Entering a slough, I saw a dog team on the side of the trail. Word passed back that it was Jon Terhune. I’d never met him before, but I noticed that the gaunt, bearded musher looked pained as the others loudly hailed him. Biting his lip, Terhune fell in behind Daily and me, driving the last dogs in line on the Iditarod Trail.
Call it the Yukon’s farewell kiss. Rising from nowhere, a freak storm enveloped us. Even Herrman was impressed by the sudden unannounced blast. One second he was gazing at the lights of Kaltag. The next, he was battling a windstorm more intense than any he’d ever seen in the Brooks Range, a wilderness known for its extreme weather.
Sepp’s trapline-tough dogs fought their way clear of the localized maelstrom. The rest of us slammed to a dead stop. Chaos descended on the convoy. Mushers were stomping around, yelling at their dogs and jerking lines. All for naught. Survival genes took over as the wind sent our dogs digging for shelter.
My brain may have been foggy from fatigue, but the storm seemed to sweep us into a different surreal dimension. It wasn’t cold or frightening, just weird. Snow drifts reached out and engulfed our convoy like an advancing giant amoeba. Dogs and mushers were transformed into strange statues. Cyrus, still on his feet, whined and jerked on the gang line. My powerhouse pup didn’t like the sea of snow rising around him. Daily hugged one of his dogs, and the two melded together. I slapped myself and rubbed my eyes, but the fantasy world remained.
Then, for the fourth time in the race, I dumped my sled and climbed inside.
Barry Lee slept on his decision to scratch. In the morning, he again prayed while attending the Sunday service at Grayling’s Arctic Mission, but nothing was added to that “go home” message.
Lee’s remaining doubts were resolved by a telephone conversation with Niggemyer in Nome.
“Barry,” the race manager said, “there’s a lot of guys getting belt buckles this year who are missing pieces of themselves. I can’t help you back there.”
Lee signed the damn papers and began dealing with the logistics of flying his dog team home from a Yukon River village. And what about that gear he’d abandoned on the river? The cooker alone was worth an easy $100. Lee, awash in the personal and financial ruins of his dream, couldn’t afford to throw away anything valuable.
The musher tracked down Rich Runyan, who was recuperating before tackling the Yukon again. Coming out of Anvik, the wind had blown so hard, the radio operator had crouched down on the big snowmachine and barreled up the frozen river with his eyes closed. Closed! It was crazy, but he couldn’t see where he was going anyway.
The sky was, for the moment, clear. Runyan felt sorry for Barry and agreed to help him with a salvage mission. The men disconnected the sled loaded with radio equipment and hooked Lee’s empty dogsled to the snowmachine. Riding double, they buzzed out of the village.
The river cache was easy to find. From half a mile or more away, Lee could see two men digging his castoffs out of the drifts. It was the trapper and Bob the bicyclist. Their snowmachine had run out of gas returning down the Yukon. After walking nearly ten miles, the pair had found Lee’s tracks, followed by odd pieces of wind-blown gear. They were in the process of searching the drifts for a sled and, possibly, a body.
Trading misadventures, the four Yukon survivors had a good laugh at each other’s expense. Runyan’s snowmachine could only carry one passenger at a time. Leaving Lee to repack the dogsled, Runyan ferried the trapper back to the village.
Bob was in no mood to wait. Vowing to hoof it to Grayling, he strapped on Lee’s old snowshoes. Barry warned him about the screwy bindings, but Bob the bicyclist — showing the same spirit that had got him this far — wouldn’t listen. The musher smiled as he watched Bob stumble several hundred sweaty yards before finally admitting defeat. The two waited together on the river for Runyan’s return.
“All right, who’s got my headlamp?” Terhune demanded, scanning the mushers slowly stirring in Kaltag’s mushers’ quarters.
No one paid him much attention. Most of us were bleary-eyed, struggling to collect our thoughts and gear following painfully short naps in the bunks upstairs.
I was depressed by the news that Barry Lee had scratched in Grayling. It was an ugly day. We hardly finished cooking dog food before the Kaltag checker, operating on orders from Iditarod, had advised us to leave using a tone appropriate for a sheriff delivering an eviction notice. Daily had called him on it, chiding the villager for being “a lackey for race headquarters.” After traveling 18 hours in storm conditions, few of us were in the mood to be rushed. Cooley had bought us the nap time, telling Iditarod headquarters that, in his opinion as a race veterinarian, an afternoon of rest was essential for the dogs.
My first priority was to arrange for Denali’s departure. Entrusting the ungrateful mutt to the checker, I took the opportunity to phone in my third trail column. “Forget what you hear about the Last Great Race being over,” I dictated. “It’s far from over….”
The piece recounted my Yukon adventures, from the trek with Daily and Cooley to the convoy’s night in the Arctic twilight zone. “Some people think traveling in the back of the Iditarod pack is a camping trip,” I concluded. “This is an ordeal.”
Back in the newsroom, the Coach — disgusted by my miserable progress to date — was pleased as he peeked in the file and read about my argument with Daily upon leaving Eagle Island.
“O’D might make it after all,” the Mowth announced.
Even without my efforts, the large block of teams traveling in the rear of Iditarod’s field was attracting notice. An Anchorage television station was referring to us as “the Kaltag Ten.” The number was derived from the official standings released by race headquarters. We knew better. There were eleven Iditarod teams in our convoy. He may have ducked the hoopla in Anchorage, but Doc Cooley was an Iditarod musher now, or none of us deserved to make the claim.
By midafternoon Sunday, the dogs had had six to eight hours of rest, which meant that nap time was over for the mushers. Weather reports carried a strong argument for haste. Another storm was coming.
From the Yukon, the Iditarod Trail climbed a 1,000-foot pass into the Nulato Hills. According to local villagers, the snow was deep on this side of the pass, but slippery thin on the other. A party of Kaltag trappers set out on snowmachines to break a trail for us. We had to get moving before the storm erased their work.
Tom Daily was in a lousy mood. He had squandered his nap time standing in line to make obligatory phone calls, but hadn’t spoken with anyone — no one was home. Cooley, on the other hand, was strangely buoyant. Mixing a cup of hot Tang by the stove, Doc mocked our hardships with an impromptu recital of poems by Robert Service. The performance was then interrupted by Terhune’s angry eruption.
“If your headlamp is missing, I’m sure it’s an accident,” Cooley said.
“Well, I’m sure it’s not,” replied Terhune. “I left it plugged in to the battery pack. That’s got my name on it. If somebody had mistaken it, they would have taken the whole thing. But the battery pack is right here,” he said, showing us the red case with his name clearly printed on the side.
“Whoever took my headlamp, knew what they were doing,” he said, curling his lips in a feral challenge. “One of you is a thief.”
Hard to accept, but Terhune’s logic was sound. The missing headlamp was a freebie provided by Dodge Trucks. Each of us had started the race with an identical one, meaning that there was no telling who had pinched his. No one was sleepy now, and we eyed each other uneasily.