My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [5]
The dogs belonged to a young Knik musher named Spencer Mayer. He was what Marcie called a “dream musher”—a guy who put together a good team, trained the dogs to perfection—but never quite got it together to enter races.
Spencer was married, with a young child. He’d landed a construction job in Dutch Harbor, a booming port in the distant Aleutians. It fell on his father, Herman Mayer, to tend the dogs. Spencer’s father had a four-wheel-drive all-terrain vehicle he wasn’t using. Marcie and Kevin needed one for training their dogs in the off season. Just watching that fine machine sitting there rusting was more than Marcie could stand.
“Herman,” she said. “sell me the four-wheeler.”
“I’m not selling my damn four-wheeler,” he said.
“Herman, you’re not riding it! Give it to me!”
“Well,” Mayer said, “I tell you what. You sell my son’s dog team, and I’ll give it to you.”
Marcie always got her way.
Mowry wanted to close the deal without delay. Old Joe Redington had repossessed his dogs, and Tim didn’t want us to miss out on these affordable replacements. I wasn’t so eager to buy an entire yard of sled dogs. I had planned to ease into mushing, lining up lease deals for training in, say, October. But Mowry had it worked out: He would buy the kennel and rent me a team for $4,000. He had already talked to his father about a loan. The Old Man was agreeable. It was the sort of livestock investment that made sense to his folks back at Mowacres Dairy in New York.
The deal landed me a team for the race at a price within my budget, and it provided me with a coach and kennel partner. The Mowth wouldn’t be racing this year, but he owned his own sled dogs at last.
When she felt like it, Raven was our kennel’s speed queen. Refreshed by a full belly and a four-hour nap, she was having fun on the return trip from Skwentna as we made tracks toward the Klondike finish line. Bounding gaily, the princess and Rainy set a blistering pace down the hard-packed river trail. It was a windless, balmy night. Sipping chicken-noodle soup, I danced aboard the sled runners, keeping time to a Stevie Ray Vaughan tape wailing through my Walkman. The river here was about 100 yards across. The ice was concealed under a rolling white avenue. Steep banks rose on either side. Old trees leaned inward at the high-water mark, dark silhouettes against the deep blue sky.
The party ended 10 miles from Yentna Roadhouse. Beast was stumbling. The young female kept tripping on the lines and falling with a glazed look in her eyes. The fun gone, Raven began balking, drawing back against the neckline connecting her to Rainy and searching for any escape.
“It’s OK, princess,” I whispered, stroking the trembling girl between the ears. “You did just fine tonight.”
I switched Raven back and placed White Rat in lead. An extremely intelligent female, she remained my personal favorite despite a tendency to slack off at every opportunity. Rat was on her best behavior tonight, but Gnat, a meek unseasoned male, seized every pause, dip, or tangle to sit down.
We’d covered 120 miles in less than 24 hours, and both Gnat and Beast verged on surrender. Mowry had warned me about this: “The thing with young dogs is they have to get past that point where they think they’re going to die.”
I took a long break and gave the team a snack. The breather refreshed everybody. Afterward Gnat and the Beast shared the work, holding their lines tight as the team hauled my sled up the steep bank fronting Yentna Station, Dawn was breaking through a mist of sprinkling rain.
Other racers were discussing the wisdom of laying over at the checkpoint, delaying their final push until the cool evening hours. It was