by Henry, Sue
Jessie had not seen the blue and yellow parka since Pelly Crossing. Roney from Atlin would have to be told by someone else to call Bishop at the checkpoint when he reached it.
It was a night filled with northern lights that spread themselves across the sky in luminous bands, curtains of whitish green that moved and swayed as if blown by some powerful wind of the upper atmosphere, though the air on the trail the mushers traveled was still. The lights seemed to add to the glow of the bright moonlight, the combination dimming the stars. As she rode along, standing on the extensions of the runners of her sled, Jessie could see a clear shadow of herself, the sled, and some of her team, cast by the light onto the snow beside the trail. The temperature had suddenly plummeted to ten below and she was glad there was no breeze to add a windchill factor to it. When they paused, she found a small fire welcome for light as well as heat.
As they awkwardly fed themselves with mittened hands, dogs sleeping all around them, Jessie and Ryan talked temperatures.
“I’d like it to stay just about how it is now,” Jessie said. “We won’t get it—it’ll get windy on the summits—but this is perfect for me and the mutts both.”
“A little colder wouldn’t hurt my feelings any,” Ryan decided. “Remember how cold it was that year on the Iditarod when we hit Norton Sound? Thought I’d freeze my buns off.”
“Hey, we could be above the Arctic Circle, or in Siberia, where it gets really cold.”
She reached to move the coffeepot farther off the fire, to stop the coffee from getting any stronger.
“Did you know,” Ryan asked, “that in Siberia it can average in the minus-fifties in January?”
“That’s more than I’d be willing to live with.”
“Me, too. They’ve got a neat word there though. Zvyozd. It means the ‘whispering of the stars’ and it’s the name for the tiny tinkling sound that your breath makes when it freezes at that temperature. As you breath out, the moisture in it drops to the ground in very tiny crystals. Can you imagine hearing your own breath hit the ground? Weird.”
“I do remember how cold it was out on the sound that year. I thought I’d never be warm again. And the wind was howling so loud you couldn’t hear anything—almost had to lip-read someone standing next to you and shouting in your ear.”
They were quiet for a few minutes, Ryan finishing a bowl of some kind of stew, Jessie once again worrying the question of Debbie Todd’s abduction and wondering what was happening as she traveled in such splendid isolation, with no way of finding out. Wondered just what happened to kill Lowery, too. She hoped Jake Leland was finding the money he needed and would, perhaps, have something new to tell her by the time she reached Dawson. Had Don Graham done what he said he would? She wouldn’t know that, either, until they made Dawson.
The whole thing made her impatient to get back on the trail and get there, but that would be imprudent. Running too far, too fast, could easily burn out the team and she’d never make it at all. Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait, she thought, chafing at the necessary delay. Frowning, she didn’t realize she had huffed in frustration until Jim Ryan spoke suddenly.
“Okay, Jessie. What’s wrong? Something’s going on. You’ve been somewhere else ever since we left Pelly. Not still worrying about that screwup with the chips, are you?”
Startled at his question and insight, she looked across the fire at him and shook her head, realizing that she had actually forgotten all about Sunny and Wart. Remembering brought another flash of anger, but she quickly let it go again.
“No. It burns me, but it’s history. I’ll take care of it later, after…the race.”
“After…what? You started to say something else. Jensen?”
She knew she hadn’t given Alex much thought, either, but recognized her own tendency to shy away from considering what was becoming extremely painful.
“Not that, either, Jim. I’m deferring all thought of it until this is done. I’m playing Cleopatra—queen of denial.” She tried to grin at the terrible pun and did it poorly.
Ryan scowled, then gave her a half-sympathetic, half-quizzical look.
“Jessie—look. Maybe I’m dumb, but I’m not stupid, and I know you pretty well—at least as far as your abilities as a musher, and a little more as a friend. You’re one of the most focused people I know. It’s what wins races for you. But I’ve never seen you so intent on anything but the race you’re in. Since that call to Leland—even before—you’ve been pushing us along as fast as you can, taking the minimal amount of time in stops, rushing through the chores. What the hell is going on that makes you want to get to Dawson so soon? Not just the race. Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
She stared at him, astonished into silence, having had no indication that he was paying such close attention to her, or that her feelings and actions could give her away so easily.
“Jim, I…”
He waited.
She felt her eyes fill with tears that she did not allow to spill over.
“I…It’s not…I can’t…”
Good, dependable, undemanding friend. He shook his head, got up and came across to where she was sitting on her thermal container, hunkered down in front of her so they were on the same level, and gave her a long serious look.
“It’s okay, Jess. You don’t have to tell me. But I’ll try to help if you’ll let me. I can be very good at keeping my own counsel.”
She broke her promise and told him.
11
“The sleds came to a halt where the trail crossed the mouth of Stuart River. An unbroken sea of frost, its wide expanse stretched away into the unknown east…. We saw no men; only the sleeping river, the moveless forest, and the White Silence of the North.”
—Jack London, “An Odyssey of the North”
STEWART RIVER, LIKE STEPPING STONE, WAS NOT AN OFFICIAL checkpoint, but a site along the river where dogs could be dropped. There was no real community, just some wall tents brought in for the race, with a race veterinarian and some volunteers to take care of the dogs mushers found it necessary to leave behind.
Dropping a dog does not always mean that it is sick or injured. Sometimes mushers take along a dog or two that have never been involved in a distance race, knowing they need the experience, intending to drop them part of the way along the trail and go on with their solid experienced team the rest of the way.
This was the case with the dog Ryan dropped at this point. Once again between regular timed rest stops, he and Jessie paused at Stewart River only briefly early Thursday morning after running all night, and each dropped a dog before going on. Ryan’s was a young female that he had planned to drop in Dawson, but he was not unhappy to leave her at Stewart, when she began to refuse to drink and exhibited initial symptoms of dehydration.
Perhaps Digger was lonely without Sunny and Wart. Perhaps the balance of the line was off slightly, though Jessie had moved dogs to compensate for this and didn’t think so. Most likely he had stepped into an invisible hole somewhere on the trail, but five miles from Stewart River the peppy black and white dog stopped pulling his share of the weight and began to drag back against his neck line, favoring one leg. Jessie stopped, took him off the line, and put him in the sled bag, head sticking out to see what was going on—he could never stand to be left out of anything—and carried him on to the stop in the basket. The vet diagnosed a sore left wrist and strained shoulder, and agreed that he should be dropped before it grew worse.
Down to eleven dogs, the same number as Ryan’s team, Jessie followed him directly onto the Stewart River for about a mile, then up onto the trail that ran away from the other bank. There they followed another cat trail for about five miles through homesteads and cleared spaces with abandoned buildings, watching the country change as they passed through it.
They had begun to travel through hard-core mining country. Not only had gold been found in this area in the 1890s, but more recent twentieth century dredges had reduced to bare earth what had once been scenic
rolling hills covered here and there with trees and brush. Everywhere there were long lines of snow-covered tailing piles from the dredges, rusted-out trucks and mining equipment, broken flume and sluice box parts, and other scattered evidence of radical mining activity. It was discouraging to see what the machines of man could do in response to his obsession with the precious yellow metal.
Apocalyptic was the word that came to Jessie’s mind, and she was grateful that snow blanketed the worst of the blasted area through which they passed. Exhausted with concern and lack of rest, she was not sorry to be able to sleep through most of the long break they took in the center of this devastation, and to be back on the trail without lingering. But she ached all over with fatigue and had begun to feel this part of the trail would never end. For one of the first times in her racing career, she was not enjoying the running of it and the country she was passing through.
“I feel like a horse that was ‘rode hard and put away wet,’ as my grandmother used say,” she said, as she stretched to relieve muscle tension and rubbed at a sore spot in one shoulder, wishing she could rub at the sore spots in her mind and nerves as well.
Now understanding her concerns and impatience, Ryan was amenable to crossing through this country as quickly as possible, while keeping close track of the condition and needs of the dogs and not taking any chance of burning them out. These dogs must get them at least to Dawson, after all, and could not be risked in doing so, whatever the crisis. The two mushers were caring dog handlers and would not under any circumstances have sacrificed their animals willingly. They were now running in the eighth and ninth positions, having left two more teams behind them, one that had slowed down considerably and one that had scratched from the race in Stepping Stone.
“Hell of a reason to make great time,” Ryan said with a wry smile, as they paused along a bald ridge above tree line.
They had just finished a half-hour climb up a huge hill so steep that the trailbreakers had put in intense sweeping switchbacks to help the teams make it to the top. The sun was just rising, with the full moon low in the sky, and from where they had paused on top they could see for miles in all directions, ridge after ridge that fell away like a rumpled blanket across the landscape—the Black Hills around Black Hills Creek.
The temperature had dropped another two or three degrees. The sun would shortly disappear into a bank of clouds that stretched out overhead, leaving only a rapidly narrowing band of clear sky to the east, through which a beam of early sunshine cast a glow on the snow-covered summits of the ridges.
“If this cloud cover’s as full of snow as it looks, it could get nasty on American Summit,” Jessie speculated.
“It could get nasty before that,” Ryan answered. “I’d rather do King Solomon’s Dome without it, if possible, and get on into Dawson for my thirty-six, where I can sleep indoors and for at least one night be away from mushers who snore.”
“I beg your pardon,” she objected haughtily.
“Oh, I didn’t mean you, of course.” He grinned. “Your snores are the very appealing, gentle kind.”
She threw a Snickers bar at him that she had been about to eat, which he neatly fielded and pocketed.
“Don’t you ever run out of these? I’ll wait to eat it when I can thaw it out. About broke a tooth on the last one.”
For fifteen miles they ran over the ridges before dropping down along a frozen creek that ran down a valley filled with more ugly evidence of strip-mining. Old equipment, oil drums, and tailing piles littered the snow-covered ground.
Coming up out of the creek, Jessie clung to the drive bow of her sled, letting it help to lift her over the edge of the bank. Suddenly the rear stanchion that she had checked in Carmacks gave way, leaving her drive bow unsupported on one side. With a cry, she let go and tumbled back down, banging an elbow on the ice as she rolled over in the snow.
“Whoa, Tank. Whoa,” she called to her leader, but, well trained, he had already brought the team to a halt at the sound of her first yell.
Ryan, running ahead, also stopped, set his snow hook, and came back to give her a hand up the bank and make sure she was okay.
They examined the loose stanchion.
“Damn. I checked that again in Pelly Crossing and it seemed fine.”
“Well, it’s just the one end that’s broken. We should be able to tape it up enough to make it into Dawson with no trouble.”
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
Jessie opened her sled bag to get out the duct tape she always carried for repairs of all kinds. She was sure that half of Alaska was held together with it—she’d seen everything from air mattresses to airplanes sporting the sticky silvery stuff.
The tape was not where she expected it to be. Ten minutes later, having searched through all her equipment and supplies, she had to admit it was missing.
“Accidentally leave it somewhere?” Ryan asked.
“Must have. But I haven’t used it—haven’t even taken it out of my tool bag. There was a whole new roll.”
“You’re sure you put it in?”
“Yes, absolutely. I double-checked the list the night before the race. Besides, I saw it in Carmacks, when I took out a toggle.”
“No problem. I have some.”
“I can’t use yours.”
“Yes, you can. It’s allowed when it’s an emergency. I can’t leave you sitting here in the wilds.”
“You’re right. Okay. Let’s get on with it.”
In half an hour they were back on the trail, Jessie’s sled solid enough to run again. Still, the incident troubled her as they ran along the creek and began to head up out of the valley. Never once in a race—or a training run, for that matter—had she ever neglected to carry any essential item with her. Thinking back, she recalled the question in her mind of forgetting to secure Bliss and Pete the night they ran off to play hooky from the dog yard. Now she wondered if this might be another such oversight.
Am I getting too confident of my own abilities? she speculated. No. I know I packed that tape.
But you could have moved it to reach the toggle, or not noticed when it fell out.
Possible, of course, but I don’t think so.
Does it really matter?
Not really. It’s just irritating. I’m not losing my mind—I hope. Just my concentration—maybe.
She shrugged it off and continued to follow Ryan up the hill that rose ahead of them.
Far in the distance, when they had climbed again, they could see the south side of King Solomon’s Dome and the hills around Dawson. It was still a long ways away and there would be hours of traveling through the night before they even came close, but at last it was possible to see where they were headed.
The area they crossed seemed an unending series of mines, hills, mountains, valleys, and creeks—of going up one ridge only to come down the other side and start up again, ceaselessly, for hours. Still much of it looked better cared for than the mining country on the other side of the ridges, and they found a small abandoned cabin in a big empty valley for one rest stop among several. It was welcome, for it offered some protection from the wind that had begun to keen along the heights where there was little to break it in the vast rolling ocean of all-but-treeless hills.
In the morning dark that was only an hour or two from growing light again, they finally began the five-or six-mile climb up the back of King Solomon’s Dome on a snow-covered dirt road swept bare to the gravel and frozen ground by the gale that blew flying snow down their necks and into their faces in the total exposure of empty space. Jessie led the way; there was no communication with Ryan but gestures because the gusts whipped sound away almost before it was made, and flying crystals of snow worked like sandpaper on any bare, unprotected skin and drummed on their parka hoods. The windchill factor took the temperature to a low of close to thirty below zero, stiffening scoured flesh and tired bodies in its relentless attempts to slip icy fingers into small openings between parkas and gloves, hoods and collars
.
As the blowing white grew thinner, an anxious and exhausted Jessie could sporadically glimpse the lights of Dawson far below and, with relief, knew it would soon be daylight and they would be running through the town’s streets.
At long last they came out onto the Klondike River, which empties into the Yukon at Dawson City, famous gold rush center. Then, in the early light of dawn, they were gliding down the long main street, past the riverboat Keno with its huge paddle wheel, to pull up at the Dawson Visitors Center, halfway checkpoint in the thousand-mile Yukon Quest, hearing the Dawson City Fire Department siren wailing to let the residents know another musher had come into town. In Jessie’s case it also signaled that she was no longer a rookie, for making it as far as Dawson canceled her first-timer status, even if, for any reason, she didn’t finish the race.
Hungry and so weary she felt drained and found it hard to concentrate, Jessie preceded Ryan to a halt in the bright lights of the waiting video crews, caught sight of her support crew waiting, and, nearby, an anxiety-ridden Jake Leland, eyes dark-circled from lack of sleep, his face lined with tension.
Strange, she thought, securing the snow hook and stepping stiffly forward to help the checkpoint official search for her required gear. Except for Jake they all still think it’s a normal race from Whitehorse to Fairbanks.
The stop in Dawson City, Yukon, was different from any other in the race. There, teams were required to take a thirty-six-hour layover and allowed to accept major assistance from their support crews. It was permissible for the musher to sleep in a hotel or accept the hospitality of a resident, rather than stay in an area designated for racers only, or with their dogs. With time to spend, they could sleep for hours, and did, catching up on rest, allowing their bodies and minds to repair the damage of overextension and bone-deep fatigue. In the cafes and restaurants, they consumed enormous amounts of protein and carbohydrates for the same reason.