My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [31]
Sandy intercepted the team as we approached the open part of the lake.
“This way,” she said, grabbing the leaders to steer the team over toward the bonfire.
“What? What?” I said, having completely forgotten the party, where my family and dozens of friends were waiting. Kelly rushed to the front of the team.
“Forget it. Brian’s not stopping. This is a race!”
We left Sandy on the lake, looking disappointed.
My dogs were pulling like an engine in fine tune. I shook hands with Troyer and Kelly, and they jumped off. I was looking backward, waving good-bye to my friends, when the team balled up in a tangle. Both handlers saw it and came running. Another team slipped by as I lined out my dogs. Kelly was waiting on the sled when I trudged back. I slapped him on the shoulder, then turned to the dogs.
“All right,” I shouted. The dogs chased the team ahead.
I leaned into the turn rounding the old Knik Museum. When I looked up, there it was, waiting for me: a curving fence rising toward a gap in the trees—the Iditarod Trail.
Dandy should be here. Mushing out of Anchorage, the absence of his trusted leader cast the only shadow touching Jon Terhune’s trail. His Kenai-conditioned dogs breezed through the warm passage to Eagle River, climbing a notch to forty-fifth position.
Watching other mushers streaming through Knik and racing off into the darkness, Terhune’s girlfriend, Dawn, brooded about the unknown dangers ahead. She couldn’t quit thinking about the money, time, and energy being squandered on this mad perversion of a sport. She thought about Terhune’s refusal to return to work the day before, as his company had demanded. Ten years with Unocal and her boyfriend had thrown it away—for what? By the time Terhune arrived at Knik Lake, Dawn was seething.
“You’re crazy,” she told Terhune. “And Joe Redington should be put in jail for starting long-distance mushing.”
It was a familiar argument. Terhune didn’t need a rerun. Certainly not there in the middle of Knik Lake. But he let her rage. He was going to Nome, regardless. And he really had no adequate response to Dawn’s main question: “Why do you do it?” Terhune figured the only answer to that was spiritual. You either saw that or you never would.
“How can you do this for a hobby?”
“It’s NOT a hobby,” Jon snapped.
The musher kept his cool. This was Dawn’s scene, and he let her play it out. Three hours slipped away in a breathy cloud of angry words. Every minute of the delay represented a major sacrifice to Terhune. But he knew she’d never appreciate that.
Barry Lee was disgusted with himself. The little cook pot for his personal food was missing.
While Lee fretted about this screwup, Dr. Nels Anderson faced a painful decision. His admirable, thrilling start was being derailed by illness. The two-time finisher hadn’t come back to the Iditarod Trail only to nurse a sick team to Nome. He resolved to scratch.
Lee hated to profit from another man’s distress, but he couldn’t let this golden opportunity pass. He talked the doctor out of his cooking pot. Anderson also sold him a spare set of runner plastic, dirt cheap. Depending on the hardness grade, a single set of runner plastic sold for $20 to $50. Lee had lacked the cash to buy spares in time to ship them out with his food drop. Lee was particularly pleased with this last acquisition. He didn’t have any runner plastic waiting at checkpoints ahead.
Jeff King, of Denali National Park, trailed Barry into Knik. In the decade since he had made his one and only Iditarod bid, placing twenty-eighth, King had emerged as a champion sled-dog racer, winning the Quest, the recent Kusko 300, and numerous other mid-distance events. None of those victories counted against the competition here. They were tune-ups for the intense, jockey-sized musher’s return to this trail.
Anxious to test the dogs and himself, Jeff King overtook Lee in a narrow section as the teams were descending a steep slope. It was a lousy place to pass, but the driver from