My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [2]
Today Harley’s inexperience showed as we entered an icy marsh, where the trail was less obvious. He repeatedly slowed to look back, seeing encouragement. “Go ahead, Harley!” A few firm words aimed at him had a powerful effect on the entire team. As the big leader’s attention returned to his work, I felt an immediate burst of speed, as if I’d tugged on a snowmachine’s gas throttle.
It was dark as we approached Skwentna, a remote settlement of about a hundred homesteaders, trappers, and lodge operators. I was startled by the sudden appearance of what seemed like dozens of fiery red eyes floating toward me, cloudlike, in the beam of my headlamp. Drawing closer, I sheepishly realized it was merely a musher coming the other way. The unearthly orbs belonged to the front dogs in John Barron’s team. The taciturn, grizzly musher from Big Lake had already turned for home. Holding the lead on these familiar trails, he ran with his headlamp switched off to confuse the mushers in pursuit. I’d reported on tactics like that but hadn’t yet seen them used.
Several other teams followed hot behind Barron. I gripped the handlebar tightly, braced for calamity, but Rainy and Harley handled the head-on passes without a hitch. Third among the approaching teams came Marcie Heckler, the friend who’d talked me into using the Klondike as my own 200-mile qualifier. Marcie wasn’t an experienced racer, but she may as well have been. For years she’d worked as a handler for Old Joe—Iditarod’s founder, Joe Redington, Sr.—and her boyfriend, Kevin, was enforcing the rules in the Klondike.
“Almost there, Bri,” Marcie grunted as she flashed past.
Leaving the river behind, I followed a line of markers to a circular driveway fronting an old cabin. The Skwentna checker inspected my gear, then handed me the clipboard to sign in.
“Looking pretty good, Brian.”
“Beginner’s luck,” I said, though I didn’t really believe that.
Bedding my team in a stand of tall birch, I began preparing the dogs a well-deserved bite to eat. Without even trying, my team had leaped ahead of ten others. Not too shabby. I wasn’t going to win this race. But some of those teams ahead of mine were bound to falter.
I studied the dogs. Raven sprawled luxuriously, her tummy thrust outward inviting a quick scratch. Who’d have guessed that the frail, fine-boned little girl possessed the stamina to run all the way to the Bering Sea coast, as she had done for Mowry his first time out? But the princess was a proven Iditarod dog.
We didn’t know as much about the racing history of Raven’s companions, however. Few seemed tired tonight. Most were still keyed up, licking their paws. Harley and Pig were watching my every move, drooling in anticipation of the feast on its way.
Harley’s appetite was the only quality Mowry found impressive.
“He’s too big,” the Coach had said the day I brought him home. “His build is all wrong. A dog like that will never make it to the finish line.”
I put more faith in the assessment of LeRoy Shank. He’d seen Harley racing for Andy Jimmy, an Athabaskan villager from Minto. Jimmy had done well that day, very well. Shank, a former trapper and founder of the 1,000-mile Yukon Quest, knew that sled dogs weren’t kept through the winter in Minto unless they were well worth feeding. After the race, he had bought the beefy village husky on the spot.
Shank worked as a pressman at our newspaper. The two-time Iditarod veteran had no plans to race this year, so he took vicarious pleasure in my preparations, stopping me in the hall ways for progress reports, badgering me to give the Minto dog a tryout. “Oh, he’s a big one,” Shank said, after offering to loan me the dog for the season. “Harley could drag you to Nome all by himself.”
Handling Harley was a chore.