The route would follow the Tanana River northward in three long meandering curves for the thirty miles to Minto, an Athabaskan village in the lowlands, and then curve sharply to the west to Tolovana. It was a varied terrain of smooth surfaces and upended pieces of ice that could bruise the knees and break elbows, and the trail often required heavy pushing and frustrating lurches.
As they crossed the Tanana to the trail on the east bank, the dogs surged forward in their collars, panting heavily and leaving behind wisps of steam that hung for a moment like ghosts along the trail. On any other occasion, the veils would have been beautiful to watch, but on that evening they were a sign that the dogs were moving too fast in the severe cold. In addition, the route was in atrocious shape. A few days earlier, a horse team dragging heavy freight had punched deep holes in the trail. For years, the horse teams had been the bane of the dog rigs. Back in 1900, one stampeder described how horses could wreak havoc on a trail:
[They] broke through every step, and it was the hardest riding I have ever seen...they would twist 8 foot sections right out of the trail. Most of the dogs had broken many of their toenails off having caught them on the edges of these horse tracks and holes. The trail was bloody for miles from the bleeding and limping dogs...Many men had sprained their ankles and were limping...What those dog men said and thought about the two men and horses would burn up a ton of asbestos fireproof paper.
Shannon's team fought to keep its footing, but finally Shannon accepted that the trail was too broken up to be of use. Shouting, "Haw!" he ordered Blackie to turn left and lead the team onto the Tanana River. The temperature would be several degrees colder on the frozen river than on the steep bank but at least the path had not been broken up by the horses.
Shannon was taking a big risk. In any type of weather, traveling over a frozen river can be extremely dangerous. River ice is in a constant state of transformation. It can be smooth along one stretch and a jumble of craggy ice sculptures on the next. The large frozen peaks are strong enough to support a truck, but the narrow valleys in between can easily crack underfoot.
It was nearly pitch dark, and though Shannon was fighting the numbing cold, he had managed to stay alert, and was watching for hazards along the river. He was particularly worried about overflow, a phenomenon that can occur in any type of winter weather, but which at 50 degrees below is life-threatening. Overflow occurs when water bursts through the surface and seeps over the top of the ice. The pent-up water can be under such pressure that it forms a geyser sometimes three or four feet high and the slick may spread for miles across the ice.
In warmer weather, many sled dogs love to splash through overflow, but in temperatures below zero a dog will do his best to avoid it. If a team drives through overflow in the bitter cold, a driver must stop immediately, cut down boughs of spruce, and build a fire to dry his moccasins and socks. A delay could cost him his toes, his foot, or his life.
It is also important to dry off each dog's paws, because the ice could build up and grind away at the pads, eventually crippling the animal. It was a cold and time-consuming operation that required working without gloves, but it was an absolute necessity. "A man is only as good as his dogs when he is on the trails of Alaska...and a dog is only as good as his feet," a well-traveled dog driver once said.
Overflow refreezes quite rapidly, forming a fragile shell that will crack loudly or flex like rubber underfoot, either of which are clear signals for the traveler to get off. But once the overflow has completely frozen to a hard sheen, it can be as slippery as glass and unyielding to any toehold.
The other risk of riding over frozen rivers was what has been described as drum ice, the opposite of overflow. This threat was the greater of the two: while a good lead dog could avoid overflow, he was often unable to detect drum ice in time to avoid catastrophe. Drum ice occurs when the water beneath a frozen river recedes, leaving behind a deep ice cavern. It appears quite ordinary on the surface, but when a team drives over it the sled begins to make a hollow sound, like a drum. If the team doesn't get off* quickly the ice could cave in and the driver fall 10 to 20 feet down to the dry riverbed.
Either way, it would be important for Shannon to remain calm: if he panicked, the dogs were likely to sense it and become unnerved, and this would only worsen the situation. In most trail emergencies, a driver was usually better off letting an experienced lead dog handle the problem on his own, without interference. On the whole, lead dogs—males and females—tend to be calm and confident by nature. They earn their position not by being more aggressive than their peers but by sheer intelligence.
In the early 1900s, Bert Hansen, a deputy U.S. Marshal in Alaska, patrolled thousands of miles of wilderness, and it was his job to bring in the frozen and the dead, the criminal and the insane. One day, traveling over a frozen river in the Interior, he fell through drum ice and became stranded in a "crystalline tomb" 12 feet deep and 150 feet wide. His lead dog, Tuesday, heard the crash, felt the sled suddenly go light, and circled back with his teammates to investigate. (Many teams would just have kept going.) The dog looked down the hole at Hansen, whined, and dug his paws into the edge of hole, "as if he were going to leap in and join me," Hansen recalled. Hansen and Tuesday had traveled this same trail several times and the marshal knew that there was a trapper who lived in a cabin about ten miles away. "So I waved my hand in that direction and ordered Tuesday to mush. He barked, turned his head the way I had motioned and looked down as though trying to read my mind," and then took off with the dog team.
The minutes ticked by slowly and Hansen, now alone, began to panic. He grabbed at the boulders, hoping to pry them loose from the frozen gravel and stack them up against the wall to create a makeshift ladder. He paced the length of the cavern, found a place where the wall sloped, and realized he could cut toeholds in the ice and climb out. He patted his parka with his hands, looking for his knife. He had forgotten to pack it, a serious oversight. In despair, Hansen began to pound on the ice. "I was in one of those strange panics a man sometimes gets into when he finds himself absolutely up against it— Another musher had made his last mush, that was all!"
The trail-hardened driver fell to his hands and knees and started to scrape at the boulders until his fingers were bleeding. Managing to pry one stone loose, he repeatedly banged against the ice until he could finally claw his way out. Just as he was pulling out, Tuesday appeared around the bend with the team and the trapper on the runners of the sled.
"Do you wonder—I don't—that Alaskans called Tuesday my 'brains,' that they said it was only because of him that I was able to make some of the mushes I made?"
So far, Shannon had been lucky. His team had avoided any drum ice or overflow and the pups were working well together. But as the hours passed, a chill crept deeper into Shannon's bones. It was becoming harder and harder, he realized, to warm his extremities. He had to take immediate action and so began to swing his arms violently downwards at the same time that he began to pedal more frequently on the runners, hoping to drive the blood back into his fingers and toes. Then there was a gradual shift in perception. His focus began to move from the trail and the dogs to his own inability to stay warm.
Suddenly, Blackie made a sharp turn. The swing dogs followed in unison and the sled veered off. Shannon momentarily lost his balance but managed to hold onto the handlebars and regain his footing. Blackie's behavior had been odd, was Shannon's first thought, until he was able to piece together what had happened: Blackie had avoided a black hole, an opening in the ice that had been eaten away by the current underneath and was "large enough to drag down the entire team."
Blackie had either seen the steam rising off the river or heard the rush of current against the hard-packed ice. He may have even felt the first vibration of cracking ice beneath his feet, for black holes have a tendency to widen quickly. Either way, he had reacted quickly. But something was wrong with four of the pups. Bear, Cub, Jack, and Jet were no longer running steadily. Sled dogs, at their best, will place the
ir back leg inside the print of their forepaw, and many of them will be in step with each other. But as dogs tire, they fall out of rhythm. A pair of hind legs will be slow on the uptake. Another dog will begin crabbing, leaving paw prints at the edge of the trail as he stumbles, lags, and has to be dragged forward by the other dogs. Cub, Jack, and Jet were clearly exhausted. They had nothing left to draw on but heart, the sheer will to keep moving forward with the other dogs. And Bear was not much better. Shannon had been on the trail for four or five hours now. The temperature was still dropping and the colder it became, the slower time seemed to pass.
Shannon's own physical problems had not resolved themselves, and worse, his attempts to get blood down to his extremities no longer seemed to be paying off. If he did not do something quickly to get more heat to his legs, he knew what would happen. He would die, along with his dogs, and perishing with them would be any hope of getting the serum to Nome. His body was simply losing heat faster than he could produce it. In an attempt to protect against the cold, his body was shunting blood from its extremities to its core vital organs.
Already his face was growing numb, and one of his big toes had become frozen. As sluggish as he felt, he knew what he had to do.
Shannon stopped the team and got off the sled. He raced to the front, just ahead of Blackie, and began to jog. The dogs matched their pace to Shannon's. When finally he felt the blood returning to his limbs, Shannon knew he had warmed up enough to go back to the sled and ride the runners.
This worked, but only for a while. Shannon was getting tired again, and, as he would recall, he was becoming "fairly stupefied by the cold."
He knew, as would any seasoned musher, what was happening to him: he was becoming hypothermic. A human being can shiver for just so long. The process is physically exhausting. It makes the muscles tense from the buildup of lactic acid and carbon dioxide. Soon it would be difficult for Shannon to hold onto the sled, let alone lean forward and pedal from the runners. With the loss of muscle control, his skin would grow pale, numb, and waxy. The uncontrollable fits of shivering would soon lead to stumbling, then to slurred speech, then mental lapses: moments of time unaccounted for, a wandering of the mind, odd behavior. A person suffering from hypothermia may even feel hot and begin taking off his clothes. Or lose the trail and begin walking in circles, unaware that he is stepping over his own footprints in the snow. Finally, apathy and exhaustion set in. A person will no longer care about reaching his destination. All he wants to do is to sleep. This feeling will nag him every step until at last he gives in to the desire, curls up in the fetal position, and closes his eyes.
At this stage, the body shuts down. All blood flow to the extremities stops, the breathing rate slows, and the pulse becomes shallow and weak. The victim is in a hibernation mode. The skin becomes bluish-gray and the limbs grow rigid. As the internal temperature continues to drop toward 86 degrees, the body becomes a metabolic icebox. To an observer, the victim will appear dead. It would be hard to find a pulse or see an indication of respiration. If the victim is in a fetal position, one specialist recommends forcing the arm to extend. It if curls back, the person is still alive. Only live muscles contract.
But in Alaska, where travelers are few and far between on the trail, hypothermia victims are rarely rescued from their deadly sleep. Men have been found encased in ice where overflow crept up around them as they slept. Others have been found sitting on a sled or on top of a boulder or frozen solid in the act of trying to strike a match.
Although death by hypothermia was relatively painless, the "long conscious fight" against a relentless chill could be agony for any experienced outdoorsman. As the traveling missionary Hudson Stuck once observed, "All of us who have traveled in cold weather know how uneasy and apprehensive a man becomes when the fingers grow obstinately cold and he realizes that he is not succeeding in getting them warm again. It is the beginning of death by freezing."
Shannon was losing track of time. He forced himself to focus on Campbell's roadhouse in Minto, where he could warm up. As Shannon raced toward Minto, he was no doubt aware of the danger he and his dogs were in. But there was nothing he could do except thrash his arms against his sides, stomp his feet when he could, and continue to jog ahead of the dogs for short periods. When his extremities failed to warm up even after these attempts, he knew there was not enough heat in his core to spare. With the fear building inside him, he pushed on, knowing he had to reach Minto before he lost control of himself and his team.
At around 3:00 a.m., the door to Johnny Campbell's roadhouse opened. Campbell took one look at Shannon and his dogs and it was clear to him that something terrible had happened. Parts of Shannon's face had turned black from severe frostbite. Blood had stained the mouths of Bear, Cub, Jack, and Jet. Helping Shannon inside, he placed him near the sheet-iron stove and poured him a cup of hot black coffee. Shannon was too tired and cold to eat. As he attempted the first sips from his coffee, he took a look at the thermometer outside: it was minus 62 degrees.
8: Along the Yukon River
A nineteenth century explorer's illustration of Athabaskan travel along the Yukon River, the central highway of Alaska's Interior.
"There are a few lonely places in this world, and the wastes of the great Alaskan Interior are the loneliest of them all."
- Traveler Henry W. Elliott, 1886
For four hours, Bill Shannon sat huddled at the stove in Campbell's roadhouse, drinking coffee and allowing the heat to wash over him. Finally, he was ready to take some food to give him the strength to continue the journey. Despite all that had happened, Shannon had not lost his resolve. He would complete the remaining twenty-two miles to Tolovana. He had given his word that he would.
As Dr. Beeson in Anchorage had instructed, Shannon had taken the serum inside so it would not freeze, unwrapping the layer of fur and canvas and dangling the container from the rafters above to share the warmth of the stove. The cabin was probably no warmer than 50 degrees, but in comparison with the temperature outside it felt tropical. Just before seven o'clock on Wednesday morning, now working on his sixth cup of coffee, Wild Bill took a last pull from his cup and went outside to check on his dogs. Although by the clock it was early morning, it would be several more hours before dawn finally drove out the darkness of the Alaskan night.
Earlier that night, after helping Shannon into the roadhouse, Johnny Campbell led the dogs to a lean-to, where he fed them and let them rest. But one look suggested that they needed far more than an hour or two of downtime. Several were suffering from what mushers in those days described as "lung scorching," a condition in which they believed a dog's lungs were turned black as coal from frostbite. Lung scorching was more conjecture than proven fact. Mushers rarely, if ever, performed autopsies on their dogs and only imagined the havoc the cold air was causing them. Modern veterinarian medicine tells us that a dog suffering from working too hard in the severe cold more likely has a pulmonary hemorrhage. Sustained heavy exertion in dry, minus-50-degree weather can freeze and burst the minute vessels of a dog's bronchial tree and damage the delicate alveoli, the tiny sacs in the lungs where the transfer of oxygen to the blood takes place. The lungs do not turn black, but fill up with blood. Although the dog finds it harder and harder to breathe, he will keep running, spurred on by his teammates, until eventually he drowns in his own blood or passes out from oxygen deprivation. In either event, he will soon be dead. The initial warning signs are bleeding from the mouth and nose, where the lining of mucous membrane becomes brittle and cracks in the cold.
When Shannon checked on the dogs, Cub, Jack, and Jet could barely struggle to their feet. The trip to Tolovana was at least another three to four hours and Shannon knew that these dogs would not make the distance. He would leave the three behind. It was questionable whether they would ever run again, but at least for now he could take comfort in the fact that Campbell would take good care of them until he returned for them.
Down to six dogs, Shannon could only hope
there would be no further mishaps on the trail. But Bear too was looking weak. He decided to let him try to make the rest of the run. If he had to, Shannon would take Bear off the team and put him in the sled basket. After readying the dogs, Shannon released the sled brake. The drive to Tolovana had now resumed.
That same morning, more than six hundred miles away at the other end of Alaska, the telephone rang at Leonhard Seppala's cabin at Little Creek, near Nome. It was the call Seppala had been waiting for. On the other end was Mark Summers, Seppala's boss at the Hammon Consolidated Gold Fields and the man who had suggested Seppala for the western half of the relay. It was time, he was told, to head out.
Seppala was not a man to leave things to the last minute. That was how you got into trouble. Salmon for the dogs had already been stacked and tied down in the sled. Earlier in the week, Constance had frozen individual servings of precooked beans, ground beef, and hardtack that he could unwrap quickly and warm up on the trail for his own nourishment. All in all, he was traveling light; he had to if he wanted to make good time.
Seppala hung up the phone and put on his fur parka and mukluks. Out in the kennel, the dogs had heard the phone and were keyed up by the time Seppala stepped outside. When he headed toward them, they exploded in a frenzy of howls and yelps. They knew that it was time to run.
In the yard outside the kennel, Seppala laid out twenty harnesses. It was not easy to line up a team. Sled dogs usually become hysterical when they watch their teammates being taken out of the kennel for hooking up. This hysteria moves through the dog yard like electricity.
To get the job done, a driver must grab each dog by the collar and be dragged out of the kennel, all the while trying to steer the dog to his position on the team. He must then straddle the dog, which is leaping and yelping with excitement, and slip the web harness over his neck and pull his two front legs into the proper holes. Even in harness, the dog will jump back and forth over the gang line, getting necklines and tuglines tangled up with those of his teammates. Others will leap out at the driver for an extra pet or the chance to play for another minute, and they will surge forward to try to blow the brake and get the sled moving down the trail. Chaos and carnival.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 16
