exposure. It made more sense, he felt, to regroup in the shelter of the slough. He didn’t mention his concerns about the hand; it stung, at least that was a good sign.
The two of us were going at it when Cooley unexpectedly mushed up from behind. The dog-driving veterinarian had been detained at the Conatsers’ cabin, where he had used the couple’s radio phone to confer with Iditarod headquarters.
“Why’d you stop?”
We hurriedly explained the situation.
Doc shook his head. “I don’t do reverse!” he shouted, grinning through frosty whiskers.
With a sharp command, Cooley ordered the wolf pack on by, passing our already snow-covered dogs. Showing nary a trace of hesitation, his team marched into the shrieking void. Daily, whose hand was now wonderfully pliable, and I quickly roused our dogs and chased him.
Terhune followed windbent trail markers into a narrow slough. Something about the shape of the drifts here made him edgy. The snow was a bit too wavy, too sculpted. He didn’t care to imagine the sort of wind conditions required to create this special effect.
Jon was aware that his dogs were nearing their limit. What about that deserted fish camp not too far back? The old buildings weren’t much to look at, but they offered some shelter from the wind. He grabbed his leaders and turned the team around.
Terhune rested the dogs through most of Sunday, waiting for the wind to break. An opening finally came in late afternoon. He took advantage of the calm, but trail conditions proved awful. If a base existed under the waist- deep powder, the musher couldn’t find it. He was angry at his bad luck, tired, and deeply depressed. Four hundred miles distant, Nome seemed impossibly far.
We caught Plettner’s group by midafternoon Saturday. The sky was supremely clear. The Yukon stretched before us, a broad field of glistening white bordered on either side by tiny lines of trees. Our ten-team convoy slowly inched up the massive river’s center. The place made the Big Su look like a racquetball court.
Daily and I remained at the caboose end of the convoy. It was an extraordinary scene. The chain of dog teams stretched a half-mile or more ahead, forming a line of brightly colored caterpillars crossing a desolate white prairie. From my sled runners, I banged off pictures of the procession, catching dog teams arrayed in an arc, stretching from my wheel dogs to the trail-breakers mushing across the distant horizon.
Sepp Herrman’s team abruptly peeled away from the convoy. “I will catch you when I please,” he shouted. Quickly and efficiently, the German made camp on the frozen river. The convoy had barely gained a mile before a wisp of smoke curled from Sepp’s cook pot.
I’d left Eagle Island packing a full cooler of hot dog food. I fed the team a real meal during one of the convoy’s many lengthy delays. It was an eat-and-run situation. I collected the pans as fast as the dogs finished their food. As I picked up Denali’s, the ornery cuss bit my hand. Furious, I bopped him with the pan.
“You ungrateful son of a bitch! I saved your life.”
Watching him slink away, I realized that the earlier pack judgment was right. I resolved to drop the ungrateful slacker the moment we hit Kaltag.
Late in the afternoon, Daily spotted Herrman’s team closing in from behind. The trapper’s reappearance drew an immediate reaction from the front of the convoy. Like the children’s game of telephone, a message was relayed from musher to musher down the line: “Send up, Sepp.”
“Gee,” Herrman said, sending his finely trained leaders jumping out of the trench. “Haw.” The leaders executed a neat left-hand turn and bounded forward, passing us with hardly a sideways glance. I whistled in appreciation.
“Now, that’s a dog team,” I told my own crew. “From now on that’s the kind of performance I’m going to expect from you guys.”
The summons to the head of the convoy marked a turning point for Herrman. The long break at Eagle Island had wrought a welcome change. Tails were up. His leaders were eager to go.
“I have a team back,” Herrman mused, watching his dogs muscle through the deep snow. He mushed past Cooley and Plettner and kept moving straight up the Yukon. Within a few minutes the convoy lurched forward again, with a noticeable burst of speed.
Entering a slough, I saw a dog team on the side of the trail. Word passed back that it was Jon Terhune. I’d never met him before, but I noticed that the gaunt, bearded musher looked pained as the others loudly hailed him. Biting his lip, Terhune fell in behind Daily and me, driving the last dogs in line on the Iditarod Trail.
Call it the Yukon’s farewell kiss. Rising from nowhere, a freak storm enveloped us. Even Herrman was impressed by the sudden unannounced blast. One second he was gazing at the lights of Kaltag. The next, he was battling a windstorm more intense than any he’d ever seen in the Brooks Range, a wilderness known for its extreme weather.
Sepp’s trapline-tough dogs fought their way clear of the localized maelstrom. The rest of us slammed to a dead stop. Chaos descended on the convoy. Mushers were stomping around, yelling at their dogs and jerking lines. All for naught. Survival genes took over as the wind sent our dogs digging for shelter.
My brain may have been foggy from fatigue, but the storm seemed to sweep us into a different surreal dimension. It wasn’t cold or frightening, just weird. Snow drifts reached out and engulfed our convoy like an advancing giant amoeba. Dogs and mushers were transformed into strange statues. Cyrus, still on his feet, whined and jerked on the gang line. My powerhouse pup didn’t like the sea of snow rising around him. Daily hugged one of his dogs, and the two melded together. I slapped myself and rubbed my eyes, but the fantasy world remained.
Then, for the fourth time in the race, I dumped my sled and climbed inside.
Barry Lee slept on his decision to scratch. In the morning, he again prayed while attending the Sunday service at Grayling’s Arctic Mission, but nothing was added to that “go home” message.
Lee’s remaining doubts were resolved by a telephone conversation with Niggemyer in Nome.
“Barry,” the race manager said, “there’s a lot of guys getting belt buckles this year who are missing pieces of themselves. I can’t help you back there.”
Lee signed the damn papers and began dealing with the logistics of flying his dog team home from a Yukon River village. And what about that gear he’d abandoned on the river? The cooker alone was worth an easy $100. Lee, awash in the personal and financial ruins of his dream, couldn’t afford to throw away anything valuable.
The musher tracked down Rich Runyan, who was recuperating before tackling the Yukon again. Coming out of Anvik, the wind had blown so hard, the radio operator had crouched down on the big snowmachine and barreled up the frozen river with his eyes closed. Closed! It was crazy, but he couldn’t see where he was going anyway.
The sky was, for the moment, clear. Runyan felt sorry for Barry and agreed to help him with a salvage mission. The men disconnected the sled loaded with radio equipment and hooked Lee’s empty dogsled to the snowmachine. Riding double, they buzzed out of the village.
The river cache was easy to find. From half a mile or more away, Lee could see two men digging his castoffs out of the drifts. It was the trapper and Bob the bicyclist. Their snowmachine had run out of gas returning down the Yukon. After walking nearly ten miles, the pair had found Lee’s tracks, followed by odd pieces of wind-blown gear. They were in the process of searching the drifts for a sled and, possibly, a body.
Trading misadventures, the four Yukon survivors had a good laugh at each other’s expense. Runyan’s snowmachine could only carry one passenger at a time. Leaving Lee to repack the dogsled, Runyan ferried the trapper back to the village.
Bob was in no mood to wait. Vowing to hoof it to Grayling, he strapped on Lee’s old snowshoes. Barry warned him about the screwy bindings, but Bob the bicyclist — showing the same spirit that had got him this far — wouldn’t listen. The musher smiled as he watched Bob stumble several hundred sweaty yards before finally admitting defeat. The two waited together on the river for Runyan’s return.
“All right, who’s got my headlamp?” Terhune demanded, scanning the mushers slowly stirring in Kaltag’s mushers’ quarters.
No one paid him much attention. Most of us were bleary-eyed, struggling to collect our thoughts and gear
