In the grey light of dawn, I rejoiced.
Out in the center of the lake — a solitary marker pole greeted me. My fine friend, the trail marker, was an inch and a half wide, stood two feet tall in the snow, thin as a reed, but capped with fluorescent orange tape that blazed wonderfully against the lake’s broad sea of white.
Rainy and Harley made a beeline for it, plowing through six inches of new snow. I was heartened, but worried nonetheless. The powder wasn’t deep enough to stop the team, but it was bound to slow us down, which meant that Lee and Garth would increase their lead.
A traffic jam clogged the trail out of Iditarod, 250 miles north. Early Friday morning, March 8, Susan Butcher had mushed out of the darkness into the glare of the TV lights set up by the banks of the Iditarod River. Three thousand dollars in silver ingots was waiting for the first musher to reach the ghost town of Iditarod, but Butcher refused to claim the prize. She told race judge Chisholm that she wanted to wait for Dee Dee.
“We mushed eighty miles together, and I want it to be a tie,” Susan said. Her request was rooted in anger. The run from Ophir had taken 25 hours, twice as long as usual because the front-runners had had to break their own trail. The Iditarod’s defending champ was seething.
Race marshal Kershner had seen this coming. Following the debacle with Adkins, he had intercepted the trail-breaking team on the Yukon River and ordered them back. Kershner wanted them to blast through to Ophir, but the snowmachiners had backtracked only as far as Iditarod before turning around.
According to Butcher, she, Jonrowe, Adkins, Osmar, Buser, Barve, and King had traded off the front position, sharing the burden placed on lead dogs cutting a new path through the drifts. Although Swenson and Runyan had arrived at Iditarod along with the others, their names were noticeably absent from Susan’s honor roll.
“What a bunch of crybabies,” responded Swenson.
Runyan ducked the name-calling, saying that he was just running at the best pace for his dogs.
The newcomer to Iditarod’s front pack, Jeff King, cast the dispute in strategic terms. “This isn’t a Boy Scout trip. It’s a race,” he told reporters. “You don’t get in the ring and grease Muhammad Ali’s gloves for him.”
As the sun rose Friday morning, Runyan mushed out of Iditarod in first place. By noon, a front pack of 18 teams was on the trail to Shageluk, with Jonrowe and Butcher bringing up the rear.
Back in McGrath, Lynda Plettner was peeved. That damn Urtha had Abdul, her best leader. After the experience of watching him struggle through the Klondike, Plettner had made sure that the rookie’s entire Iditarod team was first-rate. All Urtha had to do was feed those dogs and hang on. She was the one driving the kennel’s puppies. So WHERE was he?
Urtha Lenthar had appeared to be in good shape when Plettner left him in Rohn. Checking the time reports, she noticed he was a little late getting out. Linda could understand that. But it didn’t explain his interminable delay in the Burn. The pups had hauled her across in ten hours. Urtha had the better team, so he should have mushed into Nikolai hours ago.
Plettner mushed on to McGrath, where she spent more long hours waiting and hounding officials for an explanation. Word was finally relayed that Lenthar had RETURNED to Rohn after getting lost. What was happening out there?
Urtha finally reported in at Nikolai. Plettner got him on the phone. It was a troubling conversation. The schoolteacher sounded extremely discouraged.
“Look,” Plettner said, growing impatient. “Like, I’ve been sitting here an enormous amount of time. So I’m going to, like, casually move over to Takotna. Call me there when you get to McGrath.”
Leaving Rohn, Bill Peele was concerned about his lead dog. Most of the team looked frisky and refreshed, but that darn Charlie had been acting up again. Peel stopped his team near Farewell Lake, intending to shift his ornery leader to a less critical position. The cunning dog sniffed an opportunity. He twisted out of the novice musher’s grip and dashed off into the surrounding stunted spruce. Charlie didn’t stray far, but he refused to come back.
Peel offered Charlie food. He tried hiding behind his sled, hoping the escapee might draw in close enough to catch. He wasted hours trying to coax that dog back. Nothing worked. At a loss, Peele decided to drive his 15 remaining dogs to Nikolai, where he could consult with Iditarod officials. Charlie howled and howled as the team pulled away. As Peele crossed the Burn, those mournful cries haunted the kind-hearted musher from North Carolina.
Traveling just ahead of me was Barry Lee. Babying his dogs was paying off. During the first three days of the race, he had limited runs to an easy three hours. He was “sweetening the team,” as he called it, for harder driving later. Now, after a daylong layover in Rohn, his team was supercharged.
Lee had invested three hours fixing the snowmachine track he used as a primary brake. Streaking out of Rohn, the hefty musher put that drag track to use, trying to hold his dogs to a reasonable pace. But the jury-rigged brake snagged on a stump and tore loose.
Lee had grown up driving crazed sprint dogs. He didn’t use a brake then. He decided he didn’t need one now. Skills polished 20 years ago on the track in Anchorage came back as Lee jockeyed his sled past trees, rocks, and other encroaching hazards. The sled ricocheted through the ruts carved by local buffalo, catching air as the runners skipped across frozen mounds of overflow. This was mad, just mad. Barry loved every moment of it.
Lee kept an eye on his watch, and, exactly five hours after leaving Rohn, he shut his team down for a well-deserved meal. Based on his brother Bobby’s geographic clues, Lee reckoned he had covered at least 45 miles, putting the team near the start of the Burn, which sounded like a good place to tackle in the daylight.
The stars were bright as Barry Lee climbed into his sleeping bag. He felt good. His whole life had built toward this moment when he would rest alongside honest dogs on the Iditarod Trail.
Snow began falling. It was coming down hard when Lee awoke four hours later. Alan Garth had passed by during the night. The Englishman’s tracks were already covered by half a foot of new snow.
As Lee resumed the chase, the dogs — so puffed up with excitement upon leaving Rohn — deflated before his eyes. Watching them slog through the thickening snow, the musher grimaced. He had his old team back — that wretched bunch from the Klondike 200.
There were tracks and evidence of a camp. Clearly another team had rested here overnight. The discovery, after 14 hours of traveling solo, provided a major boost to my entire team. Tails high, my dogs excitedly sniffed the campsite. Rainy appeared more alert and quickened her pace. I was thrilled, but tried to keep it in check. The team ahead probably had a lead of several hours, and it didn’t seem likely we were gaining much ground.
The deep snow knocked a couple miles an hour off our speed. Weighted down by the twin tree-splints, my sled felt sluggish, and I couldn’t do much pushing on the hills for fear the handlebar would break.
Under a gray sky, I followed the trail through thinning strips of spruce. Before too long, I mushed past the last of the living trees and entered a charred land of the dead. I knew this place, if only from legend: Farewell Burn.
Pictures of the Burn didn’t capture the desolation left by the huge forest fire that swept the area in 1977, charring 360,000 acres. Fourteen years later, the land remained a graveyard, littered with rotting stumps and a spider web of skeletal trees.
It got colder as I entered the dead zone. A breeze soon picked up, and I rode with my back to the cutting wind, fiddling with face masks, seeking a magic combination that might keep my face pink and alive. Above all, I wanted to avoid the Aussie’s fate.
I’d been in Ruby for several days, covering the last teams passing through the checkpoint. I was booked to depart on the next mail plane out when the call sounded over the checkpoint radio. A rescue was in progress.
The injured musher was shivering, drenched in sweat, and bundled in a blue sleeping bag when he arrived. It was Brian Carver, a soft-spoken farmer from Melbourne, Australia, who had been thrust into the race after a musher friend had suffered a training accident. I’d written a funny little story about Carver’s last-minute search for an Australian flag so he could show the home colors when leaving the starting chute.
Traveling in the back of the pack with Mowry and Peter Kelly, the Aussie had proved a game, if quiet trail companion. In retrospect, his companions recalled that Carver had, perhaps, acted unusually listless when they camped the night before the accident. He hadn’t bothered to change his socks and gloves like the others. He wasn’t hungry. The Aussie had just puffed on his cigarettes and watched the others.
The temperature was falling. Kelly realized that from the way his glasses kept frosting up. Mowry reckoned Carver must be tough to bear the temperature, wearing nothing but those thin glove liners. None of the rookies knew exactly how cold it was, but they agreed it was bad, maybe 20 below zero.
The next morning Carver, moving with zombie precision, abruptly broke camp and mushed straight through to Sulatna Crossing, the next checkpoint. Volunteers at the remote tent camp were appalled by the musher’s condition as he struggled to sign in: three of Carver’s fingers and several of his toes were frozen solid.
It was obvious to them that the Australian was in need of immediate medical attention. Carver wasn’t so sure. His chalk-white digits weren’t pleasant to look at, but the injury wasn’t painful, not in that frozen state. He clung to the hope that he might yet tough out the race.
Ham radio operator Rich Runyan, then working his first Iditarod, patched through a call to a doctor at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. After a hurried conference, the doctor read the musher a medical report over the radio. The Aussie’s determination faded as he listened to the clinical analysis of the miseries — starting with potential amputations — he faced if any of his frozen parts thawed and refroze out on the trail. Carver reluctantly scratched.
Mowry arrived at Sulatna shortly before Carver boarded the plane for Ruby. He was shocked by the other musher’s injuries.
“Don’t you do it, mate,” the Aussie told him.
Carver’s frostbite was thawing by the time he landed on the river below Ruby. The internal blood fire had begun, leaving him feverish and helpless, with that left hand jammed under his right armpit and his knees hunched in the sleeping bag. Throwing off my camera bag, I helped the two pilots carry him from one plane to the other. The musher groaned when we bumped his feet against the door frame.
Carver recognized me and pulled himself together to answer a few short questions.
“They say it was forty below,” he whispered quietly. “I had no idea it was so cold. It was a great Iditarod until this happened. I just had no idea it was so cold.”
“Are you guys racing or what?” The caller was Madden. He sounded nervous, as if this morning’s Two Rivers’ Tune-up represented his serious racing debut instead of mine.
It was a cold November morning, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I was running in and out of the house, loading Mowry’s old utility truck. Any concern I might have felt about the sting of the air was dispelled by the thermometer dangling outside our cabin door. Twenty below zero. Nothing to it, I thought. Training in Fairbanks, we dealt with temperatures in that range all the time.
My gear seemed unusually stiff. The lines weren’t pliable. Normally limp harnesses were kinked and had to be stretched apart. But I was too busy to pay attention to that since I had drawn the first starting position.
I was running eight dogs. Rainy and Casey were leading, with Pig, Bo, Screech, Beast, Betsy, and Raven filling the spots behind. It wasn’t our best team, but one selected to minimize surprises. I hadn’t given much thought to my personal gear, placing faith in my familiar motorcycle suit, a trusted 14-year-old memento of my days as a photo-lab delivery driver. I had a balaclava covering my head, but it wasn’t tucked in, leaving most of my neck and face exposed.
Leaving the field, the trail joined Pleasant Valley Road. As soon as I made the turn, I felt the wind burning my cheeks. I gritted my teeth and concentrated on keeping the dogs rolling. Other teams were following at two-minute intervals. I’d started first and, so far, I was leading. If they were going to beat us, let ’em earn it.
No one caught us until we were well past the river, on the return loop. Dipping up and down with the trail, I heard a scraping sound and glanced backward. If a musher coming from behind called for the trail, I would have to pull over and let the sled pass.
A team was breathing down my back, all right, but the sled had no driver! The ghost team belonged to Jeff Boulton. About three miles into the race, his lead dogs had tangled. Boulton stopped, straightened them out, and was reaching for his sled when his excited dogs jerked the hook loose.
Rainy hesitated when she saw the crowd waiting at the finish line. Mowry clapped his hands and, coaxing her, ran with the team. People were clapping. For a few minutes I dared to dream that I might have even won. I even had Mowry scared.
“I didn’t want you to win the first time out and wind up with an unruly student on my hands,” the Coach said later.
He didn’t have to worry. All but two other teams completed the course faster. I finished fifth, beating Boulton and another musher who was delayed by a huge dog fight.
At the finish line, Kathy Swenson mentioned that she had planned on racing, but didn’t think it was worth it at 40 below.
Forty below zero. She had to be kidding! But it was no joke. Heat escaping through our cabin door had produced a false reading on our thermometer at home.
As we waited for results to be announced in the steamy convenience store, the winner of the race, Paul Taylor, slapped me on the shoulder.
“Pretty cold out there today,” he said, mentioning that he’d wondered if his lips were freezing in the breeze.
“How’s your face?” Taylor added, frowning.
Now that he mentioned it, my face felt sort of strange. My cheeks were rock hard to the touch, and cold. That’s odd, I thought.
Back at the cabin, Madman, Mowry, and Studer were fooling around in the kitchen when I finished feeding the dogs and came inside.
“Man, what happened to you, O’D!”
It wasn’t my imagination. Something was wrong. I had frostbitten my cheeks, a chunk of my neck, and both earlobes. My face was just beginning to swell. Within a few hours I puffed up like the Michelin Man. By morning, my mouth was framed with a pair of angry-red apples, and I had a pink golfball in place of my Adam’s apple.
“First-degree frostbite,” said the doctor, quickly assessing my predicament as he put on his coat for an emergency trip to the hospital. “That area will be extremely sensitive to the cold.” He prescribed a simple treatment: Avoid outdoor sports for at least three weeks. “Sooner than that and you might have scarring,” he said.
“Doc, you don’t understand. I’m in training.”
“You better train inside.”
I shook my head. Train inside? Not for the Iditarod.
My face was funny-looking, but the situation wasn’t. Even after my face had healed, the new skin remained more vulnerable. I fought back against nature, accumulating a new arsenal of cold-weather gear. The old motorcycle gear was scrapped for a $98 Refridgiwear snowmachine suit, sized triple extra large, allowing me to layer additional clothing underneath. Penny Wakefield, a local clothing designer, made me a lambskin hat and a face mask with fur sewn on the inside. My face mask collection soon threatened to crowd us out of the cabin.
“Just smear your face with Vaseline,” said Studer, comparing the trick to a swimmer rubbing on grease before attempting the English Channel. I was skeptical, but I began routinely globbing it on before tending to chores in the dog lot. It actually made a big difference.
I dressed for each run like a commando suiting up for a mission. The outfit started with long underwear, top and bottom, covered by polypropylene snow pants, and a thick, hooded pullover from Apocalypse Design, a local expedition outfitter. For foot protection, I used a $175 pair of huge white bunny boots, the U.S. military’s gift to the Arctic.
Despite my careful preparations, pieces of my body kept dying. Mowry would return home from a run sweating like a pig. I’d retreat to the bathroom to survey the expansion of bloodless white areas on several fingers, already tipped by deadened blisters.
“You’re hopeless, O’Donoghue,” the Coach said of my mounting scars.
I bought more gloves. And I bought more chemical hand warmers, which I clung to like talismans, rarely leaving the cabin without stuffing another handful in my pockets.
The warmers were neat little things. Tear open the plastic wrapper, shake the tea bag-sized sacks contained inside, and the warmers usually produced steady heat. I say “usually” because those warmers, which cost about 50 cents apiece, had a high failure rate. Roughly one in three was a dud.
I also experimented with larger fluid-filled heat pouches. These were miraculous, providing a 20-minute burst of intense heat when you flexed a metallic disc floating inside the clear fluid. Unlike the dry chemical warmers, the pouches were recyclable. If you placed a stiff white used one in boiling water, the contents liquefied and cleared, becoming as good as new. Alas, the pouches proved worthless. Routine jostling in the sled triggered them. They were always dead when I wanted one.
In Alaska, nothing takes the place of field-testing.
My biggest success against the cold came from dietary changes. Stuffing myself with bacon, buttery muffins, and cheese before training runs — that helped quite a bit. Even more important was drinking before, after, and during runs. Sipping a thermos cup of warm Gatorade, soup, even a beer, as I cruised down the trail, pumped more heat through me than a suit lined with chemical warmers.
The dead forest grew cold, then colder still. I had a full thermos, but it was difficult to tap into while jumping fallen logs and weaving between old tree stumps. More hot Gatorade spilled than reached my cup, leaving my fingers burned then chilled inside swiftly crusting gloves.
The snow is often thin in the unsheltered Burn, but recent storms had helped me out. Our trail was adequate, and a steady line of reflectors gleamed from the skeletal trees ahead. The wind ebbed and finally died by early afternoon.
I knew I was 93 miles from Rohn and Nikolai, and that it should take about 16 hours, an hour less than I’d already spent, to make the crossing. But statistics didn’t tell me anything about my own wretched progress, not after camping, the repair jobs, and riding my shattered sled. I realized that I had no handle on the actual size of the Burn. Somehow that had never come up when I covered past races, nor in my conversations with the coach.
Cresting each mound in the barren ruins, I searched the horizon for signs of life. No escape came into view. I was looking off in the distance as Rainy and Harley followed the tracks of a previous team and disappeared. Instinctively, I braced. Too late. The sled launched off a cliff, and I was looking downward at the dogs.
Frantic to avoid crushing anybody, I rolled to the left. The sled thudded to the ground on its side, missing the dogs by scant inches. Or so I thought, until Skidders bellowed in pain. The old wheel dog had a nasty slice on his right rear leg, caused by a glancing blow from a sled runner. Skidders quieted as I examined his wound. I swallowed hard and pretended to be calm. This looked bad. It was a deep slash, wide open to the muscle, right above Skidders’ ankle. At least it wasn’t bleeding much.
“Sorry, old man,” I said, digging into the sled for my first-aid kit.
The injured dog calmly watched as I greased the cut with antiseptic salve and bandaged it. I tried loading him in the sled bag, but Gnat’s burly father wiggled free and leaped out. Shaking himself, he yawned, sniffed the bandage, and seemed ready to forget the whole incident.
“All right, tough guy”
We resumed our march. Skidders, at nine the oldest dog in the team, fell into rhythm with the team’s pace without so much as a limp.
A solitary figure appeared in the distance. It was a person, on foot.
“Jesus,” I whispered, trying to figure out which musher might have lost his team.
Drawing closer, I made out a man pulling a small sled. What was anybody doing out here on foot? The riddle was answered when I spotted the rifle slung over a shoulder — a hunter. The man greeted me warmly, and I halted the team. Like two astronauts meeting in a dead lunar basin, we talked in the middle of the Burn. I was cheered more than I would have expected by the human company.
The hunter whipped out a pocket camera. “Mind if I take a picture?”
The distraction provided by the hunter was brief. Hour after hour, I pressed on, bouncing over partially buried trunks and old stumps. In midafternoon, the sled slammed to a stop, nearly flipping me over the handlebar.
“Son of a bitch!”
The chain anchoring my snowmachine track was caught on a small, firm stump. I couldn’t lift my sled over it. And I couldn’t slide the sled backward — not with 15 dogs straining forward on a downhill slope.
“Son of a bitch!”
We weren’t going anywhere unless I cut off the stump. Double-anchoring the team with both of my snow hooks, I grabbed my axe.
I’d been trapped on a mountain in a storm. Dragged off a cliff. My sled was busted and patched with trees. Now I was playing logger in a dead forest.
“Un-” I cried, swinging at the stump, “stoppable!”
I repeated the mantra with each bite of the axe, feeling stronger with every blow. “Unstoppable! Unstoppable! Unstoppable!”
The stump gave way. The team surged, popping both snow hooks as I leaped aboard the runners.
“That’s right,” I shouted at the dogs. “We are un-stoppable!”
Plettner was doing just fine, thank you. Those pups zipped right over to Takotna. She couldn’t praise them enough. It was Urtha who had her worried. Her mushing student’s situation was growing worse with each phone call. Plettner hardly knew what to say anymore.
“The dogs won’t go right,” Urtha complained. Hansel, one of the leased team’s key leaders, “wasn’t performing,” he told her.
“Is he mentally or physically having problems?” Plettner asked.
“Well, I sure don’t know.”
Plettner instructed Lenthar to find a vet and have the dog checked out. He did, and the examination proved inconclusive. That settled matters as far as Lynda was concerned.
“Look Urtha,” she said, “take a break, but not much of a break, because you’re going very slowly and those dogs AREN’T TIRED. Then get over here to Takotna. I’m going to wait for you.”
The stray had to be a team dog. That much was obvious from the harness. And who else would be traveling the Burn this time of year besides Iditarod mushers?
Then again, Doc Cooley wasn’t an official entrant himself. The debonair mushing vet from Wisconsin was Iditarod’s so-called “trail sweep,” conducting tests on sled-dog metabolism while providing veterinary backup for teams traveling in the rear of the field. It was a new concept, something Cooley, 44, had thought up after years of frustration watching apparently healthy Iditarod dogs collapse from undetected heart problems. Doc suspected electrolyte imbalances might be the cause. The race offered the perfect opportunity to test the hypothesis.
Cooley tried to lure the stray within reach, offering the dog chunks of meat. Darting between trees, Charlie remained out of reach, barking at the unwelcome intruder’s team.
Not far ahead of Cooley, John Ace barely clipped a tree with his knee. Though only a glancing blow, it came at a damaging angle. It was as if a grenade had exploded under Ace’s sled, which tumbled down the hill. He felt like his face got the worst of it. He didn’t notice the throbbing in his leg until later.
Dawn was breaking. Ace figured he could tough it out to Nikolai. Not that he had any choice. The burly musher drove onward. The pain in his leg steadily increased, as did the swelling. Before long, Ace was precariously hunched over the sled, unable to help his dogs on the hills, and enduring terrible pain as he repeatedly capsized.
The team dragged its injured driver into Don and Catherine Mormile’s camp in the Burn. They took one look at Ace’s leg and ordered him to lie down. The leg might be broken, they warned. Ace, a former Vietnam medic, wasn’t entirely convinced. He held out hope of finishing this, his sixth, Iditarod. But he welcomed their help feeding his dogs.
Cooley arrived on the scene and lent his voice to the Mormiles’. Ace’s condition was indeed grave. On a bitter night like this, Doc told the musher, he risked losing that leg, because swelling magnified the risk of frostbite. The veterinarian convinced Ace to take shelter in his sled bag and wait there while he mushed to Nikolai for help. Just to be on the safe side, Cooley confiscated Ace’s boots, leaving him no choice but to stay put.
Race Judge Al Marple and Jeff Stokes, a local EMT, returned several hours later on snowmachines, equipped with a rescue sled. In a bumpy ride, punctuated by the musher’s groans, they hauled the crippled musher to the village. Ace was flown to McGrath Friday afternoon. X rays revealed a hair-line fracture in his leg just below the knee. He and his dogs were headed home. This incident brought the total number of race casualties to eight.
Tom Daily found the Burn oddly fascinating. He passed through the skeletal forest at night, his favorite time for mushing, chasing the tracks of a fox in the fresh snow. The team’s joyride ended at Sullivan Creek, where his dogs balked at crossing the open water. The creek was about 15 feet across. Trailbreakers had built a temporary bridge for the race leaders, but the jumbled logs and sticks looked dangerous now. A dog killer, Daily decided, after scouting the crossing.
Bridge or no bridge, the rushing water had to be crossed. After a few abortive attempts at ordering the leaders across, the musher took matters into his own arms. One at a time, he picked up his dogs and carried them to the far side, wading through freezing water well above his knees. The chore delayed Tom Daily three hours, and turned his space-age foam boots into huge clumps of ice.
Lee and Garth were studying Sullivan Creek when I arrived. My timing couldn’t have been better. We teamed up for the crossing. I rode sleds to the edge of the creek, holding the dogs to a crawl as Lee threw reluctant swimmers into the water. Garth was positioned on the far shore, coaxing the dogs forward, and ready to yank foundering critters to safety. Soggy though they were, the dogs pulled our sled across upright and dry. Between the three of us, we forded the creek with minimal delay and no accidents.
I was the last one across, riding my runners all the way and sending spray flying from my bunny boots.
Sunlight was stabbing through clouds as we stopped on the far bank and snacked our soggy dogs. I took a picture of old Skidders holding his head high, impatient to go on again. Incredible dog.
Lee grinned at the sight of my taped headlamp and the trees lashed to my sled. “I wondered what was holding you up.”
Judging from Kershner’s comments before the race, I knew I could probably arrange for Mowry to ship replacement stanchions and anything else I needed to McGrath, a large village 50 miles from Nikolai. But that might take days! After what I’d just been through catching up, there was no way I was going to let Lee and Garth leave without me. After McGrath, the next likely place for a commercial air shipment was Anvik, over 200 miles north. Could the patched sled make it that far? It seemed like a hell of a gamble.
Garth’s leaders were tiring. Lee asked if I wanted to take the lead. I nodded, and he slowed his team so I could pass.
“Catch this,” I said, tossing Lee an imaginary gift as our sleds met.
“What’s that?”
“The Red Lantern!” I shouted.
Barry Lee laughed.
“You want somebody to work on that?” said the Nikolai checker, eyeing my patched sled.
Did I? I could have kissed the guy. He sent me to Nick Petruska, an Athabaskan sledmaker.
“I have a little birch,” Petruska said, studying the damage. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I tied the team alongside Petruska’s house, pulled out the cooker, then unhitched my sled from the gang line. The Athabaskan pushed it across the yard to his work shed.
In little more than the time it took to prepare the dogs a hot meal, Petruska duplicated the shattered parts and rebuilt the back end of my sled. I was amazed. It felt stronger than ever. The quiet villager didn’t ask for it, but I gave him $100. I was back in the race. Unstoppable indeed. Catching the Poodle Man would be merely a matter of time.
I walked Skidders to the checkpoint and rousted the veterinarian from bed. Though bleary-eyed, the volunteer from the Deep South grabbed his medical bag and immediately set to work, cutting off the bandage with a pair of scissors. The dog’s pasty white cut looked awful to me, but it wasn’t infected. Sealing the gash with some sort of medical staple-gun, the vet wrapped the paw.
“Have the bandages rechecked,” he said, gently rubbing Skidders’s neck, “but there’s no reason that dawg can’t run all the way to Nome on that foot.”
A race judge and several villagers were talking about Bill Peele. The rules were clear. The musher couldn’t continue without his missing dog, which several mushers had seen haunting the woods near the Burn. Peele couldn’t even officially check in at Nikolai. He had two choices: scratch or find Charlie.
After consulting with the judge, Peele arranged to rent a snowmachine, which he had absolutely no experience driving, and he hired several snowmachiners from the village. The motorized posse was supposed to leave in the morning.
Leaving the checkpoint, I ran into Steve Fossett, another rookie who was getting ready to pull out after completing his 24-hour layover in Nikolai. Lean and slightly balding, Fossett, forty-six, was a classic adventurer. The president of a securities firm in Chicago, he wanted to add the Iditarod to his already impressive list of mountain-climbing and ocean-swimming achievements. He was mushing a team leased from Canadian musher Bruce Johnson, an Iditarod veteran and winner of the 1986 Quest. But Fossett’s hired dogs weren’t cooperating.
Crossing the Burn, the dogs repeatedly quit, forcing Fossett to camp for hours each time. It was a dismal repeat of his experience on the Kusko 300, when the canine work stoppages caused him to scratch. His faith in the Iditarod investment was eroding. The best gear and dogs money could buy wasn’t worth much without cooperation between the team and its driver.
“I haven’t got any leaders at all,” Fossett said, sounding deeply discouraged.
I beat a hasty retreat, leaving Fossett to stew about his fate.
Plettner was appalled. Her leased dogs were fine, but Urtha looked just pitiful. He was shivering and had a pasty, exhausted pallor. Plettner was glad she had waited for him. Takotna was a quiet little village; there wasn’t a better place on the entire trail for an emergency overhaul.
She steered her rookie inside the checkpoint, entrusting the local volunteers to stuff him full at their bountiful table. Later, while Urtha slept, Plettner arranged for him to borrow a plain snowmachine suit. It was 20 below outside, and the forecast called for colder temperatures in the days ahead. If the schoolteacher was in trouble now, he’d never make it unless he ditched that idiotic parka of his. Urtha had one of those fancy new coats that probably felt good in the store, Plettner judged, but left a musher encased in frozen sweat.
While I lingered overnight in Nikolai, where I used Petruska’s phone to file my first News-Miner trail report, four checkpoints and some 260 miles ahead of me Jeff King was working up an appetite. He snuck out of Shageluk about ten-thirty that night, managing to leave the other front-runners behind. Four hours later, King mushed into Anvik, where he claimed $3,500 and the gourmet dinner waiting for the first musher to reach the Yukon River.
The intense musher from Denali Park played down the significance of his surge to the front. The big prize was, after all, more than 500 miles away in Nome. “But I am the one who gets dinner,” King told reporters.
Using a two-burner Coleman stove, a chef from the Clarion Hotel in Anchorage swiftly dished up a seven-course dinner, consisting of an appetizer plate of assorted seafood, chicken consommé with garden vegetables, sautéed shrimp in gin and vermouth, the hotel’s own black raspberry sorbet, Caribbean lamb medallions, a fresh fruit and cheese plate, and ice-cream tarts. Three types of wine were served — Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs, Robert Mondavi Chardonnay, and Kiona Merlot. And for dessert there was chocolate mousse and coffee.
As he dined under the glare of television cameras, surrounded by a huge crowd of villagers, waiters, and the media, King confessed that hunger wasn’t the only motivation behind his bold breakaway. “I wanted a chance to say hi to my kids on TV.”
A single six-or seven-hour push, with one or two short snack breaks: that’s how long it took most Iditarod teams to cover the 48-mile run from Nikolai to McGrath. Fossett, the securities firm president, had the same goal when he mushed from Nikolai late Saturday night. But his leased dogs had their rookie figured out. No more than an hour or two outside the village, the team quit again. Fossett fed his dogs a hot meal and gave them a long break. He eventually got them moving, but his leaders soon called another strike. The workers had seized control and were playing fetch with the boss.
The sled dogs toyed with Fossett for 15 hours before pulling his sled into McGrath. The frustrating experience convinced the stockbroker to sell short and take his losses. Turning the uncooperative dogs back over to Johnson, Fossett scratched, becoming the ninth entrant to do so in this year’s race.