In the morning I was damp, but warm. My polypropylene underwear actually felt dry to the touch. Maybe there was something to those moisture-wicking fiber advertisements, though I’d never experienced much benefit wearing soggy polypropylene socks.
Daylight revealed plenty of markers on the trees ahead. Convoy leaders had missed them in the dark because the reflectors were dusted with snow. Had I been in front, I think I would have spotted them. But it didn’t matter now.
Local villagers were sipping their Friday morning coffee as our group streamed into Golovin. Terhune and I were the last to reach the cluster of dog teams parked by the village hall. A sly smile shone through Terhune’s scruffy beard.
“I’m not staying,” he said. “I’m leaving as soon as they’re all inside.”
Not only were our dogs fresh from last night’s forced camp; White Mountain lay only 18 miles away.
“It’s time to remind these people it’s a race,” I agreed. “But I’ve got to find a bathroom before I go anywhere.”
I was swimming in gas. My bubbling gut felt ready to explode, and I didn’t want a repeat of Koyuk. Terhune wanted to get a cup of coffee. Playing it cool, we packed our sleds for departure, then sauntered inside the checkpoint.
Cooley was interrogating the checkers about Herrman. Most of our companions looked as if they were ready to relax for a good spell. I grabbed a cup of instant coffee and headed for the bathroom.
Terhune and I soon strolled back to our dogs.
“Let’s go,” he shouted, reaching for his hook.
“Daisy, Daisy on by!” he said, directing his lead dog past the teams crowding the checkpoint. It was a perfect place for a breakout. The snow was hard packed across a wide area from local traffic, and the trail exiting the village began 100 yards ahead.
The movement of Terhune’s dogs sent other teams into a howling frenzy. Mushers spilled out of the checkpoint. Bedlam ensued. Shouts mixed with barking, while local villagers clapped and cheered, applauding Terhune’s getaway.
I was right behind Jon approaching Gunnar Johnson’s team. But then my dogs bunched up. Bo seized the chance to hump Raven. I leaped off the sled and separated the lovers.
“All right! All right,” I shouted, still intent on following Terhune.
Other mushers were madly pitching gear at their sleds. As we were passing Johnson’s parked sled, a tussle erupted in the middle ranks of my team. Pig, Digger, and Spook all had their teeth locked on a big chunk of meat. Wading into the center of the melee, I ripped the meat free and threw it at Johnson.
“What kind of bullshit is this Gunnar! Leaving meat on the ground next to your sled?”
“It wasn’t on the ground,” he protested. “Your dogs dived inside my sled bag and pulled that meat out.”
“Oh, sorry about that.”
Looking over his shoulder, Terhune watched my dogs seize the meat. He nearly fell off his sled laughing at the resulting mess. So be it, he thought, watching me fall behind.
Daily welcomed the sudden excitement. Lounging in the checkpoint, he had overheard Lenthar talking about staying to do a load of laundry. That was too much. He felt like grabbing the other musher and screaming “LET’S GET OUTTA HERE!” This absurd maneuver of Terhune’s was just the jolt everyone needed.
While I fought for custody of the meat, Chad decided it was his turn to mount Raven. I broke up that love affair before it got started, and quickly got the team rolling. It was too late to gain any advantage. Everybody but Gunnar was already moving out, chasing Terhune. So much for my great escape.
Gunnar and I joined the tail end of the chain leaving Golovin. He was carrying the Red Lantern for once, but that didn’t last. Another tangle halted us dead. This time Digger had pounced on Raven, my disruptive princess of love.
“Go ahead, Gunnar,” I said, leaping off the sled to pull the dogs apart.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“Yeah, go for it.”
I had the team lined out in about ten seconds flat. That much I was getting good at.
Terhune couldn’t hold his lead. Never had a chance. Daisy’s trotting speed had dropped to five, maybe six, miles per hour. The others closed in on him less than a mile out from the checkpoint. Terhune cursed to himself. He hated to see this. But there was nothing to be done. Dogs can only do what they can do. Terhune pulled aside and let the faster teams by, watching the smug looks on the faces of every racer who passed him.
“What happened?” I said, shocked to see him parked there.
Terhune shrugged.
I’d been angry with myself for blowing that escape. Yet here we were together in the back of the train again.
“Well, we sure showed them.”
“Yeah,” Terhune growled. “Next time FEED your dogs first.”
The sun was out and it was warm, 20 or 30 degrees above zero.
“At least it’s a nice day,” I yelled back. “I don’t even need … my parka.”
Sharp as an eight-by-ten photo, I recalled my big coat draped over a chair in the checkpoint bathroom. “Son of a bitch,” I gasped, staggered by the magnitude of my screwup. I considered continuing on without it. It was so warm. Nome was so close. One word restored reality: “Topkok.”
The area surrounding the Topkok Hills was one of the most dangerous on the trail. Mushers were sometimes trapped for days on the hillsides, or in the windy valley below. Continuing without that parka put my entire race in jeopardy. I stopped the team and dragged my dogs off the trail, waving Terhune ahead.
“What’re you doing?”
“Left something behind,” I said grimly.
Grabbing the lesbian’s collar, I pulled the team back around and mushed toward Golovin.
What a pisser, thought Daily, watching me turn back. His own dogs were flying, soaring at a previously unimaginable pace behind Bogus. The lead dog appeared to actually smell Nome; Tom didn’t know how else to explain it.
My dogs broke into a joyous lope. Returning to Golovin, an easy three miles back, was obviously a popular idea with the team. I hadn’t even parked when one of the ladies staffing the checkpoint burst through the door with my parka under her arm.
“We found it as soon as you left,” she said. “You didn’t need to come back for it. We would have sent it to White Mountain on a snowmachine.”
I sighed. “Came too far to take that chance.”
Facing the exit trail, I snacked the dogs and petted them, trying to make a game of this latest pilot error. The crew responded as I hoped, wagging their tails, acting perky. But their spirits crumbled when I ordered Harley and Rainy to move out again. The lesbian didn’t want to go at all. Raven’s crotch was suddenly more interesting than anything waiting ahead. Harley froze, torn between my demands and the lure of Raven.
“Go ahead! Go ahead, Harley!” I insisted.
The big dog looked at me, a forlorn expression written on his face, then he lurched ahead, dragging Rainy to work. My dogs stumbled out of Golovin like POWs. Their ears were down. Pauses were frequent. All thirteen dogs had to relieve their bladders, or take smelly dumps, or both. I was the Bad Guy riding the heavy sled.
The accusatory looks didn’t impress me. We were only going eighteen miles. Not a damn one of them was really tired. Hungry, yes. They hadn’t had a hot meal since Elim. But my fine athletes couldn’t be tired, not after that extra break on Little McKinley. They were just disappointed. And I couldn’t blame them for that. I had broken the all-important Deal.
The dogs pulled and I fed them at each checkpoint: that was our unspoken compact, which had been reaffirmed at every stage of the last 1,000 miles. Every stage, that is, until Golovin, where I had broken that trust — twice in a single morning.
My assumption was vindicated as the dogs broke into a lope scenting White Mountain. The morning’s betrayal was forgotten. Happy days were here. Ears perked, shoulders pitched forward with effort, Deadline Dog Farm’s finest pulled with abandon. A checkpoint was ahead. Dinner was about to be served, thus reestablishing justice throughout dogdom as they knew it.
“HEP, HEP, HEP.” That simple phrase was all it took. Bogus kicked the team into overdrive, and Tom Daily easily beat everybody else into White Mountain.
Jacked by his team’s performance, Tom spent the next 45 minutes proudly greeting incoming teams. He wasn’t paying attention as the checker, who was late coming down from the lodge, made his rounds.
Daily was bummed when he saw the time sheet later. It had Lenthar arriving first at 11 A.M., March 23. Daily was listed as fourth, adding an unwarranted 36 minutes to his mandatory 6-hour stop.
“Jesus” he said, “you can’t win in this thing.”
I shared Tom’s disappointment in the White Mountain standings. Thanks to my parka snafu, I had arrived 70 minutes behind the closest musher ahead of me, and some two hours behind the Mormiles, Terhune, Daily, and Lenthar. Those were teams I expected to beat; 55 miles didn’t offer much opportunity for a rebound. But a lot could happen. Look at Swenson.
After serving the dogs a meal, I unhooked little Raven and escorted her to the picket line for dropped dogs. I hated myself. Wasn’t I the guy who had planned on mushing every dog to Nome?
Now I was abandoning a hard-working girl merely for being in heat, a situation I should have been able to deal with. But I couldn’t, and that was the truth. That mating on the ice was nearly disastrous. The fight and the subsequent delay leaving Koyuk offered further proof that Raven’s presence threatened the entire team.
The little black dog whimpered as I walked away. I hesitated, and Raven flopped on her back, legs spread, inviting me to stroke her. My princess deserved no less for hauling me 1,100 miles.
“You did a good job, little girl,” I said, rubbing her tight belly. “Too bad the boys won’t leave you alone.”
I was tired as I trudged up the hill to White Mountain Lodge. If there hadn’t been a free meal waiting, I would have gladly slept with the dogs on the frozen river below.
Inside the clean lodge I felt decidedly out of place. The thick steak, rolled napkins, and polished forks — all seemed unreal after three weeks on the trail. And the lodge’s interior was so hot I felt light headed.
My nap was interrupted. Mowry was on the line. The Coach berated me for not dropping Raven sooner. But that was just in passing. The Mowth wasn’t calling to criticize. He sought to motivate me with a new shining goal.
Though I had already been defeated by the Poodle Man, the Russians, Madman, and over 40 others, Mowry said, a means yet remained to salvage Deadline Dog Farm’s reputation. His old dogs — the team Old Joe had repossessed last spring — were pulling Don Mormile’s sled. Catherine was also mushing a Redington team. The way Mowth saw it, if I beat those two teams to Nome, the feat would command respect throughout Knik. That wasn’t just his own opinion, Mowry stressed. No less an authority than Marcie had agreed.
“Bri,” he said. “Beat the Mormiles at all costs. Got that? BEAT THE MORMILES AT ALL COSTS!”
“Hey, those dogs look sort of skinny,” said Plettner, offhandedly. She was picking up the pans from her team’s second full meal at White Mountain.
My dogs did look kind of bony. I cooked them a second meal. Plettner watched approvingly as my dogs sucked up the steaming pans of food. She was putting the last touches on packing, her own six-hour layover nearly complete. Shortly before six in the evening, Sunday, March 23, Plettner mushed out on the frozen river below White Mountain. Don Mormile followed close behind.
Watching the teams quietly slip away, I knew I’d never catch Plettner. The Mormiles? That game was still afoot. We’d find out soon enough.
I looked the team over. Even with bellies full the dogs’ ribs — rising and falling with each breath — looked more defined, all right. Bo, Digger, and Harley, in particular, appeared strikingly gaunt. It was their attitudes, however, that showed the most change. Three weeks ago Cyrus would have been pacing and whining. Like soldiers or laborers everywhere, he and the others had learned to snatch a meal or rest whenever it was offered.
Even our maniacs now exhibited workmanlike calm. In leaving Raven behind, I was losing the one dog left in the team who barked at the first hints of departure. The changes were subtle, but profound. Pig no longer squirmed. Spook even welcomed my touch as I placed on booties.
In terms of pulling, the dogs had become a fine-tuned engine. When I let off the brake, tug lines snapped taut, and the team pulled in unison. Whisper “Whoa,” and the dogs halted on a dime. The had become a single unit, possessing ability beyond the sum of the individual members. Though I didn’t know it, I hadn’t entered the race with a dog team. But I had one now.
Mushing from White Mountain, I was an hour behind the nearest sled. The trail and sky merged in a seamless gray landscape. I switched on my headlamp although it wasn’t yet dark. There was comfort in the line of reflectors glowing in my beam. With Raven gone, I had 12 dogs left. Rainy and Harley were in lead. The odd couple had brought us most of the way. No reason to change now.
I had, incredibly, forgotten to get a weather report. The failure nagged at me as light snow began falling an hour out of White Mountain. “Here it comes,” I whispered. “Three feet of snow in two hours. The biggest blizzard Nome’s ever seen.”
Daily had reentered the void. Judging from the slope, the team was probably climbing Topkok Hill. But it was just a guess. Tom couldn’t see anything except the dogs and his sled. The world beyond was utterly white. This whole Iditarod was like wandering through heaven, the musher thought, a white misty place, with no beginning or end and nothing but dogs for company.
Topkok’s bare crown was serene. The fog lifted as Daily and several other mushers descended toward the valley below. The Nome Kennel Club’s shelter cabin waited at the bottom. Plettner, the veteran, knew better than to dally in this stretch. Wind seldom rested in the so-called “Solomon Blowhole.” When it did blow, a layover in that cabin could mean the difference between life and death. On rare moments when it didn’t, only fools stopped to visit.
Sepp Herrman was already closing in on Nome. Plettner’s final drive was also underway. Cooley urged the others to assemble at the shelter cabin, and then mush together into Safety. Doc figured he’d brought his rookies too far to let one stray into the Bering Sea.
Don Mormile was outside the cabin working with his team when Terhune’s dogs popped out of the darkness. That meant I was the only driver still on the way.
“You’ve got to stop,” Mormile began. “Cooley says—”
Terhune cut him off. “I told you people, if you stop again — I don’t care what the goddamn reason is — I’m going around. I don’t want nothing to do with this group!” Ordering Daisy past the parked teams, Terhune rounded the cabin, followed the markers into the brush, and vanished.
Mormile went inside. The group got a chuckle out of this latest declaration from Terhune. No one felt threatened. This was, what, the third time the sourpuss had tried to get away? Those Kenai dogs were slower than dirt. When would he give it up?
As far as Daily could tell, Terhune couldn’t get ten feet without screaming bloody murder at his poor lead dog. Daily saw nothing noble in it, not when the price was being paid by those poor tired dogs.
It mattered to Terhune. Every inch between him and those other people mattered. Rounding the shelter cabin, the musher switched off his headlamp. His dogs were slow, but they were tough, like him. Jon Terhune and Daisy meant to show them all.
I was startled by an approaching light. It came so fast I knew it had to be a snowmachine. The driver, a burly Alaska Native, stopped alongside the trail and beckoned to me. As I drew closer, the man smiled and reached inside his suit. He pulled out a tall bottle of Bacardi 151.
“Here, take a swig,” he said, handing me the rum.
“Wind blew down the markers through here,” the snowmachiner said, as I handed back his bottle. “Don’t worry. I put in new ones for you guys. You won’t have no trouble.”
For the last hour, I’d been climbing featureless, snow-covered hills. The trail was barely discernible on the hard windswept surface. I hated to imagine this place in a whiteout. The trail rose steadily higher and higher over bare rounded steps. Several times I thought I was cresting the summit only to discover another steep hill waiting ahead.
The moon, near full, shone brightly through the misty night sky. After I switched off my headlamp, the snow seemed radiant with reflected light. The dogs and I were cast into a realm of living negatives. I rubbed my eyes and pressed on. The top — it had to be the top — was getting closer.
Cresting Topkok, the trail crossed a short flat plateau. I stopped the team and studied the valley below. The view was surprisingly clear. I could trace the trail, winding through bushes and shrubs to a shelter on the valley floor. It looked dark and deserted. Way, way off in the distance, I saw a string of moving lights.
“Gotcha!” I said. Releasing the brake, I sent my dogs charging downward.
I’d come straight through from White Mountain. The dogs were due for a break, so I paused to check out the shelter cabin. Leaving the crew gnawing on chunks of whitefish, I headed inside. The cabin interior was hot. Coals were still glowing in the stove. Obviously, the others had spent a fair amount of time at the cabin.
I found some crackers and munched on them as I read the graffiti on the walls of the cabin. Recently refurbished, the shelter cabin beneath Topkok was in the best shape of any I’d seen on the trail. Most of the graffiti must have been left by mushers in this year’s race. I saw comments from quite a few people I recognized, including Swenson, who was already gloating about win number five.
I scrawled a ditty about slipping from first to worst. “Let historians ponder that,” I muttered, signing and dating it. Then I headed back outside and roused the dogs. It wasn’t over yet.
Terhune kept Daisy on the march. He watched over his shoulder for headlamps, but none appeared. He traveled as much as possible with his own headlamp off. No reason to give those bastards a target to shoot at. Finally, Terhune saw a red-neon bar sign. Safety. He’d made it. Goddamn.
Terhune snacked his dogs and then studied the exit trail. Inside the bar he grabbed a plate of food and took a seat at a window overlooking the incoming trail. He wanted to give his dogs as much rest as possible. Exactly how long that might be, Jon didn’t know. It depended on what he saw through the window.
Herrman had mushed into Nome early that morning, finishing in fifty-first place. Plettner had pulled across the finish line at 6 A.M. It galled him, but nothing Terhune could do would ever change that. But he could still stick it to those guys behind him. Thirty minutes passed, then 45.
“Good,” the musher said, studying his watch. His dogs were getting a decent break. His stay was approaching an hour, when Terhune spied a distant bobbing light. He dashed for the bar door.
“Daisy!” the musher called the lead dog’s name as he rushed toward the team. He grabbed several dogs and jerked them to their feet. Jumping on the runners, he reached for his snow hook. The finish line was 20 miles away. The others might be faster, but he had the jump.
Mushing away with his own headlamp switched off, Terhune watched over his shoulder. The single light had swelled to a moving cluster. Near the bar, the lights stopped. He had expected that. They had to stop to sign in. OK. OK. What would they do now? The lights remained stationary, and he slowly pulled away. Jon Terhune smiled. The fools were letting him get away.
“I can’t believe Terhune is going to beat us,” Mark Williams repeated. “He had the slowest dogs in the race.”
Sitting at the bar, Daily shrugged. He wasn’t impressed with Terhune. Daily’s dogs would arrive in Nome in better shape. He was sure of that. And he wasn’t impressed with Gunnar Johnson’s deceitful little maneuver. The way he had snuck off, deserting everybody here at Safety, minutes after pretending he agreed with Cooley’s plan to wait for O’Donoghue and mush into Nome together. It rubbed Daily the wrong way.
What was the rush? Next year he would come back and really race.
Daily ceremoniously bought himself a beer, the first he’d had in 21 days. He bought Cooley one, too.
The veterinarian was embarrassed. “Can I borrow money for a burger, Tom?” he whispered, confessing that he was flat broke.
If it wasn’t the worst night of my life, it was close. Taking that short break at the cabin had been a major mistake. It had destroyed the team’s rhythm. Leaving the cabin, Rainy and Harley slowed to a crawl. It was a repeat of the Golovin turnaround.
I was in trouble myself. Couldn’t keep my eyes open. Looking for a caffeine jolt, I started dipping my fingers in the baggy of instant coffee and licking the powder off my fingertips. The secret weapon was a dud. All I got from chewing that lousy powder was cramps.
The mist returned, and world closed in around me. The whiteness just went on and on. At one point, I saw a light coming up from behind. It looked like a musher’s headlamp, but it couldn’t be; the light was coming too fast. Yet it was a dog team, closing so fast that my dogs seemed to be standing still.
“It’s got to be Plettner,” I decided by process of elimination. No one else had that kind of speed. The musher waved as the team caught and passed us. It was a man. That didn’t make any sense. I couldn’t figure it out, and then I realized the team and the sled looked all wrong. It wasn’t an Iditarod musher. The sled was empty. It must have been some local speed demon.
The trail joined an unplowed road. Misery incarnate. Clocking the accompanying mile markers, I calculated that the team had slowed to under three miles an hour. No wonder it felt like we were crawling tonight. Rainy kept stopping to stare at … nothing.
Tonight my space cadet was in total orbit. Her pauses hobbled us. Watching the lesbian blast off for the third time in a mile, I stopped the team and switched Chad into lead with Harley. The team’s pace improved. But it felt like we were just plowing faster into the void. A light snow caused spots to dance in the beam of my headlamp. I had a terrible time holding on. The road was so smooth. So endless.
With absolutely no warning, I drew alongside another parked Iditarod team. I didn’t recognize the sled, but it was fully packed. The musher was nowhere to be seen. Dusted with snow and curled in tight balls, the musher’s dogs were sleeping in front of the sled in a straight line.
Dazed, wondering who I’d caught, I stomped my snow hook into the ground. When I looked up, the other team was gone. A line of driftwood rested in its place.
I didn’t need my headlamp anymore. The slow-falling snowflakes taunted me, jittering unpredictably, straining my eyes in the blue predawn light. It was approaching eight A.M. We’d been mushing down the lousy road for what seemed like days. The coffee baggie was half gone, and I was feeling queasy.
At last, a light gleamed in the distance. A red and white bar light. A checkpoint called Safety. “Let’s go home!” I whispered. Chad raised his head. Ears shot up along the line. The dogs shifted gears, recharged with purpose.
I clung to the hope that others might be having similar problems. Surely I’d catch a few other teams lingering in Safety. I knew Terhune wouldn’t wait. But Cooley had talked about it. And the Mormiles couldn’t be too far ahead, could they?
All I found waiting was a tattered Iditarod banner, flapping in the wind. And a beer Daily had bought me on his way out the door.
“How long ago did the last team leave?” I asked the weary checker, hope flickering an instant longer.
“No more than twenty minutes,” he said.
Calculations raced through my mind. It was 20 miles to Nome. Except for Cooley’s dogs, the teams ahead weren’t anything special. They’d be lucky to do six miles an hour. That gave me …
“They rested here two, maybe three hours,” the checker added.
Hope died. Dead last. I was going to finish dead last.
A musher was sighted on the outskirts of Nome. The news was broadcast on KNOM radio at 9 A.M. Sunday, March 24, day 22 of Iditarod 1991. The banners and other decorations that greeted Swenson were no longer present, long since torn down or damaged in the numerous storms of the last 10 days. But the Burl Arch marking the Iditarod’s finish line remained standing downtown. That was all that mattered.
No other dog teams were in sight as Terhune climbed off the frozen beach and turned his dogs down Front Street. At long last the old paratrooper relaxed. The fifty-third musher into Nome was a satisfied man.
He found Dawn and his two grown daughters waiting near the arch. They were holding a long handmade banner. “Welcome Jon,” it read.
Gunnar Johnson mushed into town 45 minutes later.
The others weren’t far behind. Johnson’s desertion had sparked a general exodus from Safety. To hell with waiting for me. The race was on again. A wild contest developed in the final miles. Charging across the icy drifts outside Nome, Daily thought he had the edge. Bogus, looking inspired, loped like a frisky pup. He dusted the Mormiles and surged ahead of Mark Williams. But Tom Daily’s eight dogs were simply outpowered by the fourteen dogs pulling Urtha Lenthar’s sled.
Lenthar, Daily, and Williams finished within one minute of each other, notching the fifty-fifth, fifty-sixth, and fifty-seventh positions in the record book. Not long afterward, Catherine Mormile won the race that mattered most to her — beating her husband, Don, and the Mowth’s old dogs to the arch by almost 20 minutes. Cooley, our unofficial participant, let the others go ahead and followed Mormile into town, finishing at 10:43 A.M.
Bellies warmed by a hot meaty broth, my dogs slept on the lee side of Safety while the other teams raced for Nome. I lingered at the bar, sipping the beer Daily had bought me, sinking ever deeper into depression as I listened to the live radio coverage. The voice of Nome’s checker, Leo Rasmussen, pierced my funk.
“If Brian O’Donoghue would ever leave Safety,” I heard Leo say on the radio, “maybe we could get this over with.”
I briefly wondered if there was any way to sneak into Nome, hide the dogs, and keep Rasmussen waiting forever. That would show him.
The one thing I had in my power to do was scratch. Let Mormile keep the damn Red Lantern. That was tempting. For the first time in the entire race, I seriously considered scratching.
Pondering the ramifications, I ordered another beer.
Two and a half hours later, I’d run out of reasons not to go. The wind kicked up as I prepared to leave. Drifts had erased every trace of the trail.
“Perfect,” I said, dragging Chad to the closest marker, the first in a line of flapping streamers, which stretched toward a cluster of subdivision homes.
Golden Dog was in a contrary mood. He ignored my commands and repeatedly dragged Harley and the team away from the markers. I wanted to win this last battle of wills, but Chad was equally determined to follow snowmachine tracks leading to nearby homes. Forty-five minutes after leaving Safety, the bar remained in view behind us. The checker came outside and stared. This wasn’t going to work. Demoting Chad, I placed Rainy up with Harley. The lesbian quickly sniffed out the trail, and Safety finally faded behind us.
Wind, fog, mist, and blinding snow — we encountered the whole gamut on the Iditarod’s final 20 miles. The dogs paid no mind. They were too hardened to flinch.
Passing through a cluster of homes near the beach, I saw a couple sitting on chairs next to a marker. It was an older man and woman. They flagged me down.
“We were waiting for you,” the woman said, petting Rainy and Harley. “Could we offer you a cup of coffee or a bite to eat?”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I guess there’s some folks waiting for me.”
I was flattered that strangers would take the time to welcome me. The wind was dying down, and the day appeared brighter.
Rounding a bend, I confronted several dog teams, headed right at us. I realized we must have crossed the trail of another race as three teams passed, head-on, going full bore. I was startled by a face I knew, Iditarod musher Peryll Kyzer. She’d not only finished an impressive eighteenth; she was already running another race.
“Hi, Peryll,” I shouted as she flew past on my left.
“Brian!” she said. “Welcome to Nome.”
A few miles ahead the trail neared a plowed road leading to Nome. I knew the area well. It was the place where I had once had a pair of cameras freeze up while I was shooting Nayokpuk leading another musher through a storm, which subsequently halted the race for days. I had also been waiting here as Butcher charged into view, en route to her third straight victory. And it was at this same spot, 40 hours later, that I had witnessed Redington cap his bold run as Smokin’ Joe.
With the race lost to Susan and the other young hounds, Redington had waited at Safety for Nayokpuk. The two veterans traded stories over coffee, then Old Joe issued a challenge.
“Now we’re going to race,” he said.
The lead switched several times during the furious 22-mile sprint that followed. Redington emerged victorious, crossing the finish line 1 minute, 16 seconds, ahead of Nayokpuk.
“This is fantastic,” Butcher said, greeting the pair under the arch. “This is the best race within the race.”
Iditarod’s 70-year-old founder had failed to take the big prize, but Smokin’ Joe’s style couldn’t be beat. He earned $9,000 for the fifth-place finish, which equaled his all-time best.
In the morning, Nayokpuk awoke with a tingling in his left arm.
“I just hate to think our race had anything to do with it,” said Redington, pacing the floor of the Nome checkpoint as his friend was being flown to a hospital in Anchorage. “But Herbie, he was pushing pretty hard.”
Nayokpuk was hospitalized with a mild stroke. He recovered, but his Iditarod days were over. Thus ended the racing career of the Shishmaref Cannonball.
As for Redington, he never topped that 1988 run.
“In my mind,” Swenson said, years later. “There’s no question Joe would have won that race if he had a trail out of Cripple. It’s a damn shame.”
As I pulled within sight of the road, I heard honking and whistling. People were cheering. The reception awaiting us grew wilder by the mile. A procession of snowmachines fell in on either side of us. Cars and trucks paced the team on the nearby road. People were clapping and waving from every drift.
A man leapt out of the back of a pickup truck. Clambering down a snow berm, he tossed me a can of beer. “This Bud’s for you,” he shouted. “We knew you were going to make it.”
“Never any doubt,” I said.
The dogs responded to the attention like pros. With nary a flinch or misstep, Rainy and Harley kept the team rolling across the frozen beach and through the crowds perched on the hard drifts at the edge of town. I was proud watching the team climbing the last berm onto Front Street. Once on the road, Rainy and Harley eagerly chased a police car, which lead us to the arch, lights flashing all the way.
A crowd of a hundred people, maybe more, was waiting at the finish line. The bodies parted before Rainy and Harley, who led the team right up the middle. Leo Rasmussen stood at the end of the tunnel, a microphone in one hand and a clipboard in the other. The lesbian passed by him and ran straight under the twin burls. Jamming the hook down, I ran up and slapped the overhead arch.
The time was 2:55. My name boomed through the loudspeakers. Rasmussen was saying something about my setting a new record: first musher to ever start first and finish last. Flashes popped. Familiar faces shouted things I couldn’t quite make out. Rasmussen inspected the sled, checking off one sleeping bag, hand axe, and a pair of snowshoes. He collected the packet containing our commemorative mail delivery, via dog team, from Anchorage. Then Leo presented the clipboard. I scrawled my name in the line reserved for the sixtieth musher to Nome. Next to the signature was my team’s total elapsed time on the trail: 22 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes, 55 seconds.
Leo was holding an old kerosene lamp, which had been burning since the race started March 2. “Go ahead,” he said, “blow it out.”
Nome’s checker then handed me a shiny red lantern topped with a brass dog. Cheers resounded on Front Street as I hoisted it above my head.
It was official: the Iditarod was over.