Learn how to develop a "happy draft dog" whether for competition or carting the kids around the back yard. Step-by-step instructions on selecting equipment, conditioning and training will get you going in what may be your next dog sport!

This book was published many years ago in Germany. With more than 10000 sold copies it was unexpected succesful. Now for the first time in English. Fully coloured, with lots of illustrations and up to date. It is not only the novice musher, who wants to learn more, it is the sleddog tourist as well, who wants to know more about this complex sport with its canine athletes.Whirling snow between gliding runners, powered forward by a relentless urge. Panting they lope along the sinuous trail, the deeply snow-covered scenery passes by. A feeling like flying, ecstasy - the fascination of the sleddog sport!The sleddogsport is not always percieved this way, but it holds a geat fascination: the unity of human and animal. Anyone, who has ever experienced this feeling, will never forget it. You may say this sport is not for you, because I live in the wrong region of the world. But it is not only Alaska, Greenland and Siberia where you can practice this sport. You can do it everywhere in the world. If you can not find snow, then take the cart. It does not matter riding on snow or mud, the fascination remains, being on the road with the team of human and dog.In many places it is certainly not easy to keep more than one dog, but often there is another musher close by. You need nothing except the love for animals to start practicing this sport.This booklet cannot cover all aspects of this sport, as it is much too complex. Instead I want to give an overview of sleddog breeding, the techniques of working with an enthusiastic sleddogteam and how to take care of these fascinating animals.It is not the intention of this book to show you how to make a sleddog out of any dog. It is remarkable, that 99% of all sleddogbreedings run and pull without ever having done it before.But every Musher (french: march�r - to run) should know more about this sport than just standing on the runners. You should know how to steer a sled, how to feed the dogs, how to take care of their health and how to solve problems on the trail. This book will begin to teach you the basics, I hope.

An inspiring book about dedication, the love of dogs, and the physical endurance and mental toughness needed to run the Iditarod sled dog race -- from a female perspective. Lisa Frederic didn't set out to run the Iditarod. She just fell in love with the event and wanted to help. She ended up working as a volunteer for the Trail Committee at various checkpoints. Then she helped Iditarod champion Jeff King train his puppies. She had never mushed before. She was a rookie, but a rookie with heart and drive. She started out with short races and eventually raced the 1,049 miles from Anchorage to Nome in the Iditarod. Her story speaks to everyone who has ever followed a dream and found that the dream realized is even bigger than the imagined one.

Dog Driver is for anyone interested in sled dog training for recreational sledding, racing, or working. Based on personal sled dog experience in both racing and working sled dog teams, Miki and Julie Collins explain everything you need to know to select, raise, train and care for sled dogs, dog sledding equipment and even clothing. Learn to read and understand your dogs, as well as how to take care of injuries on and off the trail. You won't be stranded out on the trail if you study their advice on repairing harnesses and sleds. Plus, in Dog Driver, you'll get all the latest sled dog facts, know what it is really like to own mushing dogs and just what it takes to be among the top Iditarod dogs. Follow Miki and Julie through thousands of wilderness miles as they run their working sled dog teams to check on trap lines and deliver freight during the winter in the heart of Alaska.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Balto, the great Alaska sled dog, has been dead since 1933. But he still stands larger-than-life on Dogdom's Mount Olympus, where the world's great canines are immortalized. Yet few people know Baltos true story. Only one small part has been told, and even it has been distorted. Several Balto books have been written. There's even a Balto animated movie, but it, too, is largely fiction. (Balto was NOT part wolf!) Like the books, the movie leaves off where this book begins — and tells the best part of the story. Balto was only three years old when he helped carry serum across Alaska from Nenana to Nome to save the town's children from diphtheria. As leader of the last dog team in the life-saving relay race, he became an overnight sensation — a BONEa fide international celebrity. But much more happened after that. Balto lived for eight more years. His days unfolded like a sled expedition to the North Pole, carrying him in an exhilarating rush over smooth snow one minute, an icy hummock the next. And how does the new story end? With a heart-thumping surprise that you can't imagine — and neither could have Balto. Hook up your harness, step into Balto's booties, and mush off to Balto's true story.

“A readable and up-to-date introduction to a most fascinating culture” from a world-renowned Sumerian scholar (American Journal of Archaeology). The Sumerians, the pragmatic and gifted people who preceded the Semites in the land first known as Sumer and later as Babylonia, created what was probably the first high civilization in the history of man, spanning the fifth to the second millenniums B.C. This book is an unparalleled compendium of what is known about them. Professor Kramer communicates his enthusiasm for his subject as he outlines the history of the Sumerian civilization and describes their cities, religion, literature, education, scientific achievements, social structure, and psychology. Finally, he considers the legacy of Sumer to the ancient and modern world. “An uncontested authority on the civilization of Sumer, Professor Kramer writes with grace and urbanity.” —Library Journal