I.

There’s a story that circulates in Haines, Alaska, a small town hemmed in by year-round snowcaps and cold, clear, fish-rich waters on the northern edge of the Inside Passage. The story is always told third- or fourth-hand, but if its details have blurred or morphed over time, it still retains a core of truth, a local lesson, at its heart.

It’s about a woman, a visitor to Haines, who emerged one summer morning from a monster RV with Texas plates. She was a big-haired bottle blonde, so the story goes, a caricature of a Southern suburbanite, and she cuddled a tiny, shrill dog as she greeted the Alaskan morning.

Then: a rush of air from powerful wings, an instant of confusion, maybe time for one shriek from the woman, and suddenly her manicured hands were empty, the unlucky dog’s yips fading in the distance as a bald eagle bore it away across the water.

The story’s lesson is clear: This is no country for tiny dogs. This is the land of the husky.

II.

Ever since I’d moved cross-country, from Ottawa to Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon, I’d been confronted by the reality of dog mushing in my new home. A young singer-songwriter at a coffeehouse, all soft bohemian fabrics and soothing acoustic guitar, would refer casually to her next song having been inspired by her time running dogs. A friend of a friend would lend us the use of his lakeside cabin for a snowmobile trip – and instruct us to follow his dog team’s trail across the ice to get there. And around town, in the grocery store parking lot or on the steep climb up Two Mile Hill to the Alaska Highway, I would spy renovated pick-ups, dogs peering in groups of six or eight or twelve from behind the barred windows of the bulky homemade kennels built into the truck beds, dog sleds strapped on top.

Before the move, I’d known dog sledding only as a gimmicky set piece for winter tourists, or as a historical remnant – a mode of travel straight out of a Pioneer Days exhibition. It belonged alongside the grizzled fur traders and striped Hudson’s Bay Company blankets and as-yet-unconquered, free-ranging native tribes of my junior high school history textbook. I couldn’t fathom mushing as a modern lifestyle, a hobby no stranger than hot yoga or scrapbooking, but there it was, all around me.

III.

I met Jen and Michael Raffaeli outside a National Park Service hangar on the fringes of Fairbanks International Airport, in the false twilight of an Alaskan winter morning. They were looking for the same flight I was, to a historic roadhouse deep in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, and none of us yet knew that our NPS pilot, Brad, had been stranded by bad weather at the roadhouse the night before. So we gathered in the undisturbed snow of the airstrip and waited, exchanging introductions and brief biographies, until another pilot arrived with the word on Brad.

Jen was the kennel manager at Denali National Park, the only park in the U.S. system that keeps its own in-house dog teams; Michael worked as a ranger at the park in summer and a kennel volunteer in winter. Before settling in at Denali, they’d mushed dogs in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, in the Lake Tahoe region of northern California, and in an isolated Alaskan village north of the Arctic Circle. Now, as NPS staffers, they were members of a volunteer crew headed into Yukon-Charley to man a remote dog-drop station on the Yukon Quest trail.

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