By Anita Rafael
Photography by Hubert Schriebl
For a passenger, the ride in a dog sled is gentle, silent and subdued, marked only by the musher’s calls to his dogs and the swish of the wooden sled crossing the snow.
Go Dog, Go! happens to be the title of a best seller that Philip D. Eastman of Amherst, Massachusetts penned back in 1961 and it was a real page-turner among the six year-old Seuss set. In the colorful reader (still a kiddie lit classic) several mad dogs speed around as fast as they can—in little convertible sports cars. “Go dog, go!” repeats the text again and again, as the hounds, their long ears flapping in the breeze, zip across the pages and even drive straight up into lollipop-shaped trees.
“Go dog, go!” could likewise be the motto of the Husky Works Mushing Company, established in woodsy West Wardsboro last winter. There aren’t any racecars there, however—just teams of sled dogs loping along a pretty three-mile forest trail. Behind them is a 10-foot ash-frame sled, carrying one expert musher and you.
Once five to ten of his Siberian huskies are strapped into their nylon webbing harnesses with their necklines secured for pulling, company co-owner Jeremy Bedortha says, “gee,” “haw,” “ let’s go,” “easy,” and “whoa” for turn right, turn left, go ahead, slow down and stop. Sled dogs are not controlled by reins like a horse or by yanking their gangline, as the rig is called, but by the musher’s clear and confident voice commands.
“Cinders!” he says to the female lead, “Gee!” and the whole line of black-white, gray-white, all white, sable-colored and spotted “piebald” dogs arcs gracefully as Cinders turns them into a clearing ahead. “Sasha!” he says, getting the attention of the point dog who is second in line on the right-hand side of the mainline before telling her, too, to pull into the forthcoming curve: “Gee!” Two wheel dogs, as they are curiously called, are the ones closest to the front the sled and they are typically the heaviest dogs; Nashashuck’s and Yuma’s job is to calmly power the sled forward, out and around sharp corners and to make wider turns to steer the weight of the toboggan and its passengers past obstacles such as trees or posts. “Easy!” he says softly, encouraging the last pair to take the turn slowly and not tip the sled or its load. Sometimes Barren and Wazika work as the wheels.
Company co-owner Laura Bedortha, who is Jeremy’s wife, and Ben Hescock, a Wardsboro resident and a lifelong friend of Jeremy’s, are both capable Husky Works mushers. “Jeremy and I got hooked on mushing after we went on a sled tour at Mont Tremblant outside Montreal several years ago,” recalls Laura. “They let us drive our own sleds pulled by four dogs over a couple of miles of trail,” she says. Jeremy, who already had a pet Siberian named Scout, bought a second husky, Kayla. Soon, they bought a third, Sasha, then a forth. Next, they bred a litter, all five of which the Bedorthas kept. Then came a litter of four, of which they raised just two. Later, the couple adopted several more Siberians and paid a premium price to buy an experienced lead dog from a New Hampshire musher who was shutting down his business and who also sold them his used sleds. ...
