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
