My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [51]
This was no place to argue. Placing Rainy and Harley in lead, I drove the team hard for several hours. I couldn’t detect the trail myself, but we passed enough markers to maintain my confidence in the lesbian. Our luck ran out on the edge of a large lake. Rainy charged into the white expanse, but her clues ended at the shoreline. She swung the team right, then left, searching for a bearing. Then she looked at me, but I couldn’t help. From what little I could see through the white soup, the broad lake’s white surface was seamless and perfect.
Throwing the sled on its side, I halted the team on the snow-covered ice and ran up to Rainy. She shied, as always, but looked at me as I knelt down beside her. “It’s not your fault, little girl,” I whispered. “Not your fault at all.”
Pulling the dogs off the lake, I bedded the team in a clump of bushes. It was snowing again, blowing loose powder anyway. I dug a pit to shield the cooker from the wind. After serving the dogs a hot meal, I emptied my sled for the second time and climbed inside. I slept fitfully, haunted by the knowledge that I was alone—in last place—at least 800 miles from Nome.
CHAPTER 6
Alone in the Burn
In the grey light of dawn, I rejoiced.
Out in the center of the lake—a solitary marker pole greeted me. My fine friend, the trail marker, was an inch and a half wide, stood two feet tall in the snow, thin as a reed, but capped with fluorescent orange tape that blazed wonderfully against the lake’s broad sea of white.
Rainy and Harley made a beeline for it, plowing through six inches of new snow. I was heartened, but worried nonetheless. The powder wasn’t deep enough to stop the team, but it was bound to slow us down, which meant that Lee and Garth would increase their lead.
A traffic jam clogged the trail out of Iditarod, 250 miles north. Early Friday morning, March 8, Susan Butcher had mushed out of the darkness into the glare of the TV lights set up by the banks of the Iditarod River. Three thousand dollars in silver ingots was waiting for the first musher to reach the ghost town of Iditarod, but Butcher refused to claim the prize. She told race judge Chisholm that she wanted to wait for Dee Dee.
“We mushed eighty miles together, and I want it to be a tie,” Susan said. Her request was rooted in anger. The run from Ophir had taken 25 hours, twice as long as usual because the front-runners had had to break their own trail. The Iditarod’s defending champ was seething.
Race marshal Kershner had seen this coming. Following the debacle with Adkins, he had intercepted the trail-breaking team on the Yukon River and ordered them back. Kershner wanted them to blast through to Ophir, but the snowmachiners had backtracked only as far as Iditarod before turning around.
According to Butcher, she, Jonrowe, Adkins, Osmar, Buser, Barve, and King had traded off the front position, sharing the burden placed on lead dogs cutting a new path through the drifts. Although Swenson and Runyan had arrived at Iditarod along with the others, their names were noticeably absent from Susan’s honor roll.
“What a bunch of crybabies,” responded Swenson.
Runyan ducked the name-calling, saying that he was just running at the best pace for his dogs.
The newcomer to Iditarod’s front pack, Jeff King, cast the dispute in strategic terms. “This isn’t a Boy Scout trip. It’s a race,” he told reporters. “You don’t get in the ring and grease Muhammad Ali’s gloves for him.”
As the sun rose Friday morning, Runyan mushed out of Iditarod in first place. By noon, a front pack of 18 teams was on the trail to Shageluk, with Jonrowe and Butcher bringing up the rear.
Back in McGrath, Lynda Plettner was peeved. That damn Urtha had Abdul, her best leader. After the experience of watching him struggle through the Klondike, Plettner had made sure that the rookie’s entire Iditarod team was first-rate. All Urtha had to do was feed those dogs and hang on. She was the one driving