The Call of the Wild

Sled dogs, snow, and the wild untamed north.

By Eric Sparling | Photographs by Ed Vos

You've had four hours sleep in the last twenty-four. The temperature's dipped below -40 degrees Celsius. The sweat on your back is well on its way to becoming ice. You're a cheerleader, general, nutritionist, physician, navigator and marathoner. But all that is temporarily forgotten because up ahead, in the shadow of the pine trees, looms a dark shape. An encounter with a bull moose could more than just end your hopes of victory-it could mean the death of a teammate. You're not in Kansas anymore. No, you're in Alaska, and you're still more than a week and 700 miles away from finishing your first Iditarod.

"I call her my steering wheel." Martin Buser is on the phone. As a dogsledder living in Big Lake, Alaska, he inhabits a world completely foreign to most city-dwellers. Instead of workdays filled with computer screens and email, coffee breaks and stalled freeways, he has icy winter training runs filled with the panting of dogs muffled by the silence of snow-blanketed trees; the swish of a sled's runners and the sound of his own breath in the dry air.