I am seated in the basket of the sled, as stiff as a quartered moose. Behind me, riding the runner, is the musher, Kelly Murphy. We slow now and then . . . , and when we do, the dogs . . . look impatiently at us, haunches quivering, ready to pull and pull again.
I take my turn at the handle bow—riding where the musher rides, minding the brake—while Murphy jogs ahead of the dog team.
I listen to the one-way singsong between Murphy and his dogs, encouragement and caution and admiration. I watch the driving legs ahead of me—28 of them—on dogs whose frames are small and light, nothing like the creatures I’d imagined. And as we cut through the white ash swamp, hissing across the ice, I find myself wondering, why do sled dogs run?
It is not a matter of driving them. All the work is in pacing them, restraining them. . . . The dogs [pull] forward again before [Murphy] can shout, “Let’s go!” All the one-word answers to my question are too simple: love, joy, duty, obedience.
The dogs . . . don’t run for a reward or toward a goal—the greyhound’s mechanical rabbit. They get yelled at when they chew on the gangline and petted when the run is over. They don’t catch or flee anything. They would keep running if the musher fell off his sled.