Once upon a time, poodles raced in the Iditarod. They weren’t half bad.

Maybe it was his California upbringing. Perhaps it was his bent for seeing a joke in just about anything. For whatever reason, when Alaska transplant John Suter saw a miniature poodle eagerly running to keep up with his snowmobile, an improbable thought occurred to him: Now there’s a sled dog.

It was the 1970s, and the military duty that had brought Suter to Alaska, where he was a member of an army biathlon team, was over. The poodle idea gripped him. Soon, he was back in California, buying standard poodles – the big ones, because even Suter wasn’t quixotic enough to use miniatures – and transporting them north to build a dog-sledding team.