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
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 consomme with garden vegetables, sauteed 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.
CHAPTER 7. Story of the Day
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
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
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
