My lead dog was a lesbian - Brian Patrick O'Donoghue [99]
Warming up a bit, I broke some fat sausages and threw each dog a piece. I had to keep them happy. Then I dug out my big parka and put it on over the suit for the first time since early in the Yukon trek. And I put hand warmers in the mitts. This was very likely the place where Thomann froze his hand. It was easy to see how it might happen, descending out of the warm hills.
My parka hood proved invaluable as we crossed the marsh. Zipped all the way to the ruff with the string drawn tight, the hood formed a narrow tube extending about ten inches in front of my face. Vision was a little limited, peering through the soft-ball-sized gap in the fur, but I was amazingly warm inside.
The marsh was riddled with parallel snowmachine tracks, some were hard-packed and fast; others made for slow going. Johnson, I, and several other mushers traveling close together took different trails, and our dog teams soon fanned out across the icy flats. It felt as if we were an assault party of Arctic nomads, swooping down from the hills.
A narrow strip of ramshackle houses puffing smoke from oddly jutting pipes—that was Shaktoolik. The village had a harsh look to it. Not surprising for a community locked in snow drifts bordering Norton Sound, an immense frozen gulf, 125 miles long and 70 miles across. By the time we arrived, Wednesday, March 20, the annual excitement of the Iditarod had faded for the village’s 160 residents. The local volunteers were burned out, and the streets were littered with windblown race trash.
I found the others camped outside the Shaktoolik armory building in the shelter provided by a line of rough drifts. Our supplies were stored at another house, several hundred yards away. I trudged over and dragged my sacks back to the team. It me took several trips, and I felt drained and dizzy by the time I finished.
It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, but we all knew that the calm was deceptive. Directly ahead lay one of the most infamous sections of the entire Iditarod Trail: the oft-stormy passage across sea ice to Koyuk.
In 1982 Nayokpuk and his Shishmaref dogs—conditioned in the polar-bear country surrounding his remote coastal village, 20 miles shy of the Arctic Circle—met their match on the trail that lay ahead. The bold Eskimo had attempted a solo breakout during a storm that had penned front-runners in Shaktoolik. No one else dared to follow him.
“It’d be like trying to go fishing in a ten-foot skiff in forty-foot seas,” commented Dean Osmar, a fisherman destined to win the race two years later.
The Shishmaref Cannonball shot 22 miles out onto the exposed sea ice before the storm proved too intense for even his leaders. Humbled, with his dogs locked in tight balls, the musher spent a long, sleepless night shivering in his sled bag. In the morning, Herbie Nayokpuk turned his team around and returned to Shaktoolik.
“I’ve been out many years in the cold,” Nayokpuk told a reporter. “But that was the coldest night I ever spent.”
Swenson had won the 1982 race, with Butcher trailing 3.5 miles behind. It was the pair’s first one-two finish and foreshadowed the rivalry that dominated the sport in the next decade. Nayokpuk spent a day regrouping and then mushed into Nome in twelfth place, slipping from Iditarod’s top ten for the first time.
Three years later, in 1985, Libby Riddles clinched her victory in a similar situation. Arriving in Shaktoolik on a stormy afternoon, a few hours ahead of Barve and Swenson, Riddles fed her team and then agonized over whether to set out along the 58-mile trail to Koyuk. She was packing, yet struggling with her decision, when Barve mushed into the checkpoint. The blocky printer couldn’t believe the woman was even considering going out.
“If it’s anything like what I just came through, it’s impossible,” Lavon declared.
“That set me,” Riddles later wrote. “Impossible? This was the whole point of all the work and energy I’d put into the last five