My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [86]
Terhune rested the dogs through most of Sunday, waiting for the wind to break. An opening finally came in late afternoon. He took advantage of the calm, but trail conditions proved awful. If a base existed under the waist-deep powder, the musher couldn’t find it. He was angry at his bad luck, tired, and deeply depressed. Four hundred miles distant, Nome seemed impossibly far.
We caught Plettner’s group by midafternoon Saturday. The sky was supremely clear. The Yukon stretched before us, a broad field of glistening white bordered on either side by tiny lines of trees. Our ten-team convoy slowly inched up the massive river’s center. The place made the Big Su look like a racquetball court.
Daily and I remained at the caboose end of the convoy. It was an extraordinary scene. The chain of dog teams stretched a half-mile or more ahead, forming a line of brightly colored caterpillars crossing a desolate white prairie. From my sled runners, I banged off pictures of the procession, catching dog teams arrayed in an arc, stretching from my wheel dogs to the trail-breakers mushing across the distant horizon.
Sepp Herrman’s team abruptly peeled away from the convoy. “I will catch you when I please,” he shouted. Quickly and efficiently, the German made camp on the frozen river. The convoy had barely gained a mile before a wisp of smoke curled from Sepp’s cook pot.
I’d left Eagle Island packing a full cooler of hot dog food. I fed the team a real meal during one of the convoy’s many lengthy delays. It was an eat-and-run situation. I collected the pans as fast as the dogs finished their food. As I picked up Denali’s, the ornery cuss bit my hand. Furious, I bopped him with the pan.
“You ungrateful son of a bitch! I saved your life.”
Watching him slink away, I realized that the earlier pack judgment was right. I resolved to drop the ungrateful slacker the moment we hit Kaltag.
Late in the afternoon, Daily spotted Herrman’s team closing in from behind. The trapper’s reappearance drew an immediate reaction from the front of the convoy. Like the children’s game of telephone, a message was relayed from musher to musher down the line: “Send up, Sepp.”
“Gee,” Herrman said, sending his finely trained leaders jumping out of the trench. “Haw.” The leaders executed a neat left-hand turn and bounded forward, passing us with hardly a sideways glance. I whistled in appreciation.
“Now, that’s a dog team,” I told my own crew. “From now on that’s the kind of performance I’m going to expect from you guys.”
The summons to the head of the convoy marked a turning point for Herrman. The long break at Eagle Island had wrought a welcome change. Tails were up. His leaders were eager to go.
“I have a team back,” Herrman mused, watching his dogs muscle through the deep snow. He mushed past Cooley and Plettner and kept moving straight up the Yukon. Within a few minutes the convoy lurched forward again, with a noticeable burst of speed.
Entering a slough, I saw a dog team on the side of the trail. Word passed back that it was Jon Terhune. I’d never met him before, but I noticed that the gaunt, bearded musher looked pained as the others loudly hailed him. Biting his lip, Terhune fell in behind Daily and me, driving the last dogs in line on the Iditarod Trail.
Call it the Yukon’s farewell kiss. Rising from nowhere, a freak storm enveloped us. Even Herrman was impressed by the sudden unannounced blast. One second he was gazing at the lights of Kaltag. The next, he was battling a windstorm more intense than any he’d ever seen in the Brooks Range, a wilderness known for its extreme weather.
Sepp’s trapline-tough dogs fought their way clear of the localized maelstrom. The rest of us slammed to a dead stop. Chaos descended on the convoy. Mushers were stomping around, yelling at their dogs and jerking lines. All for naught. Survival genes took over