My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [3]
I poured a bucket of hot water into the sixteen-gallon cooler to soak the mash of dry dog food and frozen beef chunks. We’d come 100 miles in about 14 hours, yet none of my dogs looked tired. All 12 had their eyes fixed on the steam rising from that cooler. If I could hold the team together, we just might do very well indeed.
Gunnar Johnson hoped to squeeze in a trip to Nome before surrendering his life to medical school. He mushed into Skwentna in a horrified state. A dead dog was stowed in his sled basket. The dog had collapsed with absolutely no warning. No warning at all. Gunnar tenderly laid the dog’s body in the snow alongside the camp. Moving in a daze, he fixed the other dogs a meal. He was chopping meat when a movement caught his attention. Glancing up, Gunnar saw the dead dog panting for a snack.
Tom Daily also arrived at the halfway point carrying a dog. He’d spent $1,500 flying Zowie, his favorite leader, from his remote training camp to a clinic a few months before, after the dog ate a bum salmon. Zowie had pulled through, but still hadn’t regained his stamina. That much was obvious. Daily hated to admit it, but his entire team’s performance left a lot to be desired. Short training runs weren’t adequate to prepare dogs for a trip of this distance. The former hippie knew that from making his living giving sled-dog rides in Colorado. A once-in-a-lifetime sponsorship offer had landed him here, but the disruption of relocating North had interfered with training. With or without Zowie, these dogs were hurting.
Lynda Plettner wasn’t an official Klondike participant. Why pay an entry fee when she wasn’t here to race? Plettner was just tagging along. Someone had to keep an eye on Urtha Lenthar, the schoolteacher leasing dogs from Plettner’s kennel.
By Skwentna, Plettner had abandoned any attempt at maintaining a casual distance. Barking orders in a voice improbably loud, the Iditarod veteran was directing Lenthar’s every move. Her dogs were ready, Plettner decided, but the big goof riding the sled needed a lot of work.
Barry Lee’s borrowed dogs were short on conditioning. With that in mind, Lee took it easy the first 100 miles of the Klondike. Driving two hours, then resting two or three.
“This race will more than double some of their mileage,” Barry told me, watching his dogs settling down as I prepared to break camp.
I knew Lee from covering past races. He was one of those guys who was always turning up as a checkpoint volunteer. His confession about his dogs’ training distances was startling. All of my dogs had at least double, if not triple, that many miles of conditioning, and here Barry was playing catch-up. The dogs weren’t the only ones in need of conditioning. The musher’s gut was as wide as his habitual smile. Stepping inside the roadhouse, Barry staggered under the weight of the past 100 miles.
In the warmth of the kitchen, Lee munched on a wonderful cheeseburger, washing it down with pitcher after pitcher of iced tea. Then he went into the common room and stretched out on the floor for a quick nap. The musher awoke six hours later, racked by pain. His jaw was cramped. His arms were cramped. His abdomen and upper and lower legs were cramped. Struggling to a table, Lee grabbed a full pitcher of water and drained it. All that tea had dehydrated his system, causing his muscles to cramp during his long unplanned snooze. Barry suddenly had to pee so badly he wasn’t sure he could make it to a bathroom. Fortunately, his bladder was also cramped.
A debate was underway in the Senate chamber of the Alaska state capitol. The governor had