All good things come in three!
Our plan was to breed our best & most finishing females to create our team’s next generation. Najak was bred to the handsome Shaytaan’s Psycho Killer last summer and her puppies are doing fantastic in their first training season.
Sisu, her daughter Snuppa, and Civic had heat cycles that could not be combined with training and racing neither last year nor this spring, so we decided to breed all three of them this autumn as we are not racing any of the big races this Winter.
Earlier this week we could share the good news that both Sisu and her daughter Snuppa are expecting puppies. Now see that we hit full jackpot as also Civic is expecting!
Civic (l) and her mother Honda during the 2014 Iditarod ceremonial start. Picture Anki Ødegaard
Civic may be the most anonymous of these girls – judged by her appearence on our facebook page. But don’t get fooled by what you see online! Civic is just very hard to get adequate pictures of. She is probably the smartest girl in the kennel with a huge, unstoppable drive. Civic is fast, agile and her curious eyes follow your every move. We’ve been joking that by now she’s already taught herself to build sleds, drive a car, and when she retires her dream is to take a degree in engineering. She is a very playful, funny girl with a twinkle in her eyes that gets along with everyone.
Her very first race was the 2014 Iditarod, which wasn’t a problem at all for her. She got to lead parts of the race with Snuppa, and has developed into one of our best leaders. Civic is focused, always ready to go and cheers the team on. She thought standing under the Burled Arch in Nome was rather boring and decided to chew her neckline to indicate she’d rather go on than just stand around.
1,5 weeks later she joined our team of 9 to go to Chukotka, Siberia and race the Nadezhda Hope race, which she finished without any problems. Civic felt much at home in Chukotka, Siberia, the place where her ancestors came from and enjoyed digging into the cooked, fermented walrus that was served. She enjoyed the taste of walrus so much in fact that one day, later that Spring back in Alaska when we came back from errands in town she’d had a party all by herself. She’d manage to get loose (surprise, we don’t call her “brainy” for no reason!), and went to grab the walrus cooking pot that we hadn’t cleaned yet, grabbed a couple of beer bottles she found, and collect all the bone knuckles that were lying around in the dogyard. She draped it all under a bush were she thoroughly cleaned every square inch of the walrus cooking pot surrounded by beer bottles and a dozen knuckles. Her content, proud face when we arrived was priceless.
Civic was of course part of our team in the 2015 Iditarod which she finished easily. As she was the first to come out of season during the race she had to run with the boys and didn’t get to lead as much as we had hoped.
We made the choice to breed Quimby to all three females this autumn to create a great, homogenous group of puppies with respect to conformation, capability, personality, and preference for the years to come. Quimby came to us in Summer 2014 from Kennel Loufranc-Maximus in Canada. He is an incredibly social and lovely boy with a fantastic conformation and ravenous appetite. Quimby is hard working and was on our team both during the 2015 Knik and Iditarod. His conformation and personality match very nicely to the three girls and we’re excited to breed to Quimby’s lines and see this new generation grow up.
We can’t wait to welcome Civic and Quimby’s puppies just around Christmas eve – what better Christmas present could you hope for?
