16th February
Breakfast was porridge, dried fruit and powdered milk with sport supplement powder enriched vitamins covering the lot. Huskies can hydrate themselves by metabolizing animal fat. Sometimes I feed up to 40% of their diet as fat. They also produce their own vitamin C. Humans can't. Without vitamin C you'd end up with scurvy. This was the scourge of early polar travellers.

We began our day in brilliant sunshine. With a stretch then a yawn everyone wanted to get going. My routine is to travel for 55 minutes then allow for a 5-minute break. Pingo, Piper, Timber and Hansel know the routine and value it. The youngsters have this to learn.

There's an Inuit saying that goes:
No good dogs, long way…
Good dogs, close to…

The nearest vet to Inuvik is Dawson City in the Yukon and their fly-in visits north are, occasional. Stool, urine and blood samples can be flown out for a vet to analyse. From this a vet can divulge a fund of information over the phone about a dog's health, nutritional value of its diet, possible infections, parasites or mineral balance. Here alone, responsibility for the dogs' health is mine. I watch for many things but a basic one is to prevent or stabilize any injury by watching closely for subtle changes of any dog's running gait and behaviour.

As usual I nibbled PowerBars to maintain energy throughout the day.
 
I stopped the team just before 4pm to untangle young Kimik's harness. Then it happened. A blood curdling distant howl to the north of us. It was a wolf.
 
Amazingly an individual wolf's howl will indicate it's position within the pack, physical condition its sex and intentions. It seemed very early for this to be a courting wolf because they look to mate in late March. So maybe it was a lost wolf cub trying to get itself back to the pack, who knows. I know night howling wolf packs help summon members to a nightly hunt so I prepared myself thinking we might well be the centre of attention.