Justin
and his family were hunters and of the 'with dog' variety. They had
some really great German short hair dogs who would do what you told
them to do. I know there are lots of dogs trained to obey commands
but it was always weird for me to see one because most of the dogs in
Santaquin and especially my dog Beau didn't give two craps about what
you told him to do. These dogs had the demeanor of subservient
obedience that comes from constant training and hard justice for
disobedience. In the winter of the year I was 10 years old we were
sledding at this abandoned basement excavation but between the
depression and the hill of extracted dirt there was only about a
twenty foot drop that ended pretty abruptly. We were looking for
some sledding with less of a concussion factor when Justin and I
stumbled upon a beautiful plan. Like the mighty Eskimo (and they were
still Eskimo back then they had not yet become Inuit) we decided to
harness the power of dogs to pull our sled. We tied one of the his
trained up dogs to the sled and then tried to get her to pull us but
we would only go in fits and starts. That is when Justin discovered
the trick to getting real speed and power out of our rig. He got the
family cat and held it in his lap while I held the dog's leash so she
would point out strait. Justin would then throw the cat as hard as he
could out in front of the dog and he was off to the races. That dog
shot forward trying to catch the cat and pulled Justin at a
tremendous speed until he was scraped off on the corner of the house
that he was third to go around. The only real problem with our
system was that the cat would just go and run up a tree and the ride
was over in about 40'. While we tried to coax our little motivator
out of the tree we were working out a cat on a rope on a long stick
situation that would give us unlimited power. We were unable to
execute the plan because the cat would not get out of the tree and it
got dark. We decided to try the new plan on another day but Justin's
mom strictly forbade using the cat as bait to motivate the dog to
pull us in a sled. So we resigned ourselves to purely gravitational
sled propulsion, like poor people use.
