I was the last one across, riding my runners all the way and sending spray flying from my bunny boots.
Sunlight was stabbing through clouds as we stopped on the far bank and snacked our soggy dogs. I took a picture of old Skidders holding his head high, impatient to go on again. Incredible dog.
Lee grinned at the sight of my taped headlamp and the trees lashed to my sled. “I wondered what was holding you up.”
Judging from Kershner’s comments before the race, I knew I could probably arrange for Mowry to ship replacement stanchions and anything else I needed to McGrath, a large village 50 miles from Nikolai. But that might take days! After what I’d just been through catching up, there was no way I was going to let Lee and Garth leave without me. After McGrath, the next likely place for a commercial air shipment was Anvik, over 200 miles north. Could the patched sled make it that far? It seemed like a hell of a gamble.
Garth’s leaders were tiring. Lee asked if I wanted to take the lead. I nodded, and he slowed his team so I could pass.
“Catch this,” I said, tossing Lee an imaginary gift as our sleds met.
“What’s that?”
“The Red Lantern!” I shouted.
Barry Lee laughed.
“You want somebody to work on that?” said the Nikolai checker, eyeing my patched sled.
Did I? I could have kissed the guy. He sent me to Nick Petruska, an Athabaskan sledmaker.
“I have a little birch,” Petruska said, studying the damage. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I tied the team alongside Petruska’s house, pulled out the cooker, then unhitched my sled from the gang line. The Athabaskan pushed it across the yard to his work shed.
In little more than the time it took to prepare the dogs a hot meal, Petruska duplicated the shattered parts and rebuilt the back end of my sled. I was amazed. It felt stronger than ever. The quiet villager didn’t ask for it, but I gave him $100. I was back in the race. Unstoppable indeed. Catching the Poodle Man would be merely a matter of time.
I walked Skidders to the checkpoint and rousted the veterinarian from bed. Though bleary-eyed, the volunteer from the Deep South grabbed his medical bag and immediately set to work, cutting off the bandage with a pair of scissors. The dog’s pasty white cut looked awful to me, but it wasn’t infected. Sealing the gash with some sort of medical staple-gun, the vet wrapped the paw.
“Have the bandages rechecked,” he said, gently rubbing Skidders’s neck, “but there’s no reason that dawg can’t run all the way to Nome on that foot.”
A race judge and several villagers were talking about Bill Peele. The rules were clear. The musher couldn’t continue without his missing dog, which several mushers had seen haunting the woods near the Burn. Peele couldn’t even officially check in at Nikolai. He had two choices: scratch or find Charlie.
After consulting with the judge, Peele arranged to rent a snowmachine, which he had absolutely no experience driving, and he hired several snowmachiners from the village. The motorized posse was supposed to leave in the morning.
Leaving the checkpoint, I ran into Steve Fossett, another rookie who was getting ready to pull out after completing his 24-hour layover in Nikolai. Lean and slightly balding, Fossett, forty-six, was a classic adventurer. The president of a securities firm in Chicago, he wanted to add the Iditarod to his already impressive list of mountain-climbing and ocean-swimming achievements. He was mushing a team leased from Canadian musher Bruce Johnson, an Iditarod veteran and winner of the 1986 Quest. But Fossett’s hired dogs weren’t cooperating.
Crossing the Burn, the dogs repeatedly quit, forcing Fossett to camp for hours each time. It was a dismal repeat of his experience on the Kusko 300, when the canine work stoppages caused him to scratch. His faith in the Iditarod investment was eroding. The best gear and dogs money could buy wasn’t worth much without cooperation between the team and its driver.
“I haven’t got any leaders at all,” Fossett said, sounding deeply discouraged.
I beat a hasty retreat, leaving Fossett to stew about his fate.
Plettner was appalled. Her leased dogs were fine, but Urtha looked just pitiful. He was shivering and had a pasty, exhausted pallor. Plettner was glad she had waited for him. Takotna was a quiet little village; there wasn’t a better place on the entire trail for an emergency overhaul.
She steered her rookie inside the checkpoint, entrusting the local volunteers to stuff him full at their bountiful table. Later, while Urtha slept, Plettner arranged for him to borrow a plain snowmachine suit. It was 20 below outside, and the forecast called for colder temperatures in the days ahead. If the schoolteacher was in trouble now, he’d never make it unless he ditched that idiotic parka of his. Urtha had one of those fancy new coats that probably felt good in the store, Plettner judged, but left a musher encased in frozen sweat.
While I lingered overnight in Nikolai, where I used Petruska’s phone to file my first News-Miner trail report, four checkpoints and some 260 miles ahead of me Jeff King was working up an appetite. He snuck out of Shageluk about ten-thirty that night, managing to leave the other front-runners behind. Four hours later, King mushed into Anvik, where he claimed $3,500 and the gourmet dinner waiting for the first musher to reach the Yukon River.
The intense musher from Denali Park played down the significance of his surge to the front. The big prize was, after all, more than 500 miles away in Nome. “But I am the one who gets dinner,” King told reporters.
Using a two-burner Coleman stove, a chef from the Clarion Hotel in Anchorage swiftly dished up a seven-course dinner, consisting of an appetizer plate of assorted seafood, chicken consommé with garden vegetables, sautéed shrimp in gin and vermouth, the hotel’s own black raspberry sorbet, Caribbean lamb medallions, a fresh fruit and cheese plate, and ice-cream tarts. Three types of wine were served — Domaine Chandon Blanc de Noirs, Robert Mondavi Chardonnay, and Kiona Merlot. And for dessert there was chocolate mousse and coffee.
As he dined under the glare of television cameras, surrounded by a huge crowd of villagers, waiters, and the media, King confessed that hunger wasn’t the only motivation behind his bold breakaway. “I wanted a chance to say hi to my kids on TV.”
A single six-or seven-hour push, with one or two short snack breaks: that’s how long it took most Iditarod teams to cover the 48-mile run from Nikolai to McGrath. Fossett, the securities firm president, had the same goal when he mushed from Nikolai late Saturday night. But his leased dogs had their rookie figured out. No more than an hour or two outside the village, the team quit again. Fossett fed his dogs a hot meal and gave them a long break. He eventually got them moving, but his leaders soon called another strike. The workers had seized control and were playing fetch with the boss.
The sled dogs toyed with Fossett for 15 hours before pulling his sled into McGrath. The frustrating experience convinced the stockbroker to sell short and take his losses. Turning the uncooperative dogs back over to Johnson, Fossett scratched, becoming the ninth entrant to do so in this year’s race.
CHAPTER 7. Story of the Day
Leaving Nikolai, the trail followed snowmachine routes west through lakes and marshes to the Kuskokwim River. Past traffic had carved a fast, smooth alley for dog teams. Chad was in a cooperative mood, displaying the speed and command response that had made him our number one dog throughout the fall. Barry Lee had left two hours before me, but we caught him without even trying.