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Perhaps two miles beyond where we had camped stood what had to be Don’s Cabin. Dogs started barking as we approached. Someone was home. It was Ralf Kuba, a German adventurer making his second attempt to travel the Iditarod Trail on skis. A year earlier, he had set out on the same mission, using two German Shepherds, Cessy and Sagus, to pull his pulka, a small light sled. He had made it as far as Takotna before the remote checkpoints ahead closed.

This year Kuba had beefed up his small team with Trapper, a veteran Iditarod husky, and he had set out three days before the start of the race. I found him in a depressed mood.

“It’s no good,” he said. “The dogs are sick and weak.”

The German’s dogs looked pretty lively to me. And fat.

Checking out Don’s Cabin, I decided that anyone would be come depressed in that rat hole. The place was falling apart, with broken windows and a thick layer of ice spilling inside. This was the proverbial last resort; that it was described as a shelter confirmed my worst suspicions about the weather in this area.

I pinned a note to the front door urging Barry Lee to hurry up. The trail was starting to get lonely. Kuba was miserable, but he assured me that he wasn’t in trouble. I left him there, promising to advise the checker in Iditarod about his difficulties.

Another clear bright day. By midmorning I was sweating and began stripping down, shedding first the snowmachine suit, then the thick bibs. The heat was tough on the dogs, but I kept pushing. My foolishness had thrust us into a different sort of race: the dog food was gone. What mattered now was reaching Iditarod before my dogs crashed, or another storm rolled in. Getting pinned down out here would mean the end of my race.

I wasted precious time putting up with Chad’s antics, figuring he set the fastest pace. A lead dog’s speed is moot when he squats in protest every hundred yards. I finally came to my senses and put Harley and Rainy in lead, two dogs I could count on to keep us moving forward. To pick up the dogs’ spirits, I cut up my two remaining personal steaks—the last food left in the sled—into 15 small bites and passed those out. I’m not sure it was helpful, particularly for Harley, whose hunger was fanned by this miniature appetizer.

With his insatiable appetite, Harley had never been good about passing anything edible on the trail. With the sun beating down and an empty belly gnawing at his concentration, the big dog was far too hungry to pay attention to a musher holding an empty snack bag. Following his nose, Harley began dragging the team off the trail into each and every campsite left by the 62 teams that had passed this way before me. He was determined to scarf every shred of food those other teams had left behind, and I couldn’t really blame him.

We slowed to a crawl behind Harley’s meandering quest. Hungry Boy was as oblivious to my shouts as he was to the lesbian’s attempts to mount him from behind. Screech, meanwhile, had picked up an old glove and was sucking on it like a Lifesaver.

“Hey, there’s a letter for you,” Kuba told Daily as the musher stopped outside Don’s Cabin.

Daily wondered if he was hallucinating. Who was this German with two fat shepherds? The musher relaxed when he read my note and realized it was addressed to Barry Lee. Daily was encouraged to hear that I wasn’t more than a few hours ahead. Not because he wanted to beat me. Tom wasn’t seriously racing this year. He didn’t need to, not with his two-year sponsorship deal. No, Tom Daily was getting lonely.

Lavon Barve lead a group of seven teams off the Yukon River into Kaltag early Monday morning—day ten of the Iditarod—but these front-runners weren’t hanging together for the company. Barve, Butcher, Runyan, Buser, Osmar, Swenson, and King were forcing the pace, pushing each other toward Nome, 350 miles ahead.

“This is rumble time,” Buser told a Times reporter. “When somebody pulls the ice hook, you’ve got to go.”

For the second year in a row, Barve