In the middle of the night, the trapper threw open the door to our warm room on Eagle Island and staggered inside. Clutching an open bottle of liquor, he stumbled over the mushers slumbering in his path.
“What’re you all doing here?” he shouted, quite drunk. “Put inna trail alla way to Kaltag. You shoulda gone. Shoulda gone.”
At the river’s edge, the trail disappeared — no other word fit. Rainy cast about, perplexed. I ran to the front of the team and calmed her, searching for clues in the hard white crust. Nine dog teams had come this way in the last hour or so — channeled along the river through about eight winding miles of waist-high brush. Not a sign of the traffic remained. Wind whipping across the exposed flats had erased every scratch, every pawprint of their passage.
A churning white cloud swallowed the river ahead. It was a ground blizzard, a surface-hugging soup of wind-whipped powder. My team was perched on the edge of a gray-white limbo, violent and surreal. Our vantage point on the brink offered no refuge, nor did the scrubby bushes behind us. We were horribly exposed to the wind raking the frozen river. The dogs didn’t like the looks of this. If I wanted to avoid a forced camp, we had to keep moving.
I took Rainy and Harley by the neck line, preparing to lead them by foot, when Daily’s frightened voice cut through the storm.
“Wait, wait,” he cried, halting his dogs behind mine. “My hand is frozen!”
Fresh out of the checkpoint, Tom had noticed his hands felt cold in those high-tech gloves. Stripping off the outer shells, he inserted a chemical hand warmer into each mitt. That effort was undermined by spindrift powder, which instantly collected on his thin polypropylene inner liners. With the shells back on, the snow melted, and Daily’s hands became soaked, and his fingers became even colder. He forced the discomfort from his mind, waiting for the little chemical packs to kick in. That stoicism proved misguided; one of the warmers was a dud.
Coming up behind me, Daily rudely discovered that he couldn’t even flex the fingers on his chilled hand.
My dogs were lying down in the wind. Not understanding his predicament, I angrily urged him to hurry.
“Give me five minutes.”
“Make that two minutes,” I snapped. “Tom, we gotta go!”
I ran back and helped Daily swap his wet liner for a dry one, slipping another warmer in the mitt. As the two of us fumbled, the dogs on both teams began digging in, instinctively carving shelters from the drifts.
“I think we should consider turning around,” said Tom, flexing his stiff hand inside a mitt, uncertain whether it was damaged.
“We are NOT going back!” I declared, angry that he would even suggest such a thing. “We’re two hours out — that’s two hours closer to Nome.”
If I had to weather another storm, I wanted to do it right there, without surrendering an inch. The situation was infuriating. After all the trouble we had gone through to catch those other teams, here Tom and I were in last place again, falling farther behind by the minute. And why? Patching harnesses might have cost me a few minutes, but that wasn’t the main reason. It was because we sat on our asses and let the others get away — that’s why! I’d be damned before I’d turn around.
Sensible as ever, Daily was equally adamant. This was a terrible place to stop. Dogs couldn’t rest here. There was no way to feed them. What if the storm didn’t break for hours? Or days? We risked weakening our dogs through exposure. It made more sense, he felt, to regroup in the shelter of the slough. He didn’t mention his concerns about the hand; it stung, at least that was a good sign.
The two of us were going at it when Cooley unexpectedly mushed up from behind. The dog-driving veterinarian had been detained at the Conatsers’ cabin, where he had used the couple’s radio phone to confer with Iditarod headquarters.
“Why’d you stop?”
We hurriedly explained the situation.
Doc shook his head. “I don’t do reverse!” he shouted, grinning through frosty whiskers.
With a sharp command, Cooley ordered the wolf pack on by, passing our already snow-covered dogs. Showing nary a trace of hesitation, his team marched into the shrieking void. Daily, whose hand was now wonderfully pliable, and I quickly roused our dogs and chased him.
Terhune followed windbent trail markers into a narrow slough. Something about the shape of the drifts here made him edgy. The snow was a bit too wavy, too sculpted. He didn’t care to imagine the sort of wind conditions required to create this special effect.
Jon was aware that his dogs were nearing their limit. What about that deserted fish camp not too far back? The old buildings weren’t much to look at, but they offered some shelter from the wind. He grabbed his leaders and turned the team around.
Terhune rested the dogs through most of Sunday, waiting for the wind to break. An opening finally came in late afternoon. He took advantage of the calm, but trail conditions proved awful. If a base existed under the waist-deep powder, the musher couldn’t find it. He was angry at his bad luck, tired, and deeply depressed. Four hundred miles distant, Nome seemed impossibly far.
We caught Plettner’s group by midafternoon Saturday. The sky was supremely clear. The Yukon stretched before us, a broad field of glistening white bordered on either side by tiny lines of trees. Our ten-team convoy slowly inched up the massive river’s center. The place made the Big Su look like a racquetball court.
Daily and I remained at the caboose end of the convoy. It was an extraordinary scene. The chain of dog teams stretched a half-mile or more ahead, forming a line of brightly colored caterpillars crossing a desolate white prairie. From my sled runners, I banged off pictures of the procession, catching dog teams arrayed in an arc, stretching from my wheel dogs to the trail-breakers mushing across the distant horizon.
Sepp Herrman’s team abruptly peeled away from the convoy. “I will catch you when I please,” he shouted. Quickly and efficiently, the German made camp on the frozen river. The convoy had barely gained a mile before a wisp of smoke curled from Sepp’s cook pot.
I’d left Eagle Island packing a full cooler of hot dog food. I fed the team a real meal during one of the convoy’s many lengthy delays. It was an eat-and-run situation. I collected the pans as fast as the dogs finished their food. As I picked up Denali’s, the ornery cuss bit my hand. Furious, I bopped him with the pan.
“You ungrateful son of a bitch! I saved your life.”
Watching him slink away, I realized that the earlier pack judgment was right. I resolved to drop the ungrateful slacker the moment we hit Kaltag.
Late in the afternoon, Daily spotted Herrman’s team closing in from behind. The trapper’s reappearance drew an immediate reaction from the front of the convoy. Like the children’s game of telephone, a message was relayed from musher to musher down the line: “Send up, Sepp.”
“Gee,” Herrman said, sending his finely trained leaders jumping out of the trench. “Haw.” The leaders executed a neat left-hand turn and bounded forward, passing us with hardly a sideways glance. I whistled in appreciation.
“Now, that’s a dog team,” I told my own crew. “From now on that’s the kind of performance I’m going to expect from you guys.”
The summons to the head of the convoy marked a turning point for Herrman. The long break at Eagle Island had wrought a welcome change. Tails were up. His leaders were eager to go.
“I have a team back,” Herrman mused, watching his dogs muscle through the deep snow. He mushed past Cooley and Plettner and kept moving straight up the Yukon. Within a few minutes the convoy lurched forward again, with a noticeable burst of speed.