THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
Mary Schaefer of Fort Smith is a dog musher for two reasons - she enjoys it and she wants to help keep the tradition alive.

Mary Schaefer has owned her own dog team for the past 16 years. She currently has 10 dogs. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

She likes the experience of leading a team.

"You see more, especially if you're out in the bush with them," she explained. "Once you get out of the distractions, like away from town, it's peaceful. Standing back there, it's so quiet."

As for keeping the tradition alive, she said, "I think it's very important."

Schaefer noted not as many people are mushing these days as 10 or 20 years ago.

"It's a concern," she said. "I think it has to do with the work, maybe the health of the people, because you have to be fit and in good health to run dogs."

The 45-year-old noted dog mushing helps keep her fit and healthy.

"I'm always full of energy," she said, noting her daughter even asks what she is eating. "A lot of times I don't even have three meals a day. It's a lot of snacking. She goes, 'I want to know what you're eating to just keep going.'"

Schaefer has had a dog team of her own for 16 years - since she was 29 - but grew up around dogs because her late father, Archie Bourke, was a musher and a trapper.

"My father always had dogs and they were always used on the trapline," she recalled, noting she partly got into mushing in the hope that her son would also get involved.

Her 22-year-old son and 25-year-old daughter have yet to take up mushing.

Schaefer also has traplines - one with her husband about 20 miles east of Fort Smith and the other which she inherited from her father in northern Alberta, where she grew up in Fort Fitzgerald.

She also has three young grandchildren and she would love to see them grow up to be mushers.

"It's something to carry on, because, if I stop, I don't think they'll see it, unless from someone else," she said. "It would be better for them to gain it from me. It will make them that much more powerful in wanting to continue that."

Schaefer said she didn't really want to own a team when she was a teenager.

"I never thought of it because we always had dogs and we had to take care of them, so it wasn't something that I dreamed of doing," she said.

Schaefer said her father had working dogs, and that was more traditional than the common type of mushing today.

"It was totally different," she explained. "Dad had bush dogs. We didn't have a nice sleigh, like equipped with what I have today. At times we didn't even have that backboard to hang onto, because our sleigh was full of camping gear."

Schaefer has taken her own dogs on her NWT trapline in previous years, and planned to do that again late last month. However, she said most of her current 10 dogs have been trained for racing, which she has also occasionally done in the past.

However, she noted the really serious racers can have 60 to 80 dogs.

Schaefer recalled the last race in Fort Smith was about a half-dozen years ago, but she would love to see dog racing return to town because she thinks that would encourage more people to get involved in mushing.

"It's like everything else," she said of keeping the tradition alive. "You've got to take care of it."

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