My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [16]
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.