Doug's Friend Terry as Dog Sledder!

Hello 109ers.

My name is Terry Woolf and I have been working with Doug on his northern Canada video job. We have had lots of fun together but it has been very hard working in the extreme cold.

I run a team of sled dogs and it is one of my favorite things to do in the winter. Dog teams were very important to the north of Canada and America (mostly Alaska ) Until the introduction of the snow machine about 40 years ago almost all winter travel was by dog sled. The mail. lots of freight (packages) , food, policemen, people from the churches, trappers on their trap lines all traveled by dogs teams. I started doing it for fun.

When the European people first came to North America over 500 years ago there were only few types of dogs here. One of these was the Canadian Inuit Dog. They were used as sled dogs and the type that I use mostly.

I have 6 dogs in my team. Django the leader, Mojo, who sometimes leads,

Flash, and Foxy who are usually in the middle and Reggae and Shaky who are the “wheel” dogs or the dogs closest to the sled or toboggan.

The heart of a dog team is the lead dog. If you have a good lead dog then you can put other untrained dogs behind and they will learn from the lead dog.

A lead dog has to know certain things. They have to stay straight out front and keep the lines tight so the rest of the team doesn’t get tangled up. The leader should know some basic commands. “Gee” means go right, “Haw” means go left.

“Haw come” means turn all the way around and go back the way we have come.

The other command they should know is “Whoa” I “ll let you figure out what that means. Different people have different commands but these are the ones I use.

My main lead Django is very good. He listens to commands. He can find old trails when they are buried in snow. He’s very friendly.

The dogs live out side all through the winter. They have good fur coats and if they are fed well they can live well out side. At home I put straw in their houses for the cold in winter. If I am on the trail camping I will put fresh spruce boughs down for dogs to sleep on. Some times I have been camping and it has snowed at night. In the morning I look out side the tent and can’t see the dogs but when I whistle all their heads pop up out of the snow where they have been buried.

Doug said I should tell you the story of Homer, one of my old sled dogs. I first got Home as a puppy. The day I got him my wife Aggie was taking him for a walk to get to know him. In the woods near our house a big dog came along and scared him so he ran away in the trees. We got some friends and we searched all after noon but could find him. When we got back to our house there he was sitting out side the dog yard gate. This little puppy only 7 weeks old had only been to our house for one day yet he managed to find his way home so we called him Homer. Two years later I found I had too many dogs so I gave Homer to a friend for his team. Later this man had to move from Yellowknife , to Vancouver Island , way down south. He found he couldn’t keep a dog team there. So he sent them back to Yellowknife . From Yellowknife , some dogs were now sent to Tuktoyaktuk were they joined a different team. Homer was one of these dogs.

I didn’t know all of this story until last week

Doug and the crew were filming with a dog team owned by James Pokiak. Doug was right in the middle of all the dogs filming and I was doing the sound and watching to see that the dogs didn’t tangle up with Doug. One dog kept coming over to me and pushing against me wanting to be petted. He was very friendly to me. When we finished filming we were in James Pokiak’s house talking and I asked him about this big friendly dog. James said had come from Yellowknife and before that Vancouver Island . That’s when I realized that this was Homer. When I went back over to him and called his name his ears popped right up and he looked right at me. So I went over to pet and play with him. This dog had recognized me after 5 years and 2 different owners.

Well I guess that’s’ all my dog team stories for now. You can look on a map and find the different places that Homer traveled to. If you have any questions I will try to answer them.

Here are a couple of pictures of my dogs.

Thanks for being interested.

Terry Woolf