Balto was a fraudo. MY dogs were named Spot, Fido, Rover, (the wheel dogs); Ginger, Piddles, (the hub-and-axle dogs); Beans, (the tail gunner); Jack, Fang, Geoffrey, Humper, Marcia (the transfer case dogs, except for Marcia, who was the doggy good-time girl), and my lead dog, Heraclitus. We carried over 600 kgs. of dried dog salmon for them, and needed all of it; we also had to shoot four moose, seventeen caribou, and a pika to keep the dogs fed.

This was in addition to the gear I needed to survive: A small tent, a blanket, an axe, a simple cooking pot, a microwave oven, twelve hundred miles of extension cord, a snow machine, three hundred gallons of gasoline, a television, a bathtub/shower combination, and, of course, a couple tons of food and drink, the family plate.

Of course, I took suitable clothing -- tough clothes to withstand the rigors of the trail, informal evening attire, a swimming suit or two for the hot springs along the way, things like that. I didn't feel that formal evening attire would be necessary, and I also left my court sword at home.

Oh, yes. Fifteen vials of diptheria serum. A sextant. An astrolabe. A gyroscope. Redundant cyclotrons. And a few other things.

It was nearly noon when we left Eek. The snow was snowing fiercely, and the dogs strained at their traces. We stopped almost at once, for one of the dogs had developed a hernia, but when we had cut him out of harness we were able to simply FLY along the trail to Nome. We stopped the first night at Skinny Dick's place, and I stabled, curried, and fed the dogs before having my own supper.