My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [43]
Blood oozed from bites on his nose and ears, but Denali didn’t appear seriously harmed. I was debating what to do with him when I saw Raven nervously watching from the woods nearby. The sight gave me a chill. Lose a dog and I’d be out of the race. At home, I wouldn’t have worried, since our escapees never strayed far. But I couldn’t take anything for granted with a spooked dog in strange surroundings.
“Here Raven. C’mon little princess,” I said, gently coaxing her. The tone of my voice was all she needed. She dashed over with her tail between her legs, trembling, shaken by the violence.
“That’s OK Raven,” I said, stroking my delicate black beauty. “Everything’s all right.”
I placed Denali in wheel, where I could keep him under closer watch. If there were lingering animosities, they were soon forgotten. The dogs, including Denali, perked up their ears and leaped to their feet at the familiar rustling sound of the snack bag.
The trail to Rainy Pass rolled and snaked through a forest of thin alders. When they set trail earlier in the winter, Iditarod volunteers had trimmed these fast-growing trees. Unfortunately, the snow pack dropped during a warm spell that followed, subjecting dog teams to a gauntlet of jagged sticks and stumps projecting eight inches or more from ground level.
Plowing through mile after mile of the battering sticks, I kept wondering if we were on the right trail. But the markers were unmistakable. My sled was taking a beating. Sticks kept snagging the chains connecting a piece of snowmachine track between my runners, which I used as an extra brake. Sometimes the impediments stopped the team, throwing me against the handlebar—but only for an instant, until the stick, or whatever it was, gave way under pressure, launching my sled forward as if from a slingshot. On one sharp dip, I tasted utter disaster as a stump snagged my sled bow. Under pressure from the dogs, my sled bent in what seemed to be an impossibly tight arc. I braced myself, dreading the “crack” of runners snapping. Thankfully, the bow clamps burst first. My sled popped loose, sporting a busted nose, but sliding.
I almost never drink hard liquor, but I had left Knik packing two bottles of Jack Daniel’s. It was Jack Studer’s idea. The larger quart-sized bottle of whiskey was strictly for trading purposes. Out in the villages, a bottle can buy you a freshly laid snow-machine trail, said Studer, who understood better than anyone the misery of plodding to Nome on snowshoes.
I was also carrying a pint of Jack for personal use. Studer advised me to take a quick belt as I approached each checkpoint. He said it would soothe my transition from the serenity of the trail to the madhouse atmosphere of checkpoints.
The seal on that pint of Jack remained unbroken through Eagle River, Wasilla, Knik, Skwentna, and Finger Lake. But I was ready for a sip as I neared Rainy Pass late Tuesday morning. The bottle felt light as I pulled it out. Hardly a drop remained inside. At first I was baffled, but then I noticed a tiny hole in the cap, where the booze had leaked out. A broken bottle I could understand—but what were the odds of this happening?
Groping inside the sled bag to see if there were any other surprises, I pulled out a handful of plastic splinters: the remains of my spare headlamp reflector. That was no biggie. Though headlamp bulbs burned out fairly often, I had never, over the entire course of training, cracked a headlamp reflector. Those things were as tough as steel.
Parking on a gentle snow-covered slope below Rainy Pass Lodge, I felt bruised and disoriented. Like a mugging victim, assaulted in a beautiful park. My hips and knees were sore from being dragged God knows how many times. Raising my right arm was extremely painful. It humbled me to think that Redington was mushing this trail in his seventies.
And what about Colonel Vaughan? He was already 70 years old in 1975, the first time he attempted Redington’s Great Race. He didn’t make it to Nome that year. Or the year after, when he took a wrong