The Li'l Champs Are Getting Bigger

Joanna's new litter of 8 puppies has some champion breeding coming from four time Iditarod winner Doug Swingley lines. She is very excited about these puppies and how they may perform in the future for her dog sled races. They will soon be seven weeks old and are in one of the cutest stages of growth. Joanna is often taking interested guests up to the dog yard to show them off. It helps with their socialization too.

Joanna had quite a scare when she took Sparrow, the mother, down to breed her to one of Doug Swingley's champion sled dogs, north of the Duluth, MN area. She took Sparrow into the pen where she was to stay during the breeding process. Inadvertently, the gate was left partially unlatched and when Joanna was looking the other way, Sparrow somehow slipped out and took off. Joanna suddenly noticed she was gone and frantically ran in search of her. Sparrow wasn't in the parking lot or yard, so she looked toward the road and there she was. This all took place in February when the roads were icy and it was very cold out.

Though Joanna called to her, Sparrow was very spooked being in a strange place and would not come to her. She was in the middle of the road and an approaching vehicle tried to stop to keep from hitting her. When they hit the brakes they began to slide and almost ran into Joanna. This caused Sparrow to run toward the intersection of a busier road three quarters of a mile away. I guess she had had enough of this experience and was headed back to Canada. Joanna was getting nervous thinking she could lose her special dog in this unexpected scenario.

The man helping Joanna with the breeding had the foresight to jump in his pickup truck and head over to get Joanna. They raced down the road to catch up to Sparrow. In the meantime, Sparrow ran in front of another car. Eventually Joanna and her helper were able to go around her in their vehicle to get ahead of her. Immediately Joanna hopped out of the pickup to intercept her. She called Sparrow to her, but in her panic state she didn't recognize Joanna. As Sparrow tried to run around Joanna, she grabbed for her and touched her. That seemed to snap Sparrow out of her fear mode and she recognized Joanna, came back and crawled on her lap. Joanna's relief was immense.
Then it was back to business and a successful breeding took place. Whew!

The top three pictures are when they were first born, the rest are more recent.