confidence in me was shot. Golden Dog buried his head in the snow and wouldn’t budge. I dragged him forward several times, roughly standing him on his feet. He cooperated that far. But when I shouted, “All right,” the cue to move out — Chad sat down.
I tried Raven in single lead. No way. Her tail drooped, and the little princess tried to hide underneath the swing dogs, creating an immediate tangle. I tried using Gnat and Cricket together. The litter mates cowered. No one wanted the wheel on this doomed ship — not with me in charge.
In training sled dogs, you want to steer them into doing the right thing, while minimizing confusion and discouragement. Building stamina isn’t nearly as crucial as instilling confidence through repetition and positive reinforcement, teaching dogs that they can do whatever you, the musher, ask. By building on each success, gradually asking the team to go farther and faster, the dogs develop faith in their all-knowing driver. That was the theory. From the first August night we took our dogs out on a cart — and Chad dug up a yellow jackets’ nest in the staging area — training seldom went smoothly.
My reversals had undermined the confidence of every dog out here, and it was the wrong night for a leadership crisis. Rainy, Rat, Casey, and Harley, any one of whom might have bailed me out, were sitting at home. Hitched to this gang line I had Chad, Raven, Cricket, and Gnat: our resident head case and three happy trotters — good for leading so long as it was fun, which it wasn’t tonight.
I placed Chad back in lead, thinking he might cooperate after a reasonable break. He was, after all, still Deadline Dog Farm’s main dog.
So we sat.
Twenty minutes later, a headlamp appeared.
“How’s training going,” said Scott, a local musher preparing for the Quest.
“Fine until tonight,” I said, a dark edge to my voice.
Chad loves to chase. He perked up and followed Scott to the Winter Trail, a heavily traveled mushing and snowmachine highway, up to five feet wide in places, cutting through the forest northeast of Fairbanks. With the familiar alley in view, I bid the other musher good-bye. Crying “Haw,” I sent Chad into a hard left turn. We were home free.
A few miles later, Chad dove down another side spur for no apparent reason. I didn’t dare stop him. Nothing is more frustrating than having a dog team quit on you. We were rolling. I didn’t care where. The trail lead to a subdivision road. The sled whipped sideways, careening off berms, as the dogs loped down the icy, hard-packed road. I was hoping we’d come across another trail, but the subdivision road spilled onto Chena Hot Springs, the busiest road in the entire area. We were within a few miles of home, and I considered making a dash for it. But it was icy and dark. The sight of an oncoming dog team might send a car or truck spinning into us. I could lose the entire team in an instant.
Stomping the hook into the snow, I walked up front, gripped Chad by the collar, and turned the team around one more time. Chad shrank at my touch and wouldn’t even look at me. The other dogs weren’t much happier. On a whim, I tried Skidders in lead. The old stud immediately took advantage of his freedom to circle back and sniff the girls. Nice try. And for our next act.
I bedded the team in a sheltered spot near the main road. Cyrus, an 18-month-old pup we’d just acquired from Rattles, was bewildered. He remained on his feet, eager to continue. Five minutes later, he was still whining anxiously. I knelt down in the snow and stroked his tight belly, settling him down at last.
Turning off my headlamp, I was struck by the brilliant stars painting the sky. It was one of those nights when you see dazzling, ghostly depths, hinting at mysteries no mere human will ever grasp. Mushing forces you to spend time outside. That was one of the sport’s unexpectedly rewarding aspects. Whether it’s watching a woodpecker digging away on a trunk, or catching the sunset through trees ablaze with clumps of ice, some sort of rare experience is always waiting in Alaska’s outdoors.
I was sitting there on the snow berm, marveling at the stars, when I heard Mowry’s truck chugging up the hill. The sportswriter was on his way home after a late shift. I flagged him down.
The Coach was disgusted by my incompetence. “You’re just like Chad,” Mowry said, as we loaded the dogs into the truck.
Revolting bloody soup filled our bathtub.
“Christ,” I said, recoiling from the fermenting atrocity. “What the hell is it?”
“I’m making honey balls. It’s one of Joe’s inventions.”
Picture 100 pounds of raw chopped beef, 20 pounds of honey, 2 gallons of corn oil, 2 pounds of bonemeal, and other assorted Redington spices — slopped a foot deep.
“I don’t know, Bri,” said Mowry, stirring the mess with a broken hockey stick. “It seems sort of gooey.”
We’d already spent two days cutting meat and stuffing sacks with provisions for Mowry’s first Iditarod. He grabbed a handful and tried handpacking it into a baseball-sized glob. Meat goo oozed through Tim’s fingers. We scooped a couple bucketfuls and took them out on the porch. There, we dabbed globs of the bloody muck on the surface of flattened garbage bags, hoping it might freeze into something usable. By morning, the honey balls had changed. The Mowth and I now had a porch full of half-frozen cow pies, run together like cookies baked too close on the sheet.
“I have a lot of bucks tied up in this shit, and I don’t think it’s supposed to look like this,” said Mowry, his eyes bloodshot and his dirty blond hair sticking from his head like loose straw.
“Yeah,” I agreed, “and our tub is still full of it.”
There is, apparently, more than one kind of honey. Redington’s recipe called for thick granular honey, not the syrupy brew my roommate had used. The Mowth’s dogs did without honey balls that year. And he cleaned the tub. There’s a limit to friendship.
Recalling the chaos of Mowry’s first big race, I allotted four full days to assemble my own Iditarod food drop. It wasn’t enough.
The first setback occurred when I had to unpack twenty-six checkpoints’ worth of fish. I’d forgotten to paint my name on the sacks. It was probably just paranoia, but I had been scared the fish might become contaminated in the labeling process. So, dumping the fish, I spread out the sacks in our driveway, thinking I could knock out the job using spray paint and a stencil. It was 40 below, and the paint nozzle froze, forcing me to shift operations inside our cramped A-frame. Space constraints there limited me to painting two bags at a time. And there was no damn room for anything to dry. The quick task ate up three hours.
Two friends from the paper, Mary Beth and Anna, were in charge of my personal food. They came up with a delicious assortment of precooked meals, breads, brownies, and cookies, but it took precious hours to assemble the packets. Anna’s efforts, cooking dozens of steaks and pork chops, fell behind when her propane stove quit.
For heating water out on the trail, I planned to use a fancy cooker borrowed from another local musher. But when I tested it against the Coach’s battered old unit, Mowry’s cooker boiled water in about 25 minutes, or roughly 30 percent quicker, despite the fact that it used toilet paper for a wick. Of course, I wanted that faster heating unit, and that meant another run to town for 50 more rolls of toilet paper.
The Coach concentrated on the real athletes, leaving me to deal with the food drop — and with Rattles, a strutting peacock of a dog man with a handlebar mustache, who’d become a constant presence as the race drew near.
Mike “Rattles” Kramer had earned his nickname working a jackhammer in a hard rock mine. That was before he took up dogs and became a boisterous fixture in the Two Rivers mushing scene. Now he bounced between washing dishes and seasonal farm or construction work. He, his new wife, and their infant son were among the 20 percent of Fairbanks-area residents who lacked running water at home. He didn’t seem to mind hauling around water jugs; it provided a good excuse for visiting the neighbors and, perhaps, peddling a few eggs gathered from his chickens.
I enjoyed Mowth’s company as long as he didn’t get started talking about the Feds, the gold standard, or the threats to personal liberty posed by Social Security numbers. Rattles knew a lot of tricks about tuning snowmachines or rigging sled lines. In his excitement about the race, however, the old musher was getting on my nerves, following me around, but lifting nary a finger to help as he relived his own doggy deeds.
“Rattles,” I cried at last, “if you’re not going to help, get the hell out of here.”
The old musher chuckled, amused by my jitters.
