Monday 19 September 2005

The Story of a Sled Dog, part 1

The winter 2003 my girlfriend Annelill and I was working on Svalbard, the Arctic archipelago of Norway. I was taking tourists on snowmobile safaries and ice caving in the glaciers and Annlill was feeding and caring for 80 alaskan huskies in a professional sled dog company.
Amongst all these extreme performers of sled dogs some are considered 'not usable' for different reasons. In Pingas case, she had too much hair, specially between the toes on the paws and she was also a bit scatterbrained according to the boss dog handler. On the other hand she always liked to be touched and she communicated it by rolling around on her back ready for some scratching and hugging whenever there were people around. This made her stick a bit out in the mass of all the eighty dogs. She is also completely white - though not exactly, after spending her first year only 500 meters from one of Svalbards coal mines.
With a little bit of negotiations with the company we convinced them to (without compensation) to leave Pingo to us (yes - her original name was Pingo after a geophysical phenomenon in arctic regions; Pingos - a bulb of ice formed of an influx of water from below...).
When it was clear that she had all the vaccinations against rabies (it's rabies on Svalbard due to some mice that the russians imported in the fifties) she could start traveling down south to Norway mainland. Annelill and I was long gone south so our friend Henrik brought her along. Her first flight must have been a nightmare for her as she was pretty far out as she arrived at Oslo airport. She threw up in the car going home - pizza from kroa, her first and only pizza meal and she couldn't hold on to it - what a pity..

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