My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [0]
My
Lead Dog
Was a Lesbian
A native of Washington, D.C., Brian Patrick O’Donoghue has worked as a cab driver in New York City, a cargo ship wiper, an elevator mechanic’s helper, a pipefitter’s apprentice, a science museum technician, a press photographer, and a TV and print journalist. These days he reports on the oil industry, politics, and sled-dog racing for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. O’Donoghue, 40, and his wife, Kate Ripley, live in Two Rivers, Alaska, with a howling kennel of retired Iditarod dogs.
This book is dedicated to Doc,
who showed us the way,
and B.L.,
who had the spirit
but none of the luck
Contents
ONE: Klondike Lesson
TWO: Ready or Not
THREE: Leader of the Pack
FOUR: Early Casualties
FIVE: Storm on the Mountain
SIX: Alone in the Burn
SEVEN: Story of the Day
EIGHT: O Mighty Yukon
NINE: The Kaltag Eleven
TEN: Harley’s Nose
ELEVEN: Off to See the Wizard
TWELVE: Last Hurrahs
Epilogue
1991 Iditarod Order of Finish
Iditarod’s First and Last
CHAPTER 1
Klondike Lesson
The jitters were gone. I hadn’t lost the trail or my dog team. Nobody was limping from injuries or fights. My dogs looked absolutely great, and little Raven was playing cheerleader as usual.
I knew better, but I couldn’t resist. With one hundred miles left to go in the Klondike 200 I began imagining how amazed people would be at the finish line. Entering the Klondike, my sights had been set on merely finishing. My farthest trip on a dogsled had been 50 miles. This race stretched 200 and I had to go the distance to qualify for the Iditarod, Alaska’s Great Race to Nome. The dogs and I were already signed up for the main event, just six weeks away, but I still had to earn the right to compete. More than six months of preparation and thousands of dollars were riding on our performance here. I had to succeed.
But such concerns were behind me now. As I packed to leave Skwentna Roadhouse, the Klondike’s halfway point, a top ten finish looked to be in the bag. This wasn’t the way the Coach, Tim Mowry, and I had planned it. Our strategy, developed over a few beers back home at Deadline Dog Farm, called for me to tag along behind other, more experienced mushers. But the dogs were proving more ambitious.
The Mowth was stuck in Fairbanks, pulling the weekend shift at the News-Miner’s sports desk. I’d recruited two friends from the Matanuska Valley, Vicki and Cyndi, as my Klondike handlers. None of us knew what we were doing as I steered Mowry’s old Ford, loaded down with howling dogs and gear, onto the ice at Big Lake. But then ignorance had become a defining characteristic of this reporter-turned-dog-musher’s brief racing career.
I’d drawn the last position, number 18. My parking spot was located at the far end of the staging area. Driving to it, across the frozen lake, we nervously scanned the other racers readying their teams for departure.
I directed my unschooled pit crew sorting through the mess of harnesses and lines. Finally we began hooking up, connecting a pair of dogs at a time, in eight-foot intervals along the gang line. I was taking 12 out today, two more than I’d ever harnessed before. By the time we were done, the gang line, a plastic-coated steel cable channeling the team’s power back down the center, stretched over 50 feet ahead of me. Standing rigidly at the far end—“Good dogs!”—Rainy and Casey looked impossibly distant. They looked back at me, impatient to go.
Another friend, Sandy, turned up at the last moment. The big schoolteacher’s arrival was perfectly timed, and I drafted her for brake duty, sharing the runners with me on the back of the sled. Cyndi and Vic were positioned along the gang line, ready to lead the dogs to the starting line, which was painted out on the lake ice, some 200 yards away.
Sled dogs begin each run like champions, or demons, depending on their musher’s readiness. The trick is to hang on tight until they settle down. But that’s easier said than done. It’s bad enough setting forth on familiar trails. In the riotous atmosphere of