Sled dog the decline of the working sled dog. Recreational mushing came into place to maintain the tradition of dog mushing. The desire for larger, stronger, load-pulling dogs changed to one for faster dogs with high endurance used in racing, which caused the dogs to become lighter than they were historically. Americans then began to import Siberian Huskies to increase the speed of their own dogs, presenting "a direct contrast to the idea that Russian traders sought heavier draft-type sled dogs from the Interior regions of Alaska and the Yukon less than a century earlier to increase the hauling capacity of their
Letter to a Phoenix said that he was "fascinated" by the story, and that it was the direct inspiration for the 1975 story "The Peddler's Apprentice" which he co-wrote with his then-wife, Joan D. Vinge. Letter to a Phoenix "Letter to a Phoenix" is a science fiction short story by American writer Fredric Brown, about immortality. It was first published in "Astounding Science Fiction" in August 1949. A 180,000-year-old man writes a letter to humanity as a whole, explaining the lessons he has learned while observing the rise and fall of multiple civilizations. Literary scholar Jack Seabrook has described it as "(t)hought-provoking rather than