My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [53]
The deep snow knocked a couple miles an hour off our speed. Weighted down by the twin tree-splints, my sled felt sluggish, and I couldn’t do much pushing on the hills for fear the handlebar would break.
Under a gray sky, I followed the trail through thinning strips of spruce. Before too long, I mushed past the last of the living trees and entered a charred land of the dead. I knew this place, if only from legend: Farewell Burn.
Pictures of the Burn didn’t capture the desolation left by the huge forest fire that swept the area in 1977, charring 360,000 acres. Fourteen years later, the land remained a graveyard, littered with rotting stumps and a spider web of skeletal trees.
It got colder as I entered the dead zone. A breeze soon picked up, and I rode with my back to the cutting wind, fiddling with face masks, seeking a magic combination that might keep my face pink and alive. Above all, I wanted to avoid the Aussie’s fate.
I’d been in Ruby for several days, covering the last teams passing through the checkpoint. I was booked to depart on the next mail plane out when the call sounded over the checkpoint radio. A rescue was in progress.
The injured musher was shivering, drenched in sweat, and bundled in a blue sleeping bag when he arrived. It was Brian Carver, a soft-spoken farmer from Melbourne, Australia, who had been thrust into the race after a musher friend had suffered a training accident. I’d written a funny little story about Carver’s last-minute search for an Australian flag so he could show the home colors when leaving the starting chute.
Traveling in the back of the pack with Mowry and Peter Kelly, the Aussie had proved a game, if quiet trail companion. In retrospect, his companions recalled that Carver had, perhaps, acted unusually listless when they camped the night before the accident. He hadn’t bothered to change his socks and gloves like the others. He wasn’t hungry. The Aussie had just puffed on his cigarettes and watched the others.
The temperature was falling. Kelly realized that from the way his glasses kept frosting up. Mowry reckoned Carver must be tough to bear the temperature, wearing nothing but those thin glove liners. None of the rookies knew exactly how cold it was, but they agreed it was bad, maybe 20 below zero.
The next morning Carver, moving with zombie precision, abruptly broke camp and mushed straight through to Sulatna Crossing, the next checkpoint. Volunteers at the remote tent camp were appalled by the musher’s condition as he struggled to sign in: three of Carver’s fingers and several of his toes were frozen solid.
It was obvious to them that the Australian was in need of immediate medical attention. Carver wasn’t so sure. His chalk-white digits weren’t pleasant to look at, but the injury wasn’t painful, not in that frozen state. He clung to the hope that he might yet tough out the race.
Ham radio operator Rich Runyan, then working his first Iditarod, patched through a call to a doctor at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. After a hurried conference, the doctor read the musher a medical report over the radio. The Aussie’s determination faded as he listened to the clinical analysis of the miseries—starting with potential amputations—he faced if any of his frozen parts thawed and refroze out on the trail. Carver reluctantly scratched.
Mowry arrived at Sulatna shortly before Carver boarded the plane for Ruby. He was shocked by the other musher’s injuries.
“Don’t you do it, mate,” the Aussie told him.
Carver’s frostbite was thawing by the time he landed on the river below Ruby. The internal blood fire had begun, leaving him feverish and helpless, with that left hand jammed under his right armpit and his knees hunched in the sleeping bag. Throwing off my camera bag, I helped the two pilots carry him from one plane to the other. The musher groaned when we bumped his feet against the door frame.
Carver recognized me and