On the Edge of Nowhere

by James Huntington

  It was a brutally hard race. The heat took a lot out of dogs and men, and team after team dropped by the wayside, just unable to go on. Of thirty-two starters, sixteen were scratched before the finish and one was disqualified.

  I felt it, too. As I came up to the twenty-mile checkpoint, Clarence Charlie began closing on me. Then I saw Gallahorn was more than two minutes ahead, which meant that I had nearly five minutes of total time to make up in those last ten miles. Now there was no sense holding anything back—I’d have a lifetime of tomorrows to rest and think about this race—and I began to yell and push the sled up the hills, and the dogs really moved out. I thought we were going then. I thought we’d run that Eskimo down in no time at all.

  And then came disaster. Off in the deep snow, a pair of moose moved away from us toward the cover of the spruce trees, and those dogs tore out after them as though their tails were on fire. I hollered and hauled back on the towline, but they dragged me through the snow like a plow. Finally I got my hands on the snub hook and caught hold of a jack spruce and that brought them up smartly, yapping, floundering in the snow—and fifty yards off the trail.

  I was sick with discouragement and weariness. As I wallowed up toward the front of the team to straighten them out, my mouth felt as though it was full of cotton, and every breath I took hurt. I saw the spotter plane circling overhead. I could just imagine those guys up there reporting back to the announcer in town: “Oh, oh, Jimmy Huntington’s had a rough break. His team has run off the trail and it looks like. . .”

  The Indian passed me, going like a shot.

  My first instinct was to clout those dogs dizzy. I didn’t because, for one thing, I didn’t have the strength to spare, and for another they knew well enough they’d done wrong. They huddled low and gave me that scared-stiff expression. I took Monkey’s harness and led them all back to the trail, now maybe seven or eight minutes behind the leader, and Bergman Sam coming up on me from fourth place. I hollered, “Now come on, run, damn it! We’re going to finish this race if it kills all thirteen of us!”

  They went. Old Monkey dug in and pounded down the trail for all he was worth, and I yelled encouragement from behind, shoving that sled right up on the tail-enders. I didn’t really think I had a chance, but I guess I’d been hoping for so long that I had the habit. Anyway, I never quit trying, snatching a breather by riding downhill, but running all the rest of the time.

  Then, still five miles from the finish, I closed very fast on the team ahead—and it wasn’t the Indian! As I flashed by, I could see the sweaty white look of exhaustion on Eddie Gallahorn’s face. For three days and sixty-five miles that Eskimo had given it his all, leading the pack with the fastest total time. And now he just had nothing left to give and was limping in, fighting only to hang on so he could win a piece of place money. Later I’d feel sorry for him, but in that instant I only had room to feel one thing: if I caught the Indian, I could still win it all!

  The trail began winding now, with another hill always following the one before. I don’t know where I dredged up the strength, but I kept shoving that sled so the dogs didn’t have to pull a pound. I could just see myself, with the famous Huntington luck, having a dog drop on me so that I’d have to haul him all the rest of the way in. That would be the end of everything.

  I saw the buildings of the town in the distance and, beneath them, a blurry black line on the white flats, Clarence Charlie’s team. I struggled to remember how many seconds I’d had on him at the start and couldn’t. My brain was fixed on one thing: to be sure of winning, I had to pass that Indian up ahead.

  I tried to yell but the voice didn’t sound like mine, a croaky “Run, Monkey!” that Monkey couldn’t possibly hear. I banged on the sled with the snubbing hook, then it slipped from my fingers and fell by the trail. None of it mattered. The dogs were going on heart alone, and there just wasn’t anything anyone could do now to make them go faster.

  I don’t know what I was going on. It didn’t even seem to be me running alongside that sled, but some kind of mechanical man, soaked in sweat and unable to pull enough air into his lungs, or ever to quit plunging ahead, one painful, leaden step after another—a mechanical man running on hope.

  But the Indian came closer. The black line was twelve dogs and a sled now, and a man struggling, as I was, on the trail. My dogs were staggering, only Monkey's pulling keeping them in line and moving ahead. I could see the bottom of the Indian's boots kicking snow back. I could see him leaning against his sled, half-pushing, half-sup-porting his own dead weight.

  I passed Clarence Charlie just as we entered the chute. I didn't look at him. The great masses of people were a crowded blur in my eyes and only a terrific roar and an occasional voice—"Run, old man! Run!"—registered on my brain. I kept shoving the sled. That's all I knew how to do.

  Then someone grabbed me and turned me loose from it. I sank to my knees, my chest bursting with pain, and not enough air in all the sky to satisfy me. There were people all around, and I shoved at them until I could see that someone was holding the dogs, unhooking them and caring for them. Then I fell all the way down in the snow and let them drag me off. I was satisfied, for those dogs were all I cared about at that moment. We were one thing.

  Then there was a big hush in the crowd and somebody propped me up on a snowbank so I could see the an-nouncer: "May I have your attention!" he called out. "La-dies and gentlemen, winner of the final heat by twenty-eight seconds, North American champion—and only the third man to ever win Alaska's two major dogsled races— Jim Huntington, the Huslia Husler!"

  Then there came a thunder of cheering and applause. I felt tears in my eyes—I had actually done it—and I tried to stand up and thank everyone. But I was still a while from standing without help, so I just waved my hand at them, hoping they'd understand.

  Chapter Six

  Starting Over

  OH, IT WAS ALL SO GOOD in those first months after I came back home—to be with my family again, and all my friends, and know that my dream had come true. I had won a lot of money—$2,300, it turned out—and I was going to have my trading post at last.

  But I would never race again. I was too old and finally had to admit it. I would have to leave the racing to the younger men in our town. And they did mighty well, all those Huslia Hustlers who came after me, men like Bergman Sam and Cui Biffelt, and all the others. Of course I didn’t know it as I sat on the snowbank that March afternoon and felt the pain in my lungs ease, but they were to win half the major races of the next ten years, and Huslia would come to be known as the Dogsled Capital of the world. I’ll always be proud that I had a part in starting that.

  I fixed up the store just the way I wanted it, and when the ice went out my supplies came up on the riverboats, and the people would come around to buy and stay to talk about the old days or the big dogsled races. No man could have been happier with the shape of his dream when it finally turned real.

  Then the next summer my wife left me, and in the early autumn the store burned down, and the house, and everything I owned in the world.

  The fire started on a gray and blustering afternoon. Friday, September 27, 1957, was the kind of day that suddenly ends the Alaskan summer, the wind blowing a clear warning of freeze-up on the way. All morning I’d worked outside, sawing shelves for the store. Wayne, my youngest boy, was watching me. The other kids were in school.

  A couple of times I looked up, and Wayne’s big brown eyes were staring straight back at me. I wanted to tell him to quit sucking his thumb, but I didn’t have the heart. He missed his mother. We all did. But Wayne was only three, and what could I say to console him? That she was coming back? She wasn’t. That after twelve years of marriage and seven kids she just decided one fine summer day that she’d had it, and packed up and left us? That was the truth, and that’s all there was to say.

  After a while the boy said he was cold, and I sent him into the house. “Don’t touch anything in the store,” I said. “Stay in the back.” I went
on with my sawing, head down, never noticing the dirty gray smoke seeping out from under the roof logs. The first I knew of the trouble was when someone yelled at me from down by the riverbank:

  “Jimmy! Jim Huntington! Your house is on fire!”

  I looked up and saw the smoke. I stood rooted there while people scrambled up the bank toward me. Then I ran for the house calling, “Wayne! Wayne!

  I threw the door open and was hit by a rush of hot smoke. Inside, orange flame shot back and forth, grabbing for the rows of canned goods, the bolts of cloth that only came in last week—everything.

  “Wayne!” I yelled again. I backed off a step and ran in low, still hollering, trying to see something through the fire and the gray smoke. I didn’t know what to do. It was all going—the beaver pelts, magazines, ivory carvings—everything I had in the world, twenty-five years of bitter hard work, and I couldn’t stop it. I began snatching up whatever I could reach, boxes of Baby Ruth and O Henry bars, but they spilled from my arms and I kept stepping on them. And all the time I was edging toward the back, calling my boy.

  Choking, trying to find some air to breathe, I fell to my knees. I was close to our living quarters and they seemed to be a roaring mass of fire. My lungs hurt and my hands were seared from the heat of the floor—it smoked and buckled and would burst into flame any second—but I crept on. In my head I had this picture of poor little Wayne, caught in there and scared to death, crying for me to help him.

  I must have passed out. I had a blurry feeling that someone was dragging me toward the door, and they couldn’t have done that, no one could have pulled me out of there if I had all my senses. Outside, I sucked in fresh air like a man who’d been drowning. But just as soon as my head cleared, I broke away from whoever was holding me and tore for the house. Running, I grabbed a gunny sack up from the ground and was trying to pull it over my head when they tackled me and said I couldn’t go back in there, and held me down while I fought them and called for Wayne. Then there came that explosion and all the windows blew out and the roof caved in with a fiery crash of sparks and smoke, and finally I lay still. It was too late now, all too late. A woman crossed herself, and I said, “My poor little kid.”

  They walked me away. I saw people running up from the river with buckets of water. But all they could hope to do was wet down the next house and the outbuildings, for the wind was blowing whip-hard and you could just see those flames reaching out for something else to latch onto. One of the men came over and said, “Looks like the wind blew through an open window on the north side and tipped over the kerosene lamp. That’s how she started.”

  Somebody brought my kids from the schoolhouse. They walked real slow, their faces white and scared, and I tried to put my arms around all of them and hold them near to me. They began to cry, even the older ones, for they had never seen their father so busted up.

  And then, all of a sudden, Wayne was there. One of the men came pounding up the hill—and he was hauling Wayne by the hand! Wayne, safe and well—alive!

  “He was down playing with the dogs. Jimmy, he never even went in the house. He didn’t know what was happening up here! I just now saw him and. . .”

  I suppose I began to cry then. I was so mixed up. I grabbed that little kid and squeezed him against me so hard his bones must have ached. “Where’d you go?” I mumbled. “I thought you were in there. I thought you were a goner. . .”

  When I let him go he put his thumb in his mouth, and tears stood in his big eyes, and I tried to smile so he wouldn’t be so frightened. Not that I had anything to smile about. A life’s labor had gone up in smoke. Everything but the clothes on my back—the store, supplies I hadn’t paid for, our home, even our food for the winter—was burned down to a smoldering heap of ashes. It was all gone.

  I sat shivering on a stump under the darkening sky and stared at the ruins, tormented with remembering how long I had struggled to get this far in life. You might say I’d been twenty-five years getting that trading post built, and every last thing that went into it was bought with the sweat of my brow. My father had pounded it into me that this was one way for a hardworking man to make out in this country, to have the respect of his people, and a decent living when he was too old to live off the land.

  The things I’d done to make a dollar! I’d hunted wolves for the bounty. I’d run a trap line and hauled freight and piloted a riverboat on the Yukon. When other men my age were riding in their sleds, I was still running full speed behind mine, training my dogs all winter so that maybe I could pick up a little extra cash in the mushing races at Anchorage and Fairbanks. And I’d plowed it all into that store, into my hopes of making something of myself. But it wasn’t until this summer, past my fortieth birthday, that I could afford to move us all into the back of the cabin and open for business up front.

  My goal was always the same, to have that store, and to use it to prove to my people, once and for all, that we were as good as any white man. All anyone had to do was work and want it badly enough and he had to make good. “Look at me,” I’d tell them. “Nobody’s ever going to wag his head over me and say, ‘Poor Jimmy.’”

  And now that’s exactly what they were doing. The whole village was there, and they were all looking at me, and there was pity in every eye.

  I felt old and very tired. I didn’t see how I could possibly start all over again. It had taken me all my grown-up years just to get back to where my father had been, and in a few minutes I’d lost it all.

  Suddenly, I understood how easy it could be for a Native to give up and drift down to the white man’s towns, living off the occasional laborer’s job he might get, or whatever he could beg, and all the time trying to lose himself and his fears in whiskey. Was that what was in the cards for me after all the years of trying? Would my kids be better off if I just quit and went off somewhere and left it up to the village or the Territory to look after them?

  For weeks I just hung around, thinking about all the things that had happened to me and wondering what to do next. One day I’d decide to go out on the trap line, and the next that I’d better set to work and rebuild my cabin, and the one after that I’d fly down to Fairbanks or Anchorage and look for wages. But all of it seemed pointless and painful, like banging your head against a stone wall. I’d tried—Lord, how I’d tried—and what had it all come to? Where would I find the strength to hope that anything could be different if I tried one more time? And so I did nothing, just moved my family in with some friends and sat brooding on the riverbank all the hours of the day.

  Then, in the middle of October, a bush pilot landed at our town, and on the spur of the moment I made up my mind what I was going to do. I asked him if he would fly me up to a place on the Dakili River where I knew the marten trapping was good, and that very afternoon I was setting up a camp there. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but at least it was something. My kids would be looked after, and I hoped that a couple of months alone in the bush would help me sort out the odds and ends of my life. Maybe by Christmas, when the pilot was supposed to come back for me, I’d know what to do with the rest of my life.

  One thing, the old routine of making a camp in the woods, of preparing to live off the land and defend yourself against it, soothed away some of the hurts of civilization. There wasn’t time to think about them. They weren’t the most important things in the world anymore, not as important as cutting wood so you wouldn’t freeze to death, or pitching a good snug tent so you wouldn’t be buried by an overnight snowfall. I worked hard and tried not to think about anything but the thing I was doing.

  I spent a week setting out the traps, and then ran them every day. It was a lot different without the dogs. To cover the ground, I had to start before dawn and it was well after dark when I got in. I used a candle inside a tin can for a traveling light, and there was not a creature to say a word to, not a dog to scold or praise, not an animal stirring in the bitter cold of that winter.

  In December it turned the coldest ever. I hadn’t
brought a thermometer so I never knew what the temperature was, but I knew that no bush plane could fly in that kind of weather. Even with a fire going, the tent was freezing cold, and I slept in parka, mittens, and mukluks. On the twenty-first, when the pilot was supposed to come, the worst of the cold seemed over and I sat in the tent listening for that airplane engine all day. I had thirty marten skins and a few minks, a good catch, and I thought that at least I could make a nice Christmas for the kids.

  But the pilot didn’t come that day, or the day after. I couldn’t leave the camp for fear that he’d land while I was gone. I just sat there, hour after endless hour, straining to hear some sound in the deathly wilderness quiet, thinking the old crippling thoughts—and some new ones: now I wouldn’t even be with my kids for Christmas—a sure sign that I hadn’t yet come up with the answers about my future.

  On the fourth day it was colder than ever and I knew no airplane was coming after me. I cached the skins, fixed a light pack, and set out on foot. It was eighty miles to Huslia.

  In the beginning I walked hard just to keep warm. I made only two stops a day for tea and kept walking well after dark because there was very little daylight. The first night it was so cold I didn’t sleep at all, just rested for six hours and then put on my pack and snowshoes and started out again. The second night, when I did sleep, it snowed, and if some deep-down instinct hadn’t wakened me early, I’d have been smothered under the silent, seven-foot fall. Once more I moved on, suffering now from the cold and a growing weakness, yet heartened, somehow, by the battle. This I understood. This was a man against the wilderness, and if the odds were against me, at least I knew what they were. And fighting something I could feel and see, I pushed on, and felt stronger.

  Late on the night of the fourth day, I was little more than five miles from the town. I was very tired now, hardly moving. But I had reached the big flats, and there was nothing to make a fire with so I had to keep going. I wanted to drop my pack and leave it but all my years in the bush told me I couldn’t: if I was forced to stop, my blanket would be my last chance at survival.