Mush

Brady with his sled dog Hunter, one of 14 he cares for on his parent’s farm near Wellington.

A boy and his sled dogs

Dogs have a mind of their own. Anyone who has ever tried training them knows this. There’s a great deal of teamwork involved between human and animal to get a dog to focus and to cooperate. Multiply that challenge by six and you have the task Wellington’s Brady McConkey faces every time he competes.

Brady is a musher. At 14, he is the youngest dog sled racer in the circuit at the moment who isn’t coming from a family of mushers. It’s been that way since he started four years ago. He is a reserved, serious young man, but when he goes out to see his dogs in the backyard kennels, it’s clear this is where Brady is most at home.

“I really like having the dogs and being able to hook them up in the backyard and take them out for their training run or free-run the pups behind the four wheeler,” says Brady. “It’s just fun being on runners and training the dogs and meeting all kinds of new people.”

It started when he was much younger. His neighbour, a grade school teacher, asked Brady’s parents to come feed his sled dogs while he and his wife were away at a race. Brady came along for the ride and was enchanted.

When his parents told their neighbour about his enthusiasm, Brady was invited to help take care of and train the sled dogs. At the same time, Brady’s parents were struggling to find an extracurricular activity he could get excited about. Hunting and fishing were pastimes. Hockey was okay, but Brady wasn’t enthusiastic about playing.

But when it came to training the dogs, Brady was a natural, and he loved it. For several Christmases, he asked his parents for a dog team. It was not something they had experience with.

In 2010, with his neighbour’s help, Brady got his wish: Four sled dogs for Christmas. The family built a kennel behind the house, and his adventure with sled dogs began. He ran his first race that winter, early in 2011.

The training skills he’d learned helping out his neighbour helped Brady build his own team. But mushing is not a thrifty sport, and soon he was taking on an after school job to pay for equipment, vet bills and food for his growing team. Today, he has 14 dogs, and although his parents offer to help cover some expenses, he is responsible for the majority of their care.

Brady and his parents attend as many regional races as they can. His parents are the handlers, setting the dogs up along the gang line, taking care of any problems that come up. If dogs chew through a line or start to fight, they improvise. It’s not always easy. Dogs have minds of their own.

“Last year, we were out on the trail and snow had covered the trail and we were out on open fields and the dogs didn’t really know what to follow, and we had to hook down so many times to stop the team. It was complete chaos,” Brady recalls. He uses this word often to describe his sport. “We were out there for an hour, trying to get the dogs situated. No one was having a good run that day.”

Brady’s goal is to run the Yukon Quest race. The Quest is a daunting 1,600 kilometre race that starts in Whitehorse and ends in Fairbanks, Alaska. This year’s race began on February 7, and mushers will be running it for at least another week.

Still four years shy of the eligible age, Brady is honing his skills and his team, buying and training new dogs and stretching their endurance runs. He came in first at the Marmora SnoFest’s longest race, a 16-kilometre six-dog race. Not that coming first is everything.

“It doesn’t matter how his race goes, he always comes across the finish line with a smile. I can tell as his mom that he loves it and it’s his passion, and regardless of how his runs go, he always has a smile on his face,” says Brady’s mother, Pam. “He’s making a name for himself just with the respect that he has for his dogs and his care for his dogs, and the respect that he has for other mushers.”