My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [95]
An older woman opened the door. She stared at me, eyes widening, dubious. I realized that I filled her doorway in my bulky suit, which was smeared in snow from my dragging adventure. The headlamp shone crookedly from the side of my natural wool hat. A red face mask concealed all but my eyes and nose.
“Can I help you?” she said, in a perfectly reasonable voice.
“I was hoping you might be able to point me toward the Iditarod Trail,” I said, gesturing toward my dog team, parked out in the street. “We’re sort of lost.”
“Oh my,” the woman said. “I think it’s by the river, but I really have no idea.”
I thanked her and returned to my team. Nothing was going easy this morning. I was trying to decide what to do next when a snowmachine cruised up. It was a village cop. Chuckling at my story, he offered to lead the team out of town.
Jumping on the sled, I pulled the hook and—watched my leader lie down.
The officer zipped away. He returned before I finished placing Harley and Rainy in lead.
“Thought you were following me.”
“So did I, but Wonder Dog had other ideas.”
The officer lead me through a winding series of streets, past the last line of cabins, to a marker at the bottom of a small hill. “Here’s your trail,” he shouted over the wind and the whine of his engine. “Good luck.”
I thanked the officer, delighted to be on my way. He gunned his snowmachine, fishtailing the rear in a tight circle, and buzzed away.
A sheet-metal sign rang in the wind, which had intensified now that I was beyond the sheltering streets of the village. In the distance, I could see the outline of hills against the stars. But a dark, churning haze gripped the flat landscape directly ahead. It looked mean out there. I walked up the line, petting most of the dogs, and retightening the booties on the Rat and Screech, who still had sore feet. Little Cricket watched me, shyly wagging her tail. “What a brave little girl,” I said, stroking her chin.
Standing on the runners, I rezipped my suit, buttoning the top button. I adjusted my layered face masks, gloves, and mitts, and then—lacking any other good excuse for delay—pulled the hook.
“All right! Rainy, Harley. All right! Let’s Go!”
Dodge Corporation was bankrolling a toll-free Iditarod information line. Jeff Greenwald, an old buddy, dialed the 800 number several times a day to track my progress from his home in San Francisco. Information was sketchy regarding teams like mine, traveling far behind the leaders. Making matters worse, the folks answering Dodge’s phone knew next to nothing about mushing. They were merely reading statistics faxed from Iditarod headquarters.
One of the numbers readily available was the size of each musher’s team. Jeff noticed early on that my dog team was steadily shrinking. Their numbers had dropped from 17 to 15 dogs when I had left Gnat and Daphne in Skwentna. He saw I was down to 14 after Grayling, where I had left Skidders to recuperate; and that I had just 13 dogs upon leaving Kaltag, where I had dumped Denali.
The statistics didn’t explain that dropped dogs were placed in the care of checkers and veterinarians, or the effort devoted to evacuating them via Iditarod’s volunteer air force. The numbers didn’t hint at the attention dropped dogs received from prisoners at a state corrections facility near Anchorage, where the dogs were held for pickup by designated handlers.
Jeff had no way of knowing that most of my dropped dogs were already lounging in the woods at Cyndi’s house in Wasilla, and that—except for Skidders, with his bandaged rear paw—there wasn’t anything wrong with them. All Jeff knew was that my dog team, like most in the race, was getting smaller. He asked the people answering Iditarod’s toll-free phone what was happening.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Jeff was told. “A lot of people ask about that. The dogs must be dying in those bad storms.”
“Man,” Jeff whispered, hanging up the phone, “it must be a bummer for Brian—having all those dogs die!”
Six dogs did die over the course of the race. Two dogs in Adkins’s team died of exposure while