Byline: MARTIN WALKER

THERE was no wind, but as soon as the brake was released and the dogs' yelping gave way to their sheer lust to run, the cold air slashed into an exposed face like a knife. The snow gathered on eyelashes and eyebrows, freezing quickly as the dogs put their heads down to sprint.

The sled is so light that the motion seems effortless. The bumps from the ground that you feel when sitting in the sled somehow disappear as you stand on the runners. The flat snows sweep endlessly away, dotted by the black cones of the spruce trees, until they all blur into some theoretical horizon where the land must end and the sky must begin.

But that vastness becomes opaque as you focus on the trail, staring down that long, narrow tunnel of exhilarating concentration that is formed by the sled and the dogs. It is both thrilling and deeply calming, fast and pure.

This was how the Eskimos moved, how the entire western hemisphere was populated by the tribes who came from Siberia over the ice bridge of the Bering Straits. This is how the men of the Klondike gold rush learned to travel, how the mail was carried and the North was won.

The sleds are still made in the traditional way, of wood held together by rawhide. The dogs are still Siberian Huskies, which legend says were spawned by the mating of wolves with feral jackals.

But look closer, and the dogs are wearing booties of Arctic fleece, held on by Velcro. The runners on the sleds are heavy-duty plastic. The dogs' harnesses are no longer made of leather, but of nylon webbing. The mushers dress in polypropylene underwear and layers of thermal fleece, topped off with hi-tech plastic parkas.

The trail itself has been formed, not by the patient plodding of pioneers in snowshoes, but by snowmobiles, sleds with engines and the plastic equivalent of a tank track, known throughout Alaska as 'iron dogs'.

Over two weeks, from March 4, iron dogs will blaze more than 2,700 kilometres of trail on behalf of their fleshly predecessors, as the oil-rich state of Alaska recreates its great myth of the Yukon days with the world's greatest dog-sled race.

Sixty teams of up to 20 dogs each set out from Anchorage, and cross mountain chains, great rivers, gulleys and marshland, tundra and the frozen sea. They re-enact a mercy dash in which relays of dog-sleds rushed serum to the remote settlement of Nome in 1925, to prevent a diphtheria epidemic from wiping out the Athabaskan and Inuit natives.

The first Iditarod, as this race is called after a native village, took place in 1925 because aircraft then were too unreliable to entrust with the serum in such dangerous conditions. Now the situation is reversed. The Iditarod would not be possible without the aircraft and helicopters that fly in pre-positioned dog food, and the super-light sprinting sleds for the last dash across the sea ice.

In Alaska aviation dominates the transport system. There are 300 identified places of human settlement, yet the state helps maintain more than 900 airfields and landing strips - three times as many runways as it has places to fly to. Merrill Field, close to downtown Anchorage, is one of the 10 busiest US airfields in terms of flights. A lake across the city is the world's busiest landing for float-planes.

Oil-rich Alaska has no income or sales taxes, and pays out an annual dole of almost Dollars 1,000 to every person in the state. With the highest proportion of aircraft to people in the world, Alaskans are far more likely to have flown in a plane than to have ridden a dog sled.

The Iditarod has thus become a mobile heritage theme park for the blue-eyed Arabs of the far north, a salute to a vanishing tradition. It recreates a way of life that has virtually disappeared, and celebrates a human fortitude and canine endurance for which the urban reality of most Alaskans' lives has little call.

But the race is not only an Alaskan obsession. Just north of the town of Willow stands the Shapachka kennels, a vast open yard with 84 dogs, a small barn and a cabin which is the headquarters of the British bid for Iditarod honours. Roy Monk, a retired chemist from Blackburn, has entered three Iditarods and completed two. His wife Leslie, formerly a hairdresser in Cheshire, is one of about 30 women to have ever completed the race.

'It started when we bought a Husky from a dealer and learned about dog-sledding,' recalls Monk, 52, a tall, wiry figure bulked out against the cold by layer upon layer of fleece and Eskimo-style Mukluk boots. 'In England, it was little sleds on wheels, using forest trails, just two or three dogs.' There were just nine such dog teams in Britain when the Monks started 10 years ago. Now there are more than 200. The Monks' fascination led to the purchase of this wintry Alaskan estate, and to the orderly ranks of dogs yelping in the yard, each with its own straw-stuffed oil drum for a kennel. Food for a racing dog costs about pounds 500 a year.

'That cost me about Dollars 100,000,' grins Roy, displaying a belt buckle that proclaims he finished the 1990 Iditarod. His other souvenir is a large embroidered patch, now sewn on to his parka - the Alaskan equivalent of the Garter.

'We were in Germany and saw some fake ones, a bit smaller than the real thing,' says Leslie. 'I was very annoyed, but then I thought I can buy three and make them into a bikini. I finished the Iditarod. I'm entitled.'

She finished one race, winning the Red Lantern prize for coming in last, summoning the last reserves of will and grit to continue despite an attack of dysentery. Crossing one notorious wind-swept valley, the Farewell Burn, where a forest fire had destroyed the ground cover, she twice fell through the ice. All her hair dropped out, and she lost 30lbs from her small, muscular frame.

'Then I missed the trail and got lost for a day. Sometimes you just can't see the trail markers because of snow or fog. Sometimes local kids shift the markers for a lark, or drunks on snow machines think it's funny to move them.

'I thought of giving in at every checkpoint I reached. But it would have been too embarrassing, to me, and to the sponsors who backed me. And then quite a bit of me thought, 'I'll show that husband of mine.' Also there were women at every village telling me to go for it.' On her next Iditarod, crossing the flat and frozen marshes, she came to an overflow, where the top layer of icy water still flows over a frozen river. Her lead dogs fell into the ice. Getting them out took three hours, drenched her, and after hauling herself on to the next checkpoint, and spending three hours feeding and bedding the dogs, frostbite forced her to drop out.

This year, the Monks are lending their best dogs and supporting the first-time bid of their friend Max Hall, 44. He is trying to run a sheet-metal machinery business back in England while flying to Alaska on a series of three-week trips to train and get to know the dogs on whom his life will depend.

He must also get to know the .44 Magnum that he carries in a holster on the sled. The danger is moose, which can be crazed with hunger this late in the winter, and sometimes attack without warning. They can kill or disable half a dozen dogs in a single charge of flailing hooves.

Susan Butcher, who won the race three years in a row, chose not to carry a gun. In 1985, a moose charged her team, and stayed thrashing the dogs for nearly 20 minutes, despite her attempts to distract the beast by waving her parka and shouting. By the time another dog-sledder turned up and shot it, two dogs were dead, and six so badly injured she had to withdraw.

The first woman to complete the Iditarod was Mary Shields, who worked as a cafeteria waitress to raise funds and provide her dogs with food. She scraped the leavings from plates into buckets, and put them outside to freeze.

'In your sledload are your tent, Yukon stove, sleeping bag, Caribou mat, grub box, cook kit, axe, saw, and 200lbs of dog food and tallow. You carry all you need except for firewood and water. And all around you are dead trees and gallons of snow,' says this extraordinary woman, who finished her Iditarod, had a sleep, a celebratory dinner, then ran the route again backwards. 'I learned about the good-natured betting that was following the race. Most of the men had predicted that I'd scratch from the race in the first 100 miles. As we continued from checkpoint to checkpoint, the women were backing us. I had a whole sledload of women riding along with me.' The first woman to win was Libby Riddle, who deliberately headed straight into an ice storm that had driven the other racers to shelter.

'It was a huge gamble. Was the chance of losing my life a fair gamble? I kept thinking, 'you're not going to do this'. There was another voice that said, 'You must. You must try for this. This is the most important thing in your life.' 'The visibility was something you'd find in a blender of powdered milk, only this powdered milk was frozen and sharp and cut your face. I had to stop, set the hook, and walk ahead to look for the next trail stake. Once I'd found it, I walk-ed back to the team, and each time I wiped the glazed snow off the dogs' faces. My concentration was so intense I was aware of individual snowflakes.' The temperature dropped to 60 degrees below and the wind gusted up to 50 knots, conditions so bad that Riddle was forced to stop, set her sledge on its side and climb inside its cramped shelter. It took her two hours to change into dry clothes. At those temperatures, any wetness means certain frostbite and possible death from hypothermia.

She shivered until dawn and came out to find her dogs had disappeared. Then she saw geysers of their breath coming from holes in the snow. She called them, and they exploded out of the tiny igloos the snow had built around them, as they slept curled in tight balls, their tails over their faces.

Last year, one of her dogs died on the trail, apparently from a heart attack. For a racer who had earlier won the Vets' Prize for taking best care of her dogs, it was a personal blow. More than that: because animal rights groups have targeted the race for years, it threatened to destroy the Iditarod.

'We are absolutely opposed to it,' says Chris Kohl of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta). 'Our organisation is opposed to the use of animals in any form. They weren't put on earth for human purposes. Using them to race in zero or below-zero weather is inhuman.' Peta is a militant group, which racers could ignore. But the death of Butcher's dog, the third dog death on the trail in three years, finally persuaded the powerful Humane Society of the US to condemn it too.

'We concluded that the race was inherently harmful to the dogs, that this race was invariably going to lead to some animals being harmed and killed,' explained the Society's Wayne Purcell. 'If Susan Butcher lost a dog, everyone is faced with that prospect.' That was enough for the big sponsors, such as the Timberland outdoor clothing group, which put Dollars 1 million into the race last year. The second biggest sponsor, Iams dog food, announced that this would be the last year for its Dollars 175,000 donation.

'We are concerned about being involved in anything where there might be a negative impact from an environmental standpoint,' said Timberland's Roger Ridell.

Alaskan institutions, from the state airline and state bank to schools, have made up the deficit and maintain the Dollars 400,000 prize money.

The mushers either boil with rage or shake their heads in despair at what they see as the ignorance of the Humane Society. Certainly the veterinarians can pull out any dog or any team at any time. And the Huskies seem well cared for, with a vet at each of the 23 checkpoints, and they have been bred to this life for generations.

'These dogs just want to go. Always have. Always will,' says Norman Vaughan, who at 89 reckons he has the experience to know what he's talking about. Back in 1928, he was chief dog-driver for Byrd's expedition to the South Pole. The dogs Vaughan took became the breeding stock for the first registered Alaskan malamutes. Seventeen canine generations later, Vaughan has run 13 Iditarods with their direct descendants. His wife, Carol, 52, has run three.

'When we went on the Byrd expedition, to have a picture of you with a whip round your neck showed you were a real dog driver,' he says. 'That's all changed. We learned that dogs do better and run better without any of that. I don't know that you could finish the Iditarod with an ill-treated dog.'

During the 1976 race, after four days lost in a blizzard and way off the trail, Vaughan was out of food. His dogs had eaten their leather harnesses. He was hauling the sled himself in snowshoes, and poised to shoot a dog, drink its blood, and feed the flesh to the others, when he was finally found.

'What a lot of people don't know is the dogs are different now. All the bad traits of the Husky have been bred out. Today's dogs are faster. The dogs we had in Antarctica were like freight dogs. We didn't look for speed. And the dogs now are keen to run. They are bred for this. It would be more cruel not to let them race.' All the mushers say this. In Monk's yard, as we picked out the 10 dogs to be harnessed that day, the other 74 howled in protest, and darted to the end of their chains, as if to say: 'Pick me!' Once harnessed, they strain at the brakes to be off.

But the breeding programme could bring a new danger. Today's top musher, with two Iditarod victories in the last three years, and hot favourite this year, is Swiss-born Martin Buser. He arrived 15 years ago 'with a backpack and blue jeans', got a job at a local kennels, and decided to stay.

Buser has built up a dynasty of his own dogs, in which sprinters have been mated with traditional Huskies. His dogs are faster, lighter, with less fur, and while their stamina to run seems beyond question, their ability to withstand a prolonged and severe storm or extreme cold has yet to be tested in race conditions.

Still, however light and fast his dogs, Buser has never had to drop out of the 11 Iditarods he has run. And he holds the course record, set last year, of 10 days 13 hours, winning him the Dollars 50,000 first prize. In the right conditions Buser thinks it can be done much faster. 'My assumption is that I can breed a team that would lope to Nome in about eight days.' In 1973 and 1974, the winning time was more than 20 days, an average of 80km a day. Buser has already halved that, and now aims for what may be an impossible target pace of 240km a day.

'You don't want slow dogs, but you do want steady ones, with weight and stamina and thick coats. I like a mellow dog,' says Roy Monk. 'A lot of mushers keep their dogs just a bit hungry, because a hungry dog will be faster. Maybe mine are a touch overweight, but if the weather turns grim, that could be just the dog you need to get you through.' The arguments are finely balanced. A light team of dogs may get across thin ice, where a heavy team would fall in. The mushers are still mourning Bruce Johnson, a Canadian champion, who drowned with all eight of his dogs when lake ice broke in 1993. For the Humane Society, this was more evidence to weigh against the race.

'These dogs love to run, they love to pull. All you do is tap into that love,' says Gary Paulsen, who ran it twice, and whose book Winterdance is part of the race's literary sub-culture. It has already inspired one mystery, Murder On The Iditarod Trail, which is so close to life the mushers reckon they can identify the real-life models of each character.

The people who drive dog teams hundreds of kilometres through Arctic snows share a lot of private jokes. The one they start with is the difference between fairytales and mushers' yarns. A fairytale always begins 'Once upon a time'; the mushers always begin 'No shit, it was 40 below . . .' So, in the interests of accuracy, it was only 26 below, and a light snow was falling over the flatlands of the Susitna Valley as the light Manchester accent of Roy Monk said to me: 'Whatever happens, don't let go of the sled.' The runners are about two feet apart, and the rubber-coated ends you stand on are about two inches wide. Between them is a loosely-attached footplate: you press one foot on this to slow the sled a fraction, just enough to tauten the line again if the dogs falter. Then there is a foot-brake, which you kick down into the snow, and which will not hold a team of eager dogs. When that fails, there is a kind of anchor with a wicked hook you can toss to one side of the trail. If it won't hold, the last resort is to tip over the sled.

Once aboard, and feeling the power of the dogs as they strain to run against the slipping brake, there is a sudden sensation of impotence. This is not a stagecoach, with reins to connect driver and horse. On a dog sled, the rope is attached to the front of the absurdly light and flimsy contraption. The musher has no direct contact with the dogs. You can hang on. You can try to keep the sled on the trail by shifting your weight from one side to the other. You can shout some commands to make the dogs turn right or left or speed up. But you are in their paws, and once you have gone too far to walk back without food, you are utterly dependent on them for survival. Ill-treated dogs won't run. Caring for them hurts. Every few kilometres you must stop and inspect their feet for the dreaded ice balls which can get inside their pads and make them lame.

To remove an ice ball, and then to apply the salve, you must take off your gloves. In the team of dogs I was driving, that made 40 paws. Each paw can take a minute. In these temperatures, you can check at best eight paws before shoving your hand deep inside your clothing to warm it against your belly in preparation for the next paw.

And what dogs they are, their wolfish eyes a frozen blue-white cold as the Alaskan winds, but which suddenly soften as a giant tongue comes out to lap your hand.

'The rule is, you take care of the dogs first. You stop and stake out the dogs. Then you build a fire, melt the snow and chop up the frozen salmon and meat for their food. Then you check the dogs for ice balls,' says Monk.

'You learn to toss a plastic bag of your own frozen stew into the pot along the way. The dogs rest. You don't. I kept a log of my race in 1992. I got 10 hours sleep in 14 days on the trail. You doze off a bit on the sled. It was so cold. Three days in a row, it was 60 below, and cleaning the ice balls took forever. Three hours at a checkpoint just went on feeding and checking the dogs. You start to hallucinate, but you keep going. Madness, really. Glorious madness. I can't wait to run it again.'