Only three weeks were left. Self-doubts and potential threats to the team’s well-being dominated my every waking moment. Even the home trails felt sinister. Blizzards had buried my landmarks, and I was driving the dogs longer and longer distances, getting lost for hours at a time.
It was warm out, 3 degrees above zero. I set out for Mike Madden’s house with an eleven-dog team, intending to make a quick turnaround. The entire 50-mile trip should have taken about 7 hours, including snack breaks, simulating the travel time between average Iditarod checkpoints.
I was using Chad in single lead. That was the Coach’s new strategy for handling our temperamental wonder dog. Chad, a quick blond male, trotted with one hip swung sideways. It was an odd gait and often caused him to bump his coleader. Mowry hoped that Chad might be one of those rare dogs who preferred to lead alone. All through the fall Chad was our unquestioned top dog. He was strong, smart, and fast. Having Chad up front amounted to having power steering. Whisper “Gee,” or “Haw,” and turns were immediate.
One winter day Chad quit on me leaving the lot. He did a complete nose plant, causing half the team to tumble over him. I assumed that he was injured, but we never found anything physically wrong. It was Golden Dog’s spirit that needed nursing thereafter. And the Coach’s new approach appeared to be working.
About 15 miles out, I wasn’t paying close attention when Chad lunged onto a side trail. I stopped and turned the team around. Next, emerging from a winding slough, I wasn’t sure which direction to take on the Chena River. Which way to Madman’s house? Upstream? Downstream? Everything looked so different covered by the recent dumps of snow.
Chad glanced back, impatient. “Haw,” I said.
I mushed 10 miles along the river, searching for the familiar trail crossing until it was unmistakably clear that I’d guessed wrong. Sighing, I again turned the team around. The snow was soft and deep. The dogs sank and thrashed about in the powder. I waded to the front of the team, then sank to my armpits pulling Chad back toward the trail. A fight broke out between Bo and the normally unflappable Skidders. Back on the hard-packed trail, I separated the two scrappers. Bo was in a surly mood. So I paired Raven with Chad in lead and ran the big troublemaker alone. After stopping for a snack, we backtracked along the river, chasing the setting sun. By nightfall I was lost again, but tried to hide it from the dogs.
At a loss, I directed Chad and Raven up a side trail. We soon neared a dog lot illuminated by blinding outdoor lights. Normally, I would have retreated; people tend to defend their privacy aggressively in Alaska. But I was ready to beg for directions. Our arrival set the dogs chained outside the cabin barking furiously. The cabin door swung open and, to my utter amazement, out stepped Mike Madden.
“Madman, this is your house?”
“Whose backyard did you think you were in, O’D?”
We’d been on the trail five hours. I should have camped and given the dogs a real meal, followed by several hours of rest, before returning home. But I was on a schedule. So I snacked the dogs and then started them back.
The river was braided with snowmachine trails. Raven and Chad weren’t meshing. When they weren’t bumping each other, the leaders were wrestling through their neckline, trying to pull each other along different threads of the interwoven trail.
Even so, we were making decent time when I blundered yet again by ordering the team down a side trail. Within a mile I realized the mistake and halted the team for another turnaround. That was strike three for Chad. His confidence in me was shot. Golden Dog buried his head in the snow and wouldn’t budge. I dragged him forward several times, roughly standing him on his feet. He cooperated that far. But when I shouted, “All right,” the cue to move out — Chad sat down.
I tried Raven in single lead. No way. Her tail drooped, and the little princess tried to hide underneath the swing dogs, creating an immediate tangle. I tried using Gnat and Cricket together. The litter mates cowered. No one wanted the wheel on this doomed ship — not with me in charge.
In training sled dogs, you want to steer them into doing the right thing, while minimizing confusion and discouragement. Building stamina isn’t nearly as crucial as instilling confidence through repetition and positive reinforcement, teaching dogs that they can do whatever you, the musher, ask. By building on each success, gradually asking the team to go farther and faster, the dogs develop faith in their all-knowing driver. That was the theory. From the first August night we took our dogs out on a cart — and Chad dug up a yellow jackets’ nest in the staging area — training seldom went smoothly.
My reversals had undermined the confidence of every dog out here, and it was the wrong night for a leadership crisis. Rainy, Rat, Casey, and Harley, any one of whom might have bailed me out, were sitting at home. Hitched to this gang line I had Chad, Raven, Cricket, and Gnat: our resident head case and three happy trotters — good for leading so long as it was fun, which it wasn’t tonight.
I placed Chad back in lead, thinking he might cooperate after a reasonable break. He was, after all, still Deadline Dog Farm’s main dog.
So we sat.
Twenty minutes later, a headlamp appeared.
“How’s training going,” said Scott, a local musher preparing for the Quest.
“Fine until tonight,” I said, a dark edge to my voice.
Chad loves to chase. He perked up and followed Scott to the Winter Trail, a heavily traveled mushing and snowmachine highway, up to five feet wide in places, cutting through the forest northeast of Fairbanks. With the familiar alley in view, I bid the other musher good-bye. Crying “Haw,” I sent Chad into a hard left turn. We were home free.
A few miles later, Chad dove down another side spur for no apparent reason. I didn’t dare stop him. Nothing is more frustrating than having a dog team quit on you. We were rolling. I didn’t care where. The trail lead to a subdivision road. The sled whipped sideways, careening off berms, as the dogs loped down the icy, hard-packed road. I was hoping we’d come across another trail, but the subdivision road spilled onto Chena Hot Springs, the busiest road in the entire area. We were within a few miles of home, and I considered making a dash for it. But it was icy and dark. The sight of an oncoming dog team might send a car or truck spinning into us. I could lose the entire team in an instant.
Stomping the hook into the snow, I walked up front, gripped Chad by the collar, and turned the team around one more time. Chad shrank at my touch and wouldn’t even look at me. The other dogs weren’t much happier. On a whim, I tried Skidders in lead. The old stud immediately took advantage of his freedom to circle back and sniff the girls. Nice try. And for our next act.
I bedded the team in a sheltered spot near the main road. Cyrus, an 18-month-old pup we’d just acquired from Rattles, was bewildered. He remained on his feet, eager to continue. Five minutes later, he was still whining anxiously. I knelt down in the snow and stroked his tight belly, settling him down at last.
Turning off my headlamp, I was struck by the brilliant stars painting the sky. It was one of those nights when you see dazzling, ghostly depths, hinting at mysteries no mere human will ever grasp. Mushing forces you to spend time outside. That was one of the sport’s unexpectedly rewarding aspects. Whether it’s watching a woodpecker digging away on a trunk, or catching the sunset through trees ablaze with clumps of ice, some sort of rare experience is always waiting in Alaska’s outdoors.
I was sitting there on the snow berm, marveling at the stars, when I heard Mowry’s truck chugging up the hill. The sportswriter was on his way home after a late shift. I flagged him down.
The Coach was disgusted by my incompetence. “You’re just like Chad,” Mowry said, as we loaded the dogs into the truck.
Revolting bloody soup filled our bathtub.
“Christ,” I said, recoiling from the fermenting atrocity. “What the hell is it?”
“I’m making honey balls. It’s one of Joe’s inventions.”
Picture 100 pounds of raw chopped beef, 20 pounds of honey, 2 gallons of corn oil, 2 pounds of bonemeal, and other assorted Redington spices — slopped a foot deep.
“I don’t know, Bri,” said Mowry, stirring the mess with a broken hockey stick. “It seems sort of gooey.”
We’d already spent two days cutting meat and stuffing sacks with provisions for Mowry’s first Iditarod. He grabbed a handful and tried handpacking it into a baseball-sized glob. Meat goo oozed through Tim’s fingers. We scooped a couple bucketfuls and took them out on the porch. There, we dabbed globs of the bloody muck on the surface of flattened garbage bags, hoping it might freeze into something usable. By morning, the honey balls had changed. The Mowth and I now had a porch full of half-frozen cow pies, run together like cookies baked too close on the sheet.
“I have a lot of bucks tied up in this shit, and I don’t think it’s supposed to look like this,” said Mowry, his eyes bloodshot and his dirty blond hair sticking from his head like loose straw.
“Yeah,” I agreed, “and our tub is still full of it.”
There is, apparently, more than one kind of honey. Redington’s recipe called for thick granular honey, not the syrupy brew my roommate had used. The Mowth’s dogs did without honey balls that year. And he cleaned the tub. There’s a limit to friendship.
Recalling the chaos of Mowry’s first big race, I allotted four full days to assemble my own Iditarod food drop. It wasn’t enough.
The first setback occurred when I had to unpack twenty-six checkpoints’ worth of fish. I’d forgotten to paint my name on the sacks. It was probably just paranoia, but I had been scared the fish might become contaminated in the labeling process. So, dumping the fish, I spread out the sacks in our driveway, thinking I could knock out the job using spray paint and a stencil. It was 40 below, and the paint nozzle froze, forcing me to shift operations inside our cramped A-frame. Space constraints there limited me to painting two bags at a time. And there was no damn room for anything to dry. The quick task ate up three hours.
Two friends from the paper, Mary Beth and Anna, were in charge of my personal food. They came up with a delicious assortment of precooked meals, breads, brownies, and cookies, but it took precious hours to assemble the packets. Anna’s efforts, cooking dozens of steaks and pork chops, fell behind when her propane stove quit.
For heating water out on the trail, I planned to use a fancy cooker borrowed from another local musher. But when I tested it against the Coach’s battered old unit, Mowry’s cooker boiled water in about 25 minutes, or roughly 30 percent quicker, despite the fact that it used toilet paper for a wick. Of course, I wanted that faster heating unit, and that meant another run to town for 50 more rolls of toilet paper.
The Coach concentrated on the real athletes, leaving me to deal with the food drop — and with Rattles, a strutting peacock of a dog man with a handlebar mustache, who’d become a constant presence as the race drew near.
Mike “Rattles” Kramer had earned his nickname working a jackhammer in a hard rock mine. That was before he took up dogs and became a boisterous fixture in the Two Rivers mushing scene. Now he bounced between washing dishes and seasonal farm or construction work. He, his new wife, and their infant son were among the 20 percent of Fairbanks-area residents who lacked running water at home. He didn’t seem to mind hauling around water jugs; it provided a good excuse for visiting the neighbors and, perhaps, peddling a few eggs gathered from his chickens.
I enjoyed Mowth’s company as long as he didn’t get started talking about the Feds, the gold standard, or the threats to personal liberty posed by Social Security numbers. Rattles knew a lot of tricks about tuning snowmachines or rigging sled lines. In his excitement about the race, however, the old musher was getting on my nerves, following me around, but lifting nary a finger to help as he relived his own doggy deeds.
“Rattles,” I cried at last, “if you’re not going to help, get the hell out of here.”
The old musher chuckled, amused by my jitters.
I hit the panic button with 36 hours remaining until supplies were due at Iditarod’s Fairbanks collection drop center. I called Anna, my photographer friend Nora, Sam the editor, Wilda and her husband, Charlie, everyone I knew — begging for help. Sunday, the yard was full of helpers bagging toilet paper, fish, spare underwear, batteries, headlamp bulbs, and runner plastic.
Wilda dragged along her dad, who was visiting from Kentucky. He pitched right in, chopping meat with an axe. Our whole operation fascinated him: the dogs watching from the woods; the sleds leaning on the shed; even the cabin interior, strewn with harnesses, lines, and cold-weather gear. The day spent helping an Iditarod musher became the highlight of his Alaska trip.
By nightfall, the work party had filled 60 sacks, each color-coded for one of the 21 checkpoints where we mushers could expect to find our provisions waiting. The next day friends and I delivered the sacks to a local freight company that was assisting with the race. My contributions were weighed, sorted, and added to the pallets bound for various checkpoints. Freight handlers waited until the pallet loads reached about 6 feet tall, then stepped forward to seal them with giant rolls of plastic wrap. Fairbanks handled only a third of this year’s Iditarod field, yet the sheer tonnage was immense. My team’s load alone weighed 2,094 pounds and cost me $523 to ship.
Rounding a turn, I saw a moose on the river ahead. It was a tall bull, plunging through deep snow. The dogs quickened their trot as they caught sight of him. I lifted my foot off the brake, letting the dogs break into a free lope. It was unlikely the moose would change direction and bother us, but you never knew. Moose are unpredictable as hell.
I didn’t want any surprises to mar this gorgeous day. It was 15 below, just cold enough to envelop the team in a flowing fog of exertion. The sun hung low over the river, creating orange streamers between the blue trees. Seven dogs were pulling my sled. The sunlight set their breath ablaze, wrapping the team in a warm glow.
As we neared the river, the trail rose and fell along a series of man-sized dips. Topping one of the rises, I saw a dark mound ahead. The trail dropped again before I could make it out. Something odd was coming up. I braced as the sled climbed another slight hill. Hair, I could see hair. A moose. Oh God.
Then I realized it was dead.
The dogs slowed to sniff the carcass. “All right! All right!” I cried, forestalling any thoughts of stopping. Where there’s one, there are often others.
“A person’s crazy to go out without a gun,” Rattles had said. “With all this snow, those moose are desperate. They won’t give up the trail.”
I didn’t even own a gun, so I was a real Alaskan oddity. I’d arranged to borrow Cyndi’s.357-caliber pistol for the race. The gun was waiting for me 360 miles south. Here in town, Madman had offered me his old rifle — if I ever got around to picking it up. I’d been trusting luck to dodge the sort of encounter that postponed Susan Butcher’s first appearance in the Iditarod winner’s circle.
1985 was supposed to be Susan’s year. No woman had ever won Redington’s Great Race, but Butcher had placed second in two of the three previous years, and her 17-dog team led the race crossing the Big Su. Traveling through a spruce thicket soon afterward, Butcher and her dogs came upon a large cow moose blocking their path. The musher threw her sled over and braced for the moose’s charge, which, experience told her, would carry the brute through the team. But this angry cow was far more destructive. Wading into the middle of the team, the moose reared on its hind legs and began stomping and kicking.
The carnage lasted for about 20 minutes until fellow racer Dewey Halverson mushed to the rescue. He emptied his.44-caliber special into the enraged moose, which continued kicking dogs until the last bullet brought it down. Susan’s dog Johnny was dead. Another dog named Hyde died after five hours on the operating table. Two more needed surgery, and thirteen others were injured. The distraught Butcher scratched, clearing the way for Libby Riddles’ march to glory.
This year Alaska’s interior was reeling from an invasion of the long-legged brutes. Starving, irritable from battling the unusually deep snow, moose were in no mood to mingle peacefully. Finding it easier going on packed trails, roads, and railroad tracks, many refused to surrender their right of way to anything, including trains. The carnage was particularly gruesome along the northern railroad corridor. It got so bad that the Alaska Railroad provided counseling for engineers freaked by the nightly gore. At least locomotive drivers knew they would come out on top. Moose held the advantage over unarmed mushers.
Dave Dalton, a fellow Fairbanks musher, could testify to that. A few miles after leaving his kennel, his Dalton Gang team had met an angry moose head-on. The moose’s charge didn’t do any damage, but it was likely to get a second shot. The team had no other route home. Dalton had his pistol ready on the return trip. Sure enough, the moose was waiting. It flared its nose and barreled into the team. Taking aim, Dalton squeezed the trigger.
The gun jammed.
The moose crashed into the sled, sending the musher flying. The Gang made a clean getaway. Dave’s situation remained ticklish. He was chest-deep in snow, looking upward at a huge bull that was snorting with anger.
Very, very carefully Dalton backed away from the trail, watching the moose the whole way. When he was safely out of view, he slowly circled around the trail’s new owner and walked home. He found the Dalton Gang waiting for him there.
I’d had my own creepy moments — nights when the dogs’ ears had suddenly perked up and the headlamp had revealed fresh tracks ahead. So far, today’s carcass was the only moose we’d actually touched. Close enough. I was a fool for putting off getting the gun from Madman.
Leaving the river behind, I relaxed. That dead moose was miles behind us. The trail broke into the open, crossing several fields, then turned down a narrow tree-lined tunnel. Midway down that shaded passage, like apparitions, two menacing brown shapes rose from the snow ahead. It was a large cow and her calf. They blocked our path, only 15 yards ahead. The dogs were wild to chase them. I dug in with the brake, but the soft, deep snow offered almost nothing to grip. It was a struggle holding them back. No way could I secure the sled and turn the team around.
The cow moose was eager to avoid us. She lurched into the woods, but the calf wouldn’t follow. It continued stumbling down the center of the trail, breaking through the crust with its spindly legs. The cow took a parallel course, plowing a new path through the deep snow blanketing the woods.
The dogs clawed steadily forward. It was all I could do to maintain a gap. The trail finally emerged onto a plowed road. The moose scrambled to get away. I let off the brake, and we chased them until they ran back into the woods. Another crisis, passed.
Mowry and I dropped by Madman’s the next day. We left toting a.306-caliber rifle.
Training an Iditarod team made a mess of my working life. At top speed my dogs covered, maybe, 10–12 miles an hour. Add in the time required to get the team ready, then put them away, and it took as long as four hours to complete a 20-mile training run. Try to take a team 50 miles, and a whole day would be shot.
My bosses at the paper were supportive. Sam, the city editor, had grown up with a dog team. He knew what I was talking about when I’d show up an hour late, explaining that Rainy had got loose again and danced, just out of reach, for 45 minutes. But even Sam failed to grasp my overall predicament. Owning a recreational dog team didn’t compare with preparing for the Iditarod.
Take the meat shipment from Montana. For nearly a week, Mowry and I were on call, waiting for word from Rick Armstrong, the organizer of Two Rivers’ bulk delivery. The day Tim fled east for the holidays, I found a message waiting on my return from the airport. Naturally, the damn delivery truck was finally here. And I was already late to work.
Rushing over to the pickup site, I found Joe Garnie and half a dozen other mushers waiting by the semi in their empty pickups. Garnie was from Teller, an Inupiat village northeast of Nome. He’d recently moved to the Interior.
Like the knuckle hop, ear pull, and other traditional contests held at the annual World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, sled-dog racing has long been a source of friendly rivalry among Alaska’s regional and ethnic communities. Athabaskan mushers from the Interior river villages held the edge during the early 1970s, dominating the established sprint circuit and Redington’s new race to Nome. Advances in nutrition and conditioning strategies helped mushers such as Rick Swenson and Susan Butcher eventually outdistance the Athabaskan drivers, but the kennel bloodlines of most champions were still rooted in the Indian villages.
Like other racers from the Seward Peninsula, Garnie’s dogs excelled in the coastal wind, as his former partner Libby Riddles proved with a famous charge into a storm. Joe had come within an hour of winning the Iditarod himself, something no Eskimo musher had ever done. This year he hoped the change of scenery and the cheap dog food available in the Interior would enable him to correct that previous affront.
Armstrong was finishing his paperwork with Doug Swingley, our Montana meat supplier. Thirty minutes stretched to an hour. I could imagine the questions starting to circulate in the newsroom. “So, any bets on what time Brian will make it in?” But there was nothing to be done. I had $1,866 of meat in that truck: 3,000 pounds of ground beef, 900 pounds of liver, and 600 pounds of lamb.
Deadline Dog Farm’s meat was in the very front of the truck, so I had to help clear out everybody else’s load before I could begin collecting mine. Stacks and stacks of frozen 50-pound blocks were passed out, forming new piles in the waiting pickups. Minutes ticked away, and I fought the urge to scream.
I finally rolled into work four hours late and physically destroyed. I was exhausted and close to the breaking point, but luckily nobody said a word, and it was a quiet shift. All I had to do was swing by the cop shops, write up the crime blotter, and slap together a graph on historic weather records. Another day in training.
By January the time demands of my race preparations were out of control. Dan Joling, the managing editor, agreed to let me cut back to contributing a single weekly column for the duration. The column, “Off to the Races,” described what it was like to be a rookie preparing for Alaska’s Great Race. The Associated Press distributed a condensed version statewide. Of course, my pay dropped accordingly, but time was the currency that mattered at this point.
One day in mid-February, less than three weeks before the race, I found a message waiting at the News-Miner. Virginia, the newspaper’s business manager, wanted to see me. There had been a mistake, she said. As a part-time employee, I no longer qualified for free health insurance. To maintain my medical coverage, I’d have to come up with several hundred dollars in premiums.
“Cancel it,” I said.
I wasn’t the only one putting dogs ahead of the job.
A year before, Jon Terhune, an abrasive oil company machinist from Soldotna, had approached his plant manager at Unocal Chemicals. Advising the manager of his wish to enter the next Iditarod, Terhune asked what could be done. A month of unpaid leave was subsequently approved, so long as the machinist took the time off in conjunction with his vacation. In July, on the first day entries were accepted, Terhune signed up, becoming the twenty-fourth musher on the list.
The former army paratrooper was a dour man, with little patience for fools. One day in 1969, Jon, his first wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Heidi, had thrown everything they owned in the family’s station wagon and left the East Coast for good. Traveling westbound out of Albany, they saw cars on the other side of the highway backed up three lanes deep. The Terhunes learned from the radio that the traffic was caused by people heading to a big music festival. Nancy wanted to turn around and join the procession to Woodstock.
Her husband refused to even consider it. “That’s the reason we’re leaving,” he said, pointing to the traffic. “It’s getting to be a rat race.”
After settling in Alaska, Terhune began raising malamutes as a hobby. He got into mushing in the mid-1980s, running castoffs from Harry Sutherland. After Nancy died, Terhune found an outlet in the sport. Dogs offered companionship with none of the hassles people inevitably brought into his life. Breeding a few dogs, buying a few more dogs, Terhune gradually built a racing kennel. In 1990 he ran the Kusko 300, a grueling race through Eskimo villages in the Kobuk Valley. It was hellish. All the other rookies dropped out. Terhune spent ten hours searching for the trail in a whiteout and slipped far behind the veteran racers. But he never considered giving up. Not Terhune.
On the home stretch Jon was so tired he fell asleep on his sled, and his team trotted right past the finish line in Bethel. Startled spectators and race officials scrambled after the snoozing racer, whose team continued on its own to the far side of town.
A year later, Terhune entered the Kusko a second time. He viewed it as a final Iditarod tune-up. Instead, the race almost ended his Iditarod hopes. For starters, it was too warm. The race had to be rerouted around open water, and the opening miles crossed tundra stripped of snow by the sun and the rain. Conditions worsened as the trail dropped down on a river. There, wet, slick ice threw Terhune’s dogs into a panic. Even worse, Daisy, a recently purchased young leader, was in front. Dandy, the musher’s favorite, most dependable lead dog, was running inside the team. It was a protective move: Terhune wanted to spare her from the pressure. But the strategy backfired tragically when Dandy fell on the slick ice. She dragged in a tangle of lines while Terhune battled to slow his runaway team. But he couldn’t plant his hook in the hard river ice. Afterward, he spent 20 minutes trying to revive poor Dandy. To no avail. His lead dog was dead.
Terhune scratched from the Kusko. His girlfriend, Dawn, hoped he had learned his lesson. She hoped he was ready to give up his Iditarod obsession. Dawn figured wrong. Though traumatized by Dandy’s loss, Terhune wasn’t accepting defeat. He chose to protect his team for the bigger challenge ahead. Three other dogs were hurt. If he didn’t quit, he wouldn’t have enough left to run the Iditarod. He’d invested far too much, endured too many nights on the trail preparing for the coming trip. And he owed it to Dandy to try. Drop out? Each setback further steeled Jon Terhune’s resolve.
In February, as he prepared to take his vacation, the machinist reminded his supervisor of the promised leave. The message was relayed upstairs, where the plant manager had changed his mind. Terhune’s leave was officially denied. He appealed through Unocal’s grievance committee, but the decision was upheld. Terhune was a ten-year employee. He sent the company a letter reminding them of the prior arrangement and reaffirming his intent to run the race.
Unocal officials responded by offering to extend the machinist’s vacation by a couple of days, but the request for unpaid leave was again denied. The machinist was ordered to report back to work the day before the Iditarod started. Terhune had a hunch they were calling his bluff, convinced that no one would walk away from a $50,000 job.
“You want to know where I am?” he told his boss at Unocal. “Look in the fucking newspaper.”
On my visits home, I always put on a slide show for friends and family in Washington, D.C. After I moved to Alaska, those shows inevitably featured recent sled-dog races, conveying my growing appreciation for the sport. Over Christmas one year, my brother Coleman relayed a message from his father-in-law.
“If you want to run the Iditarod,” he said, “Mr. Brown told me to tell you not to let money stop you.”
Occasionally I’d daydreamed about entering the sled-dog races I covered for the newspaper, but I’d never given it serious thought. Certainly not the Iditarod. Did Brown realize that it would take the better part of a year to get ready? That it would cost at least $10,000? That I might not make it to Nome?
Coleman smiled, daring me to do it. “I think you ought to talk to him.”
For the hell of it, I worked up a budget and arranged to meet Brown at the Kennedy Center cafeteria for lunch.
A retired foreign service officer, Bazil Brown, 59, was a man of broad experience, sensitive to the fleeting adventure our lives represent, and haunted by a son’s death and his own bouts with emphysema. Reminders of mortality had led Brown to reflect on the experiences that had brought him the most satisfaction.
Aside from his family life, he told me over lunch, one of his most gratifying experiences resulted from a spontaneous decision he had made at a party, many years before. That night the young diplomat recklessly agreed to invest in a new play. It was called Sleuth, and it turned into a huge hit. The play was followed by a movie with the same name. By getting in on the ground floor, Brown reaped continuing financial rewards. His involvement also gave him a backstage introduction to the theater community, a world he would have otherwise missed.
Brown saw my possible entry in the Iditarod in a similar light. He told me he was prepared to put up $10,000 to make it happen.
I couldn’t accept the offer. Not yet. There was a lot to consider. I would be putting together a racing kennel from scratch, something that might easily cost closer to $15,000, possibly even $20,000. My life as a reporter was already hectic, involving weeks, sometimes months on the road. I had to decide if I was ready to commit to the months of training that would be necessary if I were to have even a chance of driving a dog team over mountains, rivers, sea ice, and God-knows-what-else I’d find on the trail to Nome.
I told Brown that I would let him know by July 1, the day Iditarod began accepting entries. If I decided to go forward, the $1,249 entry fee would come out of my own pocket, representing my personal commitment to raise any additional capital needed. Brown and I shook on it.
Riding back down the Kennedy Center escalator, I scanned the faces of people ascending toward the cafeteria. For all they knew about the Iditarod, I was headed for Mars.
I wouldn’t say that I’m superstitious. But I firmly believe in lucky streaks. Likewise, I believe that there are times when the odds are against you. Entering the final days of training, the omens took a disturbing turn, starting with my car.
My sporty VW Scirocco had never been much of a cold-weather car. I wasn’t surprised the morning the engine failed to turn over. It was 3 5 below, and I had already noticed that the wire to the oil-pan heat pad was beginning to fray. I had meant to fix it.
Living in interior Alaska, you take vehicular setbacks in stride. They are just one more front in nature’s eternal siege. I dug a trench under the engine and placed a small Hibachi charcoal stove in the snow, maybe a foot in front of the bumper. While I was waiting for the flames to give way to steady coals — so I could slide the hibachi under the engine — I draped a green military blanket over the Scirocco’s hood to help retain the heat. And I hooked a charger to the battery.
Warming an engine this way generally takes an hour. I was chopping meat, no more than a few yards away, when a breeze hastened the heating process. The flames lit the blanket. Then the fire spread from the Volkswagen’s plastic grill to the insides of my oily engine. I didn’t even hear a crackle until flames were licking around the edges of the wheel wells and grill.
“Tim, Tim, get up,” I yelled, dashing inside for our fire extinguisher. “My car’s on fire!”
Mowry slowly rolled over and sleepily glanced out his window. A thick column of black smoke was rising from my car.
“You aren’t kidding,” he said.
I popped the burning hood and pried it open with a shovel. With the inrush of air, a ball of flame leapt up six feet from the engine compartment. I pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and squeezed the trigger. It spewed froth for a second, then fizzled.
Mowry came running out of the house in his long under wear and bunny boots. We were staring at the fire, paralyzed by the spectacle, when an unfamiliar truck rushed up the driveway. Two men jumped out, each clutching small fire extinguishers. “Saw the smoke.”
The men took aim at the flames, as I had minutes before, and with the same feeble result: foam dribbled out the end of their nozzles, then gurgled to a stop. Retardant gas doesn’t work in extreme cold.
Mowry grabbed the shovel and began heaving snow on the engine. A cloud of steam replaced the smoke. So much for technology. The fire was out, leaving a charred carcass in our driveway.
We took 20 dogs out, splitting them between us. The destination was Angel Creek Lodge, a 75-mile round-trip. Call it the final exam.
The temperature was about 25 below as the Mowth and I set out. Trotting past Rattles’s place, the mountains ahead glowed with the setting sun’s red flare. We met Kathy Swenson, who was returning from Angel Creek. Swenson’s team turned around on her, ready to follow us. She straightened them out with an angry shout.
“Swenson definitely has leader problems,” Mowry said.
The Mowth’s comment wasn’t aimed at Kathy Swenson; he was referring to the rumors about her husband, the master himself, four-time Iditarod champion Rick Swenson. According to Rattles, who seldom did anything but gossip — unless he was ranting about the Feds — Swennie was having a rough year. He and Kathy weren’t getting along. His training was being hampered by the snow clogging Two River’s trail system, and Rick was said to be feeling pressure from IAMS Company, his main dog food sponsor. If that wasn’t enough, Swenson’s lead dogs were supposedly lousy, a rumor that I could tell Mowry now took as confirmed.
The Mowth and I had first met Rick Swenson in 1987 in Nome when a TV crew was interviewing him near the Burl Arch marking the Iditarod’s finish line. Swenson had recently crossed in second place. It was obvious that we also wanted to talk to him, and when the camera stopped rolling, Swenson turned to us and said, “What the hell are you waiting for? I haven’t got all day.”
At the post-race banquet that year, people shifted uncomfortably as Swenson went on with his odd rambling remarks. “I’ve got a long way to get back to the top,” he concluded. This from a musher whose second-place finish was worth $30,000. The check was no consolation for Iditarod’s former top dog, then swallowing his second straight loss to Susan Butcher.
The Iditarod’s new queen was more gracious. “In the end,” Susan said, “friendship wins out over competition.”
Calling Swenson for interviews, I could count on a rash of abuse. “Why didn’t you call me in September? I’m in training now.” Posteruption, he could be charming. One time when my car broke down during an assignment, Swenson dropped what he was doing to give me a lift.
“You know, Butcher would never do this,” he said, becoming friendlier.
Butcher’s ascendancy certainly preoccupied him. Back when she was first getting started, Rick Swenson owned the sport, coming within a second of winning five Iditarod victories before anyone else had even won the race twice. For a while, he held the speed records in most of Alaska’s big mid-distance races. But Swenson hadn’t won anything since 1982. Andy, Swenson’s famous leader in all four victories, was sleeping away his retirement years on a couch in Swenson’s workshop.
Swenson wasn’t the only musher with a Susan Butcher complex. Joe Runyan’s victory in 1989 had cracked Butcher’s aura of invulnerability, but she hadn’t exactly crumbled, since she finished a close second. A year later she won again, claiming her fourth Iditarod in five years. Susan remained the musher everyone feared. It was her dogs we chased in our dreams.
The press was billing the upcoming race as a showdown. It made for good copy, but no one I knew gave Swenson any real chance. Not without good leaders.
But there was a reason Kathy’s team acted flaky. Nearing the lodge we came across a group of snowmachiners salvaging a dead moose. Kathy had shot and killed the moose, after it had barreled into her team, kicking her dogs.
“It was a small moose, and I didn’t want to kill it,” she told me later. “But I didn’t have any choice.” She had gutted the animal, as the law requires, then arranged for some folks at Angel Creek to come out and butcher it.
The dead moose cast an ominous presence over our final miles. Mowry and I were relieved when we made it to Angel Creek, where the lodge owner stomped outside to greet us. “You damn mushers,” Steve Verbanac said. “You let your dogs piss on that wood pile, and it stinks up the place when we burn it.”
After reparking the teams a safe distance from the firewood, we mixed hot meals for the dogs using hot water from the lodge. Most of the dogs settled down, licking their paws. Cyrus continued to pace, whining and looking bewildered at this unnecessary stop. The pup hadn’t learned what it meant to be tired.
Cyrus and the other dogs with us at Angel Creek represented every possible candidate for my Iditarod team. We were watching to see who pulled the whole way, who goofed off, who had fun, and who was faltering.
“When we feed them tomorrow, you want to watch for any sign of injury and see who looks stiff,” the Coach said, watching the dogs lapping up their dinner.
Inside the bar, Steve’s wife, Annette, was retelling the story of Kathy Swenson’s epic battle with the moose. Annette had always liked Kathy.
“She doesn’t put on airs like Mr. Champion Rick Swenson.”
We stayed at Angel Creek for four hours, eating cheeseburgers and drinking beer. Our gloves, mitts, and face masks dangled from the rafters, drying above the lodge’s big barrel stove. The Mowth and I toasted each other as Steve bitched about damn mushers and their smelly gear.
By the time we repacked the sleds, the lodge thermometer read 15 below. Practically tropical. The wind was also rising, causing loose straps on my sled bag to flap.
This time we loaded bullets in the rifle. Packing the gun, the Coach left first, again running Chad in single lead. I followed with Rainy and Casey up front. As it turned out, we didn’t need the rifle. We had a clean run home.
The skittish brown and grey female wasn’t impressive to look at. She appeared to be too small. What first caught my attention was Rainy’s ability as an escape artist. Dealing with a couple dozen sled dogs, it wasn’t uncommon for one to get loose now and then. The event always triggered a ruckus. Frenzied barks. Dogs rushing out of their houses to join in the joyful prancing. Our escapee nearly always stayed nearby, darting through the kennel, visiting friends, or sniffing the food buckets.
The cause behind a breakout was usually obvious. Most often, a dog had slipped its collar. Chad was particularly good at that. He’d back up and pop the collar over his ears. The empty collar would be lying there, still hitched to the chain. Broken snaps were another common cause for escapes. Or a snap jammed with ice or dirt.
Not so with Rainy. She didn’t shed her collar. There was never anything wrong with her snap. The empty chain would be lying there, discarded in the dirt. Rainy never strayed far. But that didn’t mean she was easy to find. She liked crawling into other houses. The only giveaway was the excited reaction of other dogs nearby.
One afternoon I heard crying from the lot. Truly woeful whimpering. It was Rainy’s neighbor, Daisy, a shy black dog hardly bigger than a pup. She was immobilized between two chains, both of which were clipped to her collar. Our little escape artist was good at her craft.
Rainy’s breeding records hinted at qualities beyond what met the eye. The bloodlines of our little five-year-old female spanned the mushing world. Her lineage included dogs from kennels owned by former Quest winner Bill Cotter, sprint champions Bill Taylor and Gareth Wright, Isaac Okleasik, the Lee family, Earl Norris, and, of course, Old Joe Redington, Sr.
Rainy wasn’t affectionate. She often hid in her box or watched us from behind a tree. A transformation occurred in her when she observed preparations for a run. Seeing me carrying harnesses or moving the sled into position, she’d cry out and rise on her hind legs, pawing the air as she strained against her chain.
Placed in lead, Rainy displayed a new, bossy side. It didn’t matter how big her partner might be, the little female was always in charge. And she was a hard worker, staying out front, bending her little shoulders to the task.
Her shy tendencies didn’t apply to sex. Rainy was attracted to any dog within reach. Large or small. Male or female. Given a chance, she’d hump them all. And she’d knock males out of the way to sniff females in heat. We dubbed her Deadline Dog Farm’s resident lesbian.
Without realizing it, we came to rely on Rainy. We spent more time discussing Chad and Raven’s behavior, Rat’s dishonesty, and arguing about Harley’s potential. The little lesbian’s importance to our kennel was revealed the night I totaled the training miles logged on our kitchen chart. Rainy was the kennel’s mileage leader by a substantial margin. As the race drew near, she had recorded over a thousand miles of conditioning — two thirds of that distance as a lead dog.
The morning after our run to Angel Creek she was limping. She might have caught her wrist in a moose hole. Or she could have stumbled crossing a creek. A single misstep anywhere in that 75-mile route could have caused the injury. There was no way we could know.
Mowry and I solemnly brought the lesbian inside our cabin. We wrapped her sore wrist in a rubberized bandage designed to keep the joint warm and speed the healing process. Rainy lay down on a pile of harnesses under the staircase and slept.
“Rest easy, little Rainy,” I whispered, watching her chest slowly rise and fall. “I need you.”
A heated debate raged between high-level members of my kitchen cabinet.
Madman was starting the race with a 20-dog team, the maximum allowed. He urged me to do the same. “Go for it, O’D!”
The Coach agreed. He had his own agenda to consider. He wanted me to test as many dogs as I could — laying the groundwork for the Mowth’s momentous return to competition next year.
No way was I taking 20 dogs. I didn’t want to start with more than 16, four more than I’d ever driven at one time. And I might take as few as 14, a fine-sized dog team, easier to feed and care for.
Swenson once won mushing a small team. That was before huge dog strings became the standard, a trend fueled by the paranoia of big men repeatedly being beaten by tiny women. Besides, top racers were always telling me that the key to assembling a good team was leaving marginal dogs at home. Hell, at Deadline, we had a whole kennel of question marks.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to take a small team and get them all to Nome.”
“No, no, no, O’D. This isn’t a baby-sitting trip,” they said. “This is a race.”
Worn down by their arguments, I agreed to take 17 dogs, including Daphne, Gnat, and Denali — three dogs in whom I placed absolutely no faith at all.
Root hadn’t fully recovered from the Klondike. I was also leaving out Beast and Casey. Both lacked the stamina for the marathon ahead. Mowry pushed me to take Casey.
“Take her as far as Eagle River. Casey’s good for twenty miles.”
“I’m not taking her. Forget it.” I said, flatly refusing to take so-called disposable dogs. I still wanted to reach Nome without dropping a single dog.
The veterans thought my goal was idiotic. Dropping problem dogs was, to them, a fundamental piece of racing strategy.
Watching us loading for the big trip, Cyrus whined, Spook let loose a guttural wail, even old Skidders grew agitated, pacing from side to side on his chain and snapping his teeth. The chorus became raucous as we leaned the bow of my fully-packed sled on the rear of the truck, then slid it into place on top of the dog box. They knew. They always do.
I rolled into Cyndi’s yard about 3:00 A.M. Jack Studer, a savvy former racer whose advice always hit the mark, had warned me to take extra care staking out the dogs in Wasilla. They would be frisky from confinement and keyed up in the strange surroundings, he said — a combination that spelled trouble.
Though I took special pains separating the males and other known troublemakers, a dog fight exploded minutes after I went inside Cyndi’s house. It was over before I even got my shoes on to go back out. I wasn’t sure who was involved until I spotted the blood-splattered snow near the Rat. She had puncture wounds on one front paw and foreleg. A quarter-sized flap of skin dangled from Daphne’s right front leg. This from two sweet females that had never so much as growled.
I felt sick. Rat was supposed to be leading out of Anchorage. Fortunately, a local nurse was staying at Cyndi’s. She cleaned the dogs’ wounds, soaking their injured legs in Epsom salts and applying an antiseptic.
“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” the nurse said.
I didn’t believe her.
Monday morning I had Dr. James Leach examine the injured pair as he conducted a required prerace veterinary check on the team. The quick actions of the nurse had saved the day, Leach said. The Rat received another shot, and Daphne needed stitches, which set me back an unexpected $144. But the vet assured me that both dogs ought to be ready on Saturday.
Freezing rain was falling as I reloaded the dogs in the truck. I put the truck in four-wheel drive and crept out onto the Parks Highway. The steering wheel had no effect on the glazed pavement. We slowly drifted across the highway. Another car was approaching. The driver apparently hit his brakes, and the car started spinning.
My entire team was on board, and all I could do was watch. The other car finally stopped about ten feet short of my bumper. We both smiled nervously and fled. The highway was soon closed by a collision involving several vehicles.
Get me to the starting line, please!
A jet carrying my family touched down in Anchorage five days before the race. The visit represented their first family trip since 1985 when my mom had hauled the five of us to a wedding in Minnesota. The group included my brother Coleman, his wife Bonnie, my brother Blaine, my sisters Leigh and Karen, my mom Fanchon, and her sister Margo. Only Karen had visited Alaska before.
I couldn’t spare any time to play tour guide. The family checked into an Anchorage hotel and drove to Wasilla in a rental van. It was icy, and my mother and aunt barely made it from the driveway into Cyndi’s house without falling.
“They’re so small!” my sister Leigh said, seeing sled dogs for the first time.
“This one’s more like I would expect,” Blaine said, pointing to Harley. “THIS IS A DOG! You sure these other scrawny ones will make it?”
Inside the living room, I felt like a contestant on a game show, answering a dozen questions at once. Cyndi’s house was equipped with a woodstove and an oil heater for backup. In my rush to get ready, I’d let the stove cool. The room temperature, probably in the high 50s, felt balmy to me, in my long underwear. Along with all their other questions, my mother, brothers, and sisters kept mentioning the weather. I patiently shared what I knew about Alaska statistics.
“Hey Brian,” Coleman said finally, “you realize we’re freezing here.”
My mother seconded that opinion. “If you look around, we’re all still wearing our coats.”
I got a late start Thursday. Moonshadow Kennel driver Tom Daily and I bumped into each other at a gas station in Anchorage. Both of us were lost, pleading with strangers for directions to the Clarion Hotel, the site of the Iditarod’s mandatory prerace meeting.
The streets were slippery. A guy in a small car rammed me. I jumped out, fearing a catastrophe. The dog truck was unscratched, but the car’s grill was smashed. The guy just stood there, staring at the damage.
“Look,” I said, “this was clearly your fault. You agree, don’t you?”
He nodded yes.
“Good, because I don’t have time to mess with cops.”
I roared off, leaving him standing by the ruined car.
Twelve mushers, including Daily and me, missed the first roll call. Jim Kershner, who was again serving as race marshal, fined us $500 apiece. Then I found out that fines wouldn’t be collected until and unless I again entered the race in some future year. A reprieve. I put the fine out of my mind. Nothing mattered beyond the starting line on Saturday.
The Egan Center ballroom was packed. Last-minute withdrawals cut the number of teams to 75. No matter. My early entry had paid off. My name was number 3 5 on the list, meaning that I’d be drawing for position with others in the top half of the field.
The actual drawing was a tedious affair. Kershner held up a boot filled with buttons marked with starting position numbers. One by one, we mushers reached for a number, then stepped up to the podium in front of a huge Iditarod banner and thanked friends and sponsors. Folks at my table checked off the positions as they were announced.
I lined up ahead of Terry Adkins and Nels Anderson. The three of us were drawing for the last starting positions in the first half of the draw. Afterward, Kershner would refill the boot with buttons representing starting positions 38–75 for mushers, like Madman, who had signed up after that first day of registration in July, so many months ago.
As we awaited our turn for position, I bantered with Adkins, a true Iditarod legend.
When the mushers set out for Nome in the inaugural 1973 race, Redington talked the U.S. Air Force into letting Adkins, a Kentucky-born military veterinarian, serve as Iditarod’s first chief veterinarian. A year later, Adkins returned to Nome mushing his own team to a nineteenth-place finish. Adkins missed the 1975 race, but that was the last time an Iditarod started without the wise-cracking Montanan manning a sled.
Adkins hadn’t finished higher than twentieth since 1986. This year promised to be different. He was coming off a stunning victory over Butcher in the 500-mile John Beargrease, and there was reason to believe it hadn’t been a fluke.
Following his retirement from the service a year earlier, Adkins had begun experimenting with a new approach to dog training in San Coulee, Montana. Rejecting conventional theories about the dangers of overtraining, Adkins kept his dogs working through the summer, dragging a heavy car chassis through the mountains near his home. By the start of the race, each dog in Adkins’s team had over 4,000 miles of conditioning, nearly twice the mileage most mushers considered optimum. The result of his intensive high-aerobic training had been evident at the Beargrease. The Montanan’s team hadn’t been the fastest in the race, but no one else had dared march over 200 miles in a single shot.
Kershner didn’t have a number 1 button in his boot. That position was traditionally bestowed upon an honorary musher chosen by the Iditarod Trail Committee. That ceremonial spot was reserved this year for the late Dr. Rolland Lombard, a sprint-mushing great. The musher leading the way out of Anchorage — launching the largest field in the nineteen-year history of Redington’s Last Great Race to Nome — that job belonged to the driver of team number 2.
As we three approached the stage, the number 2 button was still in Kershner’s boot, along with button numbers 13 and 33. No driver in the field was better suited to put that starting advantage to good use than was Terry Adkins, the man standing behind me. Give his marathoners a lead, and they might just hold to Nome. He badly wanted that first spot.
I reached in the boot and fingered the three buttons, finally settling on one of them. I flashed my choice to Kershner, who rolled his eyes. Then I stepped up to the microphone.
“As most of you know, I’m a reporter. Well, I’m going to be able to write about WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO LEAD THE IDITAROD!”
A hush fell over the room, then slowly gave way to hoots and giggles. I held up the number 2 button and waved it around for all to see. Deadline Dog Farm’s team would lead the charge out of Anchorage.
Each musher would take along a handler as far as Eagle River, loaded in the sled bag or trailing behind on a second sled. It was a safety measure. Countless things could go wrong driving a dog team through the crowds and traffic of Alaska’s largest city. Kershner gave mushers the option of taking that extra rider as far as Knik Lake, where the Iditarod Trail left the road system for good. My brother Coleman had agreed to ride along on the first 20 miles, with Eric Troyer from the News-Miner filling in afterward.
Listening to me onstage, it dawned on my brother that thousands of people would be watching us. Coleman was not at all thrilled with that idea. He hadn’t admitted it to anyone, but his shoulders and knees still ached from our test run earlier in the week. His wife, Bonnie, was also frightened. She pictured her husband being dragged to his death in front of cheering crowds of bloodthirsty Alaskans.
A parade of well-wishers came over to our table. Fellow rookie Laird Barron, still waiting for his chance to draw, slapped me on the shoulder. Marcie and Kevin were giddy with excitement, babbling about sled-packing tips and dog-feeding strategies. Lavon Barve, who had drawn the fourth starting position, brought me down to reality.
“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” said Barve, a perennial contender. “But I’m gonna pass you, probably about four miles out. Here’s how I want you to handle your team….”
When I got the chance, I split for the pay phones downstairs. Mowry wasn’t in a position to help me with the start. The sportswriter and Nora were off in Canada covering the Quest, which was already underway. Before he left, Tim had talked to his old trail partner, Peter Kelly, about helping me at the start. I called the Iditarod veteran from the banquet hall to confirm that he would be available.
“Peter,” I said, “you’re not going to believe it. We’re going to have to have our shit together — I’m going out first.”
“Far out,” Kelly said.
Mowry refused to believe the news at first, but then he became excited. Going out first virtually guaranteed our team would beat the mob to Skwentna, the Coach reasoned, providing me with a tremendous advantage.