Posted 6 months ago
Today (28/10/2012)
Today was the second day of training the dogs using the sleds and on the snow. It started awesomely; Trine (the boss), Jake and I took a team each out and had no troubles whatsoever. Racing through the snow covered landscape, pulled by six or eight dogs (sled size dependent) is just amazing. It’s just so fun and liberating.
But then, on the second round of training, everything went to shit.
Jake went in the lead, and within about 75m his team had stopped and his lead dogs were trying to fuck. Every time we got to a place where the ice had cracked a bit leaving a muddy puddle of water, his lead dogs would stop, meaning that I had to stop as well. The dogs got tangled pretty much every time they stopped, which meant that we had to take time to untagle them.
Once when we stopped, I tried to anchor to a tree that seemed stable enough. As I was tying on, my dogs decided they didn’t want to stand still anymore, and jered forward, ripping the tree down, trapping me under it with my left arm caught between the taut rope and the tree. After a few dozen seconds, the rope slipped free and I pushed the tree off me and ran clumsily through the deep snow to try to catch my sled, which thankfully Jake managed to stop.
So my dogs were eager to run, to say the least, whilst the ones with Jake were hesitant to say the least. We thought it would be sensible for me to take the lead, so we looked for a place fr me to overtake him. The trail widened slightly as we came to a patch of broken muddy ice, so Jake’s team stopped and we tried to coax mine around them. Jake was leading my lead dogs past, when one of te dogs from his team, Kyrre, attacked one of my lead dogs, Ludde.
Within seconds, about four dogs had their jaws locked on Ludde, with others trying to bite him as well. We managed to pull two or three of the dogs off, and Ludde had stopped moving, as I was trying to get Kyrre off Ludde’s back leg (it was so close to his penis, I was so scared that he had bitten Ludde’s cock off) Ludde bit me.
He bit me directly on my elbow.
I cannot describe now much it hurt. Pain flooded down my arm, literally rendering it useless.
I pulled free (again, ow) and plunged my elbow into the snow, hoping that the cold would make it feel better or nub or something. Anything. I tried my phone, but no signal. Jake still had hold of two dogs, I think. I went back, unclipped Ludde from Ranta, the other lead dog, pulled them apart and I am slightly ashamed to admit to hitting the other dogs in order to get them to let go of Ludde. It worked though, so, y’know.
I held a few dogs back as Ludde kind of just lay there in the snow. My arm still wasn’t really working, so Jake did everything from this point really. I planned everything out, telling hi what to do, and he did everything admirably. he loaded Ludde into my sled, tying him in, as I changed a few dogs around in my team. We got back on the road, as it were, trying to get back to Birk ASAP.
On the way back we didn’t really have many other incidents. My sled tipped on it’s side, throwing me off as my dogs carried on running. I caught them quick enough, but it just made everything that little bit more shit.
There weren’t any other major incidents; Jake’s lead dogs still didnt like the water, but we got back to Birk and checked Ludde over. He seems fine, he’s got quite a few bites, one massive one in his leg where fur and skin is missing so you can see the muscle underneath.
So that was how our day went from hero to zero, just like that.
