A snow story for April 1

It was a cold, snowy March night in the mountains south of Fourth of July pass when Alaskan adventurer Jack Blake made what could have been a fatal mistake.

Nordic skiing off the groomed trails, his ski tip caught a branch, tripping Blake down an embankment in the darkness. After checking his extremities and confirming everything was in place, the skier tried to figure a way out of the gully.

An electric bolt of pain warned him of a sprained knee. Struggling for more than an hour, Blake was only able to crawl to the top of the ravine, hampered by the steep slope and protruding branches.

Working up a sweat in the futile effort to get back to the trail the middle-aged man began to shiver in the low-teen temperatures. Although the night was not frigid in comparison to his home turf, hypothermia was slowly setting in.

Critiquing himself for not waiting until his wife, Jet, could join him the next day, and with no way to communicate with the outside world, the vacationing Alaska trooper began pondering his cold fate. Then he heard footsteps in snow above.

Whistling for what he thought must be other skiers or snowshoers, Blake received no verbal response, but the steps came closer. Pulling himself up to the ledge, the trooper came face-to-face with the source of the footsteps, a white wolf. Snorting, the wolf pulled back, and then three more faces appeared. It was a pack of tundra wolves - two grays and a large black, along with the white one.

Having run across his share of Alaska wolves, Jack was surprised that the small pack stood their ground and didn't bolt at the site of a human. Then again, he had heard of sightings of 180-pound man-eaters in North Idaho. At this point a funny thing happened.

The white wolf, which Blake says seemed to be smiling, knelt down on her haunches and slid her forepaws toward him. Letting out a muffled whine and tapping her paws on the ledge, she made her intentions clear.

The Alaskan trooper grabbed the outstretched paws of the white wolf, holding on as she inched backward. When the wolf began to slip in the snow, first the massive black male latched onto her tail with his mouth. Then in tandem, the two gray wolves repeated the process with the mouth-to-tail procedure. As though in a tug-of-war, the wolves winched Blake out of trouble.

With the rescue successful, the wolves gathered around Blake, licking his face and hands.

Finding his knee swollen and now nearly useless for skiing, the former Iditarod musher did what his experience on the trail had taught him. Grabbing rope from his pack, Blake fashioned harnesses for the wolves, then tied each to a long line, with the black wolf in the lead.

Using his poles to pull himself upright onto the skis, Blake yelled the famous command: "Mush." The black wolf swung his immense head around, his yellow eyes glowing at Blake, then growled something to the rest of the pack.

Just as if they'd been sled dogs since they were pups, the four untamed wolves bolted down the trail. The unique team and musher arrived at the Fourth of July parking lot within 30 minutes, stopping only when they had reached Blake's rented SUV. When the back door of the SUV was opened by the trooper, all four of the wolves surprisingly sprang in and immediately lay down like well-trained retrievers.

Blake named the white wolf "Happy," because of her pleasant, outgoing demeanor. One of the grays he tagged April, as the next day would bring in the month by that name. He calls the black wolf "Fuhls," for a burly Norwegian gold miner he once knew in the Alaska bush. The last of the pack is Dey, for Susan Dey, as he admits to having a teenage crush on her when she was on the TV show, "The Partridge Family."

Trooper Blake says he is planning to take the wolves back to his home in Lone Wolf, Alaska, to intermingle with his dogteam.

"Maybe I'll run the Iditarod again in a couple of years, now that I have some new blood," says Blake, whose unique lifestyle in Alaska is the subject of two books.

Rex North is actually M.D. Kincard, Hayden resident and author of the series of Alaska Trooper Jack Blake books.