Daylight was going. Tom suggested we start looking for a sheltered camp. Doc wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to reach Blackburn’s cabin, an unofficial rest cabin, which couldn’t be more than ten miles ahead.
We were out in the middle of the river when the sky rapidly darkened. Gusts of wind slapped at my sled bag. Cooley ordered his wolves toward a bluff that would offer some slight protection. Joining him, we all decided to wait this one out, using the delay to feed our dogs. With any luck, the evening squall would skip past before we were done.
It got colder, and the wind steadily increased. It was 14 below the first time Cooley checked his thermometer. When he checked again, minutes later, the reading was 20 below zero and falling. “Watch your ass,” he yelled.
Conditions felt deadly by the time I had water boiling in my cook pot. Standing with my back to the wind and my face shielded by the parka’s thick ruff, I carefully poured the hot water inside the cooler. Next, I lined the pans out. Then I sat on the cooler with my back to the wind, letting the food soak.
“Thirty below, boys,” Cooley shouted, chuckling.
Moving stiffly, I carried pans to the dogs, two at a time. The snow was soft, and I stumbled, splashing my gloves with the wet food. I felt my fingers burning, but it wasn’t from heat. In the brief time it took to fill a pan with steaming food and carry it to a dog, a skin of ice had formed across the surface of the pan. My wet fingertips burned from the extreme cold.
As soon as the dogs finished eating, I collected the empty pans so they wouldn’t lick them and freeze their tongues to the metal. Then I climbed inside the sled.
My hands were reduced to the functioning level of pincers as I pulled the sled-bag flap overhead. Yanking my gloves off with my teeth, I surveyed the damage. Seven fingertips were bloodless white. That was better than I had dared hope, nothing more than mild frostnip. Huddling, I breathed on my hands until they throbbed with renewed life. I shucked the parka and unpacked my sleeping bag. Sealing myself inside the cocoon, I ate another packet of salmon, chewed on a carton of frozen juice, then fell asleep, feeling confident about my hard-earned survival skills.
As he had been for 1,000 miles, Barve, the burly 45-year-old printer, remained in the hunt, leaving Elim Wednesday night. Not that you could tell anything in the blizzard. Visibility was limited to about ten feet when Lavon halted his team to search for markers on foot. His frightened dogs yanked the snow hook. When the musher returned, they were gone. He didn’t panic. He could find the damn dogs tomorrow. Survival came first, and it was goddamn cold. Lavon started walking toward Golovin.
On the other side of Elim, Garnie lost his team in similar circumstances, but his mitts were tied to the sled. Joe Garnie, an Inupiat from the coastal village of Teller, knew the enemy he faced. He dug himself a hole in the snow and flopped inside, facedown, conserving his body warmth as he waited for the storm to break. Whenever the creeping cold became unbearable, he ran in circles, waving his arms to get the blood pumping. Then he lay back down in his hole.
Garnie eventually made his way to a survival shelter, where he found snowmachiners tending a hypothermic Matt Desalernos.
On the ice between Shaktoolik and Koyuk, half a dozen mushers were lost for nearly 24 hours, including Barron’s 21-year-old son, Laird. Pinned down by the storm, mere yards from a shelter cabin he couldn’t see, the young musher’s bid for rookie-of-the-year collapsed. All he’d take home from this rite of passage was a partially frozen foot.
Terry Adkins’s bold ambitions perished out on the ice fronting Koyuk. He was reduced to huddling with fellow racer Gary Whittemore, who was shivering, badly hypothermic. Whittemore probably would have died without the Montanan’s help.
In Shaktoolik, two race volunteers shared the suffering, frostbiting their eyelids loading dropped dogs on a plane. In Nome, Thursday’s temperature was 20 below zero, with winds of 55 miles per hour.
Race marshal Kershner sounded beleaguered as he discussed the known injuries and reports of missing mushers. “I feel like a mother who’s trying to gather her chicks,” he told reporters.
Jeff Dixon fired up his snowmachine and left Shageluk on what he believed was a simple dog-food delivery mission. His duties kept expanding. First, he helped that fool from Anchorage, Rich Runyan, free his snowmachine from the drift. Next he found the Englishman with the starving dogs. Then Dixon had to go save Peele, whom he found sleeping on the ground outside his sled.
“You know those Iditarod people don’t care about you at all,” Dixon told Peele, shaking him awake. “They left you to die out here.”
Runyan didn’t spend long regrouping in Shageluk. He had ground to make up. At first light, he left for Anvik on his big snowmachine, towing the freight sled loaded with radio gear. Conditions worsened and, before long, Rich was lost again. Cruising atop a ridge, he glimpsed what appeared to be a marker in the valley below. Descending for closer inspection, he plowed into a deceptively large drift. He wrestled with it for a while, but it was no good. The snowmachine was stuck again.
Rich Runyan hadn’t eaten for hours. It was miserably cold, and hypothermia was becoming a definite threat. True, he still had that big radio, but he lacked the energy to assemble it. Unpacking his sleeping bag, the ham operator from Anchorage placed a call to the Lord.
Butcher’s dogs were reluctant to leave their cozy beds of straw. The air at White Mountain carried an angry scent that night. The calm when she arrived had given way to a heavy wind blowing snow across the trail. It didn’t bother Susan. She had an appointment to keep in Nome. At the precise minute her six-hour waiting period expired, 1:31 A.M., Thursday, March 14, she had her dogs on the march.
Iditarod’s defending champion got off to a rocky start. Before her team faded from view, spectators saw Butcher jump off her sled several times to lead her team back to the trail. Her husband, Dave Monson, wasn’t particularly concerned as he watched her exit. Dogs facing such a crush of media and fans had good reason to act skittish. His wife was still driving the best team in the race.
Minutes after the champ’s departure, a snowmachiner roared into the checkpoint.
“You can’t see anything out there,” he said.
The storm rolled in as Swenson packed to go. It was 30 below, snowing and blowing hard, as he mushed out of White Mountain, one hour, seven minutes behind Butcher. The final chase was underway.
Joe Runyan was the third musher out. Susan had the fastest team. Nobody could catch her. Joe accepted that, but he fully expected to catch Swenson. And he did, passing far to one side of Rick’s team, which had obviously strayed from the trail. That was understandable. Conditions were unbelievably bad. Runyan hoped the trail ahead was decently marked. His sled was stripped for a sprint to the finish line. He wasn’t packed for camping.
Peele collapsed on the floor of the Shageluk village school.
“What do you want to do?” asked a checker.
“I can’t leave, because I can’t get my hands to work,” the musher said, feeling morose.
Peele stalled through the day. He nursed his dogs, his aching body and spirit, hoping for a palatable solution where none existed. Forty-eight hours after limping into the village, the rookie from North Carolina signed the paperwork, adding his name to the scratch list, its numbers now having swelled to fourteen.
There was no uncertainty about Alan Garth’s status. From the moment the Englishman had accepted a ride on the snowmachine, leaving his dog team behind, he had become subject to disqualification. To his credit, Garth joined the village rescue party that left Shageluk Friday and saved those Redington dogs.