My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [85]
A churning white cloud swallowed the river ahead. It was a ground blizzard, a surface-hugging soup of wind-whipped powder. My team was perched on the edge of a gray-white limbo, violent and surreal. Our vantage point on the brink offered no refuge, nor did the scrubby bushes behind us. We were horribly exposed to the wind raking the frozen river. The dogs didn’t like the looks of this. If I wanted to avoid a forced camp, we had to keep moving.
I took Rainy and Harley by the neck line, preparing to lead them by foot, when Daily’s frightened voice cut through the storm.
“Wait, wait,” he cried, halting his dogs behind mine. “My hand is frozen!”
Fresh out of the checkpoint, Tom had noticed his hands felt cold in those high-tech gloves. Stripping off the outer shells, he inserted a chemical hand warmer into each mitt. That effort was undermined by spindrift powder, which instantly collected on his thin polypropylene inner liners. With the shells back on, the snow melted, and Daily’s hands became soaked, and his fingers became even colder. He forced the discomfort from his mind, waiting for the little chemical packs to kick in. That stoicism proved misguided; one of the warmers was a dud.
Coming up behind me, Daily rudely discovered that he couldn’t even flex the fingers on his chilled hand.
My dogs were lying down in the wind. Not understanding his predicament, I angrily urged him to hurry.
“Give me five minutes.”
“Make that two minutes,” I snapped. “Tom, we gotta go!”
I ran back and helped Daily swap his wet liner for a dry one, slipping another warmer in the mitt. As the two of us fumbled, the dogs on both teams began digging in, instinctively carving shelters from the drifts.
“I think we should consider turning around,” said Tom, flexing his stiff hand inside a mitt, uncertain whether it was damaged.
“We are NOT going back!” I declared, angry that he would even suggest such a thing. “We’re two hours out—that’s two hours closer to Nome.”
If I had to weather another storm, I wanted to do it right there, without surrendering an inch. The situation was infuriating. After all the trouble we had gone through to catch those other teams, here Tom and I were in last place again, falling farther behind by the minute. And why? Patching harnesses might have cost me a few minutes, but that wasn’t the main reason. It was because we sat on our asses and let the others get away—that’s why! I’d be damned before I’d turn around.
Sensible as ever, Daily was equally adamant. This was a terrible place to stop. Dogs couldn’t rest here. There was no way to feed them. What if the storm didn’t break for hours? Or days? We risked weakening our dogs through exposure. It made more sense, he felt, to regroup in the shelter of the slough. He didn’t mention his concerns about the hand; it stung, at least that was a good sign.
The two of us were going at it when Cooley unexpectedly mushed up from behind. The dog-driving veterinarian had been detained at the Conatsers’ cabin, where he had used the couple’s radio phone to confer with Iditarod headquarters.
“Why’d you stop?”
We hurriedly explained the situation.
Doc shook his head. “I don’t do reverse!” he shouted, grinning through frosty whiskers.
With a sharp command, Cooley ordered the wolf pack on by, passing our already snow-covered dogs. Showing nary a trace of hesitation, his team marched into the shrieking void. Daily, whose hand was now wonderfully pliable, and I quickly roused our dogs and chased him.
Terhune followed wind-bent trail markers into a narrow slough. Something about the shape of the drifts here made him edgy. The snow was a bit too wavy, too sculpted. He didn’t care to imagine the sort of wind conditions required to create this special effect.
Jon was aware that his dogs were