smacked her on the nose with my mitt and yelled. The lesbian seemed not to hear me. Her lips were tight. Her attention was completely absorbed by the exodus taking place around us.
My spares were shredded. I decided to let Rainy wear a crooked harness for a while and see if that made an impression. I mushed from the village at 4:45 P.M., led by a unrepentant bitch trailing webbing in the snow.
The trail again rose into rolling hills. Gunnar Johnson repeatedly passed Terhune and me. Each time, his team bogged down as soon as he was in front, forcing us to pass again. Terhune finally exploded.
“If you pass me again,” he yelled at Johnson, “I’m going to knock you right off that goddamn sled.”
“My team’s faster …”
“Your dogs are as fast as the team in front,” Terhune snorted. “They won’t go nowhere without somebody to follow.”
His point was demonstrated as Herrman’s team overtook us. Latching on to the superior team, Johnson left us behind.
“Good riddance,” Terhune shouted at the vanishing hitchhiker.
CHAPTER 11. Off to See the Wizard
Lonely Hill rose from a flat frozen marsh, a solitary sentinel guarding the Iditarod Trail’s entrance to Norton Bay. At the foot of that towering rock stood what, on clear days, you’d have to call a crude plywood shack. On bad days, when searing winds whipped the barren coast, grateful travelers found those worn boards a priceless sanctuary.
The shelter looked bleak and unappealing when I caught the others there. A quick visit inside did nothing to change my opinion. Then again, it was a hospitable night. No wind to speak of, it was relatively mild, with darkness just slipping over the gray horizon. And there was comfort in the company gathered at Lonely Hill. Only Daily was missing from the convoy.
A faint breeze was rising. Cooley wanted everyone to agree to stick together crossing the ice. Plettner protested. She didn’t want to play nursemaid, as she had out on the Yukon. Her dogs were faster, she pointed out, so she had to keep stopping and waiting for the slower teams. Stopping at some arbitrary exposed place, midway across the ice, sounded awful cold to her.
I didn’t like the idea any better. I may have needed help with the deep Yukon snow, but this was entirely different. I was confident that Rainy and Harley, even Chad, Raven, and Rat, could handle the ice. My team was slower, not slower than everybody else’s, but definitely slower than Plettner’s, Herrman’s, Cooley’s and, perhaps, Williams’s. Traveling with the convoy compounded the speed differential. Speedsters shot ahead, then rested awaiting us slow pokes. As soon as teams like mine closed the gap, the fast drivers took off again. The net result was that the teams in the rear of the convoy were getting progressively less and less rest, resulting in our slowing down even more.
Scar was curling so tightly at every pause that he looked like a pretzel. Digger still leaped like a pogo stick when the team paused, but that bouncing exuberance seemed reflexive, almost zombielike. Even Harley seemed a bit shell-shocked, but his trembling had always been disconcerting. I argued that my dogs would be better off setting their own pace.
Cooley hung tough. “Every team in this group is going to get to Nome” he declared. “And that means we’re going to stick together tonight.” He suggested that we all go inside the shelter to discuss it.
Plettner was sick of discussions. The group was making her crazy. She pictured herself holding a machine gun and laughing as she shot us down. Rather than waste more time, she agreed to Cooley’s plan. I went along, albeit reluctantly. Each musher pledged to watch out for the team directly behind. We came up with a code for the headlamps. One blink meant “everything is all right.” Two blinks: “I’m in trouble.”
Based on the order of our arrival at Lonely Hill, Don Mormile owned the last spot in line crossing the ice. He approached me before we broke camp.
“I’m having some trouble with my leaders …”
Mormile was a ceaseless complainer. He whined about checkpoints, about race officials, and about his dogs, which were leased from Redington. I didn’t like Don Mormile. I didn’t trust him. But my personal distaste faded when I saw the fear in his eyes.
“Why don’t you go in front,” I said. The parade order made no difference to me. Not with Nome still 200 miles away. “But you better be watching for me, Mormile. You better be watching.”
Tom Daily enjoyed the climb out of Unalakleet. He hadn’t expected to see so much timber this far north. The sun was so inviting he lay on his sled and napped atop one of the hills. He awakened feeling refreshed.
Reality was waiting in the marsh below. Clouds rolled in, hurling a bitter wind at the Red Lantern musher and his dogs. The only encouraging sign came from Bogus. From the moment he hit the coast, the dog had undergone a personality change. His tug line was taut, and he trotted with the enthusiasm of a pup.
Daily assumed he would catch us in Shaktoolik. But all he found waiting behind the armory were empty beds of straw and a loose pile of race-related trash.
“Oh, you Iditarod mushers. Thank God you’re the last one.” As if it weren’t depressing enough to find us gone, the village checker’s sour greeting stung.
“Let me use a bathroom, and I’m out of here,” Daily said.
The armory’s compost toilet was overflowing owing to heavy use from earlier racers. Tom was directed to a nearby house. The family was very friendly. They ushered him into a room with a toilet in a corner. He was taking off his gear, layer by layer, when he noticed a little Eskimo girl watching. He tried to shoo her from the room, but the little girl kept sneaking back inside, delighted by this new game with the oddly costumed stranger.
“Nothing comes easy on this Iditarod,” the musher mumbled.
Conditions became hellish after Daily left Shaktoolik about eight that night. Loose snow shot across the hard drifts making it tough to see. And while Bogus set a good pace, he kept veering from the marked trail. “Gee! Gee! Gee!” Daily felt as if he had shouted the command a thousand times.
Daily sensed his dogs were nearing their emotional limit. He was being sandblasted by the wind and was starting to doubt his own judgment. The trail ahead looked awful, but Tom wasn’t at all sure he could find the way back to the village. Less than 15 miles out from Shaktoolik, Daily’s sled abruptly stopped. Curling into balls, his dogs lay down in the storm.
Begging my way onto the Associated Press plane one year, I got a look at what mushers faced crossing Norton Sound. The pilot, Larry, swooped low over several teams so Rob Stapleton and I could get pictures. The light was magnificent. The sun, already low on the horizon, threw long shadows off the dog teams, which were cutting a straight line through patches of white snow and dark blue sea ice. As Larry circled and banked, Stapleton and I leaned out the windows, chewing up film in our motor drives.
Mushing across the ice wasn’t bad, not at first. The dogs were rolling. My runners neatly sliced the crusty mounds. In the areas free of snow, numerous white cracks showed through the dark ice, but the visible depth of the fractures was actually a comfort. I caught Mormile whenever I pleased. He was conscientious about checking on me. Every five minutes or so he turned back and flashed his headlamp, awaiting my response. The bouncing lights of the full convoy stretched out half a mile or more into the darkness. Odd shouts floated back across the ice, mixing with the wind and the steady crunch of sleds on the move.
It was the perfect moment for listening to my much-traveled Miles Davis tape. I was still amazed at the journey the tape had made. A race volunteer had found it on the trail leaving Rohn, where the tape had fallen out of my overturned sled. It had then been sent ahead to Unalakleet, via Iditarod’s air force, and the checker there surprised me with it. I had the tape with me, but it was purely a good-luck charm. My Walkman had quit. Too bad, the trumpeter’s wail would have suited this forlorn place.
