"Junior Heal"

I'll have some more stories from the trail soon, but I've had alot of inquiries asking which dog Mark dropped, so I thought I'd deal with that first.

Junior was Mark's dropped dog. Relatively early in the race Junior got pushed into the soft snow on the inside corner of a turn. Mark suspects that he got injured by some sticks that were under the snow, he cried out and one of the other dogs jumped on him. Mark got it all quickly sorted out, but Junior had a tear to the groin (we suspect the original injury) and a number of other puncture wounds.

Mark and I both camped with the dogs on the trip up and our stops overlapped by about an hour, which made for a nice little visit. Junior had run up to the camp, but was feeling very sorry for himself. Once he rested a bit, things got very sore so Mark carried him in the sled for the final 50 miles to Joe May's.

Molly, who is living out at Jamie's right now (and helping Jamie out alot while Harry is away) came out and picked Junior up and dropped him off with our friends at the Big Lake Susistna Veterinary Clinic. I talked to them before we hit the trail again to make sure Junior was okay. At that point he was just waiting to go into surgery, but was going to be fine. I asked them to hang onto him till Monday, as I didn't want to inconvenience anyone at the house - and figured that Junior would enjoy some quality, inside healing time.

I talked to Andrea (his vet) yesterday when she and her husband, fellow Iditarod musher, Sven Haltman stopped by the truck while I was dropping dogs and waiting for Mark. She said Junior was doing great. He took about 10 stitches and had a small flap of skin removed. I asked if he was 'out for the season' (as I expected he was) and she gave me a surprising 'wait and see' answer. She said he had come out of his surgery very well and was already walking around quite comfortably.

So we will wait and see.

We will be picking him up later today and I'll make sure to post a few pictures of him.

Karen