Leaving Nikolai, the trail followed snowmachine routes west through lakes and marshes to the Kuskokwim River. Past traffic had carved a fast, smooth alley for dog teams. Chad was in a cooperative mood, displaying the speed and command response that had made him our number one dog throughout the fall. Barry Lee had left two hours before me, but we caught him without even trying.
My key chain thermometer read zero. The sun’s low angle created blue shadow dogs, bounding in perfect harmony, touching paws with every step.
Roughly midway to McGrath, a TV crew from Anchorage intercepted me on a snowmachine. Chad veered off the trail, ran to the reporter, and lay down by her feet.
“How does it feel to fall so far behind?” the reporter asked.
I fielded several similar questions about my troubles, while swapping Harley and Raven to lead in place of Chad. He accepted his demotion with joy. Freed from the pressures of leading, he was whining to go again. So were Digger and Cyrus. “Listen,” I told the TV woman, “if you want, the cameraman can ride on up front for a bit. But I’ve got to go.”
Daily passed us during the media ambush. Bidding the cameraman good-bye, I gave chase, steadily gaining ground as the trail twisted through sloughs and spindly shoulder-high spruce.
Nearing the Kuskokwim River, I saw a cluster of weathered shelters. Seeing the pole racks overlooking the bank, I guessed it had to be an old fish camp. The place looked deserted now, but in a few months those racks would undoubtedly sag under the weight of drying salmon.
“Who are you?” The voice came from the trees.
I blurted out my name.
“Great, I’ve been looking for you.” A photographer I knew from the Anchorage Times dashed out from behind the camp. He fell in behind the team on a snowmachine.
As we approached McGrath, the trail snaked through thick woods then abruptly dropped onto the Kuskokwim. Daily, taken by surprise, dumped his sled coming off the hill. When my team piled into his, dogs were sprawled everywhere. The photographer grabbed a shot of us as we straightened out our dog teams in the glow of the setting sun.
A Times reporter was waiting for me when I parked the dogs in front of Rosa’s Cafe. “How does it feel to go from first to last place?” he asked.
God, we’re such lemmings. I remembered being in this same place, asking similar predictable questions. Joe Runyan was the first musher to reach the Kuskokwim village that year, followed by Babe Anderson, the local favorite. Like the other reporters pestering the leaders that day, I hadn’t grasped the real story.
Neither Runyan nor Anderson had yet taken their required long break. They had chosen to push their teams through the Burn, all the way to McGrath, before starting the 24-hour clock. Consequently, their lead was illusory. Most of the other mushers in the race that year were, at that moment, in the process of completing their layovers at checkpoints en route. The incredible part was — they, too, were even then falling behind.
“The real story is behind us,” Runyan said. “Joe Redington, he’s your story.”
From Skwentna to Rohn that year, the front-runners had pushed each other, exhausting their dogs as they slogged through miles and miles of soft snow. Temperatures had dropped while Redington was nursing his flu. The trail, packed by the plodding race leaders, hardened to a racing glaze, perfectly timed to catapult Old Joe and Cannonball Herbie Nayokpuk once more into the fray.
“I feel like an old fox chased by fifty young hounds,” Redington said later that night, stomping his hook into the snow outside Rosa’s. Redington’s astonishing leap into the lead, 400 miles into the race he had founded, made for a good story, but no one considered him a serious contender, not at 70 years old.
Nayokpuk commanded more respect. The Inupiat musher from Shishmaref, then traveling close behind Redington, hadn’t been a threat since undergoing a heart operation several years before. But his announced retirement hadn’t lasted, and Herbie ended up finishing a respectable eighth in his comeback attempt. His overall record boasted finishes in every top-five spot — except first. At 54, Nayokpuk remained a long-shot contender.
Two hundred miles later, the Old Fox was even farther in front. By then, the story about his effort was assuming gigantic proportions. Could Redington pull it off? Debates raged in every cabin, seafront bar, or urban office in Alaska. An enterprising songwriter released “The Ballad of Smokin’ Joe,” which got heavy play on Alaska radio stations. Everyone was pulling for Joe.
Redington remained the leader in Ruby, the gateway to the Yukon River on the Iditarod’s northern route. Adults in the village cheered, and their children ran alongside the sled as Smokin’ Joe’s team trotted up the hill.
As the first musher to the Yukon that year, Redington earned the feast, which became a great media event. Photographers and cameramen jostled for position as the unkempt, wind-burned musher picked up his dainty fork.
In the middle of the dinner, Ruby’s checker pushed through the crowd carrying a fat beaver carcass. Seeing the beaver in Em-mitt Peters’s hand, Old Joe set aside the fancy silverware and jumped to his feet. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out a handful of crumpled bills. Redington had a dog that wasn’t eating right, and he figured that beaver, a flavorful high-energy meat, might be the cure. So Redington had asked the checker to find a trapper. Mission accomplished, the Athabaskan known as the Yukon Fox knew better than to wait on ceremony.
Leaving Ruby, Redington’s team met an incoming musher.
“Brother,” Old Joe shouted, raising one hand.
“Brother,” said Nayokpuk, returning the gesture. “Hurry,” he added. “Get out of here before they catch you.”
The trail to Nome was wide open. But Redington’s team balled up outside the village on the frozen Yukon. His leaders weren’t in the mood to hurry away from the cozy village. Redington trudged up front and switched leaders. The team ran a few feet and balled up. He again switched leaders, producing another few yards of progress, then another tangle. He switched leaders again, and again, and again. Dogs were never going to beat Old Joe — a musher for 40 years — in a test of sheer will.
Nearly 45 minutes elapsed before Redington’s team regained momentum. I got a picture as Smokin’ Joe’s team rounded a big rock wall, finally leaving Ruby behind. The Old Fox was still in front, but those young hounds were gaining. I had my first taste of the woes created by reluctant leaders.
None of the press realized at the time — and Redington was too protective of his race to point it out — but his amazing drive had already been sabotaged by a race organization screwup. Whereas Adkins complained because his trailbreakers sped too far ahead, allowing the trail to blow in, Smokin’ Joe had the opposite problem. Loping like the wind, Redington’s dogs actually overtook the snowmachines charged with clearing the front-runner’s path.
To the uninitiated, that wouldn’t appear to be such a bad thing; snowmachiners could surely repass dogs, even the fastest dogs, at their leisure. Perhaps. But such developments inevitably damaged the front-runner’s chances.
Nayokpuk had earned his nickname, Shishmaref Cannonball, in a telling incident. Leading the race in 1980, Herbie overtook the trailbreakers in Rohn. Unwilling to slow down, he barreled alone into the Burn, where he wasted half a day, lost in the charred forest, because of the lack of trail markers.
Redington’s problem was the snow. Where he caught the snowmachiners near Cripple, the halfway checkpoint on the Iditarod’s northern route, the snow was deep and powdery. Old Joe pulled into the checkpoint holding a six-hour lead on the young hounds. While others reveled in the hoopla surrounding his arrival, which earned him $3,000 in silver coins, Redington was appalled at the volunteers’ casual attitude. Nome remained his goal — to get there first, the Iditarod’s founder needed a good trail punched through.
An argument erupted, leading to a further delay. The trailbreakers finally left, but time had run out. It was a sunny day, and the trail was soft, too soft. When Redington tried to leave, still comfortably ahead of the pack after a five-hour rest, his dogs sunk to their armpits, awash in the mushy powder. Old Joe wisely retreated to the checkpoint, giving the trail more time to set. Butcher, Buser, and the other young hounds arrived during the delay, smelling blood for the first time.
“Good to see you so upbeat,” said race Judge Bill Bartlett.
“Why not,” I said. “This is fun, and it sure beats working.
“I’m not staying long,” I added, grinning through the ice clinging to my beard and mustache. “I’m picking up a headlamp, getting a beer at McGuire’s, and then I’m out of here.”
The time had arrived to execute the Coach’s strategy. McGrath, population 550, was a big noisy village. Iditarod teams seldom get much rest here. And the town has so many distractions that mushers inevitably waste a lot of time. So Mowry’s plan called for giving the dogs a short break, then pushing on to sleepy Takotna, about 25 miles ahead.
Bedding the dogs near the airstrip, I went shopping for a new headlamp. The prospects weren’t good. Alaska Commercial, McGrath’s main retail store, had already closed for the night. Checker Chris O’Gar came to my rescue. She fetched the manager, who graciously reopened the store and sold me a $32 headlamp. It was a cheap toy, producing a feeble, unfocused beam. But you take what you can get.
A package was waiting for me at the checkpoint: a box of chocolate chip cookies, baked by Shelley Gill, my old Frontiersman boss. “Congratulations,” read her note. “You’ve survived the hard part. The rest is a breeze.”
Terhune had planned from the start to take his layover in McGrath. The decision was dictated by his poor eyesight, which necessitated his using extended-wear contacts. Terhune hated the feel of the damn things, but glasses and mushing don’t mix. He could hardly walk outside in his heavy gear without fogging his thick glasses. The choice boiled down to wearing contacts or mushing blind, and McGrath was the first stop where he knew he could count on finding a cabin warm enough so that he could disinfect the lenses without freezing them solid.
As in most villages, families signed up to host Iditarod mushers. Famous mushers such as Butcher, Runyan, Swenson, or Redington, were coveted guests. Most veterans had friends they stayed with year after year. Terhune, an unknown rookie, landed in a house overrun with three mushers, more than a dozen Iditarod pilots, vets, and judges, and an even larger complement of dogs. Though exhausted, he couldn’t sleep. The noise and clatter left him feeling bitter: big-name mushers wouldn’t put up with cramped conditions like this. Terhune continued brooding until the final tick on that 24-hour clock.
McGuire’s Tavern holds an illustrious place in Iditarod lore. In years past, when locals such as Eep or Babe Anderson had a shot at winning, loyal friends sought to derail the competition by offering them free drinks. Iditarod has become so competitive that top racers seldom risk visits to McGuire’s anymore. But I claimed a bar stool with pride.
The bartender greeted me with a bowl of chili. Another Iditarod supporter sent over a free beer. I stayed for about an hour, soaking in the warmth and conversation. Walking to my sled, I tap-danced in my bunny boots.
At 9:30 P.M., precisely two hours after our arrival, I yelled, “Get up!” Dogs that weren’t already standing rose and stretched. Little Raven began barking. “All right,” I cried, reaching for the hook. “Let’s go get the Poodle Man!”
The sled slipped forward. Ahead of me, the dogs trotted toward a gleaming string of markers, leading into the darkness.
Takotna was supposed to be a short 23-mile hop. Three hours out of McGrath, I cursed all map makers and their unholy spawn. This trail climbed forever, bumping over snowmachine moguls, with no end in sight. At last, I saw a cluster of lights. The promised land beckoned. Tiny Takotna was famous for greeting every Iditarod team, from the first to the last, with hot water for the dogs and a hearty meal for their driver.
The checker, a local musher, was apologetic. “We didn’t expect anyone before morning,” he said.
Five days had passed since Butcher had led the first wave of teams through the village. With a lull expected tonight, the fire under the water barrel was left unattended. A skin of ice covered the surface of my complimentary “hot water.”
The walls of the community center were lined with a neat gallery of mushing photos. I found a huge spread of food waiting, and several nice locals eager to host a tired musher. Did I need anything? Anything at all? What did I think of the race so far? Afterward one of the women guided me to a quiet library, where I bunked out on the carpeted floor.
I was awakened, as requested, at 6 A.M. The dogs, after more than four hours of rest, would be primed. I felt worse off for my own 90-minute snooze. My body was rebelling, but I staggered to my feet. The race clock was running again.
The Coach’s strategy called for bolting from Takotna, thus sealing my lead over the teams still napping in McGrath. The concept — so exciting in the kitchen at home — felt awful in the flesh. Before lying down to rest, I had asked the Takotna women for booties I might salvage and for a needle to patch the chewed harnesses in my sled.
“I wouldn’t use thread on those harnesses. Use dental floss, it’s tougher,” one woman told me.
Six hours after arriving, I left Takotna, packing a box lunch prepared by the checkpoint volunteers, a big bag of salvaged booties, and a dental-floss dispenser with several needles tucked inside. The Coach’s plan had vaulted me a dizzy three or four spots ahead in the standings, past Lee, Garth, and Daily. Not to mention Peele, who finally captured sly Charlie in the Burn that very morning. Mushing for Ophir, I traveled in sole possession of sixty-second place, approximately 30 hours behind the next teams.
Little Cricket limped terribly on the road out of town. I checked her over, but found nothing wrong. If the mysterious malady had shown up in a bigger dog, I would have turned around and dropped it at the checkpoint. Cricket was so small that carrying her, if it came to that, wouldn’t be a problem. Watching closely, I left her in the team. She limped for about two miles, then straightened up. Over the 35 miles that followed, Cricket was her old self, keeping a taught tug line and briskly trotting with no hint of strain.
I was also watching Cyrus with considerable concern, but that wasn’t a new development. He hadn’t looked good since his foot problems surfaced at Rohn. Rattles’s pup was a changed dog, and not for the better. He was listless. His ears were down, and his tug line, running in wheel, was often slack. He wasn’t even ripping off his booties anymore — the one good sign since I had devoted a lot of time to keeping his paws medicated.
The Coach would have dropped Cyrus in an instant. “Remember, O’D, you’re only as fast as your slowest dog.” I was not sure why, but I wasn’t ready to give up on Cyrus yet.
The 38-mile trail to Ophir followed a closed seasonal road through a valley flanked by savage mountains. “Weight Limit” signs were posted at several small bridges, specifying tonnage restrictions for various vehicles. I snapped a picture of my dog team trotting by one of the signs.
The morning was cool and clear. The team made good time behind Chad and Raven, our fair-weather duo. Despite an increasing number of cabins alongside the road, the valley was marked by a disturbing stillness. No welcoming smoke rose from the cabins here. They were entombed, cold and lifeless. The eerie spell was broken by a hand-painted sign taped to a trail marker: “Ophir, 5 miles,” framing a sketch of a smiling coffee cup.
The Ophir checkpoint pulsated with life. Inviting smoke rose from a cabin nestled in a grove of tall spruce. A neat line of supply sacks rested outside the cabin, near an assortment of snowmachines, freight sleds, and a small mountain of trash and surplus gear. The checkpoint was staffed by veterinarian Mary Hoffheimer, a radio operator, and the owners of the cabin.
“I was beginning to wonder if you would ever get here,” said Mary, whom I knew from covering past races. She frowned with mock indignation.
The veterinarian carefully examined Cricket, feeling for sore spots and manipulating her legs. Like me, Mary couldn’t find any cause for the limp. The dog’s leg might have been asleep, she said, or possessed some other kink that worked itself out. There was another possibility, Mary suggested, smiling. My little Cricket might have faked the whole thing — in hopes of hitching a free ride.
“Could you also check that bandage on Skidders?” I asked, and went on to tell her about my harrowing plunge off the cliff in the Burn.
“Wait a minute,” she said, peeling the bandage from the staples. “I’ve heard about this dog. You’re the one!”
Hoffheimer said she’d run into the vet who treated Skidders in Nikolai. He’d described a semihysterical rookie who had dragged him out of bed to treat an old dog who was mending just fine. “I put in a few staples,” the vet told Mary, “more to calm the musher than anything else.”
“That rat bastard!” I said.
We compared notes on the race as Mary changed Skidders’s bandage. Working this, her third Iditarod, the New Hampshire veterinarian had the opportunity to watch the entire field pass through checkpoints. The general condition of dogs appeared excellent, she said, in teams traveling in both the front and the back ends of the race field. But the vet was appalled by what she had seen in several of the middle teams.
Inside the cabin, Mary raided the checkpoint supplies and heated me a bowl of stew. I studied the checker’s log while I ate. Four teams had departed Ophir within three hours of my arrival: Linda Plettner, Urtha Lenthar, Mark Williams, and Gunnar Johnson. But those mushers had all rested here for at least 13 hours, and most had stayed closer to 19 hours. Worse, the Poodle Man was reported already out of Iditarod, meaning that he had a lead of at least a hundred miles. But Suter’s speed was deceptive. The fool hadn’t yet taken his 24-hour layover, a strategy that had the vets increasingly concerned. The damn poodles hadn’t beat us yet.
I could have used a nap, but I didn’t plan to linger long in Ophir. I was in a hurry, determined to press on before Lee and the others caught up. Such foolishness shaped my thinking as I rushed into a series of stupid mistakes.
King was sleeping off his big dinner. Butcher mushed into Anvik, paused just 12 minutes, then led a wave of veteran teams up the Yukon River.
By the time King resumed the chase, three hours later, Butcher was resting at the next checkpoint, Grayling, with eight other mushers on the way. The front pack held no surprises to those familiar with the race: Barve, Jonrowe, Garnie, Buser, Tim Osmar, Runyan, Swenson, and Matt “the Miner” Desalernos from Nome.
Butcher paused six hours in the village of Grayling, resting her dogs through the heat of the day. The champ then set the pace again, leaving on the 60-mile trail to Eagle Island at 3:20 P.M. on Saturday.
Adkins mushed into Grayling as Butcher pulled out. The Montanan paused just five minutes and then gave chase. By dusk, ten teams were streaking up the Yukon behind Butcher, with half a dozen others preparing to follow.
The forecast called for a blizzard with possible temperatures of 30 below on the windy river. “I’m just going to wear everything I’ve got,” former champion Rick Mackey told reporters.
The predicted storm didn’t materialize, but strong winds and drifting powdery snow slowed Butcher to a crawl.
At 11:30 A.M. on Sunday — at approximately the same time I mushed into Ophir, 200 miles south — Joe Runyan parked his dogs in the ravine below Ralph and Helmi Conatser’s cabin on Eagle Island. Coming from behind, Runyan had beaten Butcher, Barve, and Quest veteran Kate Persons to the remote island checkpoint by nearly half an hour.
Nome remained more than 400 miles away. No one wanted to break trail to Kaltag, a tough 70 miles farther up the Yukon. Front-runners bedded their dogs in the snow, built crackling wood fires, and nervously eyed each other, daring someone, anyone, to make the first move.
Ralph Conatser had checked in 23 teams before the first musher left. The deadlock was broken at 6:30 P.M. on Sunday by Jeff King. Within an hour, the chase was resumed by Barve, Runyan, Buser, Swenson, Jonrowe, and Butcher — whose 18-dog team remained the largest and best rested among Iditarod’s lead pack.
Logic was left out of the equation as I repacked for the 90-mile haul to Iditarod. I was obsessed with cutting weight in the sled. Speed. Speed was all-important. With that goal in mind, it was time to improvise. For the upcoming run, one of the longest in the race, I sought to maximize speed by carrying less dog food than I had originally planned.
Checkpoint volunteers were sorting the surplus left by other teams, salvaging what they could, burning most of the rest. As I dragged over a sack filled with spare bags of lamb, liver, and beef, an uproar broke out over another musher’s castoffs.
“Eels?” cried one of the volunteers, dropping the bag and jumping backwards. The exotic fare was left by Chase. The light-traveling Athabaskan had passed through Ophir the previous morning.
The sun remained high. My dogs had only been resting about three and a half hours. They were groggy as I put on their booties. Most recurled and fell back asleep as I moved down the line.
Then I heard the word I’d been dreading: “Team!”
It was Daily.
I began chucking my gear in the sled, preparing for a fast getaway.
Mary stood on the brake as I guided Harley and Chad over to the trail. The dogs were balking; none were happy about leaving so soon. I lifted Screech, Scar, even Rainy, off the ground by their harnesses and stood them upright.
“You’re leaving?” said Daily, parking his team nearby.
“That’s right,” I said in a false, bright tone. “These dogs smell poodle meat.”
Mary didn’t say anything, but the vet side of her must have been appalled watching my team wobble out of Ophir. The dogs moved stiffly. I’d never seen them looking so discouraged. Even Raven hung her head, uncharacteristically quiet. Life in a chain gang obviously wasn’t something she cared to bark about.
Roughly halfway to Iditarod was an old uninhabited shelter known as Don’s Cabin. My plan was to push straight through to it. The distance was about 45 miles. We had clear weather, and I figured the team could do that in six or seven hours, easily.
Cutting short the team’s rest backfired on me. Any benefits of leaving early were sapped by traveling for hours in the blazing sun. The team’s speed faded in the heat. Thirsty Harley led the crew in gulping snow at every opportunity.
By midnight, there was no sign of Don’s Cabin, and I was losing the battle to stay awake. We had covered plenty of ground. That was evident from the changed landscape. The trail was rising over a barren dome of tundra, rock, and ice. This was a harsh and menacing place, a desolate end-of-the-earth setting. And if I thought it was bad — outfitted in my space-age gear, driving dogs fueled by the best nutrition money could buy, tapping caches of supplies flown in for my convenience — what must it have been like in 1910? Those cheechakos, stampeding toward the new strikes reported at Iditarod, had protected their hands with rags and had stuffed newspapers under their coats for insulation.
Redington’s Great Race was often billed as a tribute to a 1925 serum run. I’ve always considered that story a farce. Dog teams were used to rush diphtheria vaccine to Nome, but the serum was transported in a 675-mile relay from Nenana, hundreds of miles off the Iditarod Trail. One musher, Leonard Seppala, had mushed more than a hundred miles to collect the precious package, then carried it 91 miles. But the other eighteen serum-team drivers weren’t involved in anything comparable to the modern event. I had more admiration for the forgotten miners and mail carriers who had chanced this desolate passage without glory or a crisis to drive them.
Few markers remained standing in the thin, wind-blasted snow covering the barren hills. I followed what I took to be the paw marks of previous dog teams. The tracks were strangely grouped, covering a broad swath across the biggest dome. Only later did I discover that I was mistakenly trailing a caribou herd other mushers had seen in the area. I kept dozing, repeatedly catching myself in the process of falling off the sled. Part of me whispered “stop,” but the forbidding countryside spurred me onward. It would be hard to find a worse place to get caught in a storm.
At last the trail began descending. Steering the team toward a line of scrubby bushes, I made camp. Moving like a zombie, I threw all the food I could find together and cooked the dogs a hot meal. Then I crawled on top of the sled, not bothering with the sleeping bag, and slept.
Dawn was reaching over the moonscape when I awoke. It was cold. Shivering inside my clammy suit, I hustled to get the dogs ready. In ten minutes, max, the team was on the move. Guiding the sled with one hand, I ran alongside, pumping my legs to generate heat.
Perhaps two miles beyond where we had camped stood what had to be Don’s Cabin. Dogs started barking as we approached. Someone was home. It was Ralf Kuba, a German adventurer making his second attempt to travel the Iditarod Trail on skis. A year earlier, he had set out on the same mission, using two German Shepherds, Cessy and Sagus, to pull his pulka, a small light sled. He had made it as far as Takotna before the remote checkpoints ahead closed.
This year Kuba had beefed up his small team with Trapper, a veteran Iditarod husky, and he had set out three days before the start of the race. I found him in a depressed mood.
“It’s no good,” he said. “The dogs are sick and weak.”
The German’s dogs looked pretty lively to me. And fat.
Checking out Don’s Cabin, I decided that anyone would be come depressed in that rat hole. The place was falling apart, with broken windows and a thick layer of ice spilling inside. This was the proverbial last resort; that it was described as a shelter confirmed my worst suspicions about the weather in this area.
I pinned a note to the front door urging Barry Lee to hurry up. The trail was starting to get lonely. Kuba was miserable, but he assured me that he wasn’t in trouble. I left him there, promising to advise the checker in Iditarod about his difficulties.
Another clear bright day. By midmorning I was sweating and began stripping down, shedding first the snowmachine suit, then the thick bibs. The heat was tough on the dogs, but I kept pushing. My foolishness had thrust us into a different sort of race: the dog food was gone. What mattered now was reaching Iditarod before my dogs crashed, or another storm rolled in. Getting pinned down out here would mean the end of my race.
I wasted precious time putting up with Chad’s antics, figuring he set the fastest pace. A lead dog’s speed is moot when he squats in protest every hundred yards. I finally came to my senses and put Harley and Rainy in lead, two dogs I could count on to keep us moving forward. To pick up the dogs’ spirits, I cut up my two remaining personal steaks — the last food left in the sled — into 15 small bites and passed those out. I’m not sure it was helpful, particularly for Harley, whose hunger was fanned by this miniature appetizer.
With his insatiable appetite, Harley had never been good about passing anything edible on the trail. With the sun beating down and an empty belly gnawing at his concentration, the big dog was far too hungry to pay attention to a musher holding an empty snack bag. Following his nose, Harley began dragging the team off the trail into each and every campsite left by the 62 teams that had passed this way before me. He was determined to scarf every shred of food those other teams had left behind, and I couldn’t really blame him.
We slowed to a crawl behind Harley’s meandering quest. Hungry Boy was as oblivious to my shouts as he was to the lesbian’s attempts to mount him from behind. Screech, meanwhile, had picked up an old glove and was sucking on it like a Lifesaver.
“Hey, there’s a letter for you,” Kuba told Daily as the musher stopped outside Don’s Cabin.
Daily wondered if he was hallucinating. Who was this German with two fat shepherds? The musher relaxed when he read my note and realized it was addressed to Barry Lee. Daily was encouraged to hear that I wasn’t more than a few hours ahead. Not because he wanted to beat me. Tom wasn’t seriously racing this year. He didn’t need to, not with his two-year sponsorship deal. No, Tom Daily was getting lonely.
Lavon Barve lead a group of seven teams off the Yukon River into Kaltag early Monday morning — day ten of the Iditarod — but these front-runners weren’t hanging together for the company. Barve, Butcher, Runyan, Buser, Osmar, Swenson, and King were forcing the pace, pushing each other toward Nome, 350 miles ahead.
“This is rumble time,” Buser told a Times reporter. “When somebody pulls the ice hook, you’ve got to go.”
For the second year in a row, Barve made the first move in Kaltag. The hefty Wasilla printer mushed out of the village at 8 A.M., bound for the coastal town of Unalakleet. Butcher, Buser, and King gave chase within the hour, with Runyan and Swenson not far behind.
“Right now, it’s Susan, Lavon, Rick, and Runyan,” said Butcher’s husband, Dave Monson. “We should know by the end of today.”
Most observers gave the edge to Butcher. The defending champ’s 16-dog team remained the largest in the front pack. She was a superb athlete herself, famous for running behind her sled, providing an extra boost climbing hills. Butcher’s compact frame and slight build also gave her team a substantial weight advantage over those of the larger contenders, Barve, Swenson, Buser, and Runyan.
The weight differential had long obsessed Barve, who carried as much as 240 pounds on his own burly frame. He wanted a rule linking the number of dogs in each team to the weight of the team’s driver. According to Barve, “jockeys,” such as Butcher and the bantam-sized King, ought to be restricted to smaller teams of, say, 13 dogs instead of 20—to keep the race fair. He left Kaltag with 14 dogs, grousing to reporters about the difficulty of competing against Butcher’s larger team.
As he prepared to follow, Swenson had more on his mind than dogs. His wife Kathy had called to resume an argument that had led the musher to order her away from an earlier checkpoint. Race judge Chisholm was present when Swenson took the phone call. “Afterward,” he said, “Rick was possessed.”
Late Monday afternoon, I spied Daily’s team in the distance. Watching him close the gap, it was as if my sled was being pulled by a string of Arctic turtles. I felt crushed and defeated as he passed me with a friendly wave.
Daily halted about a hundred yards ahead and planted his snow hook. He turned to me holding a carved pipe. “Do you smoke?” he asked.
Alaska was no longer a pot smoker’s haven. As a result of the recriminalization measure adopted during the November general election, possession of small amounts of marijuana was now punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to 90 days in jail. But cops weren’t patrolling the Iditarod Trail as Daily and I shared a few puffs on the crest of a barren hill.
Looking out over the desolate valley before us, I wondered again at the madness that drove the gold seekers to bet their lives on the harsh country ahead.
“Let’s go home,” I said as we neared a cluster of deteriorating buildings. Rat and the other dogs broke into a full lope — the very effect intended when the Coach and I had begun using those words in the final mile of training runs. Over the course of the race, the phrase was becoming ever more powerful. “Let’s go home” tipped the dogs that a checkpoint, rest, and food lay within the team’s grasp.
The McGrath vet blamed Rock’s hair loss on stress. The dog’s condition certainly wasn’t serious, he said.
Barry Lee wasn’t so sure. Rock was shivering under her thinning coat, putting the dog at risk if the weather turned bad. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Barry paid a visit to the store and bought Rock a child-sized sweatshirt.
Rock sported her souvenir sweatshirt as far as Ophir, but it wasn’t doing the trick. It was getting colder. Watching her shiver on her bed of straw, Lee knew the dog had given him everything she could. Rock was headed home.
Crossing the barrens near Don’s Cabin Monday night, Lee found most of the trail markers had been blown down by the wind. Where he could, Lee jammed the markers in the ground, standing them upright for Garth and Peele, who were still bringing up the rear.
Sleep deprivation overtook Lee as he descended the hills. He kept dozing, and hallucinated that he was running over his wheel dogs. Before that became a reality, the musher made camp in an exposed spot with nothing to break the wind. Lee was cold, very cold, in his cheap sleeping bag.
He was awakened by a dog team.
“I’m shattered, simply shattered,” Garth whispered to Lee before continuing toward Iditarod.
Shivering in his sleeping bag, Lee pondered the Englishman’s strange remark.
Daily mushed up the river into the ghost town at 6:30 P.M. on Monday, March 11. I trailed in ten minutes later. Passing Iditarod’s skeletal buildings, I studied the broken windows for ghosts. I didn’t see any, but the ruins had a presence to them.
Most of the race staff had already flown north, leaving Rich Runyan, a ham radio operator, to serve as the checker for us stragglers in the rear of the field. A veterinarian was also left at the checkpoint. He was packed and itching to get out as soon as Iditarod’s air force could rescue him.
Doc Cooley, the mushing vet, had his leased dogs bedded down nearby on the frozen beach. They were a feisty bunch of champion-caliber sled dogs, the same ones Minnesota musher John Patten had recently mushed to victory in Montana’s 500-mile Race to the Sky. Cooley wasn’t traveling fast enough to tire the dogs out, and they continually snarled and scrapped amongst themselves. Despite the hair-curling growls, blood was seldom, if ever, spilled. The fighting was largely for show. The snarls amounted to trash talk among a team of highly competitive athletes. Daily and I nicknamed his dogs “Doc’s wolf pack.”
My dogs came alive as I dug through my checkpoint supply sacks for whitefish. I had to anchor Harley’s neck line with my second snow hook to prevent a mob assault on the rations. I threw the team frozen slices of liver and chunks of lamb.
A hole was chopped in the river ice for water. But the water was stained dark yellow from the area’s high mineral content. Yuck. So, using melted snow for dog water, I pumped hot stew into the dogs until even Harley shied away from his bowl. As they slept off the feast, I cooked a second meal to dish out in the morning. My team wasn’t budging for at least 12 hours, and not until I heard the dogs barking again. I wanted to erase all memory of that last hard march.
After ten days on the trail, my feet were rotting inside those clammy bunny boots. If I didn’t dry them out, I might as well just grab the axe and start amputating.
Daily shunned cabins. He much preferred to sleep under the stars. Leaving us to share the warm cabin floor, Tom stretched out near the dog teams, looking forward to a peaceful night.
The first disturbance was Garth. Lurching to a stop at 3:30 A.M., the Englishman staggered off his sled and headed inside the cabin, leaving his dogs to fend for themselves in an exhausted pile.
I was sewing harnesses when the Englishman threw open the cabin door and plopped down in a chair by the stove.
“I’m shattered, simply shattered,” Garth announced. The crazy Englishman had made the 90-mile trip from Ophir in a scorching nine hours.
Flipping on his headlamp at the second disturbance, Daily confronted a dazzling apparition. It was Kuba, nicknamed “the German from Mars,” owing to the array of reflective tape on the adventurer’s gear.
The bleary-eyed musher’s patience eroded as Kuba turned his own dogs loose. The three newcomers pranced through the camp, sniffing everything and sending our four teams into a frenzy. Several members of Doc Cooley’s wolf pack got loose, and a new round of fighting erupted.
Enough was enough. Daily stomped into the cabin and roused Cooley. “Doc,” he demanded, “you’ve got to come and stop the killing.”
Cooley yawned, staggered outside, and grabbed his loose dogs. He tied the team off to a flimsy stake and trudged back to the cabin. Daily heard the wolf pack renew its bickering, but he was too tired to care anymore.
My dogs had chewed a total of three harnesses in seven months of training. I figured I was being cautious packing five spares and shipping three more harnesses to various checkpoints. By Skwentna, Daphne alone had shredded three harnesses. The chewing epidemic was just beginning. Other dogs, particularly Rainy, suddenly acquired a taste for harness webbing. By Iditarod, the spares were all in use, and at least half the team was sporting harnesses with patches made from other harnesses beyond repair.
Doc and Daily left Iditarod Tuesday morning. My own departure was derailed by a sudden outbreak of chewing. So it was that I was polishing my seamstress skills in the cabin, 40 minutes later, when a dog team came trotting up from the river.
“Barry, I’ve been waiting for you.”
Lee was mortally tired. You could tell by his puffy red eyes. But his smile was as wide as ever. We talked for a little while, and then I had to go. My team had had 15 hours of rest, and the dogs were getting antsy.
The 65-mile trail to Shageluk was demonic enough to satisfy my wildest masochistic desires. From the crest of each hill, I’d see another, sometimes several more hills, unblemished save for tiny white scratches rising to the sky through trees and brush. Each faint white streak represented the trail climbing yet another distant hill. There was no end to them. Some of the upward slopes were so steep that I could have done chin-ups on the handlebar. On the descents, the dogs spilled down the powdery gutter in a cloud of paws and fur.
Doc and Daily were barely two hours ahead, but the wind had largely erased their tracks on the hilltops. And most of the markers were down. I didn’t have too much trouble following the surviving clues in the daylight, but I worried that Lee would be traveling blind after dark. So I made a point of grabbing fallen markers as I passed them, and replanting the reflective sticks in the snow, much as Lee was doing for Garth and Peele. With Iditarod’s front-runners nearing the coast, the doorway to Nome was closing on those of us in the back of Iditarod’s field. We each had to do what we could to keep it open.
The lesbian was acting strangely. She kept stopping and freezing, with her head cocked as if she was listening. At first it alarmed me — I kept waiting for a moose or a bear to rise out of the brush. But nothing happened. Her pauses had a trancelike quality, as if she was lost in thought. Yelling had no effect.
“Earth to Rainy. Earth to Rainy,” I said, wondering if she was having a mental breakdown. The thought was scary. The lesbian was our main navigator. Without her, Harley would be impossible to control. Chad, Raven, and the Rat were good for fill-in duty, but that was about it. I needed Rainy. So I waited, and watched, and wondered what the bossy little dog was seeing in her mind’s eye.
I caught up with Daily about nine that night, near another deserted fish camp. It was a woodsy stretch and, for a while, we lost the trail in deep snow. But within thirty minutes, the markers led us out of the trees and into a village street. A crowd of children escorted us to a building decorated with an official Iditarod checkpoint banner. The building was closed and dark. Daily and I were trying to decide what to do when checker Arnold Hamilton roared up on a snowmachine. He steered us to a field behind the school, where Cooley’s team was already resting.
“You’re the reporter,” Hamilton said as he returned on the snowmachine. The checker’s son was now aboard. The boy handed me a bucket of hot water. “I read your stories. You’re my pick to get the Red Lantern.”
“What!” I cried. “How can you say that? I’m miles ahead of Lee and Garth.”
Hamilton laughed.
“I’ll find some way to disqualify them,” he said.
Villagers in Unalakleet, 265 miles ahead, lined the ten-foot-high snow banks of the street cheering the first teams to reach the coast.
Susan Butcher had reclaimed the lead on the 90-mile trail from Eagle River to Kaltag. Her dogs were fed and resting before Barve trailed her into the village 45 minutes later. Another 25 minutes passed before he was followed by Buser, Osmar, and Swenson.
Butcher now held a commanding lead in her bid for a record fifth crown. Nome was a mere 200 miles away, and the performance of her dogs on the windy coast was legendary. The temperature in Barrow was 30 below and falling. Snow flurries were moving south from the North Slope, and the wind was gathering off the Bering Sea Coast.
A skinned beaver dripped blood in a bucket as it thawed. Welcome to the bush. It was about 11 P.M. as I sat down at the dinner table with Hamilton, his wife, Carolyn, and her son, Keith.
Hamilton quizzed me about my impressions of the land I’d just crossed. The Athabaskan said he knew the area well. On his return from Vietnam, he had spent a year out there alone, running traplines out of a remote cabin. “It was a good place to think,” he said.
Gesturing to the beaver, the villager explained that he was teaching the boy to live off the land, as he had, practicing the lifestyle known as subsistence. After dinner, Keith showed me a litter of pups, which he hoped might someday pull a sled in the great race. Then Hamilton steered me to a bunk where I grabbed a quick nap.
Because we were traveling so far behind the race leaders, the condition of the trail worsened with each passing day, but it was paved with hospitality in Iditarod’s villages.
Peele wasn’t a quitter. It cost him more than $700 in gas and wages, but he and his Nikolai posse tracked Charlie down. He did not begrudge the money. The dog’s harness was snagged on a bush when the searchers found him. He would surely have died without their help. But the ridiculous incident burned up more than 48 hours.
It was Sunday night before Peele mushed into McGrath, driving what was now the unrivaled last-place team. Garth and Lee, the only mushers even close, had left McGrath at least eight hours before, and both had given their teams long breaks in the busy checkpoint.
A reasonable man might have been discouraged. Except for Takotna, which hardly counted because it was so close to McGrath, Peele was headed into no-man’s-land. Snowmachines rarely traveled the 215 miles between McGrath and Shageluk, and a single storm could easily bury the trail, transforming his race into a trek for survival.
But Peele didn’t have much in common with other middle-aged men. On two different occasions the tall Southerner with the shaggy white beard had stood on top of 20,030-foot Mount McKinley. He was the driven sort, a man who took up mushing in Alaska less than a month after undergoing major knee surgery. He had borrowed $40,000 from his retirement fund to pursue this Iditarod dream. The holder of the Red Lantern might have been stubborn to the point of foolishness, but you couldn’t call him a quitter.
The weather held as Peele pushed across the barrens toward Iditarod. He didn’t find many markers left standing, but scanning the horizon with his field glasses he picked out enough to stay on course. He pushed himself relentlessly, limiting his breaks to the absolute minimum needed for the dogs. The effort seemed to be paying off when he mushed into Iditarod within four hours of Lee’s departure.
The old geezer looked ragged to the lone race official left in town. But who wouldn’t? Radio operator Rich Runyan decided that Peele was holding up pretty well for a guy traveling alone out here — some 400 miles behind the leaders.