NORWAY – When she was not quite 3, Aisling Shepherd watched on television the Iditarod sled dog race, the famous 1,150-mile trek across Alaska, and told her mother she wanted to do the same thing.
So Tara Shepherd promptly bought Aisling a plastic sled and a harness, and hooked her up to Jake, her first dog.
“She picked it up like it was nothing,” Tara said, sitting at a kitchen table with Aisling and Aisling’s grandfather Brian on a recent evening. Ainsling, now 8, her eyes behind glasses, her nose scuffed with some dirt, just smiled.
Although Tara wondered if it were a passing fancy, Aisling kept at it. And when she turned 5, Aisling won her first dog sled race in the peewee division. The ribbon hangs over some snow-filled photographs of Aisling on a sled, wrapped up tight as a sausage in winter clothes, which Tara has framed and hanging at their Norway home.
When asked what it was that drew her to dog racing, Aisling said in her small, pert voice, “Just the dogs.”
At the moment, kept in the tidy pen behind their house on Thomas Hill Road are her six sled dogs.
“She’s trained them all from puppies,” Tara said. Aisling also waters and feeds the dogs, as well as cleans out the kennel and checks each for ticks and fleas before she goes to school. And she does it all over again when she returns.
On summer nights, she occasionally brings a sleeping bag and tent to the kennel and reads books to her dogs, stories such as “White Fang.”
“The dogs respect her, even though it’s harder for a kid because you don’t have authority. When you’re a kid, you have a kid tone, and the dogs look at them as an equal,” Tara said.
“Dogs are family,” Aisling said. “They all have different emotions,” she said, describing her dogs and the way they manifest these emotions, such as “Sage gives me emotion when she wants to be petted and if she doesn’t want it.”
Tara, who works at a MacDonald’s in Paris and is opening a pet crematorium business at her home this fall, is a single mom, and her life is structured around Aisling’s dog-sled passion.
“You can kiss normal life goodbye,” she said, adding that the only vacations she now takes are to races around New England in the winter.
And she has to brace herself every time she watches Aisling take off at the starting line, which begins with all the dogs yipping and howling, and then as soon as they turn the first corner, there’s only silence.
Although Aisling said she races at “like 40 miles per hour,” her mother corrected her, saying “like, 10 to 15 miles per hour.”
She turned to Aisling and asked, “What’s the first rule?” Aisling answered, “Never let go” of the sled.
“And the second rule?” Tara followed. “Never let go,” Aisling answered dutifully. “The third rule?” “Never let go,” her daughter said.
If a musher falls off the sled, the dogs will run off.
Aisling shows no indication of giving up her passion and hopes to run the Iditarod one day, but she has to be at least 14 to enter for the half-race. Her races now are only around 4.2 miles.
Tara said on some mornings, both she and her daughter get up at dawn and watch the sun rise with the dogs. “When they give you kisses and hoot and holler, it makes it all worth it. It makes you feel good.”
Aisling agreed, “It’s beautiful,” she said.
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