I cradled the next pup, she didn’t even have a name yet but we would call her Flash. She had a sleek gray coat and ears that seemed too big for her head, and even young as she was, she already showed her patient nature. I let her take one of my fingers between her teeth and gnaw.
Does it hurt them? I asked.
A little, Mom said. They say you’re supposed to cut the dewclaw while they’re still puppies not because it hurts less but because they won’t remember the pain.
That so?
She petted the dog in my arms. Shrugged. Some pain stays with you even if you don’t remember it, she said.
Then her hand over mine, this way, hold the scissors like this. Talking me through as I concentrated. After we done all four pups, we stood near the woodstove and watched them yawn and curl round each other, a pile of puppies that would grow into racing dogs.
Mom must of been thinking the same thing. She put her arm round me and said, Just imagine. These could be the dogs on your first team.
She was partly right. My first Junior Iditarod, Flash wasn’t my lead but I put her on the line next to her sister, Zip, and all the training I done with them beforehand, all the runs we went on together, paid off. I didn’t come in first that year but second, on the tail of the reigning champ, a seventeen-year-old guy who turned eighteen three days later, which meant soon as he was done with the Junior, he turned round and done his rookie run of the big Iditarod the following week.
I was all set to do the same. My birthday was March first, and the Junior Iditarod was usually scheduled for the last weekend in February. I would turn eighteen after I run the Junior for the last time, and that would make me eligible for the big race the first weekend of March. It would be hard, two back-to-back races, especially when one of them was more than a thousand miles, and there wasn’t no sense in pushing myself to race the Iditarod sooner than I was ready. But I had dreamed of running the big race my whole life, now it was so close I couldn’t bear to miss this chance. What’s more, it would be the first time me and Dad run the same race at the same time. I imagined him getting into Nome ahead of me, already there waiting as I crossed the finish line. Pride lighting up his face.
Except everything changed once Mom died. It happened in January, and most folks figured Dad wouldn’t race that year. He’d only ever missed one Iditarod, and that was on account of he broke his leg right beforehand and was laid up the rest of that winter. What happened to Mom made the news, partly because Dad had already won the big race twice and people knew who he was. But mostly because Alaska may be a big place but it’s also real small. When something bad happens, it gets in the papers. tragic loss for iditarod champ petrikoff. Soon as that come out, people started speculating. Anytime we went into the village there was someone crass enough to ask him straight out. But far as Dad was concerned, there wasn’t no question.
Come that March, he was on the back of his sled, bib number 57. That year, Dad’s buddy Steve Inga offered to stay behind and look after me and Scott instead of running the volunteer committee like he done ever since he retired from mushing. There wasn’t no Mom holding one of the wheel dogs in place, and when Dad’s team took off he didn’t look back or wave to us. He stared straight ahead and vanished over the hill.
That year, we hovered near the radio, waiting for the trail report. Steve drove us into the village and we got updates from folks at the general store, the post office, ones who had their own racers on the trail. Dad was middle of the pack, not pushing too hard, falling farther behind each day. When I heard that, I knew his head was not in the race.
So I was surprised when a report out of Ophir told that Bill Petrikoff Junior planned to push through to the village of Iditarod. That stretch of trail isn’t traveled much outside of the race, which means no one really knows what its condition will be before the mushers get to it. Sometimes you get to Ophir and it turns out there’s no trail at all, you have to wait for the trail breakers to come along. A newly broke trail is hard to run. It don’t have time to set up, so mushers call a trail like that bottomless, on account of it seems like the surface will never hold, and you’ll sink right through. There was reports of a big snow on its way, and if Dad pushed on and left Ophir ahead of the handful of teams there with him, he’d likely find himself running a bottomless trail.
The rest of what happened is in the papers for anyone to read. Dad took only a two-hour rest in Ophir, where the weather had got worse like predicted. Once the trail breakers had gone through, Dad was the first musher back on a sled. It was a tough slog. He lost the trail twice, had to turn his team round. Then a runner broke, and he had to repair it. By the time he got to Iditarod, he’d been passed by six other teams and he’d dropped two dogs on account of injury, left each one at the nearest checkpoint with the vet on duty.
All this must of been on his mind as he pushed through to Anvik then north to Unalakleet. I don’t say that as an excuse for what happened later. Only that it was a bad race from the start, and losing so much time not to mention two dogs, it weighs on your mind. Days of riding the back of a sled, no sound but the dogs’ breath and the thoughts inside your own head, whiteness all round, you can get hypnotized. Your mind goes white and your thoughts get funny. I have heard myself laughing on the back of a sled for no reason, days into a long run. Or sometimes you cry and don’t even know it.
I imagine that was his state of mind outside of Golovin. The Dispatch News reported what happened next. Bill Petrikoff, winner of two consecutive Iditarods, found his team coming to an unexpected stop. It was on account of Panda. We called her that because of her markings, she had a white face with black patches round her eyes. Panda faltered, then went down. The rigging got tangled when the other dogs dragged the weight of her, till the rest of the team finally stopped, too snarled in their lines to move. Dad, who had tied himself to the back of his sled and was dozing at that point, come to and run up to the front of the team to see what was the matter. Panda was laying on the ground, wheezing, her lips and gums gray. He knew right away it was pneumonia.
All this, I know from the papers and from my own time on the back of a sled, not because he ever told me about that day. He never said a word about it.
I hadn’t yet competed in the big race, so maybe I don’t have no right to say he should of done this or that. But if he had been in his right mind, he would of seen Panda panting heavier, would of seen the mucus she must of been coughing up. He might of noticed how she wasn’t eating when the rest of the dogs bolted their food. Any other race, he would of put her in the basket, got her to a vet at the next checkpoint, before it was too late.
As it was, there wasn’t nothing he could do. The next checkpoint was fourteen miles up the trail in White Mountain. Too far away for the vet there to do any good. He knelt next to Panda and put his hand on her side as she struggled for air.
Maybe she rolled her eyes up and looked at him. Maybe the other dogs laid down, quiet.
It was a skier who seen what happened next and told it to the papers. Some guy who lived in Golovin, just passing by on his cross-countries. He seen my dad stand up. Watched him walk a few paces. Staggered is what the man told the papers, I thought maybe he was drunk. Dad come to a stop. Then, so quick the motion startled the skier, he grabbed something off the ground, it might of been one of the wooden stakes used to mark the trail, he took it in his hand and turned and raised it above his head and brought it down. The skier said he heard yelps from the dogs. In the news, he said he couldn’t be sure how many dogs Dad hit, or how many times he hit them. But he heard shrieks and howls, and then he seen Dad take Panda’s body off the line, wrap her in his sleeping bag, and put her in the basket.