My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian: Mushing Across Alaska in the Iditarod--The World's Most Grueling Race

by Brian Patrick O'donoghue

  The former army paratrooper was a dour man, with little patience for fools. One day in 1969, Jon, his first wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Heidi, had thrown everything they owned in the family’s station wagon and left the East Coast for good. Traveling westbound out of Albany, they saw cars on the other side of the highway backed up three lanes deep. The Terhunes learned from the radio that the traffic was caused by people heading to a big music festival. Nancy wanted to turn around and join the procession to Woodstock.

  Her husband refused to even consider it. “That’s the reason we’re leaving,” he said, pointing to the traffic. “It’s getting to be a rat race.”

  After settling in Alaska, Terhune began raising malamutes as a hobby. He got into mushing in the mid-1980s, running castoffs from Harry Sutherland. After Nancy died, Terhune found an outlet in the sport. Dogs offered companionship with none of the hassles people inevitably brought into his life. Breeding a few dogs, buying a few more dogs, Terhune gradually built a racing kennel. In 1990 he ran the Kusko 300, a grueling race through Eskimo villages in the Kobuk Valley. It was hellish. All the other rookies dropped out. Terhune spent ten hours searching for the trail in a whiteout and slipped far behind the veteran racers. But he never considered giving up. Not Terhune.

  On the home stretch Jon was so tired he fell asleep on his sled, and his team trotted right past the finish line in Bethel. Startled spectators and race officials scrambled after the snoozing racer, whose team continued on its own to the far side of town.

  A year later, Terhune entered the Kusko a second time. He viewed it as a final Iditarod tune-up. Instead, the race almost ended his Iditarod hopes. For starters, it was too warm. The race had to be rerouted around open water, and the opening miles crossed tundra stripped of snow by the sun and the rain. Conditions worsened as the trail dropped down on a river. There, wet, slick ice threw Terhune’s dogs into a panic. Even worse, Daisy, a recently purchased young leader, was in front. Dandy, the musher’s favorite, most dependable lead dog, was running inside the team. It was a protective move: Terhune wanted to spare her from the pressure. But the strategy backfired tragically when Dandy fell on the slick ice. She dragged in a tangle of lines while Terhune battled to slow his runaway team. But he couldn’t plant his hook in the hard river ice. Afterward, he spent 20 minutes trying to revive poor Dandy. To no avail. His lead dog was dead.

  Terhune scratched from the Kusko. His girlfriend, Dawn, hoped he had learned his lesson. She hoped he was ready to give up his Iditarod obsession. Dawn figured wrong. Though traumatized by Dandy’s loss, Terhune wasn’t accepting defeat. He chose to protect his team for the bigger challenge ahead. Three other dogs were hurt. If he didn’t quit, he wouldn’t have enough left to run the Iditarod. He’d invested far too much, endured too many nights on the trail preparing for the coming trip. And he owed it to Dandy to try. Drop out? Each setback further steeled Jon Terhune’s resolve.

  In February, as he prepared to take his vacation, the machinist reminded his supervisor of the promised leave. The message was relayed upstairs, where the plant manager had changed his mind. Terhune’s leave was officially denied. He appealed through Unocal’s grievance committee, but the decision was upheld. Terhune was a ten-year employee. He sent the company a letter reminding them of the prior arrangement and reaffirming his intent to run the race.

  Unocal officials responded by offering to extend the machinist’s vacation by a couple of days, but the request for unpaid leave was again denied. The machinist was ordered to report back to work the day before the Iditarod started. Terhune had a hunch they were calling his bluff, convinced that no one would walk away from a $50,000 job.

  “You want to know where I am?” he told his boss at Unocal. “Look in the fucking newspaper.”

  On my visits home, I always put on a slide show for friends and family in Washington, D.C. After I moved to Alaska, those shows inevitably featured recent sled-dog races, conveying my growing appreciation for the sport. Over Christmas one year, my brother Coleman relayed a message from his father-in-law.

  “If you want to run the Iditarod,” he said, “Mr. Brown told me to tell you not to let money stop you.”

  Occasionally I’d daydreamed about entering the sled-dog races I covered for the newspaper, but I’d never given it serious thought. Certainly not the Iditarod. Did Brown realize that it would take the better part of a year to get ready? That it would cost at least $10,000? That I might not make it to Nome?

  Coleman smiled, daring me to do it. “I think you ought to talk to him.”

  For the hell of it, I worked up a budget and arranged to meet Brown at the Kennedy Center cafeteria for lunch.

  A retired foreign service officer, Bazil Brown, 59, was a man of broad experience, sensitive to the fleeting adventure our lives represent, and haunted by a son’s death and his own bouts with emphysema. Reminders of mortality had led Brown to reflect on the experiences that had brought him the most satisfaction.

  Aside from his family life, he told me over lunch, one of his most gratifying experiences resulted from a spontaneous decision he had made at a party, many years before. That night the young diplomat recklessly agreed to invest in a new play. It was called Sleuth, and it turned into a huge hit. The play was followed by a movie with the same name. By getting in on the ground floor, Brown reaped continuing financial rewards. His involvement also gave him a backstage introduction to the theater community, a world he would have otherwise missed.

  Brown saw my possible entry in the Iditarod in a similar light. He told me he was prepared to put up $10,000 to make it happen.

  I couldn’t accept the offer. Not yet. There was a lot to consider. I would be putting together a racing kennel from scratch, something that might easily cost closer to $15,000, possibly even $20,000. My life as a reporter was already hectic, involving weeks, sometimes months on the road. I had to decide if I was ready to commit to the months of training that would be necessary if I were to have even a chance of driving a dog team over mountains, rivers, sea ice, and God-knows-what-else I’d find on the trail to Nome.

  I told Brown that I would let him know by July 1, the day Iditarod began accepting entries. If I decided to go forward, the $1,249 entry fee would come out of my own pocket, representing my personal commitment to raise any additional capital needed. Brown and I shook on it.

  Riding back down the Kennedy Center escalator, I scanned the faces of people ascending toward the cafeteria. For all they knew about the Iditarod, I was headed for Mars.

  I wouldn’t say that I’m superstitious. But I firmly believe in lucky streaks. Likewise, I believe that there are times when the odds are against you. Entering the final days of training, the omens took a disturbing turn, starting with my car.

  My sporty VW Scirocco had never been much of a cold-weather car. I wasn’t surprised the morning the engine failed to turn over. It was 3 5 below, and I had already noticed that the wire to the oil-pan heat pad was beginning to fray. I had meant to fix it.

  Living in interior Alaska, you take vehicular setbacks in stride. They are just one more front in nature’s eternal siege. I dug a trench under the engine and placed a small Hibachi charcoal stove in the snow, maybe a foot in front of the bumper. While I was waiting for the flames to give way to steady coals — so I could slide the hibachi under the engine — I draped a green military blanket over the Scirocco’s hood to help retain the heat. And I hooked a charger to the battery.

  Warming an engine this way generally takes an hour. I was chopping meat, no more than a few yards away, when a breeze hastened the heating process. The flames lit the blanket. Then the fire spread from the Volkswagen’s plastic grill to the insides of my oily engine. I didn’t even hear a crackle until flames were licking around the edges of the wheel wells and grill.

  “Tim, Tim, get up,” I yelled, dashing inside for our fire extinguisher. “My car’s on fire!”

  Mowry slowly rolled over and sleepily glanced out his window. A thick column of black
smoke was rising from my car.

  “You aren’t kidding,” he said.

  I popped the burning hood and pried it open with a shovel. With the inrush of air, a ball of flame leapt up six feet from the engine compartment. I pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and squeezed the trigger. It spewed froth for a second, then fizzled.

  Mowry came running out of the house in his long under wear and bunny boots. We were staring at the fire, paralyzed by the spectacle, when an unfamiliar truck rushed up the driveway. Two men jumped out, each clutching small fire extinguishers. “Saw the smoke.”

  The men took aim at the flames, as I had minutes before, and with the same feeble result: foam dribbled out the end of their nozzles, then gurgled to a stop. Retardant gas doesn’t work in extreme cold.

  Mowry grabbed the shovel and began heaving snow on the engine. A cloud of steam replaced the smoke. So much for technology. The fire was out, leaving a charred carcass in our driveway.

  We took 20 dogs out, splitting them between us. The destination was Angel Creek Lodge, a 75-mile round-trip. Call it the final exam.

  The temperature was about 25 below as the Mowth and I set out. Trotting past Rattles’s place, the mountains ahead glowed with the setting sun’s red flare. We met Kathy Swenson, who was returning from Angel Creek. Swenson’s team turned around on her, ready to follow us. She straightened them out with an angry shout.

  “Swenson definitely has leader problems,” Mowry said.

  The Mowth’s comment wasn’t aimed at Kathy Swenson; he was referring to the rumors about her husband, the master himself, four-time Iditarod champion Rick Swenson. According to Rattles, who seldom did anything but gossip — unless he was ranting about the Feds — Swennie was having a rough year. He and Kathy weren’t getting along. His training was being hampered by the snow clogging Two River’s trail system, and Rick was said to be feeling pressure from IAMS Company, his main dog food sponsor. If that wasn’t enough, Swenson’s lead dogs were supposedly lousy, a rumor that I could tell Mowry now took as confirmed.

  The Mowth and I had first met Rick Swenson in 1987 in Nome when a TV crew was interviewing him near the Burl Arch marking the Iditarod’s finish line. Swenson had recently crossed in second place. It was obvious that we also wanted to talk to him, and when the camera stopped rolling, Swenson turned to us and said, “What the hell are you waiting for? I haven’t got all day.”

  At the post-race banquet that year, people shifted uncomfortably as Swenson went on with his odd rambling remarks. “I’ve got a long way to get back to the top,” he concluded. This from a musher whose second-place finish was worth $30,000. The check was no consolation for Iditarod’s former top dog, then swallowing his second straight loss to Susan Butcher.

  The Iditarod’s new queen was more gracious. “In the end,” Susan said, “friendship wins out over competition.”

  Calling Swenson for interviews, I could count on a rash of abuse. “Why didn’t you call me in September? I’m in training now.” Posteruption, he could be charming. One time when my car broke down during an assignment, Swenson dropped what he was doing to give me a lift.

  “You know, Butcher would never do this,” he said, becoming friendlier.

  Butcher’s ascendancy certainly preoccupied him. Back when she was first getting started, Rick Swenson owned the sport, coming within a second of winning five Iditarod victories before anyone else had even won the race twice. For a while, he held the speed records in most of Alaska’s big mid-distance races. But Swenson hadn’t won anything since 1982. Andy, Swenson’s famous leader in all four victories, was sleeping away his retirement years on a couch in Swenson’s workshop.

  Swenson wasn’t the only musher with a Susan Butcher complex. Joe Runyan’s victory in 1989 had cracked Butcher’s aura of invulnerability, but she hadn’t exactly crumbled, since she finished a close second. A year later she won again, claiming her fourth Iditarod in five years. Susan remained the musher everyone feared. It was her dogs we chased in our dreams.

  The press was billing the upcoming race as a showdown. It made for good copy, but no one I knew gave Swenson any real chance. Not without good leaders.

  But there was a reason Kathy’s team acted flaky. Nearing the lodge we came across a group of snowmachiners salvaging a dead moose. Kathy had shot and killed the moose, after it had barreled into her team, kicking her dogs.

  “It was a small moose, and I didn’t want to kill it,” she told me later. “But I didn’t have any choice.” She had gutted the animal, as the law requires, then arranged for some folks at Angel Creek to come out and butcher it.

  The dead moose cast an ominous presence over our final miles. Mowry and I were relieved when we made it to Angel Creek, where the lodge owner stomped outside to greet us. “You damn mushers,” Steve Verbanac said. “You let your dogs piss on that wood pile, and it stinks up the place when we burn it.”

  After reparking the teams a safe distance from the firewood, we mixed hot meals for the dogs using hot water from the lodge. Most of the dogs settled down, licking their paws. Cyrus continued to pace, whining and looking bewildered at this unnecessary stop. The pup hadn’t learned what it meant to be tired.

  Cyrus and the other dogs with us at Angel Creek represented every possible candidate for my Iditarod team. We were watching to see who pulled the whole way, who goofed off, who had fun, and who was faltering.

  “When we feed them tomorrow, you want to watch for any sign of injury and see who looks stiff,” the Coach said, watching the dogs lapping up their dinner.

  Inside the bar, Steve’s wife, Annette, was retelling the story of Kathy Swenson’s epic battle with the moose. Annette had always liked Kathy.

  “She doesn’t put on airs like Mr. Champion Rick Swenson.”

  We stayed at Angel Creek for four hours, eating cheeseburgers and drinking beer. Our gloves, mitts, and face masks dangled from the rafters, drying above the lodge’s big barrel stove. The Mowth and I toasted each other as Steve bitched about damn mushers and their smelly gear.

  By the time we repacked the sleds, the lodge thermometer read 15 below. Practically tropical. The wind was also rising, causing loose straps on my sled bag to flap.

  This time we loaded bullets in the rifle. Packing the gun, the Coach left first, again running Chad in single lead. I followed with Rainy and Casey up front. As it turned out, we didn’t need the rifle. We had a clean run home.

  The skittish brown and grey female wasn’t impressive to look at. She appeared to be too small. What first caught my attention was Rainy’s ability as an escape artist. Dealing with a couple dozen sled dogs, it wasn’t uncommon for one to get loose now and then. The event always triggered a ruckus. Frenzied barks. Dogs rushing out of their houses to join in the joyful prancing. Our escapee nearly always stayed nearby, darting through the kennel, visiting friends, or sniffing the food buckets.

  The cause behind a breakout was usually obvious. Most often, a dog had slipped its collar. Chad was particularly good at that. He’d back up and pop the collar over his ears. The empty collar would be lying there, still hitched to the chain. Broken snaps were another common cause for escapes. Or a snap jammed with ice or dirt.

  Not so with Rainy. She didn’t shed her collar. There was never anything wrong with her snap. The empty chain would be lying there, discarded in the dirt. Rainy never strayed far. But that didn’t mean she was easy to find. She liked crawling into other houses. The only giveaway was the excited reaction of other dogs nearby.

  One afternoon I heard crying from the lot. Truly woeful whimpering. It was Rainy’s neighbor, Daisy, a shy black dog hardly bigger than a pup. She was immobilized between two chains, both of which were clipped to her collar. Our little escape artist was good at her craft.

  Rainy’s breeding records hinted at qualities beyond what met the eye. The bloodlines of our little five-year-old female spanned the mushing world. Her lineage included dogs from kennels owned by former Quest winner Bill Cotter, sprint champions Bill
Taylor and Gareth Wright, Isaac Okleasik, the Lee family, Earl Norris, and, of course, Old Joe Redington, Sr.

  Rainy wasn’t affectionate. She often hid in her box or watched us from behind a tree. A transformation occurred in her when she observed preparations for a run. Seeing me carrying harnesses or moving the sled into position, she’d cry out and rise on her hind legs, pawing the air as she strained against her chain.

  Placed in lead, Rainy displayed a new, bossy side. It didn’t matter how big her partner might be, the little female was always in charge. And she was a hard worker, staying out front, bending her little shoulders to the task.

  Her shy tendencies didn’t apply to sex. Rainy was attracted to any dog within reach. Large or small. Male or female. Given a chance, she’d hump them all. And she’d knock males out of the way to sniff females in heat. We dubbed her Deadline Dog Farm’s resident lesbian.

  Without realizing it, we came to rely on Rainy. We spent more time discussing Chad and Raven’s behavior, Rat’s dishonesty, and arguing about Harley’s potential. The little lesbian’s importance to our kennel was revealed the night I totaled the training miles logged on our kitchen chart. Rainy was the kennel’s mileage leader by a substantial margin. As the race drew near, she had recorded over a thousand miles of conditioning — two thirds of that distance as a lead dog.

  The morning after our run to Angel Creek she was limping. She might have caught her wrist in a moose hole. Or she could have stumbled crossing a creek. A single misstep anywhere in that 75-mile route could have caused the injury. There was no way we could know.

  Mowry and I solemnly brought the lesbian inside our cabin. We wrapped her sore wrist in a rubberized bandage designed to keep the joint warm and speed the healing process. Rainy lay down on a pile of harnesses under the staircase and slept.

  “Rest easy, little Rainy,” I whispered, watching her chest slowly rise and fall. “I need you.”