Contents
* * *
Chapter 1: A Thousand Feet Down
Chapter 2: “Hike! Hike!”
Chapter 3: Throwing Snow on Fire
Chapter 4: Changes for the Better?
Chapter 5: Soft Ice Ahead
Chapter 6: Who Has the Right of Way?
Chapter 7: Driving the Point Deep
Chapter 8: News Travels Fast
Chapter 9: More Dirty Tricks
Chapter 10: A Circle of Wolves
Chapter 11: Explosive Confessions
Chapter 12: Dynamite Dealings
Chapter 13: The Process of Elimination
Chapter 14: Setting the Trap
Chapter 15: Hometown Champions
1 A Thousand Feet Down
* * *
The bush plane banked into a steep left turn. Seventeen-year-old Joe Hardy jammed his boots against the firewall and grabbed the handle over his head. He was looking out the side window straight down for a thousand feet.
“That’s Glitter up ahead,” Flip Atkins, the pilot, said, gesturing with his thumb.
Joe stared down at the landscape, looking for the town. Trees stretched as far as he could see in every direction. A broad white swathe cut through them like an enormous highway. That, Joe knew, was the Yukon River. The ice covering it was ten feet thick at this time of year. Then he saw Glitter. It was facing the river, looking like a cluster of toy buildings in a clearing. That was where Joe and his older brother, Frank, were going.
“Okay!” Joe exclaimed. “This is going to be fantastic!”
Flip grinned. “This is real bush country,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about the neighbors bothering you because there aren’t any.”
“I can see why people call Alaska the Big Land,” Frank said from the rear seat. “I don’t see the airstrip, though.”
Flip’s grin widened. “Sure you do,” he replied. “It’s right down there—a mile wide and two thousand miles long.”
“We’re going to land on the ice?” Joe asked. “Isn’t the surface too rough for that?”
“It would be,” Flip said with a nod. “But come winter, the folks here smooth off a stretch of the ice for me.” The plane leveled off, then the nose dipped.
“See those two lines of trees?” Flip added. “They’re stuck in the ice to mark where it’s been smoothed. As long as we go right down between them, we’ll be fine.”
Flip adjusted the throttle and lowered the flaps to slow the plane for landing.
Joe’s stomach lurched when they hit an air pocket. He decided this wasn’t the time to bug Flip with more questions. He looked over his shoulder at Frank and said, “This is going to be a real adventure, isn’t it? And it’ll be great to see David again.”
Frank smiled. “It sure will.”
David Natik was an Athabascan, a Native American, and had lived his whole life in the tiny town below them. As part of a sports exchange program sponsored by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he had spent several weeks living with the Hardy family in Bayport, New York, during football season. Now Joe and Frank were returning the visit during spring break. They were going to have just enough time to help David get ready for the famous Iditarod Dog Sled Race and then see him start the race in Anchorage. They were flying back to New York from there.
“Hang on,” Flip said. He angled the plane downward.
Joe tightened his grip on the handle overhead. As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t the plane that was going down. It was the whole big earth coming up.
Flip reduced power still more, pulled back on the stick to raise the nose, then pushed it forward a little. As the landing skis touched the river ice, he reversed the prop pitch and gunned the throttle. The engine roared, the plane vibrated and bounced, and then, in what seemed like no more than a breath or two, it was over. The plane came to a stop. Flip reached down and switched off the motor. The sudden, deep silence almost hurt Joe’s ears.
“You’d better zip up your parkas,” Flip said as he reached for the door handle. “The cold around here is sneaky. It’s never windy, so you might think it’s not cold at all. But it’s way below zero, all the same.”
Frank and Joe zipped up, then climbed out.
“Do you think they know we’re here?” Joe asked, his breath turning frosty white in the sparkling air.
“They know, all right,” Flip replied. “That’s why I buzzed the town.” He opened the baggage compartment, hauled out the Hardys’ duffel bags, and set them on the ice.
“Glitter’s a funny name for a Native American town,” Frank remarked.
Flip began to pull cartons and packages from the freight compartment. “Back in the Gold Rush days,” he said, “about a hundred years ago, there were thousands of miners and prospectors back in these hills. They called the town Glitter because of the old saying.”
He paused and glanced at the Hardys.
“All that glitters is not gold.” Frank and Joe said together.
“Yup, that’s the one,” Flip said. “From what the old-timers say, this was some lively spot, too. But then the gold petered out. Practically all of the miners left. About the only people who stayed were the Athabascans, who’d been in these parts all along.”
“Look, Frank!” Joe cried, pointing toward the riverbank. “Isn’t that David?”
“Sure looks like him,” Frank replied with excitement in his voice.
About fifty yards away a sturdy figure of medium height was scrambling down the riverbank onto the ice. The hood of his fur parka was thrown back, and Joe recognized the broad face, high cheekbones, and black hair of their friend.
Joe and Frank grabbed their gear and hurried across the frozen river to meet him.
“Welcome to Alaska,” David called. They shook hands and slapped one another on the back. “How was the trip?”
“Pretty long,” Frank said. “The last leg was the most fun.”
“Come on, we’ll drop your stuff off, then I’ll show you around,” David said.
Now that they were on the ground, Joe could see that the town was built on low ground between two hillsides. The scattered log cabins seemed to hunker down against the penetrating cold. Plumes of white smoke rose straight from metal stovepipes poking into the deep blue Arctic sky.
“I got the stove going in your cabin,” David told them as they followed him into the town. “I hope it’s okay. I’m just down the way, with my uncle Peter and aunt Mona—the Windmans. I’ve been living with them while my mom and dad are down in Fairbanks. They’re working in a snow-shoe factory.”
Joe spotted a wooden sign on the wall of the only two-story building in sight. “ ‘General Store, J. Ferguson, proprietor,’ ” he read aloud. “It sounds like something out of the Old West.”
“It is.” David laughed. “Except we’ve got Flip’s airplane, instead of stagecoaches and wagon trains. Everything is flown in from Fairbanks. Whatever you need, if you can’t get it from Jake, you have to do without it.”
Out on the river Flip revved up the engine of the plane for takeoff. They turned to look.
“There he goes,” David said. “He’s going to drop off the mail downriver, the same way he did here. He comes by once a week.”
The plane sped over the ice between the two rows of spruce trees and lifted off like a Canada goose, then turned westward.
As they walked through the town, David pointed to a white building with small windows.
“That’s the assembly room,” he explained. “In the old days it was a dance hall. Now we use it for town meetings and stuff like that.”
Two big posters were tacked to the bulletin board next to the entrance. One was professionally printed. A Yes Vote Is a Vote for Glitter’s Fut
ure, it read. The other, hand lettered on a ragged piece of cardboard, read Save Our Town—Vote No.
“What’s going on?” Frank asked, gesturing toward the posters.
“There’s a big vote coming up,” David told him. “A company called ThemeLife wants to turn Glitter into a tourist attraction.”
“Like Disney World?” Joe asked. He glanced around at the tumbledown cabins.
David laughed. “That’s the general idea,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
“How do people feel about it?” Frank asked.
David shrugged. “Pretty mixed. Some people are for it, some not.”
Up ahead, a man with tangled gray hair and a long gray beard shuffled past on a crosspath. Joe noticed that his green parka and heavy wool pants were roughly patched. “Who was that?” Joe asked David in a low voice.
“Oh, that’s Lucky Moeller,” David replied. “He works a gold claim a little ways outside of town. He’s sort of a character.”
“He doesn’t look like someone who struck it rich,” Frank observed.
David smiled. “Not yet, anyway. But give him time. He’s only been at it for forty or fifty years.”
Joe and Frank followed David through the town. As they neared the outskirts, David pointed to one of the cabins and said, “That’s the Windman cabin—where my aunt and uncle and my cousin, Justine, live. They wanted to come with me to meet you, but they had to gather firewood. We’ll see them later. And this is where you’ll be staying.”
He led them to a small cabin a dozen yards from the Windman cabin and pushed the door open. Inside were two bunks piled high with blankets, a table and chairs, and an old potbellied stove. A bearskin rug lay on the floor, and the woodbox next to the stove was stacked with split logs.
“It’s pretty rough,” David said. “Not like what you’re used to back in Bayport.”
“It’s great,” Frank assured him, tossing his duffel down on one of the bunks. “Warm and cozy. Don’t worry about us. Joe and I have been in places a lot rougher.”
“You can say that again” Joe said.
David gave him a relieved look. He’d obviously been worried, Joe thought, about how his friends from the Lower Forty-Eight were going to handle a visit to the Alaskan bush.
“You want to see my sled dogs?” he asked.
“Cool,” Joe said.
The three friends left the cabin and sauntered to the edge of the town. As they neared a cluster of doghouses, a loud chorus of barking greeted them. What seemed like dozens of thick-furred huskies jumped to their feet, their tails wagging.
“These aren’t all yours, are they?” Joe asked, amazed.
“Oh, yes, they are,” David told him. “I’ve got twenty-one sled dogs. But I’ll be using just twelve of them in the Iditarod. It’s too bad you won’t have time to see more of the race.”
“I wish we could. But we’ve got to get back to school,” Frank said.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “Believe me, I wish we could postpone school. I’d love to see the finish of the race.”
“Most people see only a small part of the race,” David said. “It’s long—eleven hundred miles, all the way from Anchorage to Nome.”
Joe stared at him. “Eleven hundred miles!” he repeated, astonished.
David stopped next to a dog that had been watching every move they made. “This is Ironheart,” he said. He squatted down and hugged a powerful gray-and-white husky with glacial blue eyes. Ironheart wagged his tail. “Ironheart’s my lead dog.”
Ironheart began to lick his master’s face. David laughed and pulled away.
“The lead dog is the most important part of the team,” David added. “If we run into a whiteout, Ironheart’s a lot more important than I am.”
“What’s a whiteout?” Frank asked.
“That’s when a blizzard blows up on the trail,” David explained. “It can get so thick, you can’t see your hand in front of your face. It’s really dangerous. But a really good lead dog like Ironheart has an instinct that tells him where the trail is and alerts him to dangers like thin river ice. I’d never do a race like the Iditarod without him.”
“How long does it take?” Frank asked.
“That depends,” David said. He went around the pack of dogs, giving each one a pat on the head. “The winners usually do it in eleven or twelve days. It has to be the most grueling race around.”
“It must be hard on the dogs,” Joe said.
“Oh, no. They love it,” David told him. “Especially when it’s twenty degrees below zero, so they don’t overheat. They can hardly wait to go mushing.”
“Mushing? Sounds like soggy oatmeal to me,” Joe said.
David smiled. “That’s what we call dog-sledding. It comes from the French word marcher. It means ‘let’s get going.’ ”
“Do you have a team supporting you?” Frank asked.
David shook his head. “Nope. In the Iditarod, you race alone. And you have to carry everything you need, too: food for you and your dogs, clothes, emergency supplies—everything.”
Joe said, “That seems like a pretty strict rule.”
“I know,” David said. “But it all goes back to 1925, when there was an epidemic of diphtheria in Nome and the town ran out of medicine. There wasn’t a road, and airplanes couldn’t get through, either. But some of the best dogsled mushers in Alaska carried the medicine from Anchorage to Nome, through blizzards and all, and got there in time to save the town. The Iditarod is like a memorial to them.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Frank said. “When you were staying with us, we took you to Central Park, in New York City, because you wanted to see a statue of a sled dog.”
David smiled. “That’s right,” he said. “That was Balto, a lead dog who was one of the heroes of the rescue of Nome.”
He bent down to pet Ironheart again. “And my lead dog is just as great as Balto, aren’t you, fellow? We’re going to win the Iditarod and take home the fifty-thousand-dollar prize.”
Joe blew out a frosty whistle. “Fifty thousand dollars? Sign me up—I’ll pull the sled myself!”
“You wouldn’t get very far without a dog team,” David said, laughing. “And the competition’s pretty fierce.”
As the three were walking back into town, Joe saw a young man about their age. Like David, he was dressed in wool pants and a fur parka, but he had the hood up and his head down, as if he didn’t want to be noticed.
“That’s Gregg Anderson,” David said. He called out, “Hey, Gregg, come say hello to my friends from back east.”
Gregg stopped but didn’t speak.
“Gregg’s running the Iditarod, too,” David continued. “It’s the first time for both of us. The town’s pretty excited about us two.”
Gregg glared at him. “You think you and your team are pretty good, don’t you?” he said. “I know you’ve beat me a few times. But I’ll tell you one thing. Maybe I won’t win the Iditarod this time. But neither will you. I’m going to finish way ahead of you. Nothing’s going to stop me. I swear it.”
2 “Hike! Hike!”
* * *
Tight-lipped and scowling, Gregg pushed past Frank and walked quickly up the path. Frank watched him for a few moments, then turned to David. “What’s that guy’s problem?” he asked. “Is he always like that?”
David shrugged. “Sort of. We used to be friends when we were little, but not anymore. I guess it burns him that my dog team usually beats his.”
Joe pushed David lightly on the shoulder. “Maybe you’re just a better musher.”
David playfully shoved him back. “Hey,” he said, “you’re learning the language.”
The path they were on took them past an open yard that contained a big stack of fifty-five-gallon metal drums and a small shack. Frank heard a mechanical hum coming from the shack and asked David about it.
“That’s the town generator,” David explained. “The diesel oil to power it is brought in by barge during the sum
mer, before the Yukon ices over. That means we have to be careful about how we use electricity. If the oil runs low before the spring thaw, we’re out of luck.”
Frank glanced around. He’d never really thought about how isolated David’s town was. As long as nothing went wrong, life was probably as secure here as anywhere. But even the smallest emergency could be enough to push the town to the brink of disaster.
As they walked on, Frank found himself thinking about Gregg and his determination to finish ahead of David in the Iditarod. You needed to look out for somebody with that kind of intensity.
“David?” Frank said. “Has that guy Gregg ever given you any trouble?”
David looked over his shoulder and said, “Not really. His bark’s worse than his bite.”
Joe grinned. “Maybe that’s a good thing for a dogsled driver,” he cracked.
David grinned back. “Gregg wants to be first in everything,” he said. “But life’s not like that.”
“Has he ever beaten you in a race?” Frank asked.
“He’s come pretty close,” David replied.
“Yeah, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,” Joe said, quoting one of her father’s favorite sayings.
They all laughed. But Frank knew that the bigger the race, the bigger the temptation. And the Iditarod was the biggest dogsled race of all. Not only that, everybody in Glitter must be rooting for one or the other of the two hometown mushers. That could put an enormous amount of pressure on a guy like Gregg. Enough pressure to make him try something underhanded against his rival, David?
As they turned onto another dirt road, Frank saw a tall man in a green parka and green twill pants coming toward them.
“Oh, there’s Curt Stone. He’s the guy from the company,” David told them.
“What company?” Frank asked, noticing the confident way the man walked.
“ThemeLife—the company I told you about, which wants to turn Glitter into a theme park,” David replied. “He’s been coming here all winter, talking to people and trying to convince them to vote for the plan.”
The Alaskan Adventure Page 1