My key chain thermometer read zero. The sun’s low angle created blue shadow dogs, bounding in perfect harmony, touching paws with every step.
Roughly midway to McGrath, a TV crew from Anchorage intercepted me on a snowmachine. Chad veered off the trail, ran to the reporter, and lay down by her feet.
“How does it feel to fall so far behind?” the reporter asked.
I fielded several similar questions about my troubles, while swapping Harley and Raven to lead in place of Chad. He accepted his demotion with joy. Freed from the pressures of leading, he was whining to go again. So were Digger and Cyrus. “Listen,” I told the TV woman, “if you want, the cameraman can ride on up front for a bit. But I’ve got to go.”
Daily passed us during the media ambush. Bidding the cameraman good-bye, I gave chase, steadily gaining ground as the trail twisted through sloughs and spindly shoulder-high spruce.
Nearing the Kuskokwim River, I saw a cluster of weathered shelters. Seeing the pole racks overlooking the bank, I guessed it had to be an old fish camp. The place looked deserted now, but in a few months those racks would undoubtedly sag under the weight of drying salmon.
“Who are you?” The voice came from the trees.
I blurted out my name.
“Great, I’ve been looking for you.” A photographer I knew from the Anchorage Times dashed out from behind the camp. He fell in behind the team on a snowmachine.
As we approached McGrath, the trail snaked through thick woods then abruptly dropped onto the Kuskokwim. Daily, taken by surprise, dumped his sled coming off the hill. When my team piled into his, dogs were sprawled everywhere. The photographer grabbed a shot of us as we straightened out our dog teams in the glow of the setting sun.
A Times reporter was waiting for me when I parked the dogs in front of Rosa’s Cafe. “How does it feel to go from first to last place?” he asked.
God, we’re such lemmings. I remembered being in this same place, asking similar predictable questions. Joe Runyan was the first musher to reach the Kuskokwim village that year, followed by Babe Anderson, the local favorite. Like the other reporters pestering the leaders that day, I hadn’t grasped the real story.
Neither Runyan nor Anderson had yet taken their required long break. They had chosen to push their teams through the Burn, all the way to McGrath, before starting the 24-hour clock. Consequently, their lead was illusory. Most of the other mushers in the race that year were, at that moment, in the process of completing their layovers at checkpoints en route. The incredible part was — they, too, were even then falling behind.
“The real story is behind us,” Runyan said. “Joe Redington, he’s your story.”
From Skwentna to Rohn that year, the front-runners had pushed each other, exhausting their dogs as they slogged through miles and miles of soft snow. Temperatures had dropped while Redington was nursing his flu. The trail, packed by the plodding race leaders, hardened to a racing glaze, perfectly timed to catapult Old Joe and Cannonball Herbie Nayokpuk once more into the fray.
“I feel like an old fox chased by fifty young hounds,” Redington said later that night, stomping his hook into the snow outside Rosa’s. Redington’s astonishing leap into the lead, 400 miles into the race he had founded, made for a good story, but no one considered him a serious contender, not at 70 years old.
Nayokpuk commanded more respect. The Inupiat musher from Shishmaref, then traveling close behind Redington, hadn’t been a threat since undergoing a heart operation several years before. But his announced retirement hadn’t lasted, and Herbie ended up finishing a respectable eighth in his comeback attempt. His overall record boasted finishes in every top-five spot — except first. At 54, Nayokpuk remained a long-shot contender.
Two hundred miles later, the Old Fox was even farther in front. By then, the story about his effort was assuming gigantic proportions. Could Redington pull it off? Debates raged in every cabin, seafront bar, or urban office in Alaska. An enterprising songwriter released “The Ballad of Smokin’ Joe,” which got heavy play on Alaska radio stations. Everyone was pulling for Joe.
Redington remained the leader in Ruby, the gateway to the Yukon River on the Iditarod’s northern route. Adults in the village cheered, and their children ran alongside the sled as Smokin’ Joe’s team trotted up the hill.
As the first musher to the Yukon that year, Redington earned the feast, which became a great media event. Photographers and cameramen jostled for position as the unkempt, wind-burned musher picked up his dainty fork.
In the middle of the dinner, Ruby’s checker pushed through the crowd carrying a fat beaver carcass. Seeing the beaver in Em-mitt Peters’s hand, Old Joe set aside the fancy silverware and jumped to his feet. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out a handful of crumpled bills. Redington had a dog that wasn’t eating right, and he figured that beaver, a flavorful high-energy meat, might be the cure. So Redington had asked the checker to find a trapper. Mission accomplished, the Athabaskan known as the Yukon Fox knew better than to wait on ceremony.
Leaving Ruby, Redington’s team met an incoming musher.
“Brother,” Old Joe shouted, raising one hand.
“Brother,” said Nayokpuk, returning the gesture. “Hurry,” he added. “Get out of here before they catch you.”
The trail to Nome was wide open. But Redington’s team balled up outside the village on the frozen Yukon. His leaders weren’t in the mood to hurry away from the cozy village. Redington trudged up front and switched leaders. The team ran a few feet and balled up. He again switched leaders, producing another few yards of progress, then another tangle. He switched leaders again, and again, and again. Dogs were never going to beat Old Joe — a musher for 40 years — in a test of sheer will.
Nearly 45 minutes elapsed before Redington’s team regained momentum. I got a picture as Smokin’ Joe’s team rounded a big rock wall, finally leaving Ruby behind. The Old Fox was still in front, but those young hounds were gaining. I had my first taste of the woes created by reluctant leaders.
None of the press realized at the time — and Redington was too protective of his race to point it out — but his amazing drive had already been sabotaged by a race organization screwup. Whereas Adkins complained because his trailbreakers sped too far ahead, allowing the trail to blow in, Smokin’ Joe had the opposite problem. Loping like the wind, Redington’s dogs actually overtook the snowmachines charged with clearing the front-runner’s path.
To the uninitiated, that wouldn’t appear to be such a bad thing; snowmachiners could surely repass dogs, even the fastest dogs, at their leisure. Perhaps. But such developments inevitably damaged the front-runner’s chances.
Nayokpuk had earned his nickname, Shishmaref Cannonball, in a telling incident. Leading the race in 1980, Herbie overtook the trailbreakers in Rohn. Unwilling to slow down, he barreled alone into the Burn, where he wasted half a day, lost in the charred forest, because of the lack of trail markers.
Redington’s problem was the snow. Where he caught the snowmachiners near Cripple, the halfway checkpoint on the Iditarod’s northern route, the snow was deep and powdery. Old Joe pulled into the checkpoint holding a six-hour lead on the young hounds. While others reveled in the hoopla surrounding his arrival, which earned him $3,000 in silver coins, Redington was appalled at the volunteers’ casual attitude. Nome remained his goal — to get there first, the Iditarod’s founder needed a good trail punched through.