I know you'll believe me, Susan, when I say that I know how heavy-hearted
you must feel at the end of the career of a dog like Lance. I have still
not begun to get over the passing of Sepalluna, and knowing that your
Lance was leaving you yesterday just somehow started the grieving up all
over again for me. When it's a dog like 'Lluna, then somehow her ancestors
like Dreama and Ditko, and collaterals like Sepalleopard and Surgut and
Nyura all get mixed up in it as well, all taking turns pulling at one's
heartstrings and memories. Heavy "emotional weather" indeed!

As a result I spent this morning surfing the web for ideas and
inspiration, because I find it's time to add a Rainbow Bridge page to the
SSSD website. There are so many fine and much-missed canine personalities
who should be remembered, and a lot of good photos available to make their
memories vivid . . .

The "authentic Seppalas" I. S. A. online database work continues. I now
find that I underestimated the number of records considerably. Instead of
five or six hundred, it's now looking like it will be more like 750,
perhaps even a few more. As I get into the 1975 and later "post-Markovo"
dogs the work becomes slower and more difficult, paradoxically, perhaps
because there are no comprehensive collected listings for that period. The
"Carded!" files of dogs up to 1940 and the 1976 "The Seppala Siberian"
collection of studbook entries helped enormously with the early period.
But for MANY relatively recent dogs, registration numbers, birthdates,
owners, and descriptions are missing -- it's ridiculous, but for a large
number of 1970s and 1980s dogs, all we know that is generally available is
a name, a sire and a dam!

Of course the *Registry Database* itself remains a prime concern -- but
with you, Susan, at the helm as Custodian of Records I feel sure that we
are going to come up with a system that will be vastly superior to
anything any of us have used before now. I can feel that in my bones, that
the collective experience represented on the I. S. A. Board is going to
bear immediate fruit in that way, if we work methodically and don't rush
the process. I am thinking not only of Chinooks and Seppalas. I know we
have other sleddog minority populations that need record-keeping services.
Eventually we shall be doing this for half a dozen minority breeds at
least. We owe it to those people to build carefully and for the long term.
We've seen good examples recently of how NOT to go about it!

So work away, Susan, both on your memorial web page and on those
databases, and know that the preservation of vital information about dogs
long passed over the Rainbow Bridge will be a precious legacy to the
future, and a permanent monument to Lance.

J. Jeffrey Bragg
I. S. A. President and Chair