Sam Deltour, a young Belgian man with a love for the outdoors and a passion for the north and travel by dog team, could not express the powerful feelings rocking his world in the finish chute. He’d run his dream, and now it was over. He’d completed it, but now came a sense of loss and even mourning for having to walk away from the wilderness, back into the noise and clutter of civilized life. Deltour’s eyes were red and wet with tears as he praised a single dog in his team that he’d had to carry in his sled early on because it worked too hard, but that matured on the trail and eventually became one of his best little leaders. His story ended in sobs that echoed through the PA system set up on Front Street.

Deltour, by the way, is the only musher this year to finish with a complete string of 16 dogs. He said it wasn’t on purpose; just the way it turned out. A handler for Mitch Seavey’s racing kennel, Deltour, along with fellow Belgian Dries Jacobs, was on physical a mission to pilot a young group of dogs to Nome on a steady schedule to teach them the trail. They will have a chance to graduate to Seavey’s racing team next year. But running the 2008 race with young Seavey dogs meant more to Deltour than fulfilling a job.

With the interview obviously over, the choked up musher silently drove his team to a parking area about a block a way, and Mitch Seavey’s wife, Janine, commented, “I think this race does it. They accomplish something that takes it down to raw material.”