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.
