Voices
-Tundra: Jeff Bridges
-Aniu: Glenn Close (younger voice)
-Tally: Ana Faris

I inhaled the frigid air, letting it settle and chill my inside. This was where I was meant to be. Here, hooked up to my team, and nowhere else. I was the fastest on my team and they knew it. Too bad my musher wasn't as fast.

            I barked eagerly as John rushed to hook me up to the front of the team.

“I’m going as fast as I can Tundra” he mumbled, fumbling with the front of my harness. I rolled my eyes. If he got any slower, his fingers might freeze to the harness.

Tally nipped my tail and pulled playfully. She was just as ready to run as I was. I wanted to play too, but I knew better then to tangle the lines. Finally, the lines on my harness pulled taunt; John was on the sled now. Then I heard my favorite thing in the whole world: John yelled to mush. I jumped forward with Tally in stride but the rest of the team was slow to start. I hated when Tally and I dragged a dog forward. It wasn’t a big deal today, since it was only a practice run. But practice runs should be taken just as serious as real races were. Once again, the feeling of being at home filled me as the fresh snow crunched under my feet and the cool wind rushed past my ears. In what had seemed like only a few short minutes, we turned down the final trail that lead back to John's tiny house that was nestled in the outskirts of Fairbanks, Alaska.

    John unhooked me and the team walked back to the barn. Tally followed me as soon as she was unharnessed.
“We are so ready to win that race!”

    “You’re probably going to be the first dog to win that big of a race in his first try”.

I wagged my tail just thinking about it.    “Yea but it’s not just me, it the whole team”

“Yea right” she said knocking me to the ground and running away.  I grinned and followed my older sister back into the barn that the whole team shared.

The next morning, I was woken up by the sound of the sled being hooked up. Why did John have the sled out so early? I blinked the sleepiness out of my eyes and stood up. I stretched, yawned then went to investigate. I was the leader after all. John was actually packing things in the sled. The weights used to train us were gone. Canvas packages and small brown-wrapped bundles had replaced them. Then John came out and got us one by one, hooking us to the sled. Was this how we were going to get to the race?! John's call to move forward confirmed it. I jumped forward but John yelled to slow down. Were all humans as crazy?

We traveled farther and farther from the barn. The whole trip was a few days with checkpoints in between. Until one night, when  thousands of lights and what looked like giant barns formed on the horizon. From the back of the sled, John called "Welcome to Nenana guys".

We halted in an open area, but it was clear that it wasn't going to stay that way. John pitched a tent and while he did that, other humans set up banners, ribbons, tents and mushers settled their dogs. When John was done with his tent, he unhooked us one by one and tied us to the ground. He patted me lovingly on the head and kneeled in front of me.

    "You have this race in the bag boy! You can win!"

I barked and wagged my tail since he obviously couldn't understand anything else I said. There wasn't much to do and the race was the next morning, so sleeping the remainder of the day wasn’t a bad idea. I watched John and the other mushers go into one of the big barns a teammate had called a house, as I nestled up with Tally. I was the leader and I had to stay awake but the cold made me drowsy and my eyelids grew increasingly heavy. Before I knew it, I was dreaming about my two younger sisters, Lily and Flicka, running the race with Tally and I.

My dreams turned to steak when suddenly, my eyes flew open. I looked around; something definitely woke me up. Tally was still asleep and so was the rest of the team. Maybe it was just my imagination. I set my head down but a twig broke. My head popped back up. I sniffed the air and didn’t catch anything out of the ordinary but then again, this place had smells I had never smelt before. I lay my head back down on Tally and pretended to sleep. Something moved out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head and still pretended to be asleep. The thing stopped. The snowflakes that I had praised earlier started to make the animal disappear. But the thing moved again and to my surprise, it was a dog. This dog was pure white and something about it seemed a bit off. It didn’t exactly smell like a dog, but what else could it be? The flowing white formed turned it's head towards me and it's glowing golden eyes took my breath away. I could tell it was female by smell, and even though she was big, she looked about my age. She continued to look around and sniff everything. Her cautious, flighty steps approached us and I wrapped myself around Tally, hackles starting to rise. She walked past me, but stopped at Tally. I growled loud enough for her to hear me.  The white dog jumped and froze.

            “Get away from my sister” I growled low in my throat.

Tally woke up, and gasped, noticing the animal in front of her. I stood up, and the dog stepped back.

            “Sorry- I didn’t…know…..I wasn’t going to hurt her…”

Her voice was almost musical and not like a dog's. But then what was she?
“What kind of dog are you and what business do you have with us?"

                  “I’m not a dog" she said cautiously. "Is that what you are? I’m a wolf”

I cocked my head. I’d never heard of a wolf before. Before I could ask any more, one of my teammates woke with a gasp and started to bark at the wolf. The wolf turned tail and ran off into the woods.  A part of me wanted to follow but I wasn't meant to run out there, I was a sled dog... right?

The rest of the team was as on edge as I was. They paced at the end of their ropes, staring into the woods where She had disappeared.
"Calm down and get some shut eye" I ordered.
The team whimpered, but one by one, they drifted off. Tally curled into me, still a little frightened herself, but she too, fell back asleep. Sleep didn't come easy for me.  My mind wrestled with the thought of being free, able to taste wind whenever I wanted. But I was a sled dog. A good one at that. I jammed my eyes shut. I needed rest as much as the team did. But I knew that I wasn't going to get it...

            John woke us up the next morning. Everything was distracting and chaotic. People ran this way and that; lose dogs scrambled away from frustrated owners. Some people were handing out numbers to mushers. There had to be at least ten other teams. John got the sled ready and surprisingly, he had us hooked up in minutes. I felt like I was lost in a sea of people, some of which stopped to pet me or talk to John. Even some girl dogs stopped to talk to me while Tally rolled her eyes. But as soon as I heard his voice, I remembered what I was born for. As if I were snapped out of a trance, John's call to move slowly forward brought all my thoughts to a close. John made us stop at one point and I waited patiently. Suddenly, a gun fired along with several voices yelling their teams to go. I jumped forward, adrenaline pumping from the thrill of the flare and several other teams trying to pull ahead. And for once, Tally and I didn’t have to drag another dog. I fought the lead away from the two closest teams and left them in the dust. I wanted to keep moving this fast but the dogs closest to the sled tired; way too quickly I thought. John told us to slow down and I unwillingly did so. We ran for a very long time, longer then the short local races we did around our home trails. But just before it got dark, we stopped at the thing John called a checkpoint. He set up the thing we all learned to call a tent and tied us all to the ground again.

Later that night, when the team had fallen asleep, I plopped down on the ground myself and tried to close my eyes. I had never been this sore or tired in all my life. Thoughts of the previous night pushed themselves back into my head. I opened my eyes and when I did, they almost popped out of my head.

The graceful wolf was sniffing the ground for something, no more then twenty feet away. Something in my heart fluttered.  I'd never had that feeling before... it felt wonderfully strange. She looked up and saw me looking at her. She froze, not sure whether to run away. I wagged my tail slowly and she walked over keeping an eye on my team. I stepped over Tally, crawled until the rope held me and rolled over on my back, hoping it meant the same thing to wolves as it did to dogs. The wolf came over more confidently.

“Are you still mad at me?” she whispered.
I rolled back over on my stomach.                

“Well you said you weren’t going to hurt her” I whispered back, hearing the stupidity of my reply. I had a whole conversation planned in my head, but it dissolved as soon as she had spoken. I forced my brain to process something, anything.               

“Do wolves have names?” I blurted, once again realizing how stupid it