For Hungry Alaskan Dogs, Reason to Give Thanks

Hunger knows no confines here, not when the dim midday sun hangs low in the sky and the wind blows snow across the tundra at 15 below. The wolf takes the caribou. The grizzly, too thin to sleep, takes the moose. The man takes the few fish swimming up under the ice and, if there is some left, throws it to the dog. If not, the dog dies.

This is the circle of survival that has played out in the Alaskan bush for as long as anyone can remember. This year, however, a disastrous salmon season has left interior Alaska in worse shape for the onset of the malevolent winter than anyone can remember.

Many native families are preparing for the long, dark months with only half a dozen Chinook salmon--instead of the usual 100 or so--in the freezer. And the fall chum runs were so low that the sled dogs, the mainstays of transportation for large numbers of traditional families here, face a long season of hunger.

But help began arriving throughout the state this week when the U.S. Army launched an unusual relief mission to deliver 200,000 pounds of fish to dogs all over the Alaskan bush. Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters have begun touching down in dozens of remote villages, unloading large cartons of frozen fish assembled through an extraordinary volunteer effort that covered much of the state.

Although that fish will not be enough to feed all the hungry dogs over the winter, organizers are collecting additional donations of dog food and cash that they hope will tide over the dogs that haul water and wood, patrol the fur trapping lines and provide transportation to hunting grounds throughout the vast roadless regions of interior Alaska.

“I don’t think anybody in their right mind would starve their dogs,” said Pollock Simon, one of half a dozen families in the Koyukuk River village of Allakaket who keep large sled-dog teams. “But I ended up with about 50 fish on the fall run, and I’m just about running out of fish now. This will be a big help.”

Operation Fish-Ex began after a group of Yukon River fishermen, facing the worst salmon run in statehood history, contacted Gov. Tony Knowles for help. The governor already had offered disaster assistance to about 5,000 families reeling from the fishing crisis, but his office said the aid was for hungry families, not dogs.

In stepped a group called People for Emergency Preparedness Planning for Animals in Alaska, launched after a 1996 wildfire near Anchorage had pointed out the need for disaster planning to include animals as well.

Lorelei Lamere, an Eagle River veterinarian and president of the group, made contact with a Homer businessman who had a line on about 200,000 pounds of excess fish available through a hatchery in Valdez. Because the salmon had been stripped of their roe for hatchery reproduction, they were not fit for human food and would have been destined for fertilizer.

Lamere’s first instinct was to pass. What would she do with 200,000 pounds of fish that would go bad in a week if they weren’t frozen quickly? John Lotz at the Food Bank of Alaska quickly came up with a company that would flash freeze the fish, and the Episcopal Church world relief fund donated the $23,000 needed to pay for it.

That left Lamere with 200,000 pounds of frozen fish in Anchorage and no way to get it north toward the affected villages. In stepped the Aleyeska Pipeline Service Co., operators of the trans-Alaska pipeline, to donate enough money to truck the fish to Fairbanks.

A veterinarian at Ft. Wainwright, Maj. Peggy Barnes, arranged to have the fish stored in a large Army freezer until winter set in. But there was still the problem of getting the fish to the villages--until the Department of the Army agreed last week to organize a military airlift.

“I guess it kind of falls into our community relations program,” said Linda Douglas, public affairs officer at Ft. Wainwright, adding that it also provides an opportunity for some flight training.

“It was one of those things, if you sat back and looked at the whole picture, you’d say ‘No way, this is not possible,’ ” Lamere says now. “But it’s like eating a dirt sandwich: You eat it one bite at a time.”

Allakaket, a cluster of tiny houses and about 200 Athabascan natives, always has relied on Chinook, the big king salmon that typically stock native freezers throughout the winter. But this year, the fishing was the worst in anyone’s memory.

“This is the summer I didn’t catch one fish. Not even one fish. All the money I make now just goes to the store,” said Vincent Simon, a City Council member who has had to supplement his income by doing jobs for the village and working as a heavy-equipment operator.

Younger villagers have been hunting caribou or moose when they can. But the elders, who have lived all their lives on the fruits of the river, don’t want to eat meat. And when their small supplies of fish are gone, salmon at the village store is a whopping $6 a can.

Nowhere in that equation are the several dozen dogs that can be heard yapping throughout the village whenever someone walks by. The small, fiercely intelligent Siberian huskies stand tethered on 3-foot ropes, each with a small doghouse for shelter from the bitter cold. Their only escape from the rope is the occasional foray on the sled, when they gallop, yelping with eagerness, out through the trees on the edge of the village and across the frozen tundra beyond.

Once the dogs settle into a rhythm, the barking quiets and there is only the sound of their soft paws padding across the powdered snow.

That, says Pollock Simon, is why he never traded in his sled dogs for a snowmobile, as many native Alaskans have.

“You go out with the dogs, you just hear the rustling of the dogs’ feet. You can hear a wolf howl or a moose breaking sticks.”

Simon tells the story of the musher in Wiseman who earlier this month was saved from an attacking grizzly by his sled dogs. When the grizzly placed his lethal paws on the man’s shoulders, his dogs, still tethered, attacked the bear from behind and allowed the man to run to safety. The bear set back on the dogs as the man ran. He said he heard them howling for 20 minutes before eight of the nine died.

“My parents had dogs when I was a kid, and their parents before them,” said Steven Bergman, who needs several thousand fish to feed his 29 dogs over the long winter. He is already thinking of thinning his team.

“Without this help, there would have been a lot of looking around for options of what to do,” said Bill Fliris, a native fisherman from the Yukon village of Tanana who keeps 45 dogs. “It’s not an easy decision for people to make. I think you’d look at some of the older dogs to put down. Or people always say, maybe I can get a job and scrape together something. . . .

“When you’re living close to the resources, you’re taking one live creature out of the river and feeding it to another live creature, the dog,” Fliris said. “They are working animals, and they have to be able to do the job that’s necessary to survive.”