Mush!!!

Linda Sheesley laughs as she recalls her first dogsled race in Arviat, a community of 1,899 in Canada's newest northern territory, Nunavut. She was already an experienced musher when she arrived last August to begin a contract as a community health nurse, but she had always run dogs in the Alaskan style: standing up on the sled runners with the dogs paired in neat rows. Inuk dogsledders, on the other hand, lie flat on their stomachs on sleds called komatiks, with the dogs attached by a fan hitch – each dog on a harness at the end of its own long line. Sheesley decided to give the komatik a try.

"Picture this," she says, "a 51-year-old white woman … lying down on this sled, holding a snow-hook (which is a big two-pronged anchor) in my hand. I've got dogs in front of me and all they want to do is run." In her previous races, the dogsleds had started out at two-minute intervals leaving wide spaces between competing teams. Not in Nunavut: "You just line up, and the guy says, 'Go!' and everybody takes off at once. So I'm lying on the sled with my little face eight inches from the ground thinking, 'I'm going to die.' I look over and there's these dog heads with their tongues out, running up right beside me. Oh my God. It was great! I had a great time."

Punkers and Polar Bears

Arviat, located approximately 600 kilometers (372 miles) south of the Arctic Circle on the western shores of Hudson Bay, remains in many ways a traditional Inuk hunting community. It is accessible only by small commercial plane, except in the summer months, when a barge brings supplies. It has been "dry" since residents voted against the sale of alcohol and most people still eat "country food" – primarily caribou and some seal, polar bear, and whale meat.

Still, Arviat is adapting to modern times – a process Sheesley finds fascinating. "You can see traditional hunters here, with their caribou and sealskin clothes on, bringing home a caribou on their komatiks, and then you can go down to the Quick Stop and see beautiful young Inuk men with bleached-blond, spiked hair buying rap CDs." Recently in the public library, she watched five young men crowd excitedly around a computer terminal: "They were using the internet to find out how safe the weather was and what the tides would be, so they could go beluga whale hunting."

A doctor flies into Arviat for five days each month; the rest of the time, the town's healthcare needs are met by a team of three to five community health nurses with one nurse in charge. Each weekday morning at the walk-in clinic, Sheesley and the other nurses do it all: "We do all the assessments; the diagnoses; prescribe the medications; walk down the hall to the pharmacy and get the pills; and then walk back and hand them to the person. A lot of times, we do this with an interpreter, because people only speak Inuktitut." Afternoons are devoted to public health programs for pregnant women, babies, and the elderly. And, of course, the nurses also handle emergencies: "There's always a nurse on call, 24 hours a day, and a backup."

Hooked On Dogs

Sheesley has always loved the outdoors. In her twenties, she raced motorcycles and was a self-described ski bum. She discovered dogsledding while living in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, seven years ago. "Someone told me about a dog race down on the back bay. I'm an animal lover, so I went down and hung around like a little dog groupie." Sheesley helped out a bit, and one of the mushers let her on a sled. Instantly, she says, "I thought: I have to do this!"

She soon returned south to Kingston, Ontario, but was determined to pursue dogsledding. She asked around and finally met a musher named Sue Weih, who took Sheesley on as her handler. "As handler," explains Sheesley, "you help with the chores – feeding, scooping poop, and training. In return, she taught me how to run dogs, and she let me use some of her older dogs." Sheesley worked as Weih's handler for six years, and they became good friends.

By this point, Sheesley knew she wanted to "live someplace remote with dogs." To prepare, she went back to school and earned another certification: "So besides being a Master's-prepared nurse, I'm also a veterinary technologist."

Standing out and Fitting in

Sheesley's six huskies live in a dog yard near her home at the edge of town, because a local bylaw dictates that sled dogs must be penned at least 50 meters (55 yards) from residences. Each dog has its own house, though they don't always use them. As Sheesley says of her thick-furred, tundra-bred dogs, "Two of them were sleeping on top of their houses yesterday when I went to feed them – it was -62C (-79F)." She visits several times a day to feed the dogs, clean their run, clear snow from their houses, and give them pep talks, "It's OK, we're going to run soon, it's almost the weekend. Mummy still loves you. You're such a good boy." Often she brings her housedog, a cream-colored standard show poodle that is quite a sight wrestling with the huskies or "running around with a caribou leg in his mouth."

To participate in Arviat's dogsledding scene, Sheesley has had to negotiate linguistic and cultural differences. There are 15 members of the Arviat dog mushers' association: 14 Inuit men and Sheesley. She attends the association's meetings, which are conducted in Inuktitut, with a bilingual friend to translate. At her first race, she learned that the Inuit do not measure distance in kilometers or miles: the race route is "'to the other side of the first big lake and back.' Nobody knows how far it is, because it doesn't matter. It's just the other side of the lake!" Sheesley laughs, "Everybody knew that – except, of course, the white nurse, who had no idea." So she just followed along, and, as it turned out, she came in fourth out of 15.

Despite her outsider status – white, Southern, and first female dogsledder in Arviat – she says the people have been wonderful and that she has had "nothing but support," especially from the town's women. "They're really excited about me having dogs and racing them." Their accepting attitude probably has a lot to do with Sheesley's infectious cheerfulness, her sense of humor, and her racing success. "They laugh at me a lot," she says, "because there's stuff I don't know, and I freeze and I fall off my sled and do things like that. But it did get their attention when I started passing them during the race."

All the same, winning isn't what she's really after: "All I want to do is run my dogs," she says. "It's the nicest thing in the world to go out on a crisp, cold day when the sun is shining and all you hear is the runners on the snow and the dogs breathing. It doesn't get much better than that!"

About Arviat Arviat, called Eskimo Point until June 1989, is located in Canada's newest territory, Nunavut. Formerly the eastern portion of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut was established as a separate entity in April 1999. Arviat is located on the western shore of Hudson Bay, approximately 1,300 kilometers (807 miles) by air (i.e., small commercial plane!) from the nearest major city, Winnipeg. The geographic center of Canada is near the community of Arviat, at latitude 61 06' 30" N, longitude 94 03' 30" W. The name Arviat comes from the Inuktitut word for the bowhead whale: arviq. And regarding "Mush" … Mush, one of the commands that may be used to start a team, is from the French marché or marchons, which mean walk or go.

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