My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [70]
Gesturing to the beaver, the villager explained that he was teaching the boy to live off the land, as he had, practicing the lifestyle known as subsistence. After dinner, Keith showed me a litter of pups, which he hoped might someday pull a sled in the great race. Then Hamilton steered me to a bunk where I grabbed a quick nap.
Because we were traveling so far behind the race leaders, the condition of the trail worsened with each passing day, but it was paved with hospitality in Iditarod’s villages.
Peele wasn’t a quitter. It cost him more than $700 in gas and wages, but he and his Nikolai posse tracked Charlie down. He did not begrudge the money. The dog’s harness was snagged on a bush when the searchers found him. He would surely have died without their help. But the ridiculous incident burned up more than 48 hours.
It was Sunday night before Peele mushed into McGrath, driving what was now the unrivaled last-place team. Garth and Lee, the only mushers even close, had left McGrath at least eight hours before, and both had given their teams long breaks in the busy checkpoint.
A reasonable man might have been discouraged. Except for Takotna, which hardly counted because it was so close to McGrath, Peele was headed into no-man’s-land. Snowmachines rarely traveled the 215 miles between McGrath and Shageluk, and a single storm could easily bury the trail, transforming his race into a trek for survival.
But Peele didn’t have much in common with other middle-aged men. On two different occasions the tall Southerner with the shaggy white beard had stood on top of 20,030-foot Mount McKinley. He was the driven sort, a man who took up mushing in Alaska less than a month after undergoing major knee surgery. He had borrowed $40,000 from his retirement fund to pursue this Iditarod dream. The holder of the Red Lantern might have been stubborn to the point of foolishness, but you couldn’t call him a quitter.
The weather held as Peele pushed across the barrens toward Iditarod. He didn’t find many markers left standing, but scanning the horizon with his field glasses he picked out enough to stay on course. He pushed himself relentlessly, limiting his breaks to the absolute minimum needed for the dogs. The effort seemed to be paying off when he mushed into Iditarod within four hours of Lee’s departure.
The old geezer looked ragged to the lone race official left in town. But who wouldn’t? Radio operator Rich Runyan decided that Peele was holding up pretty well for a guy traveling alone out here—some 400 miles behind the leaders.
CHAPTER 8
O Mighty Yukon
Happy Trails Brian O’Donoghue.” The sign was nailed to a tall spruce. The forest was plastered with Iditarod greetings, but it was comical seeing my name sharing the same trunk with Jeff King’s, who was more than 300 miles ahead.
Leaving the forest, the trail descended along a frozen slough, spilling into an immense white plain, interrupted only by distant folds of ice, jutting perhaps eight feet high. I sucked in my breath. This had to be the Yukon River.
Close ahead lay the Athabaskan village of Anvik, yet the only hint of man’s presence was a string of tiny trail markers skirting the massive river’s edge. Farther out, a solitary line of trees grew from a small island, pointing like a spear at the vast white expanse.
I felt small.
Skidders had me concerned. My old wheel dog was limping. He was favoring a front paw, so the problem was unrelated to that cut on his rear leg. I stopped and examined him, but couldn’t identify a cause. His tug line remained taut, so I left him in the team. The old stud was still pulling—on three legs—as I mushed the team off the river into Anvik, passing the church where a bell had heralded King’s arrival four days earlier. It was Wednesday at 3:30 P.M. A crowd of shrieking children chased us to the checkpoint