My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [68]
Daily mushed up the river into the ghost town at 6:30 P.M. on Monday, March 11. I trailed in ten minutes later. Passing Iditarod’s skeletal buildings, I studied the broken windows for ghosts. I didn’t see any, but the ruins had a presence to them.
Most of the race staff had already flown north, leaving Rich Runyan, a ham radio operator, to serve as the checker for us stragglers in the rear of the field. A veterinarian was also left at the checkpoint. He was packed and itching to get out as soon as Iditarod’s air force could rescue him.
Doc Cooley, the mushing vet, had his leased dogs bedded down nearby on the frozen beach. They were a feisty bunch of champion-caliber sled dogs, the same ones Minnesota musher John Patten had recently mushed to victory in Montana’s 500-mile Race to the Sky. Cooley wasn’t traveling fast enough to tire the dogs out, and they continually snarled and scrapped amongst themselves. Despite the hair-curling growls, blood was seldom, if ever, spilled. The fighting was largely for show. The snarls amounted to trash talk among a team of highly competitive athletes. Daily and I nicknamed his dogs “Doc’s wolf pack.”
My dogs came alive as I dug through my checkpoint supply sacks for whitefish. I had to anchor Harley’s neck line with my second snow hook to prevent a mob assault on the rations. I threw the team frozen slices of liver and chunks of lamb.
A hole was chopped in the river ice for water. But the water was stained dark yellow from the area’s high mineral content. Yuck. So, using melted snow for dog water, I pumped hot stew into the dogs until even Harley shied away from his bowl. As they slept off the feast, I cooked a second meal to dish out in the morning. My team wasn’t budging for at least 12 hours, and not until I heard the dogs barking again. I wanted to erase all memory of that last hard march.
After ten days on the trail, my feet were rotting inside those clammy bunny boots. If I didn’t dry them out, I might as well just grab the axe and start amputating.
Daily shunned cabins. He much preferred to sleep under the stars. Leaving us to share the warm cabin floor, Tom stretched out near the dog teams, looking forward to a peaceful night.
The first disturbance was Garth. Lurching to a stop at 3:30 A.M., the Englishman staggered off his sled and headed inside the cabin, leaving his dogs to fend for themselves in an exhausted pile.
I was sewing harnesses when the Englishman threw open the cabin door and plopped down in a chair by the stove.
“I’m shattered, simply shattered,” Garth announced. The crazy Englishman had made the 90-mile trip from Ophir in a scorching nine hours.
Flipping on his headlamp at the second disturbance, Daily confronted a dazzling apparition. It was Kuba, nicknamed “the German from Mars,” owing to the array of reflective tape on the adventurer’s gear.
The bleary-eyed musher’s patience eroded as Kuba turned his own dogs loose. The three newcomers pranced through the camp, sniffing everything and sending our four teams into a frenzy. Several members of Doc Cooley’s wolf pack got loose, and a new round of fighting erupted.
Enough was enough. Daily stomped into the cabin and roused Cooley. “Doc,” he demanded, “you’ve got to come and stop the killing.”
Cooley yawned, staggered outside, and grabbed his loose dogs. He tied the team off to a flimsy stake and trudged back to the cabin. Daily heard the wolf pack renew its bickering, but he was too tired to care anymore.
My dogs had chewed a total of three harnesses in seven months of training. I figured I was being cautious packing five spares and shipping three more harnesses to various checkpoints. By Skwentna, Daphne alone had shredded three harnesses. The chewing epidemic was just beginning. Other dogs, particularly Rainy, suddenly acquired a taste for harness webbing. By Iditarod, the spares were all in use, and at least half the team was sporting harnesses with patches made from other harnesses beyond repair.
Doc and Daily left Iditarod Tuesday morning. My own departure was derailed by a sudden outbreak of