0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
On Puzzling Wavelengths
The trapper faced a difficult situation. The weather was nasty, food
was short, his wife was in the hospital at that time, and, as he was
caring alone for several young children, he could not simply ask his
children to look after themselves while he did the 120 -mile round trip
to transport the priest to Fort Simpson hospital. And there were too
many in the family to consider all going in a single sled. So he covered
the ill man up with the blankets he could spare, hitched his own dogs
to the priest’s sled, and knelt down to talk with his lead dog. He told
it to take a wooded route around the shoulder of the low mountain
they lived on, then follow the Mackenzie River to Fort Simpson and
its hospital. We are not talking about following a clear, simple, much-
used path. There are branching trails, the route around the mountain
was a brushy one, and the river ice was perilously rough. There were
innumerable places for untended sled dogs to get into difficulties.
How the lead dog kept to the right trail, how it managed to head off
dog fights, how the team avoided getting their traces tangled in the
underbrush, and how they kept to their task for sixty miles without
further human assistance will never be known. But Fort Simpson in-
habitants can give us the end of the tale: a sled with no driver, carry-
ing a bundled up and now unconscious priest, ascended the steep riv-
erbank and came to an orderly stop on the main street of the town. I
learned about this feat years after the fact from two of the daughters
who witnessed the start of the trip and from residents of Fort Simp-
son who were able to tell me about the priest’s arrival and survival.
The real story for me, though, has to do with communication between
a man and his lead dog.
I have a companion tale about a much-admired man I interviewed
and know personally. One winter night, he rolled into a fire in his open-
air trapline camp. His face and one arm were terribly burned. Despite
excruciating pain, he readied his sled, harnessed all his dogs to it, and
instructed his lead dog to take him twenty miles up river to the com-
munity’s nursing station. Then he simply collapsed into the sled. As
in the previous account, underbrush and rough ice made it a treach-
erous and difficult route for dogs that had to make their way on their
own. And, again, we have the story that everyone in the community
knows, of the man’s dogs arriving untended and coming to a halt di-
rectly in front of the nursing station with their unconscious load.
