following painfully short naps in the bunks upstairs.
I was depressed by the news that Barry Lee had scratched in Grayling. It was an ugly day. We hardly finished cooking dog food before the Kaltag checker, operating on orders from Iditarod, had advised us to leave using a tone appropriate for a sheriff delivering an eviction notice. Daily had called him on it, chiding the villager for being “a lackey for race headquarters.” After traveling 18 hours in storm conditions, few of us were in the mood to be rushed. Cooley had bought us the nap time, telling Iditarod headquarters that, in his opinion as a race veterinarian, an afternoon of rest was essential for the dogs.
My first priority was to arrange for Denali’s departure. Entrusting the ungrateful mutt to the checker, I took the opportunity to phone in my third trail column. “Forget what you hear about the Last Great Race being over,” I dictated. “It’s far from over….”
The piece recounted my Yukon adventures, from the trek with Daily and Cooley to the convoy’s night in the Arctic twilight zone. “Some people think traveling in the back of the Iditarod pack is a camping trip,” I concluded. “This is an ordeal.”
Back in the newsroom, the Coach — disgusted by my miserable progress to date — was pleased as he peeked in the file and read about my argument with Daily upon leaving Eagle Island.
“O’D might make it after all,” the Mowth announced.
Even without my efforts, the large block of teams traveling in the rear of Iditarod’s field was attracting notice. An Anchorage television station was referring to us as “the Kaltag Ten.” The number was derived from the official standings released by race headquarters. We knew better. There were eleven Iditarod teams in our convoy. He may have ducked the hoopla in Anchorage, but Doc Cooley was an Iditarod musher now, or none of us deserved to make the claim.
By midafternoon Sunday, the dogs had had six to eight hours of rest, which meant that nap time was over for the mushers. Weather reports carried a strong argument for haste. Another storm was coming.
From the Yukon, the Iditarod Trail climbed a 1,000-foot pass into the Nulato Hills. According to local villagers, the snow was deep on this side of the pass, but slippery thin on the other. A party of Kaltag trappers set out on snowmachines to break a trail for us. We had to get moving before the storm erased their work.
Tom Daily was in a lousy mood. He had squandered his nap time standing in line to make obligatory phone calls, but hadn’t spoken with anyone — no one was home. Cooley, on the other hand, was strangely buoyant. Mixing a cup of hot Tang by the stove, Doc mocked our hardships with an impromptu recital of poems by Robert Service. The performance was then interrupted by Terhune’s angry eruption.
“If your headlamp is missing, I’m sure it’s an accident,” Cooley said.
“Well, I’m sure it’s not,” replied Terhune. “I left it plugged in to the battery pack. That’s got my name on it. If somebody had mistaken it, they would have taken the whole thing. But the battery pack is right here,” he said, showing us the red case with his name clearly printed on the side.
“Whoever took my headlamp, knew what they were doing,” he said, curling his lips in a feral challenge. “One of you is a thief.”
Hard to accept, but Terhune’s logic was sound. The missing headlamp was a freebie provided by Dodge Trucks. Each of us had started the race with an identical one, meaning that there was no telling who had pinched his. No one was sleepy now, and we eyed each other uneasily.
“I’ve got an extra one,” Catherine Mormile announced, breaking the silence. She went out to her sled to get it for Terhune. She also loaned Daily a needle and thread to sew his torn sled bag.
“I could sure use a decent headlamp,” I said, pointing to the toy I’d bought in McGrath.
“You need a headlamp?” said Herrman. “I’ve got an extra you can borrow.”
The trappers were waiting at a rushing open creek a few miles out of Kaltag. Helping hands threw reluctant leaders into the frigid water. More hands were waiting on the other side to pluck our soggy fur balls and steer them onto the trail. The villagers’ teamwork reminded me of crossing Sullivan Creek with Garth and Lee — both now gone.
Once again the Red Lantern belonged to Tom Daily, who followed me out of Kaltag. Crossing the creek, his team tangled. Daily got soaking wet straightening out the mess.
“Be careful,” one of the trappers told him. “The storm coming is the worst I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”
“Great, that’s just wonderful,” said Daily, who by now expected no less from the gods. Though his response was cavalier, Tom noticed that the trappers were geared to the teeth.
Daily generally traveled at night with his headlamp off. But he didn’t want to lose me, and his team kept falling behind. Meanwhile, I kept overtaking the teams bunched ahead. So we worked out a system. Rather than creep in step with the convoy. I took a lot of breaks. Each time I rested with my back on the handlebar, shining my headlamp back toward Kaltag, watching for telltale blinks in the darkness — confirming that Moon-shadow’s musher remained on the march.
We were hit climbing a steep sidehill. Herman’s team shrugged off the frigid breeze rushing up the bare slope, and he made it through the pass. But several of the teams directly behind Sepp balked. The delay caused the dogs to start digging for shelter, shutting the rest of us down like toppling dominoes.
We struggled for maybe 30 minutes — through steadily increasing wind — trying to get the convoy moving. Mushers in the front switched their leaders. They tried dragging dogs forward by hand. Finally, half a dozen of us got together and attempted to walk those teams that were willing past those that wouldn’t budge. It was slow difficult work. The trail’s slippery groove, cut sideways into the slope, was impossibly narrow. The hill, terrifically steep. Heavy sleds kept tipping over and slipping, dragging drivers and wheel dogs downward; while other mushers grappled to arrest the slides.
Our attempt at hand-guiding teams up the sidehill was abandoned when we heard Catherine Mormile cry out.
“Don, help me. Help, help me please,” she pleaded. “I’m cold.”
Wind piercing Mormile’s sweaty snowmachine suit had turned its clammy interior freezing cold. Shivering, she had fumbled for her sleeping bag, then panicked when she couldn’t get it open.
Cooley took charge. “Has anybody got hand warmers?”
We clustered around Catherine Mormile’s sled, blocking the wind with our backs. Kneeling within the ring of parkas, Cooley stripped off the stricken musher’s boots and wet socks. He slipped on dry socks, loaded with fresh warmers. Then we guided Mormile into her sleeping bag. Daily stripped off his own gloves and fitted them on her hands. Through it all, Don Mormile stood by looking rather helpless.
Feeling the warm glow of the chemical heaters, Catherine was stricken with another sort of fear. “Does this mean I’m disqualified because I can’t take care of myself anymore?” she asked, sobbing.
We laughed with relief. “Catherine,” someone said, mock-seriously, “We’re going to have to confiscate your promotional mail packet.”
The crisis derailed our efforts to escape the hill.
Daily crawled inside his sled bag in full gear, spreading his sleeping bag over the top as a blanket. He was warm, but spent a miserable night racked by cramps.
Determined to feed my dogs a decent meal, I carved a hole in the side of the hill and formed a windscreen over the cooker with my body and the sled. It was only marginally successful. Although I burned twice the normal amount of alcohol, it only produced a tepid pot of water. The dogs didn’t seem too impressed by my hillside cuisine.
Frustration set in as I sought refuge in my sled bag for the fifth time. Nibbling on a salmon belly cheered me a little, but gloom invaded the cocoon. What a screwed up run. Fifteen miles and we were shut down again. At this rate, Nome would be another 20 days away. The novelty of the convoy action had worn off, and Terhune’s grumbling was making a lot of sense. I might not have the fastest team, but the Coach and I had trained our dogs better than to quit midway up a hill.
Atop the pass, Sepp Herrman mushed through a churning white-out. The German woodsman had never seen anything like it: as fast as his leaders might break a path, the surging drifts filled it back in, pressing inward against the dogs and sleds following behind.
