach once more, but it was just a breeze beginning to blow from the southeast, not the tingling sensation he had when he thought he was being watched. The bruised sky threatened rain and darkness was falling fast. He jumped from the log onto a large granite rock, still trying his best not to leave prints in the sand...

He thought about gathering some mussels from the tide pool but he was already shivering and the last gray light of day was fading to black. He hurried down the beach, smiling at his own buffoonery. When he was almost to the road he saw tracks where a brown bear had meandered along the water's edge. The tracks were different than black bear tracks, the toes closer together and in a straight line. The breeze still tickled the back of his neck. Red figured the bear had got wind of him and was long gone. Still, he pulled his rifle off his shoulder, chambered a round and switched on the safety. He had a great respect for bears.

He followed the tracks until they veered off into the forest. Then he saw the boot prints and scarlet beads of blood in the sand. No, not again. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, pulled a flashlight from his jacket pocket and charged into the gloomy underbrush. A few minutes later he found the dead bear, blood still draining onto the forest floor where the paws had been sawed off Red dropped the flashlight, raised his arms and pulled at his hair. All the anger and anguish of a lifetime boiled up inside him. He howled into the darkness. Red had an anger management issue.

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