The Dog Team – Part 1: Mush

"Not so tight," said Dmitri. "They can feel it."

"I'm not tight."

"You are gripping like it's a rope bridge."

Owen loosened his hands on the handlebar of the sled and tried to relax. Eight huskies strained at their harnesses ahead of him, tails curled, eyes bright, yipping. The temperature was minus twenty-two. The sky above the frozen river was an extraordinary clear blue, edged with pink, and the spruce on both banks wore thick white coats.

He was thirty-three, a travel photographer from Toronto on a two-week assignment in the Yukon, and he had never in his life been this cold or this happy.

"Ready?" called Dmitri from the runners behind. He was thirty-seven, a lean, bearded man in a fur-trimmed parka with ice in his eyebrows, who had run dogs for twelve winters and treated each one like a colleague. "Say hike."

"Hike!"

The sled leapt forward. The world became wind, silence and the soft hiss of runners over snow. Owen whooped. Behind him, Dmitri laughed, a big warm sound that rolled across the ice.

For ten days Owen mushed dogs by day and photographed them at dusk. He learned the team's names, Biscuit and Juno and Old Hank. He learned to feed, to harness, to read a dog's mood from the angle of its ears. In the evenings they sat in the cabin around a roaring stove, drinking hot tea and mending harnesses.

"Why do you do this?" asked Owen.

"The dogs make sense. People are harder." Dmitri looked up. "You make sense, though."

Owen put down his camera. "I'm not sure that's a compliment."

"It is the biggest one I have." Dmitri hesitated. "May I tell you I'd like to kiss you?"

Continue the story: Part 2 – Aurora.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Aurora.