My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [81]
Clipping together a handful of spare neck lines, the musher attached himself to the front of the dog team. He was the leader now. Advancing from marker to marker, Swenson led his dogs onward. The wind remained blinding. The dogs repeatedly knocked him down, surging forward faster than he could walk. His driverless sled kept lurching into the team and causing tangles. Was this all worth it? the 40-year-old musher asked himself. Thoughts of his strained marriage and the years of humiliation provided him with his answer. Death on the Iditarod Trail would be better than giving in now, Rick Swenson vowed.
He was resting on the ridge, with his hood ruff flapping in the wind, when a bright light approached. He assumed it was Butcher and felt drained. But the light belonged to a snowmachiner.
“Where are the others?” Swenson asked the driver.
“They all turned back.”
Twenty-three hours after leaving White Mountain, a slow-moving musher, with his parka collar sealed up to his nose, stood by the Burl Arch in a glare of floodlights, stiffly waving to the crowd cheering his arrival at the Iditarod’s finish line at 1:35 A.M., March 15.
“I walked a long, long way leading the dogs,” said Swenson, his weary voice amplified through a public address system. “It was cold. It was not a pleasant night.” The musher’s energy returned as he discussed Butcher’s decision to turn back in the storm. “Maybe she’s gotten a little bit soft with four victories under her belt,” he said, prompting a whistling clamor on Front Street. The Iditarod’s all-time champ wasn’t finished. “She’s going to have to get SIX now—if she wants to be the top dog.”
The news of his victory staggered us. It wasn’t so much the idea that Rick had beaten Susan. It was the sheer notion that anyone was in Nome—while we had another 450 miles to go.
The Blackburns treated our shock with a heavy dose of bush hospitality. Picking up a fork to eat breakfast, I felt as if I was dining at a resort. The sausage was spicy and charred, just the way I like it. The orange juice was thick and painfully tart. It was hard to believe the Yukon was right outside waiting for us. It was a clear, starry night. The temperature on the Yukon registered 3 5 below as Barry Lee crawled into his sleeping bag. The situation was daunting, but he remained hopeful. Between the temperature and the prevailing calm, the trail ought to firm up by morning, and that might help a lot. A hard, fast trail would do wonders for his dogs’ spirits.
A shrieking wind awakened Barry three hours later. “Oh, my God,” the musher whispered, sticking his head out of the sled bag. It was blowing again. And it was warmer, much warmer out, maybe zero—a sure sign another storm was coming.
Lee got a rude surprise when he slipped on his bunny boots. The left toe was rock hard. A crack must have developed in the rubber vapor barrier. Moisture had seeped inside and frozen, destroying the borrowed boot’s insulation.
Lee headed his team up the trail. He had gone two or three miles before the tracks left by the snowmachiners disappeared in new drifts. The powder was as deep here as anything he’d seen. The situation was spinning out of control. Barry figured that Eagle Island was 35 miles farther. He had cooked every bit of food he had the night before, gambling that full bellies would carry his dogs the distance in a single hard march. That plan seemed wildly optimistic now. Conditions weren’t necessarily better on the trail behind him, where new drifts probably covered his path. Aware that a wrong decision here could prove fatal, Barry Lee turned to the one advisor who never failed him.
“God,” prayed the musher, “every other clue up the line has told me to go on. What’s going on here? Am I supposed to finish this race?”
Lee received an immediate response, a message sensed, rather than heard.
“No.”
The answer was so emphatic, Lee decided that his personal fears were talking. He asked again. “Am I supposed to finish this race?”
“NO.” He