ANCHORAGE — Snow fell gently as Albert Whitehead set out with his pet reindeer on a lavender leash for their regular stroll through downtown Anchorage.
As always, the sight of Star being walked like a dog along busy streets sparked laughter, pointing fingers and slack-jawed stares. It's a scene that's been played out in Alaska's largest city for more than 40 years by a long line of reindeer, all females named Star.
"My, aren't you charming?" a passerby gushed as Star VI snuffled the air in search of the homemade bread that Whitehead carries in his pockets during their jaunts.
"That's not something you see every day," Russ Widener, a businessman from Syracuse, N.Y., said a few blocks away as he snapped a photograph, then moved in for a closer look at the frisky 4-year-old with the long, dainty antlers.
Whitehead, 64, who helped care for Star's predecessors, said the current reindeer is probably the friendliest of them all, having been raised exclusively by humans after being abandoned by her mother at birth.
Besides Star's downtown excursions, she participates in parades, visits schoolchildren and pulls kids on sleds.
All the Stars have been big on civic duty.
When she's not gallivanting around, Star lives in a 55-by-30-foot fenced pen outside Whitehead's home. Oblivious to the cold, she'll lie still for hours, chewing willow leaves and twitching only her ears as she's being blanketed with falling snow.
But when people pass by on foot, look out. She comes alive, tagging alongside the fence as they walk by. One regular visitor runs back and forth along her pen, and she trots along right next to him, Whitehead said.
"She's a people deer," he said. "This is the best place for her."
The tradition began in 1962 when Anchorage pioneers Oro and Ivan Stewart got their first Star from a Native reindeer herder. As with every subsequent Star, the reindeer had a little tuft of white on her forehead.
Whitehead, then a young soldier stationed at Ft. Richardson, had befriended the Stewarts by that time, sometimes helping out at their downtown camera shop.
Whitehead left the state, but returned a decade later with a wife and two children to pick up the friendship with the Stewarts where it left off. That involved walking Star I -- outings that are still vivid in the memory of Whitehead's son, now 35.
"Growing up with deer was really cool," Bryan Whitehead said. "I don't know how it would be like not to have one."
