My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [82]
Barry turned his leaders around for the last time. It was 25 miles back to the village, and every step became a battle. Lee was soaking wet and shivering. His foot was cold. His dogs rubbed hair off their hind legs plowing through the crusty drifts, but the musher kept driving them. He had no choice. He had no food to give them, and they were weakening by the hour.
Four miles out of Grayling, Barry Lee emptied everything but his sleeping bag out of the sled. He wanted to shave every spare ounce. It was going to be close, he knew, but the dogs would make it. He was now confident of that much.
Oddly enough, the musher drew some comfort from the day’s hardship. His unseen advisor was wise. This team never would have made it to Eagle Island. He had a season of mistakes to learn from. For now, retreat offered the only path toward salvation.
Doc’s wolf pack was faltering. After Blackburn’s cabin, the signs of stress were becoming unmistakable. Up and down his gang line Cooley’s dogs flopped on their backs, squirming in the snow with each pause. Their snarls and squabbling showed that the dogs weren’t fatigued in the physical sense. We weren’t traveling fast enough to tire his leased champions. But even the best lead dogs can only take so much pressure.
Daily shared the trail-breaking duties on this warm, sunny afternoon. But his old leader was slower than a glacier. It drove Doc crazy following the other team. He couldn’t take more than a mile of Tom’s creeping pace before impatiently reclaiming the lead, and then Cooley’s leaders would resume their games. At one point, Doc was trying to change his leaders in the deep snow when he tripped and fell, completely burying himself. The veterinarian popped back up, cursing, laughing, and almost crying as he spit out snow. My offer to put on snowshoes and blaze the trail myself didn’t help.
“Snowshoes? God no,” Cooley said, horrified. “We’ll be out here forever.”
In a deep section between two islands, we came across a half-buried bicycle. The powdery river had evidently defeated the specially rigged twin tires on each wheel. Judging from the tracks, the rider had continued on foot. We braced ourselves for the appearance of a body. Instead, we soon encountered an Athabaskan trapper traveling by snowmachine. Watching the winds the day before, the Indian from Grayling knew that any mushers left on the river had to be struggling. He’d come out scouting for us.
The trapper dug into his supplies, and, in short order, we three were sipping hot coffee and chewing strips of dried salmon. And the Indian had surprising news. A “whole bunch of teams” were still camping at Eagle Island, and the checkpoint lay little more than an hour away by dog team, he said.
I was famished and complimented the trapper on the salmon.
“You like them? Help yourself,” he said, handing me a baggy filled with the chewy strips.
Gunning his snowmachine, the trapper looped around and streaked back toward Eagle Island, repacking our new trail.
Swennie’s victory produced a weeklong orgy of front-page stories and special in-state broadcast reports. Elsewhere his victory was briefly noted, then the race swiftly faded from attention. The fate of the 50-odd teams left on the trail hardly rated a mention. Even in Alaska, most of the sports-page ink was devoted to baseball spring training, now entering its meaningless second week.
Four time zones away, television station WDCA played up Washington D.C.’s local Iditarod angle one last time. My participation in the race had already been the subject of several local television and newspaper reports. Now WDCA combined their interviews with my family with a home video of the start and a network story about Swenson’s victory. Assuming the Iditarod was over for everyone, the station erroneously reported that Washington’s musher had finished in sixtieth place.
As the newscast drew to a close, the anchors bantered about the incredible sequence of events that had placed me—the son of a once-prominent D.C. attorney—on a dog sled in