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
