My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian

by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

  “God,” prayed the musher, “every other clue up the line has told me to go on. What’s going on here? Am I supposed to finish this race?”

  Lee received an immediate response, a message sensed, rather than heard.

  “No.”

  The answer was so emphatic, Lee decided that his personal fears were talking. He asked again. “Am I supposed to finish this race?”

  “NO.” He actually heard that. “YOU NEED TO GO HOME.”

  Barry turned his leaders around for the last time. It was 25 miles back to the village, and every step became a battle. Lee was soaking wet and shivering. His foot was cold. His dogs rubbed hair off their hind legs plowing through the crusty drifts, but the musher kept driving them. He had no choice. He had no food to give them, and they were weakening by the hour.

  Four miles out of Grayling, Barry Lee emptied everything but his sleeping bag out of the sled. He wanted to shave every spare ounce. It was going to be close, he knew, but the dogs would make it. He was now confident of that much.

  Oddly enough, the musher drew some comfort from the day’s hardship. His unseen advisor was wise. This team never would have made it to Eagle Island. He had a season of mistakes to learn from. For now, retreat offered the only path toward salvation.

  Doc’s wolf pack was faltering. After Blackburn’s cabin, the signs of stress were becoming unmistakable. Up and down his gang line Cooley’s dogs flopped on their backs, squirming in the snow with each pause. Their snarls and squabbling showed that the dogs weren’t fatigued in the physical sense. We weren’t traveling fast enough to tire his leased champions. But even the best lead dogs can only take so much pressure.

  Daily shared the trail-breaking duties on this warm, sunny afternoon. But his old leader was slower than a glacier. It drove Doc crazy following the other team. He couldn’t take more than a mile of Tom’s creeping pace before impatiently reclaiming the lead, and then Cooley’s leaders would resume their games. At one point, Doc was trying to change his leaders in the deep snow when he tripped and fell, completely burying himself. The veterinarian popped back up, cursing, laughing, and almost crying as he spit out snow. My offer to put on snowshoes and blaze the trail myself didn’t help.

  “Snowshoes? God no,” Cooley said, horrified. “We’ll be out here forever.”

  In a deep section between two islands, we came across a half-buried bicycle. The powdery river had evidently defeated the specially rigged twin tires on each wheel. Judging from the tracks, the rider had continued on foot. We braced ourselves for the appearance of a body. Instead, we soon encountered an Athabaskan trapper traveling by snowmachine. Watching the winds the day before, the Indian from Grayling knew that any mushers left on the river had to be struggling. He’d come out scouting for us.

  The trapper dug into his supplies, and, in short order, we three were sipping hot coffee and chewing strips of dried salmon. And the Indian had surprising news. A “whole bunch of teams” were still camping at Eagle Island, and the checkpoint lay little more than an hour away by dog team, he said.

  I was famished and complimented the trapper on the salmon.

  “You like them? Help yourself,” he said, handing me a baggy filled with the chewy strips.

  Gunning his snowmachine, the trapper looped around and streaked back toward Eagle Island, repacking our new trail.

  Swennie’s victory produced a weeklong orgy of front-page stories and special in-state broadcast reports. Elsewhere his victory was briefly noted, then the race swiftly faded from attention. The fate of the 50-odd teams left on the trail hardly rated a mention. Even in Alaska, most of the sports-page ink was devoted to baseball spring training, now entering its meaningless second week.

  Four time zones away, television station WDCA played up Washington D.C.’s local Iditarod angle one last time. My participation in the race had already been the subject of several local television and newspaper reports. Now WDCA combined their interviews with my family with a home video of the start and a network story about Swenson’s victory. Assuming the Iditarod was over for everyone, the station erroneously reported that Washington’s musher had finished in sixtieth place.

  As the newscast drew to a close, the anchors bantered about the incredible sequence of events that had placed me—the son of a once-prominent D.C. attorney—on a dog sled in Alaska.

  “At least he’s not a lawyer,” anchor Jim Vance said.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Kaltag Eleven

  Dusk was near as I parked in the Iditarod village taking root in the slough. “HOW LONG DO YOU PLAN TO STAY?” asked Eagle Island checker Ralph Conatser, a hard look in his eyes. Dogs were sleeping or stretching over long beds of straw. Smoke rose from several campfires. Heaps of supply sacks and trash were scattered in the crusty, urine-stained snow.

  The stormy 60-mile trek up the Yukon had taken us more than 30 hours. Conatser tensed as I described our ordeal, mentioning that the dogs needed a good rest. He relaxed as I added, “So we won’t be pulling out until tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, that would be fine, just fine,” said the checker in a much warmer tone.

  The scowl returned as Conatser gestured at the other dog teams scattered nearby. Terhune, Linda Plettner, Sepp Herrman, Don and Catherine Mormile had been camping on the island for the past three days. Mark Williams, Gunnar Johnson, and Urtha Lenthar had been in residence nearly that long. Friday’s addition of Doc, Daily, and me brought to eleven the total number of dog teams crowding Conatser’s peaceful retreat. He and his wife even had a visiting cyclist. After intercepting the three of us, the trapper had found Bob, the owner of the abandoned bicycle, struggling up the river on foot, through waist-deep powder. The amused trapper had given the failed Idita-cycler a lift to the checkpoint.

  The crowd itself wasn’t unusual. Twice that many Iditarod teams had jammed into the slough after Runyan lead the first wave last Sunday. But hardly seven hours had passed before King launched most of those teams on a new stampede up the Yukon. Mushers traveling in the rear of the field were different, said Conatser. They weren’t racers. They were campers. Look at those wood fires burning in his slough! These damn campers would clear-cut his entire island if he didn’t watch out.

  “Some of these people act like they’re never going to leave. They’re eating us out of house and home. And we got one woman here who’s driving me crazy.”

  “Daily and I have been chasing these guys for weeks,” I said. “Don’t worry. Now that we’ve caught up, we won’t be sticking around.”

  The checker invited us to come by his cabin after we finished with the dogs. “Haven’t got much left, but my wife will fix you something. I’m glad somebody here remembers the Iditarod is a race.”

  Jon Terhune hadn’t forgotten. As Daily, Doc, and I arrived, the irritable Soldotna musher was tightening the straps, resealing his sled bag. Stuck in this lousy slough since Wednesday, Terhune was anxious to escape. He was sick of listening to Linda Plettner, sick of that Gunnar kid, the Mormiles, and those others. He thought they were a bunch of sorry whiners, every one of them. He planned to ditch them once and for all.

  Earlier that afternoon, Terhune and the other seven mushers encamped at Eagle Island had pitched in $50 apiece and hired the trapper to break a new trail to Kaltag. They were unaware that Niggemyer, the race manager, had already cut a deal with the trapper, filling his snowmachine with gas for that same mission. The trapper kept a straight face as the mushers approached him with their request. They wanted him to wait until morning, but the trapper was impatient to get back to Grayling. The trip north was hundreds of miles out of the way. So the trapper struck out for Kaltag that evening, carrying his unexpected $400 bonus.

  Another cold night was forecast on the river, at least 30 below. Plettner and the others resolved to wait until daylight, giving the trail more time to set. Terhune thought they were fools.

  “Screw you people,” he said, stomping out of the stove-heated mushers’ quarters. “I’m leaving.”


  Plettner, Herrman, and the Mormiles felt differently. They were angered at Conatser’s refusal to share supplies abandoned by previous teams, and his stinginess in doling out alcohol for their stoves. Several went so far as to accuse the checker of creating the shortage by bartering away his checkpoint reserves. They had complained to Iditarod as a group.

  Before we arrived, Bill Chisholm had flown in to Eagle Island to sort out the dispute. The race judge had marching orders from Kershner to get the trailing pack teams moving. Accordingly, Chisholm not only backed up Conatser’s decisions on supplies; he warned the mushers not to expect special help. The visit ended in a confrontation between Herrman and Chisholm, a neighbor of Swennie’s who was familiar with the German’s hard-ass reputation as a dog trainer and Brooks Range survivalist.

  “Sepp,” the race judge said, “I bet you never see the coast.”

  The comment infuriated Herrman, whose pride was already suffering from mistakes he had made early in the race. True, he hadn’t pushed his dogs. He’d been playing nursemaid ever since the starting line. But Sepp no longer doubted that he’d make it to Nome, if only to spit in the judge’s face.

  There were hard feelings all the way around. I wasn’t about to take sides. Herrman and the other mushers were foolish to ask for official help. I’d seen that lesson played out many times.

  “From the moment Swenson crossed under that arch, we’ve been on borrowed time,” I warned the group. “Iditarod is going to want to wrap up the race—any way they can. If we want to get to Nome, we have to take care of ourselves. Ask for food, fuel, anything—and you’re risking disqualification. I’ve seen it happen.”

  The others seemed surprised. They weren’t considering the logistics supporting our extended adventure. This was day 14. More than a dozen mushers were already in Nome celebrating with Swenson. The support network of veterinarians, pilots, ham-radio operators, and other volunteers was already fragmenting. The majority of these volunteers came from Anchorage or other urban areas. The thrill of providing us with 24-hour service, sleeping on hard floors, and eating camp meals was, by now, wearing thin. The big award banquet in Nome, due to start at about six on Sunday evening, marked the end of the race for most people involved.

  Even so, our situation looked pretty good to me. We had Doc Cooley, our own private veterinarian. We could expect help from Iditarod supporters in the villages ahead, where our supplies were still waiting. Most important, within the group here we had the sheer dog power needed to break our own trail to Nome. Strength in numbers was something Daily, Doc, and I keenly appreciated after our hard-fought drive from Grayling.

  “I can’t BELIEVE they’re waiting for us,” Daily confided later, echoing my own thoughts. “But it sure is nice.”

  The Yukon swallowed the trail before his eyes. Terhune was discouraged, but refused to backtrack. Every mile brought him closer to Nome and farther away from those slackers in the slough.

  Grueling hours later, the musher saw a light approaching. It was weaving like crazy, left and right, left and right. As it drew closer, the light straightened out, taking a direct line toward him. It was the trapper on his snowmachine. The man had lost the trail on the return trip from Kaltag. He was searching for it when he spotted Terhune’s headlamp.

  “You’re the only one that came?” shouted the trapper, doubting the evidence of his own eyes.

  Terhune shrugged.

  The trapper’s freight sled was loaded with extra cases of Heet alcohol fuel, which he was delivering to the checkpoint back at Eagle Island. He unpacked a handful of bottles and gave them to Terhune. The trail was open, the villager said, but he didn’t think it would last. “Try and avoid the places where it goes back and forth,” he added, “because I’ve been lost for an hour.”

  In the middle of the night, the trapper threw open the door to our warm room on Eagle Island and staggered inside. Clutching an open bottle of liquor, he stumbled over the mushers slumbering in his path.

  “What’re you all doing here?” he shouted, quite drunk. “Put inna trail alla way to Kaltag. You shoulda gone. Shoulda gone.”

  At the river’s edge, the trail disappeared—no other word fit. Rainy cast about, perplexed. I ran to the front of the team and calmed her, searching for clues in the hard white crust. Nine dog teams had come this way in the last hour or so—channeled along the river through about eight winding miles of waist-high brush. Not a sign of the traffic remained. Wind whipping across the exposed flats had erased every scratch, every pawprint of their passage.

  A churning white cloud swallowed the river ahead. It was a ground blizzard, a surface-hugging soup of wind-whipped powder. My team was perched on the edge of a gray-white limbo, violent and surreal. Our vantage point on the brink offered no refuge, nor did the scrubby bushes behind us. We were horribly exposed to the wind raking the frozen river. The dogs didn’t like the looks of this. If I wanted to avoid a forced camp, we had to keep moving.

  I took Rainy and Harley by the neck line, preparing to lead them by foot, when Daily’s frightened voice cut through the storm.

  “Wait, wait,” he cried, halting his dogs behind mine. “My hand is frozen!”

  Fresh out of the checkpoint, Tom had noticed his hands felt cold in those high-tech gloves. Stripping off the outer shells, he inserted a chemical hand warmer into each mitt. That effort was undermined by spindrift powder, which instantly collected on his thin polypropylene inner liners. With the shells back on, the snow melted, and Daily’s hands became soaked, and his fingers became even colder. He forced the discomfort from his mind, waiting for the little chemical packs to kick in. That stoicism proved misguided; one of the warmers was a dud.

  Coming up behind me, Daily rudely discovered that he couldn’t even flex the fingers on his chilled hand.

  My dogs were lying down in the wind. Not understanding his predicament, I angrily urged him to hurry.

  “Give me five minutes.”

  “Make that two minutes,” I snapped. “Tom, we gotta go!”

  I ran back and helped Daily swap his wet liner for a dry one, slipping another warmer in the mitt. As the two of us fumbled, the dogs on both teams began digging in, instinctively carving shelters from the drifts.

  “I think we should consider turning around,” said Tom, flexing his stiff hand inside a mitt, uncertain whether it was damaged.

  “We are NOT going back!” I declared, angry that he would even suggest such a thing. “We’re two hours out—that’s two hours closer to Nome.”

  If I had to weather another storm, I wanted to do it right there, without surrendering an inch. The situation was infuriating. After all the trouble we had gone through to catch those other teams, here Tom and I were in last place again, falling farther behind by the minute. And why? Patching harnesses might have cost me a few minutes, but that wasn’t the main reason. It was because we sat on our asses and let the others get away—that’s why! I’d be damned before I’d turn around.

  Sensible as ever, Daily was equally adamant. This was a terrible place to stop. Dogs couldn’t rest here. There was no way to feed them. What if the storm didn’t break for hours? Or days? We risked weakening our dogs through exposure. It made more sense, he felt, to regroup in the shelter of the slough. He didn’t mention his concerns about the hand; it stung, at least that was a good sign.

  The two of us were going at it when Cooley unexpectedly mushed up from behind. The dog-driving veterinarian had been detained at the Conatsers’ cabin, where he had used the couple’s radio phone to confer with Iditarod headquarters.

  “Why’d you stop?”

  We hurriedly explained the situation.

  Doc shook his head. “I don’t do reverse!” he shouted, grinning through frosty whiskers.

  With a sharp command, Cooley ordered the wolf pack on by, passing our already snow-covered dogs. Showing nary a trace of hesitation, his team marched into the shrieking void. Daily, whose hand was now wonderfully pliable, and I quickly roused our dogs a
nd chased him.

  Terhune followed wind-bent trail markers into a narrow slough. Something about the shape of the drifts here made him edgy. The snow was a bit too wavy, too sculpted. He didn’t care to imagine the sort of wind conditions required to create this special effect.

  Jon was aware that his dogs were nearing their limit. What about that deserted fish camp not too far back? The old buildings weren’t much to look at, but they offered some shelter from the wind. He grabbed his leaders and turned the team around.

  Terhune rested the dogs through most of Sunday, waiting for the wind to break. An opening finally came in late afternoon. He took advantage of the calm, but trail conditions proved awful. If a base existed under the waist-deep powder, the musher couldn’t find it. He was angry at his bad luck, tired, and deeply depressed. Four hundred miles distant, Nome seemed impossibly far.

  We caught Plettner’s group by midafternoon Saturday. The sky was supremely clear. The Yukon stretched before us, a broad field of glistening white bordered on either side by tiny lines of trees. Our ten-team convoy slowly inched up the massive river’s center. The place made the Big Su look like a racquetball court.

  Daily and I remained at the caboose end of the convoy. It was an extraordinary scene. The chain of dog teams stretched a half-mile or more ahead, forming a line of brightly colored caterpillars crossing a desolate white prairie. From my sled runners, I banged off pictures of the procession, catching dog teams arrayed in an arc, stretching from my wheel dogs to the trail-breakers mushing across the distant horizon.