by Sue Henry
From Unalakleet to Shaktoolik the trail runs mostly over land, following the slight curve of the shore. To reach Koyuk, however, mushers must venture onto the sleeping ice giant of Norton Sound.
Although the line between land and sea ice is not obvious, somehow the mushers know when they have crossed onto the sound. For those running their first race, the knowledge that far below their sled runners lies ocean, with its impermanently subdued salt water, makes them feel small and vulnerable. A feeling of danger and the transience of nature inspires an almost giddy sense of relief when the crossing is over. Experienced mushers respect the ice bridges between Shaktoolik and Nome, never quite losing their awareness of the power of the sea over which they travel.
Jensen, Becker, and Caswell watched in silent awe as they passed over, barely able to pick out the line of stakes and tripod markers carefully laid by the trailblazers to guide the racers across. They looked like toothpicks in the snow, flagged with the familiar pink surveyors’ tape, only visible when they were flying low.
“Jesus,” whispered Becker. “You couldn’t pay me enough.”
Jensen remembered the race won by Libby Riddles. She made this crossing alone in a severe storm, bravely walking into the face of the wind, creating enough of a lead to break away from the rest of the field. He had wondered at the guys who elected to stay safe in Shaktoolik. Now he suddenly realized what an incredible thing Riddles had done, brave or foolish, when she crossed, foot by foot, from one marker to the next, giving herself the edge. He no longer questioned the wisdom of those who waited it out.
They were approaching Koyuk when he realized he could not see the ground. A white fog had blown in from the west. Glancing toward Caswell, he discovered a frown on the pilot’s face. At that moment the plane took a slight drop and began to dance, vibrating slightly.
He felt his stomach lurch.
“We got problems, Cas?”
“Not yet, but I want to see that gravel strip soon. The storm is about to hit. Check your belts, guys. I don’t want one of you in my lap. This may get worse before I can set it down.”
Alex looked back to see Becker, wide-eyed. He grinned.
“Don’t sweat it. If Cas can’t get us down, no one can. Right?”
“Right. Why doesn’t that make me feel better?”
The motion of the plane now subsided into irregular jerks and bounces as they flew north, searching for the lights of the village.
Caswell could be heard speaking into his microphone, but to Jensen’s untrained ears it was mostly uninterpretable pilotese, interrupted by jounces.
“Can’t you reach anyone?” Becker asked.
“All the villages from here to Nome are uncontrolled landing sites,” Caswell told him. “That means you’re on your own. No radios, except for other pilots. I got through to Unalakleet, thinking we’d better turn around and head back. They’ve closed the strip. The storm has blown in there already. It seems to be coming in from the south, following us up the coast. We’ll have to make a run for it, find a place to land as soon as we can. Koyuk’s out. Wind’s too strong and I don’t want to waste the time. We’ll aim for Elim, but I think we’re going to wind up in Nome. They have radio and can talk us down if they have to.”
With that, he turned his attention to the plane. For what seemed like an interminable amount of time they slid around the sky, heading mostly west. The wind picked up, tossing them in unexpected directions.
Cinching his safety harness as tight as possible, Alex tried to keep his knees and elbows out of Caswell’s way and to ignore his stomach. That became almost impossible when Becker lost his lunch into an evidence bag, but he managed to control himself until the ventilation system could remove most of the unsettling odor.
Caswell paid attention to nothing but keeping them airborne. Always impressed with his fellow troopers flying skills, Alex now realized the true extent of his ability. He responded so quickly to movements of the wind-driven machine that he seemed to anticipate them. Perhaps he did.
If I don’t live through this, I’ll never blame Cas, he thought. He knew by the absurdity of the thought just how scared he really was.
It grew darker, and it seemed as if they had been thrown around the cockpit for hours. Jensen’s right arm began to ache from hitting the door. Becker was moaning quietly from the rear seat when Caswell began to speak tensely into the microphone. Another ten minutes and the jouncing gentled slightly. Straightening in his seat, Alex looked down to see lights under him.
“Nome,” Caswell said, and he continued his tense communications on the radio. As the ground came up beneath them, Alex could see how much they were still being blown around. The strip moved up and down as Cas fought to bring the plane into contact with its surface. They bounced three times and slid sideways as they taxied in, Cas fighting every inch. Two figures in parkas ran to throw their weight against the plane, and another directed Cas into the shelter of a small hangar. They stopped moving, and Caswell was out the door in an instant to make sure the halt was permanent.
Alex opened his own door, stumbled out onto the ground, and threw up.
“Who the hell taught you to fly like that?” he asked Caswell as they unloaded the secured Maule M-4.
“A guy in Anchorage named Bunker, who knows more than I’ll ever learn. Why? You want a lesson?”
“Not in a million years. But I’d sure like to shake his hand.”
28
Date: March 11
Race Day: Ten
Place: Nome checkpoint and between Shaktoolik and Koyuk checkpoints (fifty-eight miles)
Weather: Blizzard conditions, blowing snow and heavy winds
Temperature: High –19°F, low –27°F
Time: Early evening
“But I don’t want to be in Nome, damn it,” Jensen told Sergeant Ken Carpenter of Detachment D, Nome Post. “If anything happens, it will be back down the trail. There’s got to be some way to get to Koyuk or Elim, even White Mountain.”
The tall, half-Eskimo trooper in charge shook his head and tried again to explain, but he wasn’t saying what Jensen wanted to hear.
“Alex,” Caswell interjected. “There’s just no way. As long as this storm has us socked in, you can’t get anywhere. You know that, you just don’t like it. I don’t either, but there is nothing, I repeat, nothing, we can do about it.”
Jensen stopped, leaned on the desk, and took a deep breath. Then he apologized to Carpenter, and to Caswell, for good measure.
After taking care of the plane and collecting their gear, they had taken a cab directly to Carpenter’s office, where he was working late, in case of trouble. Iditarod week in Nome is the biggest event of the year, and half the population, plus more than a thousand nonresident race fans, was crowded into the local bars in celebration of the approaching finish. With several hundred folks thoroughly awash with alcohol, there was always some trouble—seldom anything serious, but something.
The ground blizzard was now howling through town. The few people on the street scurried from one shelter to the next, clutching one another to avoid being blown off their feet. The south side of Front Street turns its back on the sea, but the blizzard thrust its frigid fingers between buildings. Out on the ice, a person turning his back on such a storm would actually feel his breath being sucked from his lungs by the strange vacuum created by the wind.
Inside the drinking establishments of Nome, from the Polaris to the Breakers and on down to the Board of Trade, bands imported from Anchorage pulsed loud enough to drown the sound of the wind, as well as any serious attempt at conversation. Dance floors, little larger than a barn door, were packed with gyrating patrons. Hobo Jim, a regular in the Nome Iditarod celebration, sang repeatedly, “I did, I did, I did the Iditarod Trail,” as the crowd clapped and loudly followed along.
Alex would notice all this later. Now he turned and dropped into a ch
air.
“Okay,” he said. “I give up. We wait. But let’s figure out what’s available to us. Can we get through on the radio?”
Caswell and Carpenter gave each other a look to decide who told him the rest of the bad news. Carpenter lost.
“Very iffy,” he stalled. “Depends on the conditions between here and there. We can try. We can also keep in touch with Iditarod headquarters here, to see what they get.”
Cas tackled the issue head-on. “The best we can do right now is hope this blows itself out in less than a week. We might as well find something to eat and get some sleep.”
“A week?”
“It has been known to happen. We are damned lucky to be here. And, believe me, no one is running on the trail in this. They will hole up in the closest checkpoint and wait it out. Just like us.”
“Good God. I hope so.”
He had no way of knowing how the night would be spent by mushers on the ice of Norton Sound, between Shaktoolik and Koyuk.
Arriving in Shaktoolik late in the evening, after a cold, windy, but reasonable run from Unalakleet, Jessie found Schuller and Martinson still at the checkpoint, debating a move on Koyuk. While she fed and cared for her dogs, they decided to wait and see if the wind would lessen early in the morning. All three of them went to get some sleep.
Two hours later, as if it had tired of toying with them, the wind abated. Staying with a friend, Jessie woke to, if not the sound of silence she hoped for, at least a comparative quiet. Going out to check, she found both men readying their teams for departure.
“If this holds we can get across most of the ice,” Schuller told her.
“Naw,” said Martinson, seemingly in a better mood. “We’re just getting some practice packing sleds. Go back to bed.”
“Right behind you,” she replied instantly, knowing it was a make or break situation. If she allowed them to get ahead of her and was blocked by a returning storm, she would forfeit all possibility of winning. So tired she could hardly stand, she started preparations of her own.
“We’re almost ready. Won’t wait for you.”
“I don’t remember asking you to.”
Schuller grinned and went back to booting his dogs.
In thirty minutes they were gone. She followed them ten minutes later, having booted her dogs and, hurriedly, packed her sled. On each trip into the house, she was almost overcome by its warmth. She ignored the temptation to linger. Protests from her friend had no effect on her determination, but she was grateful for several thick ham sandwiches and a thermos of well-sugared coffee, which, stashed inside her parka, disappeared with her into the dark and onto the ice.
For the next hour and a half, she followed the tracks of the two mushers, who ran before her. Several times she thought she saw a headlamp behind her, but she had no way of knowing who it could be. If the order had been maintained, it would be T.J., but now that it was really a race, it could be Bomber or Gail Murray, who were also pushing hard. She hoped it was the latter, but was soon distracted by the wind as it began to rise once again.
Soon it was blowing so hard that it wiped out the tracks on the trail in front of her as effectively as if they had never been made. The only thing that made forward progress possible was the emergence, from the white nightmare the wind had become, of the trail markers, one after another, spaced more than a hundred feet apart. Most of these were simply slats stuck into the snow, but a few, regularly spaced, were tripod markers, a little easier to spot in the whirling storm.
Slowly, walking ahead of her team, Jessie found each marker. It grew worse until finally she couldn’t see the next one. Stopping the team she moved forward until she located it, then went back for the dogs. She remembered reading Riddles’s account of her perilous crossing in the same kind of weather. It encouraged her, as did the fact that, somewhere to the north, Schuller and Martinson also struggled through the maelstrom.
She stopped periodically beside each dog to wipe away the snow that packed their fur and coated their faces. She could feel it on her own cheeks and tried to keep the tunnel of her parka hood turned away from the direct force of the wind. She was sure the wind chill had dropped to well below minus fifty in the gusts she estimated at seventy miles per hour. She pulled a ski mask from her sled pack, put it on, and pulled her hood back up. Her hands and feet were warm, but she paid close attention to them. Hypothermia could catch up in a matter of minutes in this kind of cold.
Slowly, they proceeded along the trail of sticks. The name of the game now was patience and care. Care not to freeze, not to get off the trail, not to panic. She wondered how far ahead Schuller and Martinson were, and how far she could go. It was over fifty miles from Shaktoolik to Koyuk. How far could she possibly have come? In the hour and a half before the storm hit, perhaps fifteen miles. The dogs were still moving well, but soon she would have to camp, wait until morning, and hope that this blew over, even a little.
Once again she left the team to go forward and find the marker. As she went back to call the dogs, a trick of the wind stratified the snow. For just an instant, she thought she saw the light again. Next to a tilted slat, she waited. Again she saw it, sure this time it was real. Who was back there? Harvey? Cranshaw? Or someone else? Suddenly she was frightened. If she was forced off the trail for any reason in this weather, she could be lost, buried in snow and never found. Breakup in the spring would send her body into the sea with the rest of the ice.
She now moved forward with more purpose, working carefully so as not to go too fast or miss any vital element in what was fast becoming flight. One mistake could cost her everything. Drive as far as possible, she thought, keeping the last marker in sight until she could see the next one. If I can’t see it, stop the dogs, walk ahead to find it, return and drive forward once more. Keep moving. She didn’t want to know who was on the trail behind her. Better to stay ahead.
This is crazy, she thought. It’s got to be T.J. or Bomber. But what if it isn’t? Worse—what if it is and one of them is the killer in the pack? Suddenly she felt completely isolated, alone in a way she didn’t like.
She remembered Holman’s borrowed gun. At the next marker, she put it in the pocket of her parka, along with the box of shells.
What seemed like hours had passed, and whoever followed her hadn’t caught up. Tired, hungry, and desperate, she was still moving one marker at a time. Everything seemed unreal. The last time she had cleaned his face, Tank had whined and licked her hand. Although she had switched him with her second-best leader to give him a break, she knew she couldn’t keep the dogs going much longer.
Stumbling forward, she tried to shield her face with her mittened hand as she looked for the tripod that should be there. Instead, a large lump of snow came into view, the size of a packing crate.
“Cruiser. Tank. Come on guys,” she shouted to the dogs.
Suddenly the lump moved, startling her back away from it. The head and shoulders of a man appeared above it. A hooded figure stepped around and moved toward her.
In panic, she turned to run away, and fell. The figure reached to help her up. She recognized Dale Schuller’s green parka as he put his mouth close to her ear and yelled to be heard over the howl of the wind.
“Jessie? That you?”
Relief flooded through her, weakening her knees.
“Oh God, it’s you, Dale. Thank God.”
She didn’t bother to share her fears of the last few hours.
Schuller and Martinson had turned their sleds on their sides and crawled in between for some protection. Now they pulled Jessie’s around beside theirs, creating a three-sided shelter. Dumping almost everything from the sled bags, they piled the gear against the runners, heavy stuff on top so the rest wouldn’t blow away. They put anything flat down between the sleds to keep their sleeping bags off the snow. With some effort they tied a piece of canvas onto the stanchions to form a ma
keshift roof.
Taking turns within the limited space in the dark, they struggled to remove as much of their cold outer clothing as possible, put on something dry, and climb into their heavy cold-weather sleeping bags. They managed somehow, knowing that if they didn’t, their frozen clothes would thaw as they rested, drenching the bags and leaving them vulnerable to the cold.
Trying to pull up her bag’s zipper, Jessie thought her cold fingers would fall off, but she grew a little warmer as she lay still, letting her body heat warm the bag and her mittens, which she had placed under her to dry out. Remembering the sandwiches and coffee, she shared them with the other two. Although by now the sandwiches were half-frozen, nothing could have tasted better. The coffee, still warm from the thermos, helped thaw them.
Huddled as close as possible, they all gradually grew warm enough to doze.
Before settling into restless sleep next to Schuller, Jessie shouted to him over the howl of the storm. “Someone has been behind me for a long time without catching up. I kept seeing the light.”
He shouted back. “It’s probably T.J. If he shows up we’ll let him in. Don’t worry. It won’t do any good. He’ll be okay.”
The last thing she thought about as she drifted into exhausted sleep was the terror that had clutched her earlier and how glad she was that these two were in the middle of Norton Bay. It would have been easy to miss them. She hoped it was T.J. behind them, but she felt sorry for him if it was.
29
Date: Tuesday, March 12
Race Day: Eleven