by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Apr 24/98) - Twice each year, every dog and cat in Inuvik has its day.

Or if not every dog and cat, then however many animals can fit into a gruelling 10-hour day of surgeries, checkups and grooming.

James McCleary, a Mississauga, Ont., vet has been treating animals in Inuvik for the past 10 years, performing spays and neuters and other small-animal surgery. It is the only time in the year such routine surgery is available as Inuvik does not have a full-time vet of its own.

McCleary has been a constant in the last decade. Before he took on the job a decade ago at the urging of Peter Clarkson, not many vets were willing to make the trip North due to the improvised working conditions at the time and fewer still were willing to repeat the experience.

"I came up in the first place because they couldn't get anyone else to come up," he recalled on Sunday, with three sedated cats drowsing on a blanket a few feet away after their operations.

"People would come up once or twice but they wouldn't come back. Most vets are used to having a nice little well-supplied clinic, while my first year here I was working on a four-by-eight piece of plywood on two sawhorses."

Now McCleary, assisted by Peter and Sue Clarkson and Martin Male of Inuvik, works in a well-lit room of Aurora College's Research Centre and each day the corridors quickly fill up with dog and cat carriers holding patients.

McCleary, who has five practices in Toronto, describes his trips to the North as "vacations," but they're gruelling ones -- on Sunday morning, for example, he did 16 surgeries starting at 7:30 a.m. Most could be described as simple fixing or neutering, but there is often nothing simple about Northern surgery.

From improvising solutions to dogs that start to hemorrhage while being operated on, to animals that reveal a heart problem while going under the gas, the work is harrowing and often exhausting.

"In the south you can have some sort of electrocardiogram and other tests to do on dogs before you operate on them," he says, but that specialized equipment is absent in the North, meaning vets must do some very tricky work under pressure when something unanticipated happens.

For his past six trips, McCleary has been accompanied by groomer Michelle Lamb, who heads up a busy dog-grooming operation in another room of the college. With assistance from Sarah Cayen of Fort McPherson, Kim Male of Inuvik and several Beavers -- British exchange students doing a work term in Inuvik -- she shampooed, trimmed and manicured 15 or more animals both days assembly-line style.

"For a dog groomer, eight or nine trims in a day is a really busy day," McCleary says.