Risk

What is there to say about Risk other than she is my main leader and a near flawless one at that. I rely on her more than I should which is to say that she is seldom in any position other than lead. She not only gets me to where I want to go, but she is helping to train the new batch of leaders. Risk is very confident in her abilities to lead a team and I have seen her pull a dog off it's feet when it didn't listen to a directional command and she did. Although not as fast as our other leaders, Risk is steady. Where one of our leaders tends to slack off going up hills, Risk works hard to keep her line tight.

This past summer I came home late from work one night and it was dark when I was feeding the dogs. When I got to the dog run, I noticed that Risk was loose. She followed me as I fed each dog in turn and it wasn't until I fed Olive that I noticed something was really wrong. Olives face was severly damaged and when I looked at Risk, her face was laid open to the bone in several places, her ear was torn and her face was covered in caked on blood. My heart sank. Not only had she and Olive, two dogs that I would have said never fight, fought, but they were my two main leaders and I highly doubted that they would run together again. Plus, there was some serious damage. Jenn and I brought them in the house and tried our best to tend to their wounds but they were truly awful and severe. Olive's muscle and skin on her lower jaw had been separated from the jaw bone so that she looked like a pelican. We couldn't do anything for them, so it was a $1,600 vet visit to get them stitched up. Risk got over 70 stitches in her face. And that is where the mystery started; why would such a severe fight only have produced injuries to the face? Jenn and I thought about it and the more we thought about it, the more it seemed like the pair of dogs had fought with something through the fence. I suspect a bear, most likely a cub, because there had been a cub around all summer and although their injuries were bad, I expect an adult bear would have done even worse. This explains Risk's sneer because the stitches kind of pulled her one lip back a bit.

Risk comes from Whitehorse musher Kiara Adams