By Guy Grieve
Ahead of me, the six dogs jumped and strained against their tug lines, howling at the white moon and flickering Borealis. I stood on the slender birch runners of the sled and looked over the leaping charm bracelet from hell. Dogs' eyes reflected in the light from my head torch, and I saw their breath rising and then falling around them as it froze.
Behind me I heard Fuzzy, my retriever, gently whining as he too grew impatient. Like the sled dogs he knew that soon I would lift the snow anchor and we would be off. I looked back at the cabin, knowing that by morning the stove would have burnt out and everything would be frozen solid - a high was forecast and this could mean weeks in the -50s and 60s.
At last I reached down and pulled the anchor, then held the sled with my foot-brake as the dogs leapt high and clawed at the packed snow, desperate to run. A cacophony of howls and barks rang out through the frozen woods, and Bubbles, my lead dog, glanced back impatiently as if to say: "C'mon! Let's go!" - "Okay", I said quietly, lifting my foot from the brake, and she dropped into her harness and ran.
Now there was silence, as the team charged down the frozen white trail which cut steeply through the dark forest. We flew along, twisting through the boreal woodland of white spruce, birch, balsam poplar, alder and willow, then along the grass lake and out on to the glittering slough. Even though this was just an offshoot of the mighty Yukon it was still as wide as the Thames in central London.
"Easy!" I called to Bubbles, braking gently to slow the team from a gallop to a trot. It would take seven hours to get to the village, and we had to pace ourselves. I leant back and watched the Plough start its clockwise journey around Polaris.
I let one hand drop from the sled handle and felt the power of the running dogs surging through me like an electric current. I could hear nothing but the brisk staccato of dogs' paws on packed snow, the elemental swish and cut of the runners and the straining of the birch sled against its moose hide bindings. Suddenly the dogs picked up their pace and I was shaken from my reverie.
Forty-five kilometres ahead an immense bull moose stood squarely on my trail. "Whoa!" I shouted, and we came to a slithering halt. I held the team on the foot-brake, feeling its steel studs bite deep into the snow.
The moose stood motionless, staring towards us. Clearly he had no intention of deviating from his course, and seven barking dogs and one man waited while the world's largest deer stood black as coal across my trail.
I slipped my rifle from the sled and held it ready. Moose kill more people than bears in Alaska, and many a musher has watched in horror as his dogs have been pounded one by one into the snow.
This time I had been lucky: if we had met in the woods he would have felt trapped and therefore more likely to be aggressive. Now I would just have to wait until he decided to lumber off.
How different the traffic had been nine months ago. I was trapped in the typical commuter's lifestyle, driving two thousand miles each month from our home in the Scottish borders to an office job in Edinburgh.
Each morning, as my wife and young son slept, I crept out of the house and into the metal box that conveyed me to work via an endless queue of traffic. For the next eight hours I would sit there, before driving home for a few snatched hours with the family and starting the whole cycle again.
I began to rail against this way of life. Over time a childhood dream began to take shape in my mind of a simple life that would offer an escape from office hierarchies, timetables and budgets.
I wanted to experience an extreme way of life that would use all my strength and resourcefulness. Gradually I formed a plan, to build a cabin and live for one year in the Alaskan wilderness, following in the footsteps of many pioneers throughout history.
At first it seemed unrealistic. However, over the course of the next two years I researched possible places to go and sources of funding, the dream keeping my soul alive through the tedious ups and downs of office life. At last, unbelievably, the plan came together, and by June 2004 I was ready to go.
Juliet had decided to take the children to her childhood home on the Isle of Mull, and I knew they would be safe in the year that I was away.
We both felt that this journey would forge a new course for our family, and Juliet supported me, even though she knew I was taking a great risk with my life. I arrived in the Alaskan interior in July, and was told by old-timers that it was much too late in the year to build a cabin. The sheer size of the place intimidated me; the interior region of Alaska is a wilderness of 171,200 square miles - over five times the size of Scotland yet with a population of only 50.000.
I had no experience of life in the bush, and knew nothing of the hardships I would face. I had never even seen a bear in a zoo, far less met one alone, face-to-face in the shade of the spruce trees. And later, as winter whitened her knuckles across the land and I sat huddled in my canvas tent, I often wondered if I had lost my mind.
For weeks I lived on fried flour and willow grouse, and I lost weight fast as I toiled to build my cabin before winter set in. At night I lay on spruce boughs beside the stove, listening to the cries of wolves along the snow-bound rivers that surrounded my lonely camp.
I knew that the wolf pack had seen me, and sometimes in the mornings I found their sign along the trail, not far from my tent. I regularly spotted bears, and knew that as winter drew in they would grow more dangerous. The dream had long disappeared, and now I struggled to deal with the frightening reality that I had created for myself.
My ideas of life in the wilderness had been utterly artificial, and in every sense I was the living embodiment of what the native Alaskans call a "tenderfoot".
I quickly realised that loners frequently end up dead, and I was lucky that an indigenous family pointed the way from time to time. Still, I made every mistake in the book and came close to being killed a number of times: once by a bear, once by thin ice and once by a drunk man in a riverside saloon.
Yet gradually after each painful lesson I learnt something more about the meaning of humility, doing things slowly and carefully and listening to my instincts. And when at last spring returned, and I found that I had managed to survive a winter in one of the coldest places on earth, I swore that I would never return to my old way of life.
My year in Alaska had been like a pilgrimage, a voyage to rediscover myself and recapture the simple joy of being alive. Away from the trappings of modern life I had found a new happiness, a new sense of my place in the scheme of things. This would be the gold that I brought home.
- Call Of The Wild: My Escape to Alaska' by Guy Grieve (published by Hodder & Stoughton)