I've always enjoyed thinking about sled dogs, those incredibly durable animals who absolutely delight in pulling heavily weighted sleds across miles and miles of snow.  Unlike most animals, including people, who are usually looking for a way to get out of work or a way to make a given task easier, sled dogs cannot wait to do what they have been bred to do.  They live to pull a sled.
     In This Much Country, her recently published memoir of her life in the backcountry of Alaska, Kristin Knight Pace writes movingly about her affections for her sled dogs.  She tells of her many adventures with them, particularly their days on the Yukon Quest and Iditarod, perhaps the most famous dog mushing races in the world.  Over and over, she tells of how once she harnessed the dogs up each morning on these races, they are more than ready to go, more than ready to push through the hundreds of miles of fresh snow--and minus twenty or thirty degree temperatures--that await them.  It's quite amazing. She loves her dogs like her own children.
     As a long time traveler of the Arctic and similarly wild places, I reveled in Pace's descriptions of the vast lands through which she and her dog teams traveled.  With its starkly circumscribed vistas of mountain, lake, and tundra, and its immense emptiness and isolation, the Arctic is not for everyone.  But it is provocative and amazing.
     On the other hand, just as sled dogs are bred to pull, so are we designed to explore.  We are made to adventure, seek out, and pursue.  Although how these will happen differs for everyone, in the joy, tenacity, and loyalty of a sled dog we see glimmers of perhaps how it should:  in the firm yet boundless love of a creator God.