glowing in my beam. With Raven gone, I had 12 dogs left. Rainy and Harley were in lead. The odd couple had brought us most of the way. No reason to change now.
I had, incredibly, forgotten to get a weather report. The failure nagged at me as light snow began falling an hour out of White Mountain. “Here it comes,” I whispered. “Three feet of snow in two hours. The biggest blizzard Nome’s ever seen.”
Daily had reentered the void. Judging from the slope, the team was probably climbing Topkok Hill. But it was just a guess. Tom couldn’t see anything except the dogs and his sled. The world beyond was utterly white. This whole Iditarod was like wandering through heaven, the musher thought, a white misty place, with no beginning or end and nothing but dogs for company.
Topkok’s bare crown was serene. The fog lifted as Daily and several other mushers descended toward the valley below. The Nome Kennel Club’s shelter cabin waited at the bottom. Plettner, the veteran, knew better than to dally in this stretch. Wind seldom rested in the so-called “Solomon Blowhole.” When it did blow, a layover in that cabin could mean the difference between life and death. On rare moments when it didn’t, only fools stopped to visit.
Sepp Herrman was already closing in on Nome. Plettner’s final drive was also underway. Cooley urged the others to assemble at the shelter cabin, and then mush together into Safety. Doc figured he’d brought his rookies too far to let one stray into the Bering Sea.
Don Mormile was outside the cabin working with his team when Terhune’s dogs popped out of the darkness. That meant I was the only driver still on the way.
“You’ve got to stop,” Mormile began. “Cooley says—”
Terhune cut him off. “I told you people, if you stop again — I don’t care what the goddamn reason is — I’m going around. I don’t want nothing to do with this group!” Ordering Daisy past the parked teams, Terhune rounded the cabin, followed the markers into the brush, and vanished.
Mormile went inside. The group got a chuckle out of this latest declaration from Terhune. No one felt threatened. This was, what, the third time the sourpuss had tried to get away? Those Kenai dogs were slower than dirt. When would he give it up?
As far as Daily could tell, Terhune couldn’t get ten feet without screaming bloody murder at his poor lead dog. Daily saw nothing noble in it, not when the price was being paid by those poor tired dogs.
It mattered to Terhune. Every inch between him and those other people mattered. Rounding the shelter cabin, the musher switched off his headlamp. His dogs were slow, but they were tough, like him. Jon Terhune and Daisy meant to show them all.
I was startled by an approaching light. It came so fast I knew it had to be a snowmachine. The driver, a burly Alaska Native, stopped alongside the trail and beckoned to me. As I drew closer, the man smiled and reached inside his suit. He pulled out a tall bottle of Bacardi 151.
“Here, take a swig,” he said, handing me the rum.
“Wind blew down the markers through here,” the snowmachiner said, as I handed back his bottle. “Don’t worry. I put in new ones for you guys. You won’t have no trouble.”
For the last hour, I’d been climbing featureless, snow-covered hills. The trail was barely discernible on the hard windswept surface. I hated to imagine this place in a whiteout. The trail rose steadily higher and higher over bare rounded steps. Several times I thought I was cresting the summit only to discover another steep hill waiting ahead.
The moon, near full, shone brightly through the misty night sky. After I switched off my headlamp, the snow seemed radiant with reflected light. The dogs and I were cast into a realm of living negatives. I rubbed my eyes and pressed on. The top — it had to be the top — was getting closer.
Cresting Topkok, the trail crossed a short flat plateau. I stopped the team and studied the valley below. The view was surprisingly clear. I could trace the trail, winding through bushes and shrubs to a shelter on the valley floor. It looked dark and deserted. Way, way off in the distance, I saw a string of moving lights.
“Gotcha!” I said. Releasing the brake, I sent my dogs charging downward.
I’d come straight through from White Mountain. The dogs were due for a break, so I paused to check out the shelter cabin. Leaving the crew gnawing on chunks of whitefish, I headed inside. The cabin interior was hot. Coals were still glowing in the stove. Obviously, the others had spent a fair amount of time at the cabin.
I found some crackers and munched on them as I read the graffiti on the walls of the cabin. Recently refurbished, the shelter cabin beneath Topkok was in the best shape of any I’d seen on the trail. Most of the graffiti must have been left by mushers in this year’s race. I saw comments from quite a few people I recognized, including Swenson, who was already gloating about win number five.
I scrawled a ditty about slipping from first to worst. “Let historians ponder that,” I muttered, signing and dating it. Then I headed back outside and roused the dogs. It wasn’t over yet.
Terhune kept Daisy on the march. He watched over his shoulder for headlamps, but none appeared. He traveled as much as possible with his own headlamp off. No reason to give those bastards a target to shoot at. Finally, Terhune saw a red-neon bar sign. Safety. He’d made it. Goddamn.
Terhune snacked his dogs and then studied the exit trail. Inside the bar he grabbed a plate of food and took a seat at a window overlooking the incoming trail. He wanted to give his dogs as much rest as possible. Exactly how long that might be, Jon didn’t know. It depended on what he saw through the window.
Herrman had mushed into Nome early that morning, finishing in fifty-first place. Plettner had pulled across the finish line at 6 A.M. It galled him, but nothing Terhune could do would ever change that. But he could still stick it to those guys behind him. Thirty minutes passed, then 45.
“Good,” the musher said, studying his watch. His dogs were getting a decent break. His stay was approaching an hour, when Terhune spied a distant bobbing light. He dashed for the bar door.
“Daisy!” the musher called the lead dog’s name as he rushed toward the team. He grabbed several dogs and jerked them to their feet. Jumping on the runners, he reached for his snow hook. The finish line was 20 miles away. The others might be faster, but he had the jump.
Mushing away with his own headlamp switched off, Terhune watched over his shoulder. The single light had swelled to a moving cluster. Near the bar, the lights stopped. He had expected that. They had to stop to sign in. OK. OK. What would they do now? The lights remained stationary, and he slowly pulled away. Jon Terhune smiled. The fools were letting him get away.
“I can’t believe Terhune is going to beat us,” Mark Williams repeated. “He had the slowest dogs in the race.”
Sitting at the bar, Daily shrugged. He wasn’t impressed with Terhune. Daily’s dogs would arrive in Nome in better shape. He was sure of that. And he wasn’t impressed with Gunnar Johnson’s deceitful little maneuver. The way he had snuck off, deserting everybody here at Safety, minutes after pretending he agreed with Cooley’s plan to wait for O’Donoghue and mush into Nome together. It rubbed Daily the wrong way.
What was the rush? Next year he would come back and really race.
Daily ceremoniously bought himself a beer, the first he’d had in 21 days. He bought Cooley one, too.
The veterinarian was embarrassed. “Can I borrow money for a burger, Tom?” he whispered, confessing that he was flat broke.
If it wasn’t the worst night of my life, it was close. Taking that short break at the cabin had been a major mistake. It had destroyed the team’s rhythm. Leaving the cabin, Rainy and Harley slowed to a crawl. It was a repeat of the Golovin turnaround.
I was in trouble myself. Couldn’t keep my eyes open. Looking for a caffeine jolt, I started dipping my fingers in the baggy of instant coffee and licking the powder off my fingertips. The secret weapon was a dud. All I got from chewing that lousy powder was cramps.
The mist returned, and world closed in around me. The whiteness just went on and on. At one point, I saw a light coming up from behind. It looked like a musher’s headlamp, but it couldn’t be; the light was coming too fast. Yet it was a dog team, closing so fast that my dogs seemed to be standing still.
