My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [56]
Cresting each mound in the barren ruins, I searched the horizon for signs of life. No escape came into view. I was looking off in the distance as Rainy and Harley followed the tracks of a previous team and disappeared. Instinctively, I braced. Too late. The sled launched off a cliff, and I was looking downward at the dogs.
Frantic to avoid crushing anybody, I rolled to the left. The sled thudded to the ground on its side, missing the dogs by scant inches. Or so I thought, until Skidders bellowed in pain. The old wheel dog had a nasty slice on his right rear leg, caused by a glancing blow from a sled runner. Skidders quieted as I examined his wound. I swallowed hard and pretended to be calm. This looked bad. It was a deep slash, wide open to the muscle, right above Skidders’ ankle. At least it wasn’t bleeding much.
“Sorry, old man,” I said, digging into the sled for my first-aid kit.
The injured dog calmly watched as I greased the cut with antiseptic salve and bandaged it. I tried loading him in the sled bag, but Gnat’s burly father wiggled free and leaped out. Shaking himself, he yawned, sniffed the bandage, and seemed ready to forget the whole incident.
“All right, tough guy”
We resumed our march. Skidders, at nine the oldest dog in the team, fell into rhythm with the team’s pace without so much as a limp.
A solitary figure appeared in the distance. It was a person, on foot.
“Jesus,” I whispered, trying to figure out which musher might have lost his team.
Drawing closer, I made out a man pulling a small sled. What was anybody doing out here on foot? The riddle was answered when I spotted the rifle slung over a shoulder—a hunter. The man greeted me warmly, and I halted the team. Like two astronauts meeting in a dead lunar basin, we talked in the middle of the Burn. I was cheered more than I would have expected by the human company.
The hunter whipped out a pocket camera. “Mind if I take a picture?”
The distraction provided by the hunter was brief. Hour after hour, I pressed on, bouncing over partially buried trunks and old stumps. In midafternoon, the sled slammed to a stop, nearly flipping me over the handlebar.
“Son of a bitch!”
The chain anchoring my snowmachine track was caught on a small, firm stump. I couldn’t lift my sled over it. And I couldn’t slide the sled backward—not with 15 dogs straining forward on a downhill slope.
“Son of a bitch!”
We weren’t going anywhere unless I cut off the stump. Double-anchoring the team with both of my snow hooks, I grabbed my axe.
I’d been trapped on a mountain in a storm. Dragged off a cliff. My sled was busted and patched with trees. Now I was playing logger in a dead forest.
“Un-” I cried, swinging at the stump, “stoppable!”
I repeated the mantra with each bite of the axe, feeling stronger with every blow. “Un-stoppable! Un-stoppable! Un-stoppable!”
The stump gave way. The team surged, popping both snow hooks as I leaped aboard the runners.
“That’s right,” I shouted at the dogs. “We are un-stoppable!”
Plettner was doing just fine, thank you. Those pups zipped right over to Takotna. She couldn’t praise them enough. It was Urtha who had her worried. Her mushing student’s situation was growing worse with each phone call. Plettner hardly knew what to say anymore.
“The dogs won’t go right,” Urtha complained. Hansel, one of the leased team’s key leaders, “wasn’t performing,” he told her.
“Is he mentally or physically having problems?” Plettner asked.
“Well, I sure don’t know.”
Plettner instructed Lenthar to find a vet and have the dog checked out. He did, and the examination proved inconclusive. That settled matters as far as Lynda was concerned.
“Look Urtha,” she said, “take a break, but not much of a break, because you’re going very slowly and those dogs AREN’T TIRED. Then get over here to Takotna. I’m going to wait for you.”
The stray had to be a team dog. That much was obvious