Another outdoor adventure: dogsledding

It was the quintessential Canadian experience. One slice out of time epitomizes the extreme Canucktivity of it: Shirley leans over in the sled and grabs up a used Tim Horton's cup that someone has dropped. She's picking up litter, it's from a coffee and donut chain founded by a deceased pro hockey player, and she's on a dogsled. It's -20 Celsius, or -4 Fahrenheit. You can't get more Canadian than that.

The dogsledding opportunity came up yesterday, while Shirley's blood-son and my shadow-son Tristan, 14, was off school due to exams, so we let my blood-son and Shirley's shadow-son Raphi, 11, play hooky to go. We went to Chocpaw Expeditions near South River, Ontario, which is about an hour north of where I live. (That's an info-packed website, by the way, an education in and of itself.)

Raphi, left, and Tristan. All photos by Shirley.

Raphi set to go with some other folks

This outfit is serious about dogsledding. They own 380 dogs. When you arrive, the first thing you see is a massive field with what look like plastic barrels on their sides placed in neat rows. Each barrel is shelter for a dog, who is tethered to a stake near it, unless he or she is out pulling a sled. When I arrived, they all started barking, a deeply-impressive welcome. This is the place to be if you love dogs.

The dogs are the most extraordinary thing about dogsledding. "Pulling is the most important thing to them," our sled driver, Kevin, told us. They'll go all day. Unless someone stops them, he says, they'll go until they keel over dead. Watching their feet fly as you're in the sled, you believe it. On our ride, they're pulling at least 600 lbs. worth of human, plus the sled, and they run like they're not pulling anything. There is a liquid, practiced, unstoppably-steadfast joy to their running that is astonishing to see. They are like an engine, except that an engine, when you hit the brakes, doesn't almost immediately start whining and shrieking and jumping up to strain against its harness, desperate to go again. These dogs are hard-core.

Chocpaw's tireless pooches are mixed-breed, based majorly on Alaskan Sled Dogs with other breeds added, so most of them have the haunting blue or light brown eyes, but their coats are every colour: black, black and white, white, husky-coloured, golden, black-nosed like German shepherds, brindle. They are happiest in temperatures like yesterday's. In teams of seven or eight, they are hitched to the sled, a bent-wood contraption that looks just like the ones that Inuit use in movies, equipped with a brake and an anchor to hook into the snow when the driver wants it to stay put despite the dogs' imperative to move it elsewhere. They are attached to a central cord by a leash hooked to the back of the harness, which is actually what they pull, and a chain joining their collars to the central cord so as to keep their heads pointed in the right direction.

To steer the sled, you can make minor corrections by leaning your body or dragging your foot, but your main method is telling the lead dog where to go. If you fall off your sled, you chase it and, says, Kevin, "hope that the dogs come to some kind of obstacle."

To see them run, you imagine they'll have a totally-disciplined, almost military temperament -- and they are astonishingly non-distracted, even by passing cars or fascinating smells -- but they're still dogs. When they're not running, they'll crowd up to you making typical doggy please-love-me eyes. I gave our seven all good pettings, as well as unrestrained praise, in gratitude after our ride. I wanted to give them scraps but they are on a strict high-protein athlete's diet.

Raphi got his ride before I got there; Shirley and Tris and I went together, cuddled up in single file in the basket of the sled. The ride was several kilometres. The sky was the merciless blue of extreme cold; the air was totally still but for solid white plumes of steam from chimneys and mouths; the sun shone starkly through the ice-haze in the air. We went along a trail through a forest of utterly-motionless evergreens, every branch outlined with a frosting of brilliant white. When we weren't speaking, there was no sound but the whooshing slide of the runners. It inspired internal stillness. The perfect joy in pure exertion of the dogs inspired ongoing admiration.

If you have a chance to go dogsledding, I won't say "take it." Because I am Canadian, I will say "I suggest you take it." Bundling up, however, is mandatory.

Tris petting Aspen, who is a veteran and expert lead dog