by Amanda Castleman

Tongue flapping, the spotted mongrel churned the chest-deep snow. He lunged, twisting on the tugline: just one bell on the tangled wind chime of baying hounds. Then - hike! - the team shot forward over the crusted powder. And we were off, dogsledding in the Rocky Mountains.

Balanced on back runners - slender strips of plastic-coated ash - I was living the legend. I was Iditarod champion DeeDee Jonrowe. I was Anarulunguaq, the first female Arctic explorer, an Inuit woman who helped Knud Rasmussen 2,000 miles across the Northwest Passage in 1923-4.

"Call of the Wild" was a write-off, fantasy-wise, since old Jack London barely acknowledged the fairer sex in his bleak Gold Rush books. So I had to settle for Jessie Arnold, musher and mystery novel heroine.

Racing across a hillside in Gunnison-Crested Butte.

In my imagination, I was racing through icy drifts, lit only by the Aurora Borealis. In reality, I was skimming around a snowcat track in the Rockhouse Ranch field just outside Gunnison, Colorado.

Never mind, though. The mushing magic was still potent. And, on the plus side, the temperature was a balmy 31°F, rather than those disturbing negative numbers that can lead to amputated limbs.

The dogs, however, were feeling the heat. Husky mixes run best around zero degrees: the alpine air - so harsh to this lowlander - left them twitchy.

Canines basically sweat through their mouths, as guide John Bach of the Lucky Cat Dog Farm pointed out. The dogs' panting releases 90 percent of their excess body heat. Every few minutes, a dog bent and sucked a swallow of snow. "It's called dipping," he said. "They're not thirsty, they're cooling their tongues. It's their version of air conditioning."

Internal furnaces stoked by fats, they charged forward. In Arctic race conditions, these animals average 150 miles a day, burning up to 10,000 calories. Ours are, well, a bit underwhelmed by the cushy conditions in the Rockhouse Ranch back pasture. (CONTINUE...)