The Markovo Kennels Rescue Project: 1969 - 1975 Copyright © 2003 J. Jeffrey Bragg

Brush Farm and Markovo Kennels

ABOUT A MONTH LATER Ms. Bush had to fly to Pennsylvania to visit her parents. On her return trip she stopped by Oxford Station. It was a very brief visit; we talked further about Seppalas and their unusual position, hovering on the brink of extinction. She had the good grace to inform me that I had been right in my choice of XAIRE for her -- the bicolour-eyed puppy was absolutely all that she had hoped she might be. On a mad impulse, as we stood in the outbuilding looking at the Z-Litter in their large wire cage, I pulled out little ZEITA OF MARKOVO (dark-coloured with two blue eyes!) and handed her to Betsy, telling her to take that one as well, to keep XAIRE company.

As Betsy's DC-9 flight climbed steeply away from the Ottawa airport, I felt strangely as though my stomach were dropping through the soles of my shoes. I went back home and wrote a mad letter. Somehow I could not get rid of the feeling that I had met a soul-mate. A flurry of correspondence ensued. I had not had a vacation since we moved to Oxford; shortly after picking SHANGO up, I flew out to Saskatoon for a weekend, to talk to Betsy and try to sort ourselves out.      All that got sorted out was that the feeling of being soul-mates and Seppala co-conspirators deepened! My wife Mary had never had much sympathy for my fascination with Seppalas; she was much more interested in mainstream Siberians of a more conventional type. When I returned from my weekend in Saskatoon, Mary gave me a look of critical appraisal a day or two afterward and said, "You haven't come back from Saskatoon yet." Shortly thereafter she bluntly told me, "you only have one life to live, and if you don't live it, you'll have nobody to blame but yourself."      The Oxford Station farm sold on its first viewing, we found a nice place near Ottawa for Mary, and on the 13th of August 1973 I arrived in Saskatoon with fourteen Seppalas. Mary kept the mainstream Siberians, and in a few months sent me a friendly letter saying that she would very much appreciate an uncontested divorce, as she wanted to marry my best friend (and long-term confirmed bachelor, I had thought) Bill Ross, who lived a few miles away in Merrickville, ON.

Betsy LeSueur Bush, August 1973

  

Bets had used the month's notice to good effect, purchasing a quarter-section of wheat fields with a small house on Highway Five east of Saskatoon. We christened it "Brush Farm" (BRagg and bUSH). It looked a little bleak, sitting there on the bald-headed prairie, but it was affordable and available. The big prairie sky was amazing. I found the characteristic vegetation of wild rose, sedge grass and wolf willow created a totally different feel to the environment than what I had been accustomed to in Ontario. Little did I know how different it would feel when winter arrived in a couple of short months!

Betsy and Xaire of Markovo, (8 months) Sept. 1973

I had driven from eastern Ontario to Saskatoon, 1900-odd miles, in two and a half days, my truck overloaded with gear and belongings packed solid beneath the dog box. We secured the dogs' chains to a number of falling-down outbuildings on the Brush Farm property, where they noisily proclaimed their consternation at the new environment and the absence of their familiar dog houses, which would arrive in a few weeks via commercial trucking.

Helen of Markovo, tied to a falling-down farm shed just after arrival in Saskatchewan

"Now It's For Blood!"

BETS HAD PLANS to erect a set of fenced runs behind the house and there were only eight or ten weeks left before the snow would fly. We bought a power auger to speed the job, only to find that the auger went down six inches and stopped. Not even a pickaxe would make much impression on the rock-hard layer of subsoil a handsbreadth below the surface! We hacked futilely at it for awhile and had to give up. The dogs would spend the winter on stakeouts. At least my carefully-constructed doghouses arrived by truck in good time.      Up until this point, my efforts had been divided. Until I saw the results of the W, X and Z test-matings, and acquired SHANGO OF SEPPALA, I had not even been sure that it would really be feasible to attempt to rescue the pure Seppala lineage from impending extinction.

S-Litter of Markovo, Surgut and Shango centre (by Shango of Seppala ex Lyl of Sepsequel)

    In Ontario I had been all set for a winter of training and racing, since I finally had enough of the right kind of dogs to be able to field a respectable team. Much of my effort had still been directed towards the Tadluk stock, its breeding, care and training. Now all that was history. There was little racing in Saskatchewan then -- perhaps there was one race in Prince Albert. Instead of a kennel of forty-odd dogs, we had just sixteen Seppalas, six of them growing puppies. My leaders and half my team had been left behind in Ontario. The die had been cast and my commitment thenceforward was to be to the Seppalas exclusively. Tadluk was behind me; now it was Markovo Kennels and an all-out bid for Seppala survival. As Bets said with grim satisfaction, "now it's for blood"!

FROSTFIRE ANISETTE was shipped off to Missouri in October for mating to VANKA OF SEPPALA, owned then by Garl Egelston. Since SHANGO was recently convalescent and past eleven years old, I could not in good conscience wait another year to make use of his genes; in November I bred him to LYL OF SEPSEQUEL, to HELEN OF MARKOVO and to HOLLY OF MARKOVO.      On 23 December 1973 FROSTFIRE ANISETTE whelped the M-Litter, five tiny puppies that grew like wildfire into sturdy youngsters. On the 7th January 1974 LYL OF SEPSEQUEL whelped the S-Litter -- an all-male litter of 6, four of which survived. On the 22nd January HELEN OF MARKOVO whelped the R-Litter. HOLLY failed to produce a litter, perhaps just as well for the two harried people who struggled to keep these pups warm and growing through a brutal winter.      Although I had excellent help and full support from Betsy (who was probably even more devoted to these unique dogs than I), the ensuing winter was to be the most horrible season of my life. An unsheltered location, an unbelievably horrid winter, forty-mile-an-hour winds, forty-degrees-below-zero temperatures, plus: three litters of puppies, three canine mothers with occasional diarrhea, two overworked people and at least a thousand field mice together in one small uninsulated frame farmhouse -- these factors combined into a nightmare that beggars description.

Vanka of Seppala (Rolo of Seppala ex Kama of Seppala II) Photo courtesy Elsie Chadwick, Siberian Husky Archives

I can recall with terrifying vividness awakening in the morning to look out on the kennel only to discover two or three dogs utterly gone from sight, buried in their houses, the houses, too, vanished beneath five and six-foot snowdrifts! Then the backbreaking labour of rescuing the trapped dogs and "resurrecting" buried hundred-pound doghouses containing maybe two hundred pounds of frozen ice-straw conglomerate . . .      Despite all her other responsibilities during that first terrible winter in Saskatchewan, Betsy arose each morning in the subzero predawn cold to boil up a large pot of oat-and-wheatmeal porridge before going to work; this she served hot (in scoopfuls on the corners of their doghouse roofs) to every single Seppala, a daily event they all anticipated and greeted with the highest of spirits. It kept them in good shape throughout a very extreme winter season.     Conditions were so rugged that training a team was out of the question for us (let alone trying to break trail through 6-foot snowdrifts). Most of our energies were occupied with digging dogs and doghouses out from under packed drifted snow, melting snow for our water supply and keeping Betsy's car and my truck running. For two years we struggled to survive rural prairie conditions, while we fought for the survival of Seppala strain. The strain of coping with the situation, plus Betsy's job at the vet college, her twenty violoncello students and her Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra duties, put both of us in the hospital with nervous breakdowns in late winter of 1974 (not quite simultaneously, fortunately).

Mia, Mokka and Minka of Markovo

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Nutok of Markovo in winter of 1973, beside his half-buried doghouse

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