dispute. He locked the cabin door and went to sleep. A few hours later, Daily’s rest was disturbed by pounding. It was Mugsy. The villager was drunk, and he was furious at finding the door to his warm cabin locked. Daily explained his orders, which just made the old musher angrier.
“Let me in,” the man cried, “or I’m going to kill your dogs.”
This thrust Daily into a dilemma. If he opened the door, he sensed that Mugsy was going to come in swinging. Tom didn’t want to fight the poor old guy. All he wanted was a few more hours of rest.
“Mugsy, if you’re going to kill them, go do it, get it over with. I’m going back to sleep.”
Leaving the sled dogs in peace, the old musher headed up the street.
After dinner I went to check on my dogs. They were sleeping peacefully, so I went over to the gym. I talked for a while with the checker, a local musher, and one of the race judges. Al Marple had flown in to Unalakleet that afternoon to “give us a pep talk” and make sure we backpack mushers didn’t overstay our welcome.
“Don’t lump me in with the guys who stayed three days at Eagle Island,” I said, feeling defensive. “Doc, Daily, and I spent that time battling storms on the Yukon. We got into Eagle Island at night and pulled out in the morning, same as we’re doing here.”
Marple appreciated my attitude. “We want to see you guys make it,” he said.
There was a shower in the gym bathroom. I let the burning steam wash away 900 miles of pain. The shower left me richly satisfied, but dizzy. I collapsed on the hardwood floor of the gym next to Cooley. I didn’t bother with a sleeping bag, I just stretched out on top of my suit. A feather mattress couldn’t have felt any finer.
Shouts awakened us a few hours later. I knew that voice. Who was it? Oh yeah, it was that crazy old musher. I fell back asleep as a Unalakleet public safety officer, Alaska’s village equivalent of a policeman, hauled the drunk away.
A cloud of smoke enveloped the streetlight. A pair of snowmachines throbbed in the street below. Doc, Williams, and I carefully lined up our dog teams facing the deserted intersection. It was 4 A.M. I was last in line.
The snowmachines took off around the corner. Doc and Williams charged after them. Chad got the call and seemed enthusiastic. He leapt in the air as I pulled the hook. Following his cue, my entire 13-dog team sprang forward with manic intensity.
I cut the turn too close. My sled climbed the berm and launched sideways into the air. I hung on, flying parallel with the ground. The sled finally crashed on its side, knocking the wind out of me, but I didn’t let go. The snow-covered street was icy and hard-packed, a perfect surface for dragging. The dogs seized the opportunity to set a new kennel record, dragging me 500 yards.
I wouldn’t have minded the dragging — I was used to that — but Chad and the wild bunch had so much fun that he lost track of the teams ahead. The snowmachines, Doc, and Williams — all had cleared out before I regrouped and righted the sled. Ahead of us the street was deserted. My bold leader didn’t have a clue where to go next.
“Go ahead! Go ahead!” I shouted, sending Chad charging forward in hopes he would pick up the scent. There were side streets and snowmachine tracks leading everywhere, but no Iditarod markers. I would get lost in Unalakleet, the biggest labyrinth on the trail, where I hadn’t talked to anyone about the route out of town — because we had arranged for guides.
I saw a light in the window of a nearby cabin. Could someone actually be awake at 4 A.M.? Probably not, I decided. But what did I have to lose. I threw the sled on its side again and jammed the snow hook in the ground. Then I climbed the icy berm by the side of the road and dropped into the yard of the cabin with the lighted window, thinking this was a great way to get myself shot.
An older woman opened the door. She stared at me, eyes widening, dubious. I realized that I filled her doorway in my bulky suit, which was smeared in snow from my dragging adventure. The headlamp shone crookedly from the side of my natural wool hat. A red face mask concealed all but my eyes and nose.
“Can I help you?” she said, in a perfectly reasonable voice.
“I was hoping you might be able to point me toward the Iditarod Trail,” I said, gesturing toward my dog team, parked out in the street. “We’re sort of lost.”
“Oh my,” the woman said. “I think it’s by the river, but I really have no idea.”
I thanked her and returned to my team. Nothing was going easy this morning. I was trying to decide what to do next when a snowmachine cruised up. It was a village cop. Chuckling at my story, he offered to lead the team out of town.
Jumping on the sled, I pulled the hook and — watched my leader lie down.
The officer zipped away. He returned before I finished placing Harley and Rainy in lead.
“Thought you were following me.”
“So did I, but Wonder Dog had other ideas.”
The officer lead me through a winding series of streets, past the last line of cabins, to a marker at the bottom of a small hill. “Here’s your trail,” he shouted over the wind and the whine of his engine. “Good luck.”
I thanked the officer, delighted to be on my way. He gunned his snowmachine, fishtailing the rear in a tight circle, and buzzed away.
A sheet-metal sign rang in the wind, which had intensified now that I was beyond the sheltering streets of the village. In the distance, I could see the outline of hills against the stars. But a dark, churning haze gripped the flat landscape directly ahead. It looked mean out there. I walked up the line, petting most of the dogs, and retightening the booties on the Rat and Screech, who still had sore feet. Little Cricket watched me, shyly wagging her tail. “What a brave little girl,” I said, stroking her chin.
Standing on the runners, I rezipped my suit, buttoning the top button. I adjusted my layered face masks, gloves, and mitts, and then — lacking any other good excuse for delay — pulled the hook.
“All right! Rainy, Harley. All right! Let’s Go!”
Dodge Corporation was bankrolling a toll-free Iditarod information line. Jeff Greenwald, an old buddy, dialed the 800 number several times a day to track my progress from his home in San Francisco. Information was sketchy regarding teams like mine, traveling far behind the leaders. Making matters worse, the folks answering Dodge’s phone knew next to nothing about mushing. They were merely reading statistics faxed from Iditarod headquarters.
One of the numbers readily available was the size of each musher’s team. Jeff noticed early on that my dog team was steadily shrinking. Their numbers had dropped from 17 to 15 dogs when I had left Gnat and Daphne in Skwentna. He saw I was down to 14 after Grayling, where I had left Skidders to recuperate; and that I had just 13 dogs upon leaving Kaltag, where I had dumped Denali.
The statistics didn’t explain that dropped dogs were placed in the care of checkers and veterinarians, or the effort devoted to evacuating them via Iditarod’s volunteer air force. The numbers didn’t hint at the attention dropped dogs received from prisoners at a state corrections facility near Anchorage, where the dogs were held for pickup by designated handlers.
Jeff had no way of knowing that most of my dropped dogs were already lounging in the woods at Cyndi’s house in Wasilla, and that — except for Skidders, with his bandaged rear paw — there wasn’t anything wrong with them. All Jeff knew was that my dog team, like most in the race, was getting smaller. He asked the people answering Iditarod’s toll-free phone what was happening.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Jeff was told. “A lot of people ask about that. The dogs must be dying in those bad storms.”
“Man,” Jeff whispered, hanging up the phone, “it must be a bummer for Brian — having all those dogs die!”
Six dogs did die over the course of the race. Two dogs in Adkins’s team died of exposure while he was saving Whittemore’s life out on the ice. Mackey had a dog drop dead of heart failure outside McGrath. Suter had a poodle die of exposure in a storm near Unalakleet and had to drop the rest of his shivering poodle victims before continuing on, pulled by the team’s true sled dogs. More violent were the deaths of two dogs and the injuries to two others in Rollin Westrum’s team.
Westrum was nearing White Mountain, about 85 miles from the finish line, when his team was illuminated in the glaring headlight of a snowmachine.
