Urtha finally reported in at Nikolai. Plettner got him on the phone. It was a troubling conversation. The schoolteacher sounded extremely discouraged.
“Look,” Plettner said, growing impatient. “Like, I’ve been sitting here an enormous amount of time. So I’m going to, like, casually move over to Takotna. Call me there when you get to McGrath.”
Leaving Rohn, Bill Peele was concerned about his lead dog. Most of the team looked frisky and refreshed, but that darn Charlie had been acting up again. Peel stopped his team near Farewell Lake, intending to shift his ornery leader to a less critical position. The cunning dog sniffed an opportunity. He twisted out of the novice musher’s grip and dashed off into the surrounding stunted spruce. Charlie didn’t stray far, but he refused to come back.
Peel offered Charlie food. He tried hiding behind his sled, hoping the escapee might draw in close enough to catch. He wasted hours trying to coax that dog back. Nothing worked. At a loss, Peele decided to drive his 15 remaining dogs to Nikolai, where he could consult with Iditarod officials. Charlie howled and howled as the team pulled away. As Peele crossed the Burn, those mournful cries haunted the kind-hearted musher from North Carolina.
Traveling just ahead of me was Barry Lee. Babying his dogs was paying off. During the first three days of the race, he had limited runs to an easy three hours. He was “sweetening the team,” as he called it, for harder driving later. Now, after a daylong layover in Rohn, his team was supercharged.
Lee had invested three hours fixing the snowmachine track he used as a primary brake. Streaking out of Rohn, the hefty musher put that drag track to use, trying to hold his dogs to a reasonable pace. But the jury-rigged brake snagged on a stump and tore loose.
Lee had grown up driving crazed sprint dogs. He didn’t use a brake then. He decided he didn’t need one now. Skills polished 20 years ago on the track in Anchorage came back as Lee jockeyed his sled past trees, rocks, and other encroaching hazards. The sled ricocheted through the ruts carved by local buffalo, catching air as the runners skipped across frozen mounds of overflow. This was mad, just mad. Barry loved every moment of it.
Lee kept an eye on his watch, and, exactly five hours after leaving Rohn, he shut his team down for a well-deserved meal. Based on his brother Bobby’s geographic clues, Lee reckoned he had covered at least 45 miles, putting the team near the start of the Burn, which sounded like a good place to tackle in the daylight.
The stars were bright as Barry Lee climbed into his sleeping bag. He felt good. His whole life had built toward this moment when he would rest alongside honest dogs on the Iditarod Trail.
Snow began falling. It was coming down hard when Lee awoke four hours later. Alan Garth had passed by during the night. The Englishman’s tracks were already covered by half a foot of new snow.
As Lee resumed the chase, the dogs — so puffed up with excitement upon leaving Rohn — deflated before his eyes. Watching them slog through the thickening snow, the musher grimaced. He had his old team back — that wretched bunch from the Klondike 200.
There were tracks and evidence of a camp. Clearly another team had rested here overnight. The discovery, after 14 hours of traveling solo, provided a major boost to my entire team. Tails high, my dogs excitedly sniffed the campsite. Rainy appeared more alert and quickened her pace. I was thrilled, but tried to keep it in check. The team ahead probably had a lead of several hours, and it didn’t seem likely we were gaining much ground.
The deep snow knocked a couple miles an hour off our speed. Weighted down by the twin tree-splints, my sled felt sluggish, and I couldn’t do much pushing on the hills for fear the handlebar would break.
Under a gray sky, I followed the trail through thinning strips of spruce. Before too long, I mushed past the last of the living trees and entered a charred land of the dead. I knew this place, if only from legend: Farewell Burn.
Pictures of the Burn didn’t capture the desolation left by the huge forest fire that swept the area in 1977, charring 360,000 acres. Fourteen years later, the land remained a graveyard, littered with rotting stumps and a spider web of skeletal trees.
It got colder as I entered the dead zone. A breeze soon picked up, and I rode with my back to the cutting wind, fiddling with face masks, seeking a magic combination that might keep my face pink and alive. Above all, I wanted to avoid the Aussie’s fate.
I’d been in Ruby for several days, covering the last teams passing through the checkpoint. I was booked to depart on the next mail plane out when the call sounded over the checkpoint radio. A rescue was in progress.
The injured musher was shivering, drenched in sweat, and bundled in a blue sleeping bag when he arrived. It was Brian Carver, a soft-spoken farmer from Melbourne, Australia, who had been thrust into the race after a musher friend had suffered a training accident. I’d written a funny little story about Carver’s last-minute search for an Australian flag so he could show the home colors when leaving the starting chute.
Traveling in the back of the pack with Mowry and Peter Kelly, the Aussie had proved a game, if quiet trail companion. In retrospect, his companions recalled that Carver had, perhaps, acted unusually listless when they camped the night before the accident. He hadn’t bothered to change his socks and gloves like the others. He wasn’t hungry. The Aussie had just puffed on his cigarettes and watched the others.
The temperature was falling. Kelly realized that from the way his glasses kept frosting up. Mowry reckoned Carver must be tough to bear the temperature, wearing nothing but those thin glove liners. None of the rookies knew exactly how cold it was, but they agreed it was bad, maybe 20 below zero.
The next morning Carver, moving with zombie precision, abruptly broke camp and mushed straight through to Sulatna Crossing, the next checkpoint. Volunteers at the remote tent camp were appalled by the musher’s condition as he struggled to sign in: three of Carver’s fingers and several of his toes were frozen solid.
It was obvious to them that the Australian was in need of immediate medical attention. Carver wasn’t so sure. His chalk-white digits weren’t pleasant to look at, but the injury wasn’t painful, not in that frozen state. He clung to the hope that he might yet tough out the race.
Ham radio operator Rich Runyan, then working his first Iditarod, patched through a call to a doctor at Providence Hospital in Anchorage. After a hurried conference, the doctor read the musher a medical report over the radio. The Aussie’s determination faded as he listened to the clinical analysis of the miseries — starting with potential amputations — he faced if any of his frozen parts thawed and refroze out on the trail. Carver reluctantly scratched.
Mowry arrived at Sulatna shortly before Carver boarded the plane for Ruby. He was shocked by the other musher’s injuries.
“Don’t you do it, mate,” the Aussie told him.
Carver’s frostbite was thawing by the time he landed on the river below Ruby. The internal blood fire had begun, leaving him feverish and helpless, with that left hand jammed under his right armpit and his knees hunched in the sleeping bag. Throwing off my camera bag, I helped the two pilots carry him from one plane to the other. The musher groaned when we bumped his feet against the door frame.
Carver recognized me and pulled himself together to answer a few short questions.
“They say it was forty below,” he whispered quietly. “I had no idea it was so cold. It was a great Iditarod until this happened. I just had no idea it was so cold.”