by morning, and that might help a lot. A hard, fast trail would do wonders for his dogs’ spirits.
A shrieking wind awakened Barry three hours later. “Oh, my God,” the musher whispered, sticking his head out of the sled bag. It was blowing again. And it was warmer, much warmer out, maybe zero — a sure sign another storm was coming.
Lee got a rude surprise when he slipped on his bunny boots. The left toe was rock hard. A crack must have developed in the rubber vapor barrier. Moisture had seeped inside and frozen, destroying the borrowed boot’s insulation.
Lee headed his team up the trail. He had gone two or three miles before the tracks left by the snowmachiners disappeared in new drifts. The powder was as deep here as anything he’d seen. The situation was spinning out of control. Barry figured that Eagle Island was 35 miles farther. He had cooked every bit of food he had the night before, gambling that full bellies would carry his dogs the distance in a single hard march. That plan seemed wildly optimistic now. Conditions weren’t necessarily better on the trail behind him, where new drifts probably covered his path. Aware that a wrong decision here could prove fatal, Barry Lee turned to the one advisor who never failed him.
“God,” prayed the musher, “every other clue up the line has told me to go on. What’s going on here? Am I supposed to finish this race?”
Lee received an immediate response, a message sensed, rather than heard.
“No.”
The answer was so emphatic, Lee decided that his personal fears were talking. He asked again. “Am I supposed to finish this race?”
“NO.” He actually heard that. “YOU NEED TO GO HOME.”
Barry turned his leaders around for the last time. It was 25 miles back to the village, and every step became a battle. Lee was soaking wet and shivering. His foot was cold. His dogs rubbed hair off their hind legs plowing through the crusty drifts, but the musher kept driving them. He had no choice. He had no food to give them, and they were weakening by the hour.
Four miles out of Grayling, Barry Lee emptied everything but his sleeping bag out of the sled. He wanted to shave every spare ounce. It was going to be close, he knew, but the dogs would make it. He was now confident of that much.
Oddly enough, the musher drew some comfort from the day’s hardship. His unseen advisor was wise. This team never would have made it to Eagle Island. He had a season of mistakes to learn from. For now, retreat offered the only path toward salvation.
Doc’s wolf pack was faltering. After Blackburn’s cabin, the signs of stress were becoming unmistakable. Up and down his gang line Cooley’s dogs flopped on their backs, squirming in the snow with each pause. Their snarls and squabbling showed that the dogs weren’t fatigued in the physical sense. We weren’t traveling fast enough to tire his leased champions. But even the best lead dogs can only take so much pressure.
Daily shared the trail-breaking duties on this warm, sunny afternoon. But his old leader was slower than a glacier. It drove Doc crazy following the other team. He couldn’t take more than a mile of Tom’s creeping pace before impatiently reclaiming the lead, and then Cooley’s leaders would resume their games. At one point, Doc was trying to change his leaders in the deep snow when he tripped and fell, completely burying himself. The veterinarian popped back up, cursing, laughing, and almost crying as he spit out snow. My offer to put on snowshoes and blaze the trail myself didn’t help.
“Snowshoes? God no,” Cooley said, horrified. “We’ll be out here forever.”
In a deep section between two islands, we came across a half-buried bicycle. The powdery river had evidently defeated the specially rigged twin tires on each wheel. Judging from the tracks, the rider had continued on foot. We braced ourselves for the appearance of a body. Instead, we soon encountered an Athabaskan trapper traveling by snowmachine. Watching the winds the day before, the Indian from Grayling knew that any mushers left on the river had to be struggling. He’d come out scouting for us.
The trapper dug into his supplies, and, in short order, we three were sipping hot coffee and chewing strips of dried salmon. And the Indian had surprising news. A “whole bunch of teams” were still camping at Eagle Island, and the checkpoint lay little more than an hour away by dog team, he said.
I was famished and complimented the trapper on the salmon.
“You like them? Help yourself,” he said, handing me a baggy filled with the chewy strips.
Gunning his snowmachine, the trapper looped around and streaked back toward Eagle Island, repacking our new trail.
Swennie’s victory produced a weeklong orgy of front-page stories and special in-state broadcast reports. Elsewhere his victory was briefly noted, then the race swiftly faded from attention. The fate of the 50-odd teams left on the trail hardly rated a mention. Even in Alaska, most of the sports-page ink was devoted to baseball spring training, now entering its meaningless second week.
Four time zones away, television station WDCA played up Washington D.C.’s local Iditarod angle one last time. My participation in the race had already been the subject of several local television and newspaper reports. Now WDCA combined their interviews with my family with a home video of the start and a network story about Swenson’s victory. Assuming the Iditarod was over for everyone, the station erroneously reported that Washington’s musher had finished in sixtieth place.
As the newscast drew to a close, the anchors bantered about the incredible sequence of events that had placed me — the son of a once-prominent D.C. attorney — on a dog sled in Alaska.
“At least he’s not a lawyer,” anchor Jim Vance said.
CHAPTER 9. The Kaltag Eleven
Dusk was near as I parked in the Iditarod village taking root in the slough. “HOW LONG DO YOU PLAN TO STAY?” asked Eagle Island checker Ralph Conatser, a hard look in his eyes. Dogs were sleeping or stretching over long beds of straw. Smoke rose from several campfires. Heaps of supply sacks and trash were scattered in the crusty, urine-stained snow.
The stormy 60-mile trek up the Yukon had taken us more than 30 hours. Conatser tensed as I described our ordeal, mentioning that the dogs needed a good rest. He relaxed as I added, “So we won’t be pulling out until tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, that would be fine, just fine,” said the checker in a much warmer tone.
The scowl returned as Conatser gestured at the other dog teams scattered nearby. Terhune, Linda Plettner, Sepp Herrman, Don and Catherine Mormile had been camping on the island for the past three days. Mark Williams, Gunnar Johnson, and Urtha Lenthar had been in residence nearly that long. Friday’s addition of Doc, Daily, and me brought to eleven the total number of dog teams crowding Conatser’s peaceful retreat. He and his wife even had a visiting cyclist. After intercepting the three of us, the trapper had found Bob, the owner of the abandoned bicycle, struggling up the river on foot, through waist-deep powder. The amused trapper had given the failed Idita-cycler a lift to the checkpoint.
The crowd itself wasn’t unusual. Twice that many Iditarod teams had jammed into the slough after Runyan lead the first wave last Sunday. But hardly seven hours had passed before King launched most of those teams on a new stampede up the Yukon. Mushers traveling in the rear of the field were different, said Conatser. They weren’t racers. They were campers. Look at those wood fires burning in his slough! These damn campers would clear-cut his entire island if he didn’t watch out.
“Some of these people act like they’re never going to leave. They’re eating us out of house and home. And we got one woman here who’s driving me crazy.”
“Daily and I have been chasing these guys for weeks,” I said. “Don’t worry. Now that we’ve caught up, we
