won’t be sticking around.”
The checker invited us to come by his cabin after we finished with the dogs. “Haven’t got much left, but my wife will fix you something. I’m glad somebody here remembers the Iditarod is a race.”
Jon Terhune hadn’t forgotten. As Daily, Doc, and I arrived, the irritable Soldotna musher was tightening the straps, resealing his sled bag. Stuck in this lousy slough since Wednesday, Terhune was anxious to escape. He was sick of listening to Linda Plettner, sick of that Gunnar kid, the Mormiles, and those others. He thought they were a bunch of sorry whiners, every one of them. He planned to ditch them once and for all.
Earlier that afternoon, Terhune and the other seven mushers encamped at Eagle Island had pitched in $50 apiece and hired the trapper to break a new trail to Kaltag. They were unaware that Niggemyer, the race manager, had already cut a deal with the trapper, filling his snowmachine with gas for that same mission. The trapper kept a straight face as the mushers approached him with their request. They wanted him to wait until morning, but the trapper was impatient to get back to Grayling. The trip north was hundreds of miles out of the way. So the trapper struck out for Kaltag that evening, carrying his unexpected $400 bonus.
Another cold night was forecast on the river, at least 30 below. Plettner and the others resolved to wait until daylight, giving the trail more time to set. Terhune thought they were fools.
“Screw you people,” he said, stomping out of the stove-heated mushers’ quarters. “I’m leaving.”
Plettner, Herrman, and the Mormiles felt differently. They were angered at Conatser’s refusal to share supplies abandoned by previous teams, and his stinginess in doling out alcohol for their stoves. Several went so far as to accuse the checker of creating the shortage by bartering away his checkpoint reserves. They had complained to Iditarod as a group.
Before we arrived, Bill Chisholm had flown in to Eagle Island to sort out the dispute. The race judge had marching orders from Kershner to get the trailing pack teams moving. Accordingly, Chisholm not only backed up Conatser’s decisions on supplies; he warned the mushers not to expect special help. The visit ended in a confrontation between Herrman and Chisholm, a neighbor of Swennie’s who was familiar with the German’s hard- ass reputation as a dog trainer and Brooks Range survivalist.
“Sepp,” the race judge said, “I bet you never see the coast.”
The comment infuriated Herrman, whose pride was already suffering from mistakes he had made early in the race. True, he hadn’t pushed his dogs. He’d been playing nursemaid ever since the starting line. But Sepp no longer doubted that he’d make it to Nome, if only to spit in the judge’s face.
There were hard feelings all the way around. I wasn’t about to take sides. Herrman and the other mushers were foolish to ask for official help. I’d seen that lesson played out many times.
“From the moment Swenson crossed under that arch, we’ve been on borrowed time,” I warned the group. “Iditarod is going to want to wrap up the race — any way they can. If we want to get to Nome, we have to take care of ourselves. Ask for food, fuel, anything — and you’re risking disqualification. I’ve seen it happen.”
The others seemed surprised. They weren’t considering the logistics supporting our extended adventure. This was day 14. More than a dozen mushers were already in Nome celebrating with Swenson. The support network of veterinarians, pilots, ham-radio operators, and other volunteers was already fragmenting. The majority of these volunteers came from Anchorage or other urban areas. The thrill of providing us with 24-hour service, sleeping on hard floors, and eating camp meals was, by now, wearing thin. The big award banquet in Nome, due to start at about six on Sunday evening, marked the end of the race for most people involved.
Even so, our situation looked pretty good to me. We had Doc Cooley, our own private veterinarian. We could expect help from Iditarod supporters in the villages ahead, where our supplies were still waiting. Most important, within the group here we had the sheer dog power needed to break our own trail to Nome. Strength in numbers was something Daily, Doc, and I keenly appreciated after our hard-fought drive from Grayling.
“I can’t BELIEVE they’re waiting for us,” Daily confided later, echoing my own thoughts. “But it sure is nice.”
The Yukon swallowed the trail before his eyes. Terhune was discouraged, but refused to backtrack. Every mile brought him closer to Nome and farther away from those slackers in the slough.
Grueling hours later, the musher saw a light approaching. It was weaving like crazy, left and right, left and right. As it drew closer, the light straightened out, taking a direct line toward him. It was the trapper on his snowmachine. The man had lost the trail on the return trip from Kaltag. He was searching for it when he spotted Terhune’s headlamp.
“You’re the only one that came?” shouted the trapper, doubting the evidence of his own eyes.
Terhune shrugged.
The trapper’s freight sled was loaded with extra cases of Heet alcohol fuel, which he was delivering to the checkpoint back at Eagle Island. He unpacked a handful of bottles and gave them to Terhune. The trail was open, the villager said, but he didn’t think it would last. “Try and avoid the places where it goes back and forth,” he added, “because I’ve been lost for an hour.”
In the middle of the night, the trapper threw open the door to our warm room on Eagle Island and staggered inside. Clutching an open bottle of liquor, he stumbled over the mushers slumbering in his path.
“What’re you all doing here?” he shouted, quite drunk. “Put inna trail alla way to Kaltag. You shoulda gone. Shoulda gone.”
At the river’s edge, the trail disappeared — no other word fit. Rainy cast about, perplexed. I ran to the front of the team and calmed her, searching for clues in the hard white crust. Nine dog teams had come this way in the last hour or so — channeled along the river through about eight winding miles of waist-high brush. Not a sign of the traffic remained. Wind whipping across the exposed flats had erased every scratch, every pawprint of their passage.
A churning white cloud swallowed the river ahead. It was a ground blizzard, a surface-hugging soup of wind-whipped powder. My team was perched on the edge of a gray-white limbo, violent and surreal. Our vantage point on the brink offered no refuge, nor did the scrubby bushes behind us. We were horribly exposed to the wind raking the frozen river. The dogs didn’t like the looks of this. If I wanted to avoid a forced camp, we had to keep moving.
I took Rainy and Harley by the neck line, preparing to lead them by foot, when Daily’s frightened voice cut through the storm.
“Wait, wait,” he cried, halting his dogs behind mine. “My hand is frozen!”
Fresh out of the checkpoint, Tom had noticed his hands felt cold in those high-tech gloves. Stripping off the outer shells, he inserted a chemical hand warmer into each mitt. That effort was undermined by spindrift powder, which instantly collected on his thin polypropylene inner liners. With the shells back on, the snow melted, and Daily’s hands became soaked, and his fingers became even colder. He forced the discomfort from his mind, waiting for the little chemical packs to kick in. That stoicism proved misguided; one of the warmers was a dud.
Coming up behind me, Daily rudely discovered that he couldn’t even flex the fingers on his chilled hand.
My dogs were lying down in the wind. Not understanding his predicament, I angrily urged him to hurry.
“Give me five minutes.”
“Make that two minutes,” I snapped. “Tom, we gotta go!”
I ran back and helped Daily swap his wet liner for a dry one, slipping another warmer in the mitt. As the two of us fumbled, the dogs on both teams began digging in, instinctively carving shelters from the drifts.
“I think we should consider turning around,” said Tom, flexing his stiff hand inside a mitt, uncertain whether it was damaged.
“We are NOT going back!” I declared, angry that he would even suggest such a thing. “We’re two hours out — that’s two hours closer to Nome.”
If I had to weather another storm, I wanted to do it right there, without surrendering an inch. The situation was infuriating. After all the trouble we had gone through to catch those other teams, here Tom and I were in last place again, falling farther behind by the minute. And why? Patching harnesses might have cost me a few minutes, but that wasn’t the main reason. It was because we sat on our asses and let the others get away — that’s why! I’d be damned before I’d turn around.
Sensible as ever, Daily was equally adamant. This was a terrible place to stop. Dogs couldn’t rest here. There was no way to feed them. What if the storm didn’t break for hours? Or days? We risked weakening our dogs through
