My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [58]
Sunlight was stabbing through clouds as we stopped on the far bank and snacked our soggy dogs. I took a picture of old Skidders holding his head high, impatient to go on again. Incredible dog.
Lee grinned at the sight of my taped headlamp and the trees lashed to my sled. “I wondered what was holding you up.”
Judging from Kershner’s comments before the race, I knew I could probably arrange for Mowry to ship replacement stanchions and anything else I needed to McGrath, a large village 50 miles from Nikolai. But that might take days! After what I’d just been through catching up, there was no way I was going to let Lee and Garth leave without me. After McGrath, the next likely place for a commercial air shipment was Anvik, over 200 miles north. Could the patched sled make it that far? It seemed like a hell of a gamble.
Garth’s leaders were tiring. Lee asked if I wanted to take the lead. I nodded, and he slowed his team so I could pass.
“Catch this,” I said, tossing Lee an imaginary gift as our sleds met.
“What’s that?”
“The Red Lantern!” I shouted.
Barry Lee laughed.
“You want somebody to work on that?” said the Nikolai checker, eyeing my patched sled.
Did I? I could have kissed the guy. He sent me to Nick Petruska, an Athabaskan sledmaker.
“I have a little birch,” Petruska said, studying the damage. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I tied the team alongside Petruska’s house, pulled out the cooker, then unhitched my sled from the gang line. The Athabaskan pushed it across the yard to his work shed.
In little more than the time it took to prepare the dogs a hot meal, Petruska duplicated the shattered parts and rebuilt the back end of my sled. I was amazed. It felt stronger than ever. The quiet villager didn’t ask for it, but I gave him $100. I was back in the race. Unstoppable indeed. Catching the Poodle Man would be merely a matter of time.
I walked Skidders to the checkpoint and rousted the veterinarian from bed. Though bleary-eyed, the volunteer from the Deep South grabbed his medical bag and immediately set to work, cutting off the bandage with a pair of scissors. The dog’s pasty white cut looked awful to me, but it wasn’t infected. Sealing the gash with some sort of medical staple-gun, the vet wrapped the paw.
“Have the bandages rechecked,” he said, gently rubbing Skidders’s neck, “but there’s no reason that dawg can’t run all the way to Nome on that foot.”
A race judge and several villagers were talking about Bill Peele. The rules were clear. The musher couldn’t continue without his missing dog, which several mushers had seen haunting the woods near the Burn. Peele couldn’t even officially check in at Nikolai. He had two choices: scratch or find Charlie.
After consulting with the judge, Peele arranged to rent a snowmachine, which he had absolutely no experience driving, and he hired several snowmachiners from the village. The motorized posse was supposed to leave in the morning.
Leaving the checkpoint, I ran into Steve Fossett, another rookie who was getting ready to pull out after completing his 24-hour layover in Nikolai. Lean and slightly balding, Fossett, forty-six, was a classic adventurer. The president of a securities firm in Chicago, he wanted to add the Iditarod to his already impressive list of mountain-climbing and ocean-swimming achievements. He was mushing a team leased from Canadian musher Bruce Johnson, an Iditarod veteran and winner of the 1986 Quest. But Fossett’s hired dogs weren’t cooperating.
Crossing the Burn, the dogs repeatedly quit, forcing Fossett to camp for hours each time. It was a dismal repeat of his experience on the Kusko 300, when the canine work stoppages caused him to scratch. His faith in the Iditarod investment was eroding. The best gear and dogs money could buy wasn’t worth much without cooperation between the team and its driver.
“I haven’t got any leaders at all,” Fossett said, sounding deeply discouraged.
I beat a hasty retreat, leaving Fossett to stew about his fate.
Plettner