My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [54]
“They say it was forty below,” he whispered quietly. “I had no idea it was so cold. It was a great Iditarod until this happened. I just had no idea it was so cold.”
“Are you guys racing or what?” The caller was Madden. He sounded nervous, as if this morning’s Two Rivers’ Tune-up represented his serious racing debut instead of mine.
It was a cold November morning, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I was running in and out of the house, loading Mowry’s old utility truck. Any concern I might have felt about the sting of the air was dispelled by the thermometer dangling outside our cabin door. Twenty below zero. Nothing to it, I thought. Training in Fairbanks, we dealt with temperatures in that range all the time.
My gear seemed unusually stiff. The lines weren’t pliable. Normally limp harnesses were kinked and had to be stretched apart. But I was too busy to pay attention to that since I had drawn the first starting position.
I was running eight dogs. Rainy and Casey were leading, with Pig, Bo, Screech, Beast, Betsy, and Raven filling the spots behind. It wasn’t our best team, but one selected to minimize surprises. I hadn’t given much thought to my personal gear, placing faith in my familiar motorcycle suit, a trusted 14-year-old memento of my days as a photo-lab delivery driver. I had a balaclava covering my head, but it wasn’t tucked in, leaving most of my neck and face exposed.
Leaving the field, the trail joined Pleasant Valley Road. As soon as I made the turn, I felt the wind burning my cheeks. I gritted my teeth and concentrated on keeping the dogs rolling. Other teams were following at two-minute intervals. I’d started first and, so far, I was leading. If they were going to beat us, let ’em earn it.
No one caught us until we were well past the river, on the return loop. Dipping up and down with the trail, I heard a scraping sound and glanced backward. If a musher coming from behind called for the trail, I would have to pull over and let the sled pass.
A team was breathing down my back, all right, but the sled had no driver! The ghost team belonged to Jeff Boulton. About three miles into the race, his lead dogs had tangled. Boulton stopped, straightened them out, and was reaching for his sled when his excited dogs jerked the hook loose.
Rainy hesitated when she saw the crowd waiting at the finish line. Mowry clapped his hands and, coaxing her, ran with the team. People were clapping. For a few minutes I dared to dream that I might have even won. I even had Mowry scared.
“I didn’t want you to win the first time out and wind up with an unruly student on my hands,” the Coach said later.
He didn’t have to worry. All but two other teams completed the course faster. I finished fifth, beating Boulton and another musher who was delayed by a huge dog fight.
At the finish line, Kathy Swenson mentioned that she had planned on racing, but didn’t think it was worth it at 40 below.
Forty below zero. She had to be kidding! But it was no joke. Heat escaping through our cabin door had produced a false reading on our thermometer at home.
As we waited for results to be announced in the steamy convenience store, the winner of the race, Paul Taylor, slapped me on the shoulder.
“Pretty cold out there today,” he said, mentioning that he’d wondered if his lips were freezing in the breeze.
“How’s your face?” Taylor added, frowning.
Now that he mentioned it, my face felt sort of strange. My cheeks were rock hard to the touch, and cold. That’s odd, I thought.
Back at the cabin, Madman, Mowry, and Studer were fooling around in the kitchen when I finished feeding the dogs and came inside.
“Man, what happened to you, O’D!”
It wasn’t my imagination. Something was wrong. I had frostbitten my cheeks, a chunk of my neck, and both earlobes. My face was just beginning to swell. Within a few hours I puffed up like the Michelin Man. By morning, my mouth was framed with a pair of angry-red apples, and I had a pink golfball in place of my Adam’s apple.
“First-degree frostbite,