Husky News

KUSKO 300: Talkeetna musher may go to Bethel to hunt for pet.

Somewhere in the vast wilderness of the frozen Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta roams Joey, a playful black sled dog with tall, pointy ears, a healthy appetite and an aversion to the roar of a snowmachine engine.

At least that’s what musher Dave Tresino hopes.

The reality could be ugly.

Joey, a member of Tresino’s Kuskokwim 300 sled dog team, got loose Saturday while a volunteer was walking him to a plane at the Kalskag checkpoint, about 100 miles from the finish line.

The animal bolted, fleeing noise and commotion foreign to his home in the woods near Talkeetna, where Tresino runs a small kennel with a dozen dogs.

What’s happened since is anyone’s guess — and most of the speculation is bleak.

“There’s wolves out there — a lot of wolves,” Tresino said Wednesday from Talkeetna, where he returned earlier this week with the rest of his team.

And wolves aren’t the only danger.

“If it’s hungry and digging around fish camps and into fish stores, somebody might shoot it,” Kusko 300 race chairman Myron Angstman said.

Given those potential fates — becoming dinner, or getting shot for wanting dinner — Tresino hopes Joey is traveling the river.

Or maybe someone has spotted him, caught him and adopted him, although Angstman doubts that. He said it’s common knowledge along the river that there’s a missing sled dog. KYUK radio in Bethel helped spread the news in English and Yupik.

“I want this dog back. I miss him dearly,” Tresino said. “I’m out here working my dogs, and I don’t have my Joey.”

Joey got loose sometime Saturday after Tresino decided to drop the dog in Kalskag. Joey is one of his best, but gets skittish around snowmachines.

“I could tell he wasn’t resting as well as I wanted him to because of all the commotion,” Tresino said.

As Tresino headed downriver, volunteers took on the chore of getting Joey to the jail in Bethel, where dropped dogs wait out the end of the race.

As a woman led Joey to a waiting airplane, she apparently slipped and fell on the ice, and Joey took off. A couple of people gave chase on snowmachines, “which would’ve just scared the hell out of him,” Tresino said.

Tresino doesn’t blame anyone. Accidents happen, he said.

But he wishes race officials had told him the minute the dog disappeared. He might have joined the hunt.

He heard stories about a missing dog, but “the race never did notify me till I crossed the finish line. They told me they were sorry about my dog,” he said. “Whether a musher is tired or not, the musher should know if his dog is gone. He should be looking for his dog.”

That still might happen, Tresino said. He’s thinking about buying a plane ticket to Bethel and visiting villages along the river in the hope he’ll find Joey.

It’s not impossible. One of the best stories from last year’s Iditarod was the unlikely tale of Aafes, a member of G.B. Jones’ team who got loose near Rohn. Just about everyone but Jones had given up when Aafes showed up 11 days later at a makeshift airstrip outside Rohn.

If Aafes could survive that long in a wolf-infested corner of the Alaska Range, maybe Joey can too.

In the event anyone sees Joey — a 3-year-old who looks more like a pointer than a husky – Tresino has this advice:

“Walk away from your snowmachine. You have to approach him on foot,” he said. “Anybody who’s a dog person can catch this dog, because this dog loves to eat.”

Source: The Anchorage Daily News