Lone Wolves

by John Smelcer

  Denny beamed a genuine smile.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’m just happy to be running the race. Can I say hello to everyone back home?”

  “Go ahead,” replied the reporter.

  Denny waved at the camera. “Hey everyone!”

  After thanking her for the interview and double-checking the spelling of her name, the reporter turned and walked away, remarking to his cameraman what a nice young woman she was.

  By late morning, after all the gear was checked and the dogs examined, the race began. As always, the racers left the start gate separated by a few minutes to avoid piling up or bottlenecking on the narrow trail. As the reigning champion, Jasper Stark was first. Denny was twenty-seventh. The route had been mostly the same for decades, following rivers, through mountainous passes, past small villages of barely a dozen or so cabins, and finally along the sea as the racers made their way to the finish line. All racers were required to stop at more than two dozen check points and to overnight at certain places to ensure adequate rest for mushers and dogs alike. Eleven hundred miles is a long way to go.

  Denny tried to put the distance into perspective.

  Eleven hundred miles was three hundred miles longer than Alaska’s length north to south. The length of the Alaska Pipeline was only eight hundred miles. It was like driving from upstate New York to Nashville, Tennessee or Ocala, Florida. In Europe, a train traveling eleven hundred miles would pass through the boundaries of numerous small nations and through populations of over a hundred million people.

  The race record was a little over fifteen days.

  Fifteen days! That meant a team had to cover roughly 75 miles a day. Denny had done the calculation long ago. She had never done anything like that in her training, because there wasn’t enough time with everything else she had to do. She worried that she was in way over her head, that her team couldn’t keep such a pace for so long a distance. But she swallowed her doubts and fears and prepared herself for what was ahead, remembering what her grandfather had told her about trying your best, even if you fail.

  For the most part, the first day was uneventful. The field stayed pretty much in the order they left the gate. A few racers jockeyed to move closer to the leaders. Even Denny leapt into the top twenty. But this early in the race, with so many miles to go, no one was going to push his dogs too hard. As predicted, Jasper Stark set the pace, which was fast.

  But late in the afternoon, Denny came upon a scene that illustrated the danger of the trail. A team had rounded a bend only to come face to face with a cow moose and her calf. Moose often followed the packed trails made by snowmobilers and mushers. Every winter, thousands of moose were killed by automobiles and trains as they followed the snowless highways and railroads.

  With her ears back and her mane bristling, the protective mother had launched her angry, thousand-pound bulk into the line of dogs, kicking and stomping. In her fury, she killed one dog and severely injured two others before she and her calf dashed off the packed trail and into the safety of the woods. Such encounters were one of the many hazards along the trail.

  When Denny arrived, another musher was helping the driver and had already called for help on his cell phone. He told Denny that a helicopter was on its way to transport the wounded dogs for medical help; both suffered from broken ribs and legs. With eleven uninjured dogs remaining, the musher was determined to continue the race.

  Denny knew that at least one such incident occurred during each year’s race.

  Hopefully, thought Denny as she continued down the trail, this would be the last.

  In the Great Race, mushers don’t stop just because it gets dark outside. Instead, they push on through the darkness, guided by their headlamps, barely illuminating the trail ahead, the dogs dimly feeling the trail with their feet. Some clear nights the full moon is so bright that its light casts dark shadows from trees, staining the white snow. Though inexperienced, Denny knew her team. They had never run so far in a single day. Now, there would be days on end of such punishment. She wanted to pace them, keep them strong.

  For now, rest and a hot meal was just what the doctor ordered.

  Sometime around midnight, Denny stopped alongside a frozen river and made camp a dozen yards off the trail. She would allow herself and her team several hours of much-deserved sleep and a hot-cooked meal. Before dawn, which came late in winter, she would break camp and once again hit the trail. After feeding the team a steaming gruel of dry dog food in warm water, she gave each dog a fillet of dried salmon and then examined their paws for injury, carefully splaying each paw apart and checking in between the toes.

  After the full-bellied dogs were bedded down for the night, Denny ate her own meal and afterwards cut spruce boughs for her bed. She stripped down to her long johns and crawled into her sleeping bag, still wearing her thick wool socks and a black wool cap. She cringed all the way because the inside of the sleeping bag was the same temperature as the outdoors, which was below zero. It took a few minutes for her body heat to warm up the ice-cold bag.

  She was asleep only a few minutes later.

  While she slept, snuggled inside her warm sleeping bag atop the scented pile—snoring from exhaustion—stars slid above treetops, the nearby river heaved and strained to turn over in its icy bed, and the campfire burned down to a heap of gray ashes as cold as the night.

  Other teams passed in the quietude, the only sound the soft patter of paws on packed snow, the huffed panting of tired dogs, and the scraping glide of runners as the sleds passed in the darkness. Taz opened his eyes groggily and went back to sleep almost instantly.

  In such a long race, timing was everything. Everyone had to rest sometime, dog and man alike. When they did, other teams gained ground. But even those same teams had to sleep sometime or other, at which time their lead would be lost. Knowing when to rest and when to push on was part of the strategy. Racers like Jasper Stark knew it well. He mapped out his rest stops systematically, with calculated precision—a few hours here, an overnight there. Many a leader had lost the race by miscalculating rest stops. Sometimes, driven too hard for too long, a team hit a brick wall of fatigue and could move no further. Thoroughly exhausted, the dogs required eight hours of rest to recharge. By then, other leaders might be nearing the finish line or, perhaps, had already crossed it.

  15

  Ghelaay nen’

  High Country

  The next morning, after building a campfire to heat water for the dogs’ breakfast and for her oatmeal and tea, Denny walked out on the frozen river and gazed in the direction she would travel. From where she stood, she could see that the trail climbed into high country. She could see that the valley became narrow and steep, forbidding and treeless at such altitudes.

  It took an hour to pack up camp, use a tree out of necessity, and rig up the team to the main line. The dogs whined and leaped with anticipation, especially Taz. Denny was surprised at their enthusiasm, given the long previous day. She herself was tired and sore all over. Her shoulders throbbed, and her hands hurt from gripping the handle so tightly for so many hours. But most of all, her lower back ached from standing on the back of the sled all day. She wished she could sit in the little sweathouse behind her cabin for a while to soothe her muscles.

  It wasn’t long before the team was in the mountain pass. To Denny’s dismay, screeching winds funneled through the valley had scoured snow from the ground, exposing large and small rocks frozen to the earth as if they had been set in concrete. The going was rough on dog paws, rough on the sled, and rough on the driver. The constant jolting rattled Denny’s teeth and her bones, and her arms felt as if they were being wrenched from their sockets.

  After crossing a particularly treacherous stretch of exposed rock, Denny saw blood on the trail.

  “Whoa!” she shouted. “Stop!”

  Taz brought the team to an abrupt standstill. Denny tried to set th
e brake hook, but the ground was so frozen that the sharp hooks wouldn’t penetrate. Instead, she tied a snub line around a boulder.

  “See if you can move that,” she said to the team after cinching the knot.

  Methodically, from the front of the line to the back, Denny lifted each dog’s paw to see which one was bleeding. It was one of the mid-line dogs, the one named Molly. She had thrown three of her booties, and one of her front paws had a cut from a sharp rock. Denny untied the dog from the tow line and guided her to the back of the sled where she treated the injury with a first-aid ointment. Then she bound the foot in gauze, and gently set the dog into the basket.

  Molly didn’t seem to mind.

  “You can take a break until your paw heals,” she said, patting the dog on the head.

  Denny knew that such a minor cut would heal quickly, and the dog would rejoin the team by mid-afternoon. She’d make sure the Velcro straps on her booties were tighter this time. With her team temporarily weakened by the loss of one dog, she undid the snub line, put her gloves back on, pulled up her parka hood, and gripped the sled handle.

  “Mush!” she shouted.

  And once again the team was off.

  As she rode along on the back of the sled, trying to keep from falling asleep from exhaustion, Denny marveled at the steep, rugged valley. The cliffs and crags looked as if nothing had changed since the beginning of time. She imagined dinosaurs roaming this valley long ago. But she knew better. Many times, sitting around a campfire, hot coffee mug clutched in both hands, her grandfather had spoken about the nature of Time and of Nature itself.

  “Everything changes,” she remembered him saying in his slow, deliberate way. “Forever and forever and forever nothing stays the same. The earth turns and each day the radiance of the sun spins into existence and is gone. Sea waves crash and scour the coast and the coastline changes. Rain erodes mountains, and rivers carry them back to the sea. People die and people are born. Glaciers grow and melt. Many are gone that existed when I was a boy. I have seen whole mountain slopes suddenly break free and crash like thunder into their valleys. They say even the sun itself will one day burn out. Nothing that comes stays for long. Live fully in this moment. Embrace that truth, Granddaughter, and live a happier life.”

  As young as she was, Denny already understood some of what her grandfather had told her. Year after year, she had marveled at how the river alongside her village changed channels, how sand and gravel islands appeared and disappeared, how tree-lined banks sometimes sloughed into the river, creating new banks. She recalled how most of the trees along one of her favorite fishing streams had been toppled in a storm, the creek bed and surrounding ground crisscrossed with felled trees and deadfalls, making it impossible to fish or even to walk through the once-forest. For over a hundred years the trees had grown there, and then one day the place no longer looked the same, nor would it for another hundred years.

  Halfway through the pass, Denny came upon two teams stopped along the trail, the two mushers standing beside one of the sleds. One of the men was a foot taller than the other. Denny stopped to investigate, securing her team far enough away from the other teams to avoid dogfights.

  “Any trouble?” she asked, as she walked up to the two men and pulled down her parka hood.

  The taller man told how his sled had hit a large rock, which had overturned and thrown him, breaking his arm in the fall. The shorter musher had arrived about fifteen minutes later and helped to fashion a makeshift sling for the dangling arm.

  “Are you going to scratch from the race?” Denny asked the injured man.

  “I don’t have no choice. I can’t hold onto a sled with one hand for five hundred miles.”

  “Can you help me get him into his sled?” asked the shorter man. “I’ll hook up his team in front of mine and take him to the next check point, which is about twenty miles away.”

  Denny knew that the reason he wanted the other team in front of his was because it was downhill all the way, and with the injured man resting in the basket, he would be unable to use the foot brake when the sled gained too much speed and they would crash into each other. In this way, the driver at the back of both teams could use his brakes as well as voice commands to control the descent. Denny helped load the injured racer into the basket, and then she tied a line between the teams.

  “Does this look good?” she asked the other musher.

  “It looks great,” he said after checking the length and the knot. “You might as well go on ahead of us. We’re going to take it slow. Tell the people at the check point that we’re right behind you and that he’ll need a doctor to set that arm.”

  Denny wished them both luck, untied her team, and took off down the trail, turning and waving goodbye as she passed. The whole way down the mountain, she worried something like that could happen to her. She knew that in the Last Frontier, it only took an instant for disaster to strike.

  16

  Son’de’aa

  A Rising Star

  Over the next four days, Denny pushed on toward the finish line. Unused to so much physical exertion for days on end with little sleep, both she and her team were exhausted. The white miles passed blindly at times, as if in a dreamlike trance. More than once she nodded off at the back of the sled, only to be awakened by some rough bump. There were times she even thought about quitting.

  But at such moments, she thought about her grandfather and how he must be watching her, and the happy memories kept her going.

  Little by little, relentless mile after relentless mile, Denny found herself in the top ten.

  Hundreds of miles lay defeated behind her, but many hundreds of grueling miles lay ahead on the uncertain trail. Back home, unbeknownst to Denny, students at her school tracked her progress on a large map, posted blogs about her, made colorful pictures and posters they taped to classroom and hallway walls, read about her in the newspaper, and listened for her name on the news. In keeping with the spirit, middle school and high school students read Jack London’s quintessential Alaskan adventure story, The Call of the Wild. Few teachers pointed out London’s overt notions of supremacy of the White Man over Indians—the steadfast mantra of imperialism and colonialism. America’s westward expansion had been driven by it. For the most part, young readers simply liked a good dog story, and the story of Buck was among the best.

  Silas posted the BBC interview on the school’s website, editing it so that the reporter’s last words played in a loop over and over again—“Even a 16-year-old girl might win”—each time Denny’s beaming face popped up. At first, only a few hundred people visited the blog site daily, not much for a website, but the numbers began to grow.

  When Denny and her team pulled into one of the small villages for an overnight and to check in at the required veterinary station, several newspaper reporters from across the nation interviewed her. She talked about how her grandfather had taught her and how he had died while out on the trail with her. The next day, a photograph of a haggard-looking Denny hugging Taz adorned the front page of those papers. The accompanying story even talked about the traditional tattoo on her face and how she was one of the youngest Indian women to have one and what it meant to her. Millions saw the picture and read the various captions: “An Unlikely Alliance,” “Against All Odds,” “Miracle on the Snow,” and “A Mighty Underdog.” Several of the stories hailed her team as the fastest in the field because no other team had gained so much time, surpassing seventeen other teams to make it into the top ten. Denny would later learn that one newspaper story hailed Taz as “Taz, the Spaz” because he had so much energy and was so fast.

  Other newspapers soon adopted the witty epithet.

  And while out on the trail Denny was oblivious to all the stories about her in newspapers and on television and websites, everyone back home in her village read the stories, even her father. Denny’s mother proudly cut out every story she
could find and saved them for her daughter in an old photo album. One of her favorites read:

  The One to Watch

  With an old-fashioned wooden sled handmade by her deceased grandfather and wearing a traditional parka, sealskin gloves, and mukluks made by her mother and grandmother, 16-year-old Alaska Native Deneena Yazzie is making headlines around the world, jumping from the middle of the pack to the leader board. While every other team has more than a dozen dogs—some with as many as eighteen on a double lead—Denny’s team of eight, led by “Taz, the Spaz,” is the fastest in this year’s field. While it’s too soon to call a winner, this determined teen is certainly one to watch.

  After the newspaper and TV stories began coming out, the school’s blog site got almost a hundred thousand hits a day from around the world. Despite Jasper Stark’s ambitious prediction, the poor weather combined with a broken runner and two dropped dogs all but evaporated his dream of breaking his own record.

  And Denny hadn’t been without her own troubles. She had lost a little time when one of the lower stanchions on the sled broke after she hit a tree stump. Luckily, she was able to repair it temporarily with duct tape, one of the few tools she carried with her. Also, one of her dogs had succumbed to exhaustion and was being dragged by the others before she stopped and put the trembling animal into the basket to let it rest for six hours. A dog in the basket was common among racers. Some mushers regularly allowed each dog a brief respite in this way.

  After a hot shower and a welcome dinner in the local school gym, courtesy of the villagers, almost every one of them Indian, Denny took a little time to email her own school as she had promised, telling everyone back home about the race and of her thoughts and feelings. She even downloaded some pictures from a digital camera one of her teachers had loaned her for the purpose. One of her best pictures was taken from the back of the sled as the team raced along a frozen river, their breath rising like ice fog. All you could see in the photograph were tails and behinds of all eight members of the team—the barren, wintry landscape indistinct in the foreground.