by Scott O'dell
Iditarod is a ghost town, just a few shacks left over from the gold rush, when ten thousand people lived there. As I drove in and put on the brakes, sending up a shower of snow, a marshal came out to greet me. He looked at his watch, put down figures in a book, and talked to people.
There was a long wait. Then a man came out and said, "Congratulations. You are the first driver to reach Iditarod. You are the winner of two thousand dollars."
I couldn't be the winner, but here I was. I felt giddy in the head. I had never earned more than fifty dollars making and selling mukluks. I tried to say a little speech. All I could say was, "Thank you."
The race was not over. As soon as I could leave politely, I thanked everybody again and left. I was tired and the dogs were tired, too tired to go faster than three miles an hour.
The trail wound through steep hills, straight up and straight down. Going up, I had to get off and push hard on the sled to help the dogs. Going down, I had to press hard on the brake and the rubber mat. Twice I put out the snow hook. Once I ran off the trail. Then the sled turned over and I lost nearly an hour.
Oteg caught up with me and helped to set it back on the trail and get the dogs' harness straightened out. Seven teams passed me before Oteg came.
I was glad to reach Shageluk, a village on the Innoko River. School was out, and a band of children and their teacher came and asked if I would like to take a bath in the schoolhouse. I hadn't had a bath since I left Anchorage. It was a wonderful invitation, but then I thought how awful it would be to have to crawl back into my half-frozen clothes. Then I changed my mind and used up all of the school's hot water.
Oteg didn't believe in baths. "Water," he said, "is bad. It washes you away, bits at a time. Not good."
While I was getting into warm clothes, he cooked soup for the dogs and caribou steaks for us which he bought from a villager. It was the first real food I had eaten in days. I was so tired that I had eaten only chocolate bars, five or six of them every day, and spoonfuls of Eskimo ice cream.
After Shageluk it got very cold, much below zero. My eyelashes gathered frost. They began to feel like splinters. I had a hard time seeing and had to depend on Black Star.
I was traveling at a good five or six miles an hour, well ahead of Oteg, on a lagoon formed by the Innoko River, when the trail began to tremble. At once I realized that we were on ice, thin ice, no more than a couple of inches thick. Ahead of us it was billowing like waves on the sea.
Black Star saw the billows, too, and stopped the dogs. If we went on, the whole team, all of us, would go crashing down into the rushing river. We couldn't turn and go back because now the ice behind us had started to billow.
We were trapped. Panic seized me. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself.
Black Star stood with his ears curled back tight against his head. He was trying to decide where to go, to the right or to the left. I was of no help. I didn't know what to do. It was Black Star's decision.
At last he turned to the left, toward a line of trees that marked the shore. He went slowly and the team followed him.
The ice grew thinner. It creaked beneath the weight of the sled. I got off the runners and walked to lighten the heavy load.
We went along toward the trees. Through the ice I could see fish swimming and blue water racing over the rocks. Black Star seemed to be sure where he was going. His head was up and his ears alert, his bushy tail curved high over his back. The rest of the team were dragging their tails. Every few steps they wanted to stop.
We were close to the shore now, but the ice was thinner and full of bubbles. Suddenly Black Star pulled up. He glanced in both directions, trying to decide where best to make for the shore. The willow trees that marked it ran in a straight line.
After a moment he moved ahead in the same direction we had been going. Slowly he gathered speed, then, with the bank only a few yards away, he made a dash and scrambled safely to shore. The next five dogs followed him. Then the ice broke and the rest of the team fell through into the swirling water. The sled went with them and I went with the sled.
Dazed and blinded, I held tight to the handlebar. The dogs were struggling against the current, their heads up and silent. There was a gray mist among the trees, but I had a glimpse of my leader. He and his five dogs were pulling on the towline. With all my strength, I shouted, "Go, Black Star, go!"
The dogs clawed their way out of the water and up the bank. The sled got caught on a willow root. All of the team was pulling now and we were able to get the sled free. I staked the dogs out among the willows, built a fire in the cooker, and fed them some thick soup.
I was a sheet of ice, shivering and blue with cold. It took me a long time to peel off my frozen clothes and get into warm ones. I sat down by the cooker and was half thawed out when Oteg came racing through the trees.
"I saw your tracks," he said. "You took a wrong turn. You went right instead of left."
I remembered now that he had told me to go left.
"You lost an hour," he said.
"I forgot."
"Too bad."
He set out a pan of snow to boil for water.
"From here to Anvik," he said, "we will be going through a forest. Only one trail to Anvik. It is a narrow trail. Crooked, too. We go slow, huh?"
He made himself a pot of tea.
I started to harness the dogs.
"You better sleep before you go," he said. "You need sharp eyes on the Anvik trail."
I harnessed the dogs and packed the sled. Oteg was drinking his bitter tea when I left.
The night was still. The forest was close on both sides. I felt as if I were traveling in the darkest tunnel. All the trees looked the same. They stood up tall and straight like soldiers. Then the soldiers melted together. I was driving between two high walls. I looked up but saw no stars. I began to nod.
I got off the sled and trotted to wake myself up. There were some teams ahead of me, so the trail was packed hard. My boots made weird sounds on the hard snow.
The team was running better than ten miles an hour. They were glad to be out of the river and dry again. I grew tired at that pace and got back, on the sled, which slowed the team down by half.
We left the forest and were now in open country, with far-off hills on the horizon and a moon. A strong headwind was blowing, but the temperature was well above zero. I took off my parka and gloves and opened my sweater. Still I was warm.
The slick runners made whispering sounds. The dogs ran together in long, loping strides. They made scarcely a sound in the snow. They were tired. I didn't push them. The moon and the hills became a hazy blur.
I began to nod once more. I was drifting down a broad river filled with salmon. Their golden scales glittered in the moonlight. They were leaping out of the water. They were trying to tell me something—one word over and over.
The dream suddenly faded. Again I was on a sled, moving through the night. I glanced over my shoulder. A team had slipped up behind me. The musher's lamp sent out a blinking glare. It was Oteg.
"Trail!" he shouted. "Trail!"
I pulled my dogs over and let him pass.
"I have followed Bright Dawn for two miles," he said as he went by. "She slept like a babe. But we do not sleep on the trail. If we do sleep, we may never wake up."
He hadn't yet congratulated me on winning the $2,000. He cracked his long reindeer whip and was gone. He left a snowy mist in the night. His headlamp glowed far down the trail in streaks of yellow gold.
At last, I thought, he has set me free to race my own race. It felt good to be free, but lonesome, too, and scary.
14
I came to Eagle Island at seven the next morning, just as faint light showed on the horizon. It was fifty-three degrees below zero with a sharp wind blowing out of the north.
The marshal said that it was warmer at Kaltag, the next checkpoint. So I went on for an hour, made camp, fed the dogs, and ate two chunks of muktuk. The whale fat and skin have a good
flavor but take a lot of chewing. I got everything out of the sled, crawled into my sleeping bag, pulled the sled cover over myself, and set my alarm clock for noon.
Oteg woke me before noon. He came creeping into camp with three injured dogs and his leader dead. Two of the dogs he carried in the basket and one limped along behind him. The rest of the team looked beaten. Oteg, too. He had a bloody cut across his chin and one of his hands was bandaged.
I got out of my sleeping bag as fast as I could.
"Moose," he said before I could ask him what had happened. "Oteg is a lucky man to be alive."
"I saw three of them soon after I left Grayling."
"By the cave?"
"Yes."
"I saw three moose grazing close around the cave, but it was a good place. I saw a candy wrapper and knew you had camped there."
"A litter bug."
"I went to sleep. When I woke up, one of the moose was standing right over me, staring with its red-streaked eyes. I did not move. I barely took a breath. The moose walked away a few steps.
"My gun was in the sled, ten or twelve feet away. I did not get up. I rolled a little toward the sled. The moose walked back and stood over me again. A terrible thought came to me. I was going to die there in the snow. Killed by a moose."
Oteg had a hand wrapped in a piece of dirty cloth. His fingers, which stuck out, had turned blue in the cold. He tried to get a mitten on the hand, but it wouldn't fit over the bandage. He used his teeth and bit through the bandage and put the mitten on.
"The moose hung over me," Oteg said. "His lumpy snout hung down close to my face. I feared he was going to stay there until I froze to death. Then he grunted and walked off, not far.
"He kept watching. Another moose came up and both of them watched me. Then they went over to where the team was staked out. The dogs were barking and trying to pull up their stakes.
"I lay very quiet. The beasts quit watching. They were curious about the dogs. I crawled to the sled and found the gun. It was in a bag and it took me a while to get it out.
"My leader had pulled up his stake. He was between the two moose. I heard a terrible sound. He was moaning. A sharp hoof had slit his throat. The other dogs were staked down, but they were trying to fight off the two moose.
"My first bullet struck an antler and whizzed back close to my head. The second bullet struck one of the moose square in the heart. The other moose came at me. The third bullet stopped him."
"I'll take your injured dogs to Kaltag."
"You will lose time."
"I will take time."
I made room for the dead leader and the three injured dogs and covered them with the sleeping bag.
Oteg said, "Leave them at Kaltag. And do not wait for me. You're in a race."
My team was anxious to go. Black Star was lunging at his harness. I hung back, hating to leave my friend.
Oteg said again, "Do not wait. This is the time to go fast."
I shouted, "Hike!" and pushed on the sled. Black Star lunged away. I looked back. The light from Oteg's lamp grew faint and faded away.
A half hour after midnight I got to Kaltag. After I checked in, I gave Oteg's dogs to the veterinarian. They were not seriously hurt, he told me, but they couldn't pull a sled. The dead leader we buried.
Word had come from Mr. Weiss in Ikuma. He had sent it that day by radio to the marshal in Kaltag.
"Mr. Weiss," the marshal told me, "said that the town of Ikuma asks God to speed you on to victory."
"Victory!" I exclaimed. "Is that what Mr. Weiss said?"
"That's what he said. Victory. I heard it clearly."
In less than an hour I was back on the sled. I found a place to camp and slept until dawn. Snow was falling. There were no dogs in sight when I woke up, only little round holes. They were buried in the snow and were breathing through the holes. I went back to sleep until ten that morning.
At noon, eight drivers left Kaltag in staggered order. In the lead was a girl I had talked to in Shageluk, who had advised me not to stand around at the checkpoints and jabber. Despite everything, I was running ninth.
A wind came up and drove the snow. Black Star forced the team to fight it. We moved through half darkness all day.
At four the next morning I camped off the trail in a small meadow protected by a ring of spruce trees. Wind roared through the tops of the trees, though it was quiet and peaceful on the ground.
I staked out the dogs, all except Black Star, who curled up at my feet beside the fire I had built. I dozed for a while and woke up to strange sounds. It wasn't the wind. I had heard the sounds before.
By now it was dawn. Orange and green light streaked down through the trees. I made out a wolf pack standing at the edge of the meadow. The leader took a few cautious steps toward the fire, then turned away. But before he disappeared I had a very clear picture of him.
From the brief glimpses I had had of him, all I knew about him was his color. In the dawn light I saw that his body was exactly the same pure white as Black Star's. Their faces were the same also. Ice-blue eyes that slanted up at the corners. Shadowy, foxlike masks around the slanted eyes. The black, starlike blaze on the foreheads.
The only difference between the dogs was that Black Star was younger by three or four years. Yet surely they came from the same family.
I remembered that Black Star's father was brought to our village by a trapper from Baffin Bay and mated to a Siberian husky. Suddenly it struck me that Black Star was the son of this wolf.
As the leader moved away from us, my dogs yelping at his heels, Black Star did not move. But his ears were pricked up, his body was tense, and his gaze followed the white wolf. Something had passed between them—a scent, a look, a sound I had not heard.
I needed sleep, two hours at least. I took my time and tied Black Star securely to the sled, then got into the sled and my sleeping bag.
I slept longer than I had planned and woke up covered with a blanket of ice. The snow had stopped, but the wind still roared. I took hold of Black Star's rope and shouted, "Let's go!" The rope came loose in my hand. The end was ragged. It had been gnawed through. Black Star was gone.
I jumped off the sled and cast a wild look around the meadow. It shimmered in the morning light. Footprints were everywhere—about the sled, the meadow, out of the meadow to the trail. Black Star and six of my team were nowhere in sight. But their tracks showed clear. They led north toward Ikuma and Nome.
Stunned, I harnessed the six dogs left to me. There was a chance, a small chance, that I could overtake my fleeing dogs. Running with the wolves, they would travel at a slow pace, hunting for food. Possibly, once the urge to join his father had been satisfied, Black Star would return. What the other dogs, the ones Mr. Weiss had purchased, would do, I didn't know.
The sun was lost in a bank of somber clouds. The clouds broke up into horsetails, the wind shifted to the east, and a heavy wind struck us. The dogs struggled against it, but we hadn't gone far, without Black Star to lead us, when they turned their backs to the wind and curled up in the snow.
With some effort I got them off the trail and into a stand of trees. I built a fire, fed them, and changed their boots. I ate the last of my ice cream and lay down by the fire.
I dozed for an hour and woke to find Black Star stretched out beside me, fast asleep. He always slept with one eye open, so in a moment he raised up and rubbed his cold nose against mine to beg my pardon for his absence. Then he curled up again.
15
The next checkpoint was Ikuma. My things were strewn about on the sled, thrown in any old way. I took time and put everything in order.
I changed my clothes from the skin out and put on sealskin pants and my best parka and the parka cover I had made of red cotton cloth. It had a flowery print of roses and looked like a summer dress. It matched the ribbon on the dogs' boots and the ribbon in my hair.
Now, when I drove down the main street, I would not be taken for a derelict. Now I felt like a racer. B
lack Star did, too. He kept pointing his nose toward the north, lunging at the towline. But there was one very bad thing. I had left Ikuma two weeks earlier with fourteen dogs. Now I had only seven.
A bitter wind sprang up. It didn't come out of the sky. The sky was clear. It came sneaking along the trail in angry gusts, driving icy arrows before it. I couldn't see through my goggles, so I took them off.
The dogs bowed their heads against the arrows. The sleet piled up and hid the trail. I walked out in front with Black Star to help him find the way. Then the arrows began to unravel the dogs' boots. In an hour of travel I stopped three times to take off torn boots and tie on new ones.
Yet, as the storm ended, one of my dogs was lame and I had to put him on the sleigh. I also had to change all their boots and clean the ice balls from their ears and eyes.
With myself there was nothing I could do. The parka cover was still in one piece, but it no longer looked like a summery dress. My hair was matted. My face, with all its spots and windburn, felt like a mask made of wood. Iron wood. But I couldn't lose more time. Now I was driving a team of only six dogs.
Faintly, in the distance, I saw a golden glow. Ikuma calls itself a town, but it's really a village and has no streetlights. Yet the glow came from there. The glow grew brighter, then as dawn came it disappeared and I saw blue smoke rising from the hill beside the village. They had built a bonfire to guide me during the night.
We went into Ikuma at a slow trot. Black Star strained at his harness and wanted to go faster, but the dogs behind him were tired.
The whole village was gathered on Main Street, which was two blocks long. The people were in the middle of the street. They formed a lane that was just wide enough for us to get through. It was like driving through a tunnel.