I packed and repacked, agonizing over whether to move on. Medred came over to interview me. It was so bright out that I had to squint to bring the reporter into focus. Finding his questions difficult to follow, I answered with grunts.
Ace was camped nearby. The veteran said he was going to try to beat the storm over the pass. That sealed my decision. We agreed to rest our dogs a few hours, then pull out about 6 P.M.
Mushing the Iditarod Trail, it was tempting to think that the dogs and I had cut all ties to our lives back in town. But the mundane world hadn’t forgotten me. A personal check for $145, written in payment for Dr. Leach’s veterinary services, arrived Tuesday at National Bank of Alaska. Last-minute supplies and unexpected expenses, like the vet bill from Rat’s fight with Daphne, had pushed the total cost of my participation in the Iditarod over $16,000. My personal account was already overdrawn by $3.56. All my bank accounts, including the special Iditarod account, were tapped out. The check written to Dr. Leach was returned unpaid. An overdraft notice was mailed to Deadline Dog Farm.
Ace came over to talk while I was getting ready to break camp.
“I don’t want to scare you,” he said, stroking his thick beard, “but take a little extra food, a little extra fuel, and prepare yourself in case we don’t make it.”
Ace spoke from experience. His first race he had weathered a long night in the pass, trapped mere yards from a shelter tent that had been rendered invisible by the storm.
I had 15 dogs, which meant that I had 60 paws to prepare. The situation was not helped when Rat and Cyrus pulled their booties off. Ace mushed out of the checkpoint. It took me an additional 45 minutes to get ready. Several veterinarians came over and helped guide my team out of the checkpoint. The dogs looked good, including Denali, who had been treated for his bites. I sensed that the vets were more concerned about my own haggard condition and blatant incompetence.
Despite the rumored storm, it was bright out, with hardly a cloud in the sky and a calm, warm 20 above zero. Trail markers led us to a steep hill, perhaps 150 feet high. Rainy and Harley tried to climb it, but slipped right back down. Bathed by the evening sun, the snow was too slick for their new booties.
Damned if I was going to strip off those booties. Not after the hassle of putting them on. I ran up front, grabbed my leaders by the neck line, and began pulling them up the slope, kicking steps in the soft snow with my bunny boots. The dogs seemed amused to see the boss working on the front end of the gang line. Together we crept up the slippery hill.
Looking virtually straight down at my 64-foot-long string of dogs, I wondered what the hell was going to happen if the sled tipped, or I lost my footing. But the sled remained upright, incredibly enough. One step at a time, the team and I neared the top.
Lavrakas spotted us climbing the hill. It reminded him of a scene from the gold-rush days: a miner making a superhuman effort as he hauled supplies toward an unknown camp. The incline was so steep, however, that the photographer rather doubted I was on the right trail.
The light was starting to go. Lavrakas roared to the bottom on his snowmachine. Alas, he was digging in his camera bag for the right lens when I crested the top of the hill.
I mushed toward the pass with growing dread. The landscape was barren, completely inhospitable. The surrounding mountains were jagged and cruel, casting an ominous air over the basin I was ascending. As dusk settled in, I caught Ace crossing a windswept plain. He was having trouble with his leaders and waved me ahead.
It grew darker and the wind picked up. Snow began falling. The trail was rising with no end in sight. I sensed that we’d lost our race with the storm, but there was no turning back.
Seeking a spiritual boost, I popped a tape in my Walkman. The band was Los Lobos. I enjoyed the tune until I actually listened to the words: “There’s a deep dark hole, and it leads to nowhere….”
Lavrakas reappeared on his snowmachine, shadowing my team. Several times he speeded ahead and positioned himself to get pictures of my dogs bursting through the flowing snow. His flashes added a surreal dimension to my predicament.
I was warm enough, but the wind and snow were definitely getting worse. And I was mushing up into Rainy Pass, elevation 3,400, the highest point on the 1,150-mile Iditarod Trail. Redington once faced 100-below-zero conditions on this same stretch. I was thinking about that. And I was thinking about the warning from Ace.
When I got the chance, I flagged down Lavrakas and asked him if he knew how far it was to the survival shelter. He raced back to confer with Ace, then zoomed ahead, vanishing in the storm. About 30 minutes later, the photographer returned.
“I went quite a ways ahead and couldn’t find the shelter,” Jim said, looking grim.
I was reluctant to part from my speedy messenger in the storm. Lavrakas’s face had taken on a guardian angel’s glow. I think we both suspected I wasn’t ready for this. But my dogs were straining to go. And the trail wasn’t getting any better.
“I’m strapped to an engine with no reverse,” I shouted over the snowmachine’s throb. “Tell Ace I’m going ahead.”
The shelter was supposed to be on the edge of a lake, near the top of the pass. In the tunnel vision created by my headlamp, I was lucky to glimpse the dogs, much less the landscape. Visibility was so poor, we could be within ten feet of the shelter and I might not see it. New snow was already piled a foot deep, and it was coming down hard.
Rainy was in her element, acting strangely buoyant. She and Harley were leaping, leaping into the swirling soup, splashing through the flowing drifts. I was so tired I could hardly stand. The snowflakes streaking toward my goggles reminded me of the way stars appear when the starship Enterprise shifts into warp drive. Were we moving uphill or was it down? Did the trail really tilt sideways here? I felt so disoriented, I couldn’t tell.
Rainy seemed to know where she was going.
“Have you been here before little Rainy? Is this where you got your name?”
Our records about the lesbian’s racing history were inconclusive. Coming from Knik, Redington’s Iditarod-crazed training grounds, it could be that she was drawing on memories of the Great Race. The sport’s history is full of such stories. Emmitt Peters, an Athabaskan musher from Ruby, had a revealing experience in his first Iditarod. His leader, Nugget, kept stopping the team in odd places along the trail. The musher didn’t know what to think when the lead dog ignored a village checkpoint and confidently steered the team to a stranger’s house. Then a local woman mentioned that the dog had slept in that same spot before, the year Nugget guided Carl Huntington’s team to victory. Peters realized that the leader’s puzzling pauses were nothing but familiar rest stops. With Nugget’s help, the rookie went on to win that Iditarod, a feat that earned Peters the nickname Yukon Fox.
Then again, Rainy might be sniffing out a mountain-goat path, leading us toward a cliff. There was no way to know.
This had to be Harley’s first trip. Minto, the big dog’s village, boasted champion sprint mushers, but no one that I knew of from the village had ever attempted this trail. Harley supplied the engine that night, but Rainy held the steering wheel. I wondered how far I dared trust the little lesbian.
I was glad when Ace finally caught up. With my team leading, we continued for about another hour, until the veteran, too, had doubts.