Rainy hesitated when she saw the crowd waiting at the finish line. Mowry clapped his hands and, coaxing her, ran with the team. People were clapping. For a few minutes I dared to dream that I might have even won. I even had Mowry scared.
“I didn’t want you to win the first time out and wind up with an unruly student on my hands,” the Coach said later.
He didn’t have to worry. All but two other teams completed the course faster. I finished fifth, beating Boulton and another musher who was delayed by a huge dog fight.
At the finish line, Kathy Swenson mentioned that she had planned on racing, but didn’t think it was worth it at 40 below.
Forty below zero. She had to be kidding! But it was no joke. Heat escaping through our cabin door had produced a false reading on our thermometer at home.
As we waited for results to be announced in the steamy convenience store, the winner of the race, Paul Taylor, slapped me on the shoulder.
“Pretty cold out there today,” he said, mentioning that he’d wondered if his lips were freezing in the breeze.
“How’s your face?” Taylor added, frowning.
Now that he mentioned it, my face felt sort of strange. My cheeks were rock hard to the touch, and cold. That’s odd, I thought.
Back at the cabin, Madman, Mowry, and Studer were fooling around in the kitchen when I finished feeding the dogs and came inside.
“Man, what happened to you, O’D!”
It wasn’t my imagination. Something was wrong. I had frostbitten my cheeks, a chunk of my neck, and both earlobes. My face was just beginning to swell. Within a few hours I puffed up like the Michelin Man. By morning, my mouth was framed with a pair of angry-red apples, and I had a pink golfball in place of my Adam’s apple.
“First-degree frostbite,” said the doctor, quickly assessing my predicament as he put on his coat for an emergency trip to the hospital. “That area will be extremely sensitive to the cold.” He prescribed a simple treatment: Avoid outdoor sports for at least three weeks. “Sooner than that and you might have scarring,” he said.
“Doc, you don’t understand. I’m in training.”
“You better train inside.”
I shook my head. Train inside? Not for the Iditarod.
My face was funny-looking, but the situation wasn’t. Even after my face had healed, the new skin remained more vulnerable. I fought back against nature, accumulating a new arsenal of cold-weather gear. The old motorcycle gear was scrapped for a $98 Refridgiwear snowmachine suit, sized triple extra large, allowing me to layer additional clothing underneath. Penny Wakefield, a local clothing designer, made me a lambskin hat and a face mask with fur sewn on the inside. My face mask collection soon threatened to crowd us out of the cabin.
“Just smear your face with Vaseline,” said Studer, comparing the trick to a swimmer rubbing on grease before attempting the English Channel. I was skeptical, but I began routinely globbing it on before tending to chores in the dog lot. It actually made a big difference.
I dressed for each run like a commando suiting up for a mission. The outfit started with long underwear, top and bottom, covered by polypropylene snow pants, and a thick, hooded pullover from Apocalypse Design, a local expedition outfitter. For foot protection, I used a $175 pair of huge white bunny boots, the U.S. military’s gift to the Arctic.
Despite my careful preparations, pieces of my body kept dying. Mowry would return home from a run sweating like a pig. I’d retreat to the bathroom to survey the expansion of bloodless white areas on several fingers, already tipped by deadened blisters.
“You’re hopeless, O’Donoghue,” the Coach said of my mounting scars.
I bought more gloves. And I bought more chemical hand warmers, which I clung to like talismans, rarely leaving the cabin without stuffing another handful in my pockets.
The warmers were neat little things. Tear open the plastic wrapper, shake the tea bag-sized sacks contained inside, and the warmers usually produced steady heat. I say “usually” because those warmers, which cost about 50 cents apiece, had a high failure rate. Roughly one in three was a dud.
I also experimented with larger fluid-filled heat pouches. These were miraculous, providing a 20-minute burst of intense heat when you flexed a metallic disc floating inside the clear fluid. Unlike the dry chemical warmers, the pouches were recyclable. If you placed a stiff white used one in boiling water, the contents liquefied and cleared, becoming as good as new. Alas, the pouches proved worthless. Routine jostling in the sled triggered them. They were always dead when I wanted one.
In Alaska, nothing takes the place of field-testing.
My biggest success against the cold came from dietary changes. Stuffing myself with bacon, buttery muffins, and cheese before training runs—that helped quite a bit. Even more important was drinking before, after, and during runs. Sipping a thermos cup of warm Gatorade, soup, even a beer, as I cruised down the trail, pumped more heat through me than a suit lined with chemical warmers.
The dead forest grew cold, then colder still. I had a full thermos, but it was difficult to tap into while jumping fallen logs and weaving between old tree stumps. More hot Gatorade spilled than reached my cup, leaving my fingers burned then chilled inside swiftly crusting gloves.
The snow is often thin in the unsheltered Burn, but recent storms had helped me out. Our trail was adequate, and a steady line of reflectors gleamed from the skeletal trees ahead. The wind ebbed and finally died by early afternoon.
I knew I was 93 miles from Rohn and Nikolai, and that it should take about 16 hours, an hour less than I’d already spent, to make the crossing. But statistics didn’t tell me anything about my own wretched progress, not after camping, the repair jobs, and riding my shattered sled. I realized that I had no handle on the actual size of the Burn. Somehow that had never come up when I covered past races, nor in my conversations with the coach.
Cresting each mound in the barren ruins, I searched the horizon for signs of life. No escape came into view. I was looking off in the distance as Rainy and Harley followed the tracks of a previous team and disappeared. Instinctively, I braced. Too late. The sled launched off a cliff, and I was looking downward at the dogs.
Frantic to avoid crushing anybody, I rolled to the left. The sled thudded to the ground on its side, missing the dogs by scant inches. Or so I thought, until Skidders bellowed in pain. The old wheel dog had a nasty slice on his right rear leg, caused by a glancing blow from a sled runner. Skidders quieted as I examined his wound. I swallowed hard and pretended to be calm. This looked bad. It was a deep slash, wide open to the muscle, right above Skidders’ ankle. At least it wasn’t bleeding much.
“Sorry, old man,” I said, digging into the sled for my first-aid kit.
The injured dog calmly watched as I greased the cut with antiseptic salve and bandaged it. I tried loading him in the sled bag, but Gnat’s burly father wiggled free and leaped out. Shaking himself, he yawned, sniffed the bandage, and seemed ready to forget the whole incident.
“All right, tough guy”
We resumed our march. Skidders, at nine the oldest dog in the team, fell into rhythm with the team’s pace without so much as a limp.
A solitary figure appeared in the distance. It was a person, on foot.
“Jesus,” I whispered, trying to figure out which musher might have lost his team.
Drawing closer, I made out a man pulling a small sled. What was anybody doing out here on foot? The riddle was answered when I spotted the rifle slung over a shoulder—a hunter. The man greeted me warmly, and I halted the team. Like two astronauts meeting in a dead lunar basin, we talked in the middle of the Burn. I was cheered more than I would have expected by the human company.
The hunter whipped out a pocket camera. “Mind if I take a picture?”
The distraction provided by the hunter was brief. Hour after hour, I pressed on, bouncing over partially buried trunks and old stumps. In midafternoon, the sled slammed to a stop, nearly flipping me ov
er the handlebar.
“Son of a bitch!”
The chain anchoring my snowmachine track was caught on a small, firm stump. I couldn’t lift my sled over it. And I couldn’t slide the sled backward—not with 15 dogs straining forward on a downhill slope.
“Son of a bitch!”
We weren’t going anywhere unless I cut off the stump. Double-anchoring the team with both of my snow hooks, I grabbed my axe.
I’d been trapped on a mountain in a storm. Dragged off a cliff. My sled was busted and patched with trees. Now I was playing logger in a dead forest.
“Un-” I cried, swinging at the stump, “stoppable!”
I repeated the mantra with each bite of the axe, feeling stronger with every blow. “Un-stoppable! Un-stoppable! Un-stoppable!”
The stump gave way. The team surged, popping both snow hooks as I leaped aboard the runners.
“That’s right,” I shouted at the dogs. “We are un-stoppable!”
Plettner was doing just fine, thank you. Those pups zipped right over to Takotna. She couldn’t praise them enough. It was Urtha who had her worried. Her mushing student’s situation was growing worse with each phone call. Plettner hardly knew what to say anymore.
“The dogs won’t go right,” Urtha complained. Hansel, one of the leased team’s key leaders, “wasn’t performing,” he told her.
“Is he mentally or physically having problems?” Plettner asked.
“Well, I sure don’t know.”
Plettner instructed Lenthar to find a vet and have the dog checked out. He did, and the examination proved inconclusive. That settled matters as far as Lynda was concerned.
“Look Urtha,” she said, “take a break, but not much of a break, because you’re going very slowly and those dogs AREN’T TIRED. Then get over here to Takotna. I’m going to wait for you.”
The stray had to be a team dog. That much was obvious from the harness. And who else would be traveling the Burn this time of year besides Iditarod mushers?
Then again, Doc Cooley wasn’t an official entrant himself. The debonair mushing vet from Wisconsin was Iditarod’s so-called “trail sweep,” conducting tests on sled-dog metabolism while providing veterinary backup for teams traveling in the rear of the field. It was a new concept, something Cooley, 44, had thought up after years of frustration watching apparently healthy Iditarod dogs collapse from undetected heart problems. Doc suspected electrolyte imbalances might be the cause. The race offered the perfect opportunity to test the hypothesis.
Cooley tried to lure the stray within reach, offering the dog chunks of meat. Darting between trees, Charlie remained out of reach, barking at the unwelcome intruder’s team.
Not far ahead of Cooley, John Ace barely clipped a tree with his knee. Though only a glancing blow, it came at a damaging angle. It was as if a grenade had exploded under Ace’s sled, which tumbled down the hill. He felt like his face got the worst of it. He didn’t notice the throbbing in his leg until later.
Dawn was breaking. Ace figured he could tough it out to Nikolai. Not that he had any choice. The burly musher drove onward. The pain in his leg steadily increased, as did the swelling. Before long, Ace was precariously hunched over the sled, unable to help his dogs on the hills, and enduring terrible pain as he repeatedly capsized.
The team dragged its injured driver into Don and Catherine Mormile’s camp in the Burn. They took one look at Ace’s leg and ordered him to lie down. The leg might be broken, they warned. Ace, a former Vietnam medic, wasn’t entirely convinced. He held out hope of finishing this, his sixth, Iditarod. But he welcomed their help feeding his dogs.
Cooley arrived on the scene and lent his voice to the Mormiles’. Ace’s condition was indeed grave. On a bitter night like this, Doc told the musher, he risked losing that leg, because swelling magnified the risk of frostbite. The veterinarian convinced Ace to take shelter in his sled bag and wait there while he mushed to Nikolai for help. Just to be on the safe side, Cooley confiscated Ace’s boots, leaving him no choice but to stay put.
Race Judge Al Marple and Jeff Stokes, a local EMT, returned several hours later on snowmachines, equipped with a rescue sled. In a bumpy ride, punctuated by the musher’s groans, they hauled the crippled musher to the village. Ace was flown to McGrath Friday afternoon. X rays revealed a hair-line fracture in his leg just below the knee. He and his dogs were headed home. This incident brought the total number of race casualties to eight.
Tom Daily found the Burn oddly fascinating. He passed through the skeletal forest at night, his favorite time for mushing, chasing the tracks of a fox in the fresh snow. The team’s joyride ended at Sullivan Creek, where his dogs balked at crossing the open water. The creek was about 15 feet across. Trailbreakers had built a temporary bridge for the race leaders, but the jumbled logs and sticks looked dangerous now. A dog killer, Daily decided, after scouting the crossing.
Bridge or no bridge, the rushing water had to be crossed. After a few abortive attempts at ordering the leaders across, the musher took matters into his own arms. One at a time, he picked up his dogs and carried them to the far side, wading through freezing water well above his knees. The chore delayed Tom Daily three hours, and turned his space-age foam boots into huge clumps of ice.
Lee and Garth were studying Sullivan Creek when I arrived. My timing couldn’t have been better. We teamed up for the crossing. I rode sleds to the edge of the creek, holding the dogs to a crawl as Lee threw reluctant swimmers into the water. Garth was positioned on the far shore, coaxing the dogs forward, and ready to yank foundering critters to safety. Soggy though they were, the dogs pulled our sled across upright and dry. Between the three of us, we forded the creek with minimal delay and no accidents.
I was the last one across, riding my runners all the way and sending spray flying from my bunny boots.
Sunlight was stabbing through clouds as we stopped on the far bank and snacked our soggy dogs. I took a picture of old Skidders holding his head high, impatient to go on again. Incredible dog.
Lee grinned at the sight of my taped headlamp and the trees lashed to my sled. “I wondered what was holding you up.”
Judging from Kershner’s comments before the race, I knew I could probably arrange for Mowry to ship replacement stanchions and anything else I needed to McGrath, a large village 50 miles from Nikolai. But that might take days! After what I’d just been through catching up, there was no way I was going to let Lee and Garth leave without me. After McGrath, the next likely place for a commercial air shipment was Anvik, over 200 miles north. Could the patched sled make it that far? It seemed like a hell of a gamble.
Garth’s leaders were tiring. Lee asked if I wanted to take the lead. I nodded, and he slowed his team so I could pass.
“Catch this,” I said, tossing Lee an imaginary gift as our sleds met.
“What’s that?”
“The Red Lantern!” I shouted.
Barry Lee laughed.
“You want somebody to work on that?” said the Nikolai checker, eyeing my patched sled.
Did I? I could have kissed the guy. He sent me to Nick Petruska, an Athabaskan sledmaker.
“I have a little birch,” Petruska said, studying the damage. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I tied the team alongside Petruska’s house, pulled out the cooker, then unhitched my sled from the gang line. The Athabaskan pushed it across the yard to his work shed.
In little more than the time it took to prepare the dogs a hot meal, Petruska duplicated the shattered parts and rebuilt the back end of my sled. I was amazed. It felt stronger than ever. The quiet villager didn’t ask for it, but I gave him $100. I was back in the race. Unstoppable indeed. Catching the Poodle Man would be merely a matter of time.
I walked Skidders to the checkpoint and rousted the veterinarian from bed. Though bleary-eyed, the volunteer from the Deep South grabbed his medical bag and immediately set to work, cutting off the bandage with a pair of scissors. The dog’s pasty white cut looked awfu
l to me, but it wasn’t infected. Sealing the gash with some sort of medical staple-gun, the vet wrapped the paw.
“Have the bandages rechecked,” he said, gently rubbing Skidders’s neck, “but there’s no reason that dawg can’t run all the way to Nome on that foot.”
A race judge and several villagers were talking about Bill Peele. The rules were clear. The musher couldn’t continue without his missing dog, which several mushers had seen haunting the woods near the Burn. Peele couldn’t even officially check in at Nikolai. He had two choices: scratch or find Charlie.
After consulting with the judge, Peele arranged to rent a snowmachine, which he had absolutely no experience driving, and he hired several snowmachiners from the village. The motorized posse was supposed to leave in the morning.
Leaving the checkpoint, I ran into Steve Fossett, another rookie who was getting ready to pull out after completing his 24-hour layover in Nikolai. Lean and slightly balding, Fossett, forty-six, was a classic adventurer. The president of a securities firm in Chicago, he wanted to add the Iditarod to his already impressive list of mountain-climbing and ocean-swimming achievements. He was mushing a team leased from Canadian musher Bruce Johnson, an Iditarod veteran and winner of the 1986 Quest. But Fossett’s hired dogs weren’t cooperating.
Crossing the Burn, the dogs repeatedly quit, forcing Fossett to camp for hours each time. It was a dismal repeat of his experience on the Kusko 300, when the canine work stoppages caused him to scratch. His faith in the Iditarod investment was eroding. The best gear and dogs money could buy wasn’t worth much without cooperation between the team and its driver.
“I haven’t got any leaders at all,” Fossett said, sounding deeply discouraged.
I beat a hasty retreat, leaving Fossett to stew about his fate.
My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian Page 13