Adopted from HSSV as a mostly blind puppy, Ingrid – now Toph – was trained slowly into a joring dog, guided by the sound of a bicycle bell.

A mushing day starts with the harness — one built to protect her joints while she pulls — and a coat of Musher’s Secret, a wax that keeps her paw pads from tearing up. Toph gets clipped to a ten-foot line and she sits, waiting for one word.

“Mush.”

She starts hard. Ahead of her, Nicole pedals a bike with a bell ringing so Toph knows where to go. Behind her, holding the line from a skateboard, is Nicole’s husband, Alex. By her family’s estimate, she can hit fifteen miles an hour, and she’ll cover two or three miles of the bike path near their house before she’s done. Back home there’s goat milk for electrolytes, Cosequin for her joints, and a long flop in the yard.

A full morning for any dog. Toph does all of it blind.

The dog she kept talking herself out of

Nicole wasn’t looking for a puppy. She was looking for a friend for Peach, her senior dog, who had lost a lot of joy and “just seemed sad and lonely.” Peach loves other dogs, but as Nicole puts it, “she’s weird and socially awkward,” which made friends hard to come by. A longtime shelter worker herself, Nicole hoped to find a dog with special needs – she’d loved them her whole career.

Then she saw a blind puppy named Ingrid on HSSV’s website. Ingrid had arrived that September through HSSV’s Regional Rescue program, about five months old, not quite sixteen pounds, and, her vets concluded, almost certainly blind since birth. Her right eye never fully developed; her left sees shadows at most. Neither causes her any pain.

“My heart instantly melted.” She showed her coworker. She showed her husband. And then she talked herself out of it, because a hyper puppy was the last thing she’d signed up for, and surely this one would find a home without a crotchety old lady dog attached. For weeks, she checked on her every day anyway, and talked herself out of it each time.

Meanwhile, the search for Peach’s companion stalled. After around ten failed meet-and-greets, they gave up. For closure,

Nicole checked the website one last time. Ingrid was gone. “I was pretty sad, but figured it was for the best.”

A few weeks later, some instinct pushed her to look again – and there was Ingrid. She hadn’t been adopted after all. At the shelter, she had caught her paw in the top of a crate, and when a staff member reached in to help, the frightened puppy – who couldn’t see the it coming – bit their hand. California law requires a bite quarantine, so she was removed from the website in the meantime. An HSSV vet cleared her within the week. “I called the shelter right then and there.”

At the meet-and-greet, Nicole braced for another mismatch: a bouncing puppy, a senior dog. Then Toph stuck herself to Peach’s side and shadowed her from area to area. “I knew innately that this was meant to be our dog.”

The last worry was the almost three-hour drive home. Toph slept upside down on Alex’s lap the entire way.

Raised by Peach

They had braced for chaotic puppyhood, but it never really arrived. Toph had exactly one accident before potty-training herself. Within a week she had mapped both Nicole’s house and her parents’ house, and she didn’t bump into anything unless it had been moved. What did arrive was a personality: hilarious, energetic – a small terror, and smart enough to be obedient “when she felt like it.”

Peach did much of the raising. The family suspects she once had puppies of her own, so she knew what she was doing. “Her maternal instinct was incredible from day one,” Nicole says. “She coddled, corrected, and played with Toph all day long.” The dog they adopted to fix Peach’s loneliness got mothered in return. “I truly believe that she made my old girl’s life a hundred times better.”

Auditioning for the Iditarod

While Toph was still at HSSV, behavior specialist Gee worked her in agility and thought she’d be great at dog sports.

HSSV behaviorist, Gee, with a young Toph

Her family agreed she needed a job. “Toph is an insanely smart and energetic dog, and without a proper outlet I have no doubt she’d be so naughty.”

The outlet was discovered through her biggest training struggle: pulling on leash “like she was auditioning for the Iditarod.” A DNA test explained why: husky and pit bull, “two dog breeds with pulling in their DNA.” So they stopped fighting the pulling and gave it somewhere to go: joring, the sport where a harnessed dog pulls a person on wheels or skis.

Training a blind dog to mush

They started on their quiet suburban street. Alex, a skilled skateboarder, let Toph pull him at a walk, forward only. “It took zero training for this – it was instinctual for her.” On off days they worked directionals in the yard: left, right, straight, mush, and “woahhh” for slow down.

“She’s a brainiac, so she caught on right away.”

Her confidence lagged behind her skill, and her husband worried about cars. His idea: put Nicole out front on a bike, so Toph always had something to follow. That clicked. She went from walking to running. Nicole had been whistling to orient her, which upgraded to a bell. “Now she runs so fast that I struggle to go faster than her on my bike.”

“It is a trust thing,” Nicole says. “If she didn’t listen to directionals, both us and her could get hurt. We rely on each other for safety, and everyone is working together to have fun.” Somewhere along the way, the fairly reserved, independent dog they brought home became a cuddlebug – “when she feels like it, of course.” She loves being picked up like a baby, all 50 pounds of her.

The freaky little weirdo

Nicole calls her “an absolute freaky little weirdo,” and the evidence is extensive. Toph only lies in beds upside down. When play with Peach gets rowdy, she burrows under Peach’s bed andflips it over, Peach included. She sleeps in what the family calls “sport mode,” tongue all the way out. She stalks people through the yard and pounces. “I think she believes that no one else can see either.” Call her into a heel and she leaps through the air into a perfect sit at your feet, kneecaps beware. And, as Nicole puts it, “she looks like an ancient oracle from a Greek myth that would tell you a riddle.”

“That’s so sad”

When people learn Toph is blind, Nicole usually hears the same three words: “That’s so sad.”

The family keeps a response ready – that the universe made her blind so she wouldn’t take over the whole world with her cunning naughtiness. “She is the farthest thing from a sad dog that could exist. Her joy and pure love for life is beautiful to watch, and it spreads to everyone around her.”

In fact, her mobility is so good that her family sometimes forgets she can’t see, tossing her a cookie just for it to land on the floor right in front of her.

Day to day, caring for her asks very little. They keep her walking paths clear. She knows “WATCH OUT,” a command that stops her mid-stride before she runs into something. Her leash wears a “Blind Dog” patch, and they ask strangers not to grab at her suddenly, since she can’t see hands coming. “Besides that, she’s just like any other dog.”

Nicole has been advocating for dogs like her for years, and her advice is simple: “If you see a dog in a shelter that you love and they’re a great fit for your home, but they’re blind or deaf or maybe even both, give them a chance. They might end up surprising you. Just because they’re differently-abled does not make them unable.”

Somewhere on a bike path almost three hours from HSSV, a bell is ringing, and Toph is chasing it as fast as she can go.