runner plastic and repacking. Four hours later I was busying myself with the sled. My dogs were getting anxious. Raven and Spook were barking. Digger was leaping in place. I had my back to the sled when the team jerked the hook free and bolted. The team dragged my empty sled about a hundred yards before Redington and two other guys caught the dogs.
“I don’t think they need more rest,” Old Joe said.
Barry Lee had been warned: Expect a long 45 miles from Skwentna to Finger Lake. “It doesn’t look like it, but it’s all uphill,” Bobby told him. “You’re rising toward Rainy Pass.”
With his brother’s comments in mind, Barry tried to ignore his team’s plodding pace, but disappointment was gnawing at him. Though his dogs acted happy, the team was just crawling.
I caught Lee right after he finished changing booties. Aware that my dogs were faster, he ordered his team over to a parallel snowmachine path, clearing the way for me to pass.
Behind me, Lee’s dogs broke through the crusty side trail. While he struggled to pull the team back to the packed snow, many of his dogs took advantage of the distraction to kick or pull off the booties that had just been placed on their feet with painstaking care. Politeness had just cost Barry another 20 minutes of work.
Early Monday afternoon Joe Redington, Sr. completed his required 24-hour layover in Skwentna. I had my dogs off to the side and was tossing out snacks when the old racer barreled past.
“Go get ’em, Joe!”
He flashed a familiar weathered smile.
Sparks shot upward from a roaring log. Heat had melted a circular wall, six feet high, in a surrounding snow drift. Dewey Halverson, his face lit by flames reflecting off the glassy walls, had the other Finger Lake volunteers in hysterics with his impressions of other mushers.
The checkpoint consisted of a cluster of tents in a clearing between tall spruce trees. Accommodations for mushers were sparse. We had a floorless tent, heated by a small sheet-metal stove. Spruce boughs served as bedding.
After tending my dogs, I headed for the tent carrying a fat ice wad of used booties. Most were castoffs from other teams, which I’d snagged en route. My own booty situation was approaching a crisis. The icy trail had already shredded several hundred, wiping out my reserves. Examining my frozen assortment in the mushers’ tent, I picked out several dozen booties in good shape and burned the rest.
Alan Garth, Chase, and I talked by the stove, which hissed with drying gloves and booties. Mark Williams was sleeping soundly nearby.
Chase mentioned that he had never, in all his Iditarods, drawn a decent starting position.
“Yeah,” I said, “I got lucky, but I didn’t know what to do with it.”
Herrman was off in the woods by himself. He couldn’t bear for others to witness his distress. First it had been the heat. Now his dogs were sick. Only 11 dogs left, and 9, NINE, had bloody diarrhea. It looked to Sepp like they had swollen tonsils as well. The German had a theory about the cause. Living at his remote cabin in the Brooks Range, his dogs hadn’t been exposed to the viruses common in populated areas. They had never had a chance to build immunity to the diseases carried by the other teams. Up north, the trapper depended on no one but himself. He didn’t need or want any help now. Those nosy Iditarod officials could just mind their own business.
For 36 hours Sepp kept the fire going under his cook pot as he camped near Finger Lake. Using snow melted by the gallon, the trapper nursed and hand-fed his poor sick puppies.
Despair was overwhelming Barry Lee. Twelve hours had passed since he had set out from Skwentna on the 45-mile run to Finger Lake. He wasn’t absolutely sure, but he doubted anyone was behind him. Every team in this race was faster, and nobody was wasting as much time. What was I thinking of taking so many naps? he asked himself. Yet he felt tired even now. Bone weary. Oh, what was he going to do? This wasn’t just wilderness; it was an emotional wasteland. Tears ran down the musher’s cheeks.
Suddenly Lee sensed a light over his shoulder. Stopping his team, he slowly turned, expecting to see the headlamp from an approaching musher. The light came from no earthly source. A corona reached across the heavens. Shimmering bands formed an arching circle in the sky, reminding the musher of a great circus tent. The lights were an intense, dynamic presence. And so beautiful. Barry divined a message in the display: God had staged this Northern Lights show to let him know everything was going to be OK.
Anchoring his team with two snow hooks, Lee lay on his back in the snow, reveling in the glorious celestial fire. Tears again streamed down his face. This time, tears of joy. “Thank you, God,” whispered Barry Lee, staring up at the wondrous colors.
He was still rejoicing when a real headlamp appeared from behind. It was John Ace, a thick-bearded, barrel- chested musher from Sutton making his sixth run to Nome.
“How far in?” Lee asked.
“Oh, not too far,” said Ace. “Two miles, maybe three.”
Trailing the other musher through a thick stand of tall spruce, Lee sensed a change within himself. Whatever else happened, however grim the situation might get, he would never again feel so low. He had company on this, on any trail. His faith was confirmed. How could it be otherwise? At the moment of Barry Lee’s greatest need, a message had come.
CHAPTER 5. Storm on the Mountain
Leaving the campsite at Finger Lake, I mushed into an inky void. The Northern Lights had faded, and clouds must have rolled in, because there wasn’t a single star shining. Despite new batteries, my headlamp merely poked at the darkness with its narrow, ineffectual beam. Maybe my eyes were shot from staring at the bonfire, but the night was blacker than black. So it was that I had a blind man’s grip on the sled — when my dogs plunged over the edge of an invisible chasm.
Worst hill I’d ever run with a dog team. Couldn’t see the bottom. Fresh from their rest, the dogs sprinted down the slope, while I teetered on one slippery runner, stabbing for the brake with my free foot. As unexpectedly as it began, the blind fall ended. The void leveled out, and I continued onward, feeling my terror give way to anger. Someone at the damn checkpoint could have mentioned the killer hill less than a mile ahead. Guess they didn’t want to spoil my fun.
The torture of the unexpected was becoming a familiar theme. Entering the race, I thought my reporting background would more than compensate for my mushing inexperience. I could list Iditarod’s famous hazards: Rainy Pass, the descent into Dalzell Gorge, and the brutal Farewell Burn. I had a general idea of the geography from flying the route, something few other rookies could claim. But aerial observations made at 100 miles an hour were meaningless here on the ground. And writing secondhand stories was no substitute for real life.
Uncertainties were in full swing early Tuesday morning, as I approached the infamous canyon at Happy River Valley.
“Happy River’s got less than half the usual snow,” race manager Jack Niggemyer had warned us at the prerace musher’s meeting. “The steps are in pretty good shape, but they’re narrower than usual. Just be cautious. It’s not a death ride, but it won’t be as easy as last year.”
Barry Lee had heard that he should unfasten the tug lines before attempting the steps, so the dogs couldn’t pull quite as hard on the downhill chutes. He had shared the tip while we camped at Finger Lake. It sounded like a good idea, but I had a feeling — mushing through tonight’s void — that I wouldn’t know I was close to Happy River until the team dragged me over the edge. So I ran all night with the tugs disconnected and a tight grip of my handlebar, expecting to whip into another dark hole any second.
Light was breaking through the trees when I saw a handmade sign nailed to a tree. “SLOW!” it proclaimed, over a sketch of a dog team running down a 75-degree slope. “Hill next four steps.”
If only I’d known the canyon was marked with a traffic hazard sign.
