Raven was chirping like a poodle. Spook was baying. Harley and Cyrus were jerking the sled forward, inch by inch.
“Sorry, Miles,” I said.
I shifted my foot, and the brake sprang free. Chad felt the release and leaped at the trail ahead. The team whipped my sled with mad zeal.
I did what I could to hold the dogs to a reasonable pace, but paws were flying as we entered a narrow tunnel in the spruce. The sled glanced off several big trees without incident. Then, with a sharp “crack,” my right rear stanchion nicked a small tree and splintered. The handlebar felt like a limp noodle.
Snow was falling, each flake lengthening the gap between my team and those ahead. I tied the team to a tree and examined the damage. Didn’t look that bad. A few hose clamps should do the trick. In less than 40 minutes, I was back on the trail, aiming to close that gap on Barry Lee.
“Nothing to it,” I thought, pleased with my ingenuity.
The patch job held for about 15 minutes, until I smacked another tree, further busting up the stanchion and a rear support bar.
The light was fading as I chopped down a small tree and lashed it over the stanchion like a splint. The repair job made for sluggish steering. I traveled a few miles before an abrupt dip in the trail sent me nose-diving into the runners. Pieces of my headlamp reflector fell when I lifted my head. The bulb was still burning, but it cast a splotchy light. Looking at my sled, I blinked a few times, unwilling to accept the truth. The splint had held, but now the companion rear stanchion was broken.
“No longer funny, guys,” I said, using a tone that caused the dogs to perk up their ears.
I couldn’t believe it. Snow was pouring down on us. Flakes sizzled on the bare bulb of my crunched headlamp. The next checkpoint, Nikolai, was at least 75 miles away, and I had a broken sled.
First priority was the headlamp. I pieced together shards and formed a crude reflector, which I attached to the bulb bracket with first-aid adhesive tape. The patched reflector threw a fragmented beam, but light of any kind was precious. Then I chopped down another thin tree and fashioned another splint. The overhaul took 90 minutes and turned my sled into something more suited to Fred Flintstone than an Iditarod musher.
Only traces remained of the tracks ahead, but the trail remained obvious through dense groves of spruce and snow-covered tussocks. Navigation got tougher as we entered the Post River Valley, where the trail crossed gravel bars and zigzagged through driftwood piles. “Chad,” I whispered, “you’re following something out here, but where are the markers?”
I heard later that a number of mushers had got lost in the area, including Runyan and Swenson. That might explain why Chad confidently charged down several blind alleys. Trouble was brewing as I turned the team around several times. But I had ground to make up, and Golden Dog was still my fastest leader. I tried to erase the disappointments with quick snacks, but it wasn’t Chad’s night. The third or maybe fourth time I second-guessed his judgment, Chad’s ego crumbled. He buried his head in the snow and refused to budge.
This was no place to argue. Placing Rainy and Harley in lead, I drove the team hard for several hours. I couldn’t detect the trail myself, but we passed enough markers to maintain my confidence in the lesbian. Our luck ran out on the edge of a large lake. Rainy charged into the white expanse, but her clues ended at the shoreline. She swung the team right, then left, searching for a bearing. Then she looked at me, but I couldn’t help. From what little I could see through the white soup, the broad lake’s white surface was seamless and perfect.
Throwing the sled on its side, I halted the team on the snow-covered ice and ran up to Rainy. She shied, as always, but looked at me as I knelt down beside her. “It’s not your fault, little girl,” I whispered. “Not your fault at all.”
Pulling the dogs off the lake, I bedded the team in a clump of bushes. It was snowing again, blowing loose powder anyway. I dug a pit to shield the cooker from the wind. After serving the dogs a hot meal, I emptied my sled for the second time and climbed inside. I slept fitfully, haunted by the knowledge that I was alone — in last place — at least 800 miles from Nome.
CHAPTER 6. Alone in the Burn
In the grey light of dawn, I rejoiced.
Out in the center of the lake — a solitary marker pole greeted me. My fine friend, the trail marker, was an inch and a half wide, stood two feet tall in the snow, thin as a reed, but capped with fluorescent orange tape that blazed wonderfully against the lake’s broad sea of white.
Rainy and Harley made a beeline for it, plowing through six inches of new snow. I was heartened, but worried nonetheless. The powder wasn’t deep enough to stop the team, but it was bound to slow us down, which meant that Lee and Garth would increase their lead.
A traffic jam clogged the trail out of Iditarod, 250 miles north. Early Friday morning, March 8, Susan Butcher had mushed out of the darkness into the glare of the TV lights set up by the banks of the Iditarod River. Three thousand dollars in silver ingots was waiting for the first musher to reach the ghost town of Iditarod, but Butcher refused to claim the prize. She told race judge Chisholm that she wanted to wait for Dee Dee.
“We mushed eighty miles together, and I want it to be a tie,” Susan said. Her request was rooted in anger. The run from Ophir had taken 25 hours, twice as long as usual because the front-runners had had to break their own trail. The Iditarod’s defending champ was seething.
Race marshal Kershner had seen this coming. Following the debacle with Adkins, he had intercepted the trail-breaking team on the Yukon River and ordered them back. Kershner wanted them to blast through to Ophir, but the snowmachiners had backtracked only as far as Iditarod before turning around.
According to Butcher, she, Jonrowe, Adkins, Osmar, Buser, Barve, and King had traded off the front position, sharing the burden placed on lead dogs cutting a new path through the drifts. Although Swenson and Runyan had arrived at Iditarod along with the others, their names were noticeably absent from Susan’s honor roll.
“What a bunch of crybabies,” responded Swenson.
Runyan ducked the name-calling, saying that he was just running at the best pace for his dogs.
The newcomer to Iditarod’s front pack, Jeff King, cast the dispute in strategic terms. “This isn’t a Boy Scout trip. It’s a race,” he told reporters. “You don’t get in the ring and grease Muhammad Ali’s gloves for him.”
As the sun rose Friday morning, Runyan mushed out of Iditarod in first place. By noon, a front pack of 18 teams was on the trail to Shageluk, with Jonrowe and Butcher bringing up the rear.
Back in McGrath, Lynda Plettner was peeved. That damn Urtha had Abdul, her best leader. After the experience of watching him struggle through the Klondike, Plettner had made sure that the rookie’s entire Iditarod team was first-rate. All Urtha had to do was feed those dogs and hang on. She was the one driving the kennel’s puppies. So WHERE was he?
Urtha Lenthar had appeared to be in good shape when Plettner left him in Rohn. Checking the time reports, she noticed he was a little late getting out. Linda could understand that. But it didn’t explain his interminable delay in the Burn. The pups had hauled her across in ten hours. Urtha had the better team, so he should have mushed into Nikolai hours ago.
Plettner mushed on to McGrath, where she spent more long hours waiting and hounding officials for an explanation. Word was finally relayed that Lenthar had RETURNED to Rohn after getting lost. What was happening out there?