chewing. So it was that I was polishing my seamstress skills in the cabin, 40 minutes later, when a dog team came trotting up from the river.
“Barry, I’ve been waiting for you.”
Lee was mortally tired. You could tell by his puffy red eyes. But his smile was as wide as ever. We talked for a little while, and then I had to go. My team had had 15 hours of rest, and the dogs were getting antsy.
The 65-mile trail to Shageluk was demonic enough to satisfy my wildest masochistic desires. From the crest of each hill, I’d see another, sometimes several more hills, unblemished save for tiny white scratches rising to the sky through trees and brush. Each faint white streak represented the trail climbing yet another distant hill. There was no end to them. Some of the upward slopes were so steep that I could have done chin-ups on the handlebar. On the descents, the dogs spilled down the powdery gutter in a cloud of paws and fur.
Doc and Daily were barely two hours ahead, but the wind had largely erased their tracks on the hilltops. And most of the markers were down. I didn’t have too much trouble following the surviving clues in the daylight, but I worried that Lee would be traveling blind after dark. So I made a point of grabbing fallen markers as I passed them, and replanting the reflective sticks in the snow, much as Lee was doing for Garth and Peele. With Iditarod’s front- runners nearing the coast, the doorway to Nome was closing on those of us in the back of Iditarod’s field. We each had to do what we could to keep it open.
The lesbian was acting strangely. She kept stopping and freezing, with her head cocked as if she was listening. At first it alarmed me — I kept waiting for a moose or a bear to rise out of the brush. But nothing happened. Her pauses had a trancelike quality, as if she was lost in thought. Yelling had no effect.
“Earth to Rainy. Earth to Rainy,” I said, wondering if she was having a mental breakdown. The thought was scary. The lesbian was our main navigator. Without her, Harley would be impossible to control. Chad, Raven, and the Rat were good for fill-in duty, but that was about it. I needed Rainy. So I waited, and watched, and wondered what the bossy little dog was seeing in her mind’s eye.
I caught up with Daily about nine that night, near another deserted fish camp. It was a woodsy stretch and, for a while, we lost the trail in deep snow. But within thirty minutes, the markers led us out of the trees and into a village street. A crowd of children escorted us to a building decorated with an official Iditarod checkpoint banner. The building was closed and dark. Daily and I were trying to decide what to do when checker Arnold Hamilton roared up on a snowmachine. He steered us to a field behind the school, where Cooley’s team was already resting.
“You’re the reporter,” Hamilton said as he returned on the snowmachine. The checker’s son was now aboard. The boy handed me a bucket of hot water. “I read your stories. You’re my pick to get the Red Lantern.”
“What!” I cried. “How can you say that? I’m miles ahead of Lee and Garth.”
Hamilton laughed.
“I’ll find some way to disqualify them,” he said.
Villagers in Unalakleet, 265 miles ahead, lined the ten-foot-high snow banks of the street cheering the first teams to reach the coast.
Susan Butcher had reclaimed the lead on the 90-mile trail from Eagle River to Kaltag. Her dogs were fed and resting before Barve trailed her into the village 45 minutes later. Another 25 minutes passed before he was followed by Buser, Osmar, and Swenson.
Butcher now held a commanding lead in her bid for a record fifth crown. Nome was a mere 200 miles away, and the performance of her dogs on the windy coast was legendary. The temperature in Barrow was 30 below and falling. Snow flurries were moving south from the North Slope, and the wind was gathering off the Bering Sea Coast.
A skinned beaver dripped blood in a bucket as it thawed. Welcome to the bush. It was about 11 P.M. as I sat down at the dinner table with Hamilton, his wife, Carolyn, and her son, Keith.
Hamilton quizzed me about my impressions of the land I’d just crossed. The Athabaskan said he knew the area well. On his return from Vietnam, he had spent a year out there alone, running traplines out of a remote cabin. “It was a good place to think,” he said.
Gesturing to the beaver, the villager explained that he was teaching the boy to live off the land, as he had, practicing the lifestyle known as subsistence. After dinner, Keith showed me a litter of pups, which he hoped might someday pull a sled in the great race. Then Hamilton steered me to a bunk where I grabbed a quick nap.
Because we were traveling so far behind the race leaders, the condition of the trail worsened with each passing day, but it was paved with hospitality in Iditarod’s villages.
Peele wasn’t a quitter. It cost him more than $700 in gas and wages, but he and his Nikolai posse tracked Charlie down. He did not begrudge the money. The dog’s harness was snagged on a bush when the searchers found him. He would surely have died without their help. But the ridiculous incident burned up more than 48 hours.
It was Sunday night before Peele mushed into McGrath, driving what was now the unrivaled last-place team. Garth and Lee, the only mushers even close, had left McGrath at least eight hours before, and both had given their teams long breaks in the busy checkpoint.
A reasonable man might have been discouraged. Except for Takotna, which hardly counted because it was so close to McGrath, Peele was headed into no-man’s-land. Snowmachines rarely traveled the 215 miles between McGrath and Shageluk, and a single storm could easily bury the trail, transforming his race into a trek for survival.
But Peele didn’t have much in common with other middle-aged men. On two different occasions the tall Southerner with the shaggy white beard had stood on top of 20,030-foot Mount McKinley. He was the driven sort, a man who took up mushing in Alaska less than a month after undergoing major knee surgery. He had borrowed $40,000 from his retirement fund to pursue this Iditarod dream. The holder of the Red Lantern might have been stubborn to the point of foolishness, but you couldn’t call him a quitter.
The weather held as Peele pushed across the barrens toward Iditarod. He didn’t find many markers left standing, but scanning the horizon with his field glasses he picked out enough to stay on course. He pushed himself relentlessly, limiting his breaks to the absolute minimum needed for the dogs. The effort seemed to be paying off when he mushed into Iditarod within four hours of Lee’s departure.
The old geezer looked ragged to the lone race official left in town. But who wouldn’t? Radio operator Rich Runyan decided that Peele was holding up pretty well for a guy traveling alone out here — some 400 miles behind the leaders.
CHAPTER 8. O Mighty Yukon
Happy Trails Brian O’Donoghue.” The sign was nailed to a tall spruce. The forest was plastered with Iditarod greetings, but it was comical seeing my name sharing the same trunk with Jeff King’s, who was more than 300 miles ahead.
Leaving the forest, the trail descended along a frozen slough, spilling into an immense white plain, interrupted only by distant folds of ice, jutting perhaps eight feet high. I sucked in my breath. This had to be the Yukon River.
Close ahead lay the Athabaskan village of Anvik, yet the only hint of man’s presence was a string of tiny trail markers skirting the massive river’s edge. Farther out, a solitary line of trees grew from a small island, pointing like a spear at the vast white expanse.
I felt small.
Skidders had me concerned. My old wheel dog was limping. He was favoring a front paw, so the problem was unrelated to that cut on his rear leg. I stopped and examined him, but couldn’t identify a cause. His tug line remained taut, so I left him in the team. The old stud was still pulling — on three legs — as I mushed the team off the river into Anvik, passing the church where a bell had heralded King’s arrival four days earlier. It was Wednesday at 3:30 P.M. A crowd of shrieking children chased us to the checkpoint at the community lodge.
