My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [69]
“Barry, I’ve been waiting for you.”
Lee was mortally tired. You could tell by his puffy red eyes. But his smile was as wide as ever. We talked for a little while, and then I had to go. My team had had 15 hours of rest, and the dogs were getting antsy.
The 65-mile trail to Shageluk was demonic enough to satisfy my wildest masochistic desires. From the crest of each hill, I’d see another, sometimes several more hills, unblemished save for tiny white scratches rising to the sky through trees and brush. Each faint white streak represented the trail climbing yet another distant hill. There was no end to them. Some of the upward slopes were so steep that I could have done chin-ups on the handlebar. On the descents, the dogs spilled down the powdery gutter in a cloud of paws and fur.
Doc and Daily were barely two hours ahead, but the wind had largely erased their tracks on the hilltops. And most of the markers were down. I didn’t have too much trouble following the surviving clues in the daylight, but I worried that Lee would be traveling blind after dark. So I made a point of grabbing fallen markers as I passed them, and replanting the reflective sticks in the snow, much as Lee was doing for Garth and Peele. With Iditarod’s front-runners nearing the coast, the doorway to Nome was closing on those of us in the back of Iditarod’s field. We each had to do what we could to keep it open.
The lesbian was acting strangely. She kept stopping and freezing, with her head cocked as if she was listening. At first it alarmed me—I kept waiting for a moose or a bear to rise out of the brush. But nothing happened. Her pauses had a trancelike quality, as if she was lost in thought. Yelling had no effect.
“Earth to Rainy. Earth to Rainy,” I said, wondering if she was having a mental breakdown. The thought was scary. The lesbian was our main navigator. Without her, Harley would be impossible to control. Chad, Raven, and the Rat were good for fill-in duty, but that was about it. I needed Rainy. So I waited, and watched, and wondered what the bossy little dog was seeing in her mind’s eye.
I caught up with Daily about nine that night, near another deserted fish camp. It was a woodsy stretch and, for a while, we lost the trail in deep snow. But within thirty minutes, the markers led us out of the trees and into a village street. A crowd of children escorted us to a building decorated with an official Iditarod checkpoint banner. The building was closed and dark. Daily and I were trying to decide what to do when checker Arnold Hamilton roared up on a snowmachine. He steered us to a field behind the school, where Cooley’s team was already resting.
“You’re the reporter,” Hamilton said as he returned on the snowmachine. The checker’s son was now aboard. The boy handed me a bucket of hot water. “I read your stories. You’re my pick to get the Red Lantern.”
“What!” I cried. “How can you say that? I’m miles ahead of Lee and Garth.”
Hamilton laughed.
“I’ll find some way to disqualify them,” he said.
Villagers in Unalakleet, 265 miles ahead, lined the ten-foot-high snow banks of the street cheering the first teams to reach the coast.
Susan Butcher had reclaimed the lead on the 90-mile trail from Eagle River to Kaltag. Her dogs were fed and resting before Barve trailed her into the village 45 minutes later. Another 25 minutes passed before he was followed by Buser, Osmar, and Swenson.
Butcher now held a commanding lead in her bid for a record fifth crown. Nome was a mere 200 miles away, and the performance of her dogs on the windy coast was legendary. The temperature in Barrow was 30 below and falling. Snow flurries were moving south from the North Slope, and the wind was gathering off the Bering Sea Coast.
A skinned beaver dripped blood in a bucket as it thawed. Welcome to the bush. It was about 11 P.M. as I sat down at the dinner table with Hamilton, his wife, Carolyn, and her son, Keith.
Hamilton quizzed