The serum had yet to face its greatest challenge—the crossing of Norton Sound.
10: The Ice Factory
A dog team crossing the dreaded Norton Sound. (Photograph by Jeff Shultz; reprinted with permission)
"The ice is like a mean dog, he always waits for you to stop watching him and then he tries to get you."
- Anthropologist Richard K. Nelson
Alaskans called it "the ice factory." Norton Sound, a forbidding inlet of the Bering Sea some 150 miles long and 125 miles across at its widest point, appeared from afar to be an endless expanse of solid ice that stretched until it met the sky. But the distant view was deceptive, for the closer you got to the sound, the more conscious you became that the ice was in a constant state of change and recreation. Huge swaths would suddenly break free and drift out into the sea or a long narrow lead of water would open up and widen. Depending upon the temperature, wind, and currents, the ice could assume various configurations--five-foot-high ice hummocks, a stretch of glare ice, or a continuous line of pressure ridges, which look like a chain of mountains across the sound. Not surprisingly, even among people whose valor on ice had been proved, Norton Sound was considered the most perilous kind of terrain to cross.
Then there was the wind. It was a given that on Norton Sound the wind howled and that life along these shores would be a constant struggle against a force that tied to beat you back at every step of every task. But when the wind blew out of the east, people took special note. These winds were shaped into powerful tunnels, and gusts barreled down mountain slopes and through river valleys, spilling out onto the sound at speeds of more than 70 miles per hour. They could flip sleds, hurl a driver off the runners, and drag the wind chill down to minus 100 degrees. Even more terrifying, when the east winds blew, the ice growing out from shore often broke free and was sent out to sea in large floes.
At night, the star-lit hummocks cast deep shadows over a shoreline that already seemed prehistoric with its crags and barren capes, all hardened off with a wind-crusted covering of snow. No campfires or cannery lights twinkled on the horizon, for although there was a rich marine life, the Native villages and white outposts were few and far between. Conditions were simply too harsh and dangerous here; over 380 miles of coastline, the distance from New York to Quebec, there were only six main villages. On the southern shore of the sound stood St. Michael, formerly a Russian fort and fur depot that over the years had become a Native village. 1 Sixty miles or so east of St. Michael was Unalakleet (YOU-na-la-kleet —"the place where the east wind blows"), a quiet, industrious village of schooner builders and Native hunters. The village is at the end of the Kaltag portage, the overland route through mountains that linked the Yukon River with the Bering Sea. Nearly forty miles northeast along the coast, before a traveler reached the bulge of Cape Denbigh, was Shaktoolik, the Native village that had become a major center for the wandering commercial reindeer herds of the northwest. 2 Unalakleet had once been the terminus of the winter Native trade route between Eskimos and Athabaskans, who first forged the route over the portage, and Shaktoolik was once the southernmost settlement of the Mahlemuit group. Now, both villages were stops on the mail trail and designated as the transfer points for the serum en route to Nome.
1. In 1833, the Russian-American Company built a fort in St. Michael and a storage depot for furs trapped in the Interior awaiting shipment to Russia. After the United States bought the territory, the U.S. Army continued to maintain a fort there. St. Michael had been the commercial and population center for Northwest Alaska as well as a port for goods and passengers heading up the Yukon River looking for gold or furs. The town was eclipsed by Nome when gold was discovered in 1898, and in 1923 it became redundant as a transit point to the Interior when the Alaska Railroad was completed. By 1925, St. Michael had declined to about three hundred people, most of them Eskimo from nearby villages who had been wiped out by a measles epidemic in 1900 and the influenza pandemic in 1918-19. The rusting relics of steamships and gold mining equipment littered St. Michael's beach. By the end of 1925, the U.S. military fort too would be abandoned.
2. The richness and subtly of the Eskimo language can be seen just in the naming of Shaktoolik. The word means "sandbar," after the location of the town. And it also means "stretched out." One Eskimo in Unalakleet described yet another meaning: "Further, it means the feeling you have when you have been going toward a place for so long that it seems that you will never get there."
On the northern coast of Norton Sound the villages were even smaller, from Koyuk, set in the bend of an inlet a mile up a river, to the Eskimo Roadhouse at Isaac's Point, and beyond that, Elim, a mission and reindeer reserve. Finally, about ten miles farther west, at Cape Darby, was six-mile Golovin Bay. From here, there were ninety more miles of varied, craggy terrain to Nome. A few old mining villages like Bluff, Solomon, and Port Safety dotted the coast, but by 1925 they served mainly as roadhouses for weary travelers.
On Cape Denbigh, at a site called "Iyatayet," twelve miles northeast of Shaktoolik, archaeologists have found traces of early man dating back eight thousand years. By 1925, the Eskimos in these Norton Sound villages were still keeping to a subsistence lifestyle based on hunting seal and fish far out on the ice, although with the coming of fur traders, whalers, and gold miners, the Eskimos along much of the sound were taking advantage of new tools and techniques the white man had brought them. In addition, they had improved their livelihood by freighting supplies by dogsled, herding reindeer, or sculpting figurines and cribbage boards out of ivory. In return, the Eskimos passed on to the whites knowledge developed over thousands of years—knowledge that allowed them to survive winters so close to the Arctic Circle.
At an early age, Eskimo children could already identify every headland and inlet of the sound and could orient themselves quickly by reaching down from the sled and feeling blindly for the tiny ice waves called sastrugi, which formed in the same configuration at every freeze and mirrored the topography on shore.
To them, the coast of Norton Sound was a neighborhood, like any other neighborhood. Just as a resident of a European or U.S. city could rattle off the names of stores on streets and know which neighborhoods were safer than others, the Eskimos of Norton Sound could tell you the various conditions of the ice off Isaac's Point (also known as Bald Head) compared to those off Shaktoolik. They paid close attention to the shorefast ice, which grew out from shore every winter. It could vary in length from a few feet, usually around points and capes, to several miles. The relatively stable and safe shorefast ice (no ice should ever be considered totally safe) ended at what was called the flaw edge, or hinge, where it met ice that had formed in place. Beyond the flaw edge, the ice was more dangerous, and under the right conditions of wind and current, it could break up and begin to drift out to sea. It was the first ice to go when the east wind blew onto Norton Sound.
Eskimo children learned how to read the color of ice to tell them whether a particular stretch was safe to cross. Darks spots were signs of thin, unstable ice: the seawater was close beneath. A certain shade of light gray indicated that the ice had built up far enough above the seawater and thus was thick enough for travel. A dog team too could help detect thin ice. It was believed that when dogs suddenly strayed off course, it was because they felt slight changes in moisture on the surface through their paws.
There were times, however, when even an Eskimo made a mistake and realized too late that the ice beneath him was beginning to bend and break. In such a situation, he would not stop moving, as most of us would reflexively be inclined to do, but instead would spread his legs to distribute more widely the support of his weight and then slide forward with both feet on the surface. 3 As a last resort, he would lie down, stretch out his arms and legs, and shimmy along until he came upon safe ground. This technique had its own dangers in cold weather, because thin ice was moist and would eventually soak a traveler's clothes.
3. According to Richard K. Nelson, this technique may hav
e been learned from watching polar bears, which can walk over ice too thin to support a human by spreading their paws until their bellies nearly touch the surface and then sliding forward (Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Ice, 21).
An important tool for ice travel was an unaak, a seven-foot pole with a spike on one end and a hook on the other. With the spike end, an Eskimo hunter could stab as he walked at the snow-covered ice in front of him, gauging its thickness. The hook end was a real survival tool. If he fell through the ice, he could grab onto the edge of the remaining ice, preventing himself from being swept under by the current. If he found himself stranded on a floe but saw a smaller floe closer to the shore, he could use the hook end to pull the smaller floe close enough for him to cross over onto it, using each passing floe as another stepping-stone back to shore.
Early Saturday morning on January 31, the fourth day of the relay, two men—Myles Gonangnan, a full-blooded Eskimo, and the Norwegian Leonhard Seppala—stood on opposite sides of Norton Sound, unaware of each other's location, and studied the ice and the wind. They each had a decision to make. They could take an over-water route, thereby cutting off a great deal of time, or they could follow an onshore trail that skirted the sound. In either direction, the trail route was safer, and Seppala had already been warned not to attempt an ice crossing. For neither man would the decision be based on courage or even stamina—but solely on which way the wind blew.
Over the past few days, the wind had been blowing onshore, pushing water in from the Bering Sea and raising the level of the sound, which had weakened the ice. But as long as the wind continued to blow from that quarter, there would be little cause for alarm. The ice would continue to break up, as it always does, but it would merely drift toward shore. But sometime during the night, the wind's direction had shifted. It was now blowing offshore, from the northeast, and getting stronger.
A little before five o'clock that morning, Gonangnan had received the serum at Unalakleet from his fellow Eskimo and townsman, Victor Anagick, who had traveled down from the Old Woman shelter cabin on the portage. 4 Leaving it inside Traeger's store to warm near the heat of his iron stove, Gonangnan set out to examine conditions on Norton Sound. A few minutes beyond Unalakleet, he would have to decide whether to take the trail route northeast into the foothills or the shortcut route over the ice. The ice route ran several miles out from shore and under the shadow of Besboro Island, an enormous, uninhabited crag that had long ago broken off from the mainland bluffs.
4. Anagick and a driver known as "Jackscrew" carried the serum over the portage. Jackscrew received the serum from Patsy at Kaltag and then traveled forty miles to Old Woman, where he handed off the serum to Anagick.
The shortest route of all would have been to cut straight across the sound, which meant heading northwest in a direct line to Nome. But in the middle of the sound was a large body of open water called a polynya, which was kept free of ice most of the season by a constant eddying. As ice formed in the area of the polynya, wind and current pushed it toward the edge, where it compacted and was then driven into the southerly moving ice pack of the Bering Sea. It made a terrifying grinding noise, like that of giant bulldozers dragging their metal buckets against concrete.
Gonangnan studied the giant field of ice as it creaked and sighed, and by the light of the moon he could see the whole body slightly rise and fall. The sea was rolling in from beneath. Somewhere out in the distance there was open water, spray exploding off whitecaps and floes rumbling and fragmenting. In the cavernous sky above, the stars twinkled with unusual clarity. Behind him, the wind was growing stronger, the gusts more frequent. The signs were clear: a storm was brewing and could well land full force on the coast within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The question was no longer whether the sea would break up but when. He would not risk taking the shortcut.
Gonangnan returned to the store, picked up the serum, and tied the package down in his sled. It was about five-thirty in the morning when he took off for the foothills behind Unalakleet. A few hours later, across the sound, Leonhard Seppala, unaware that the relay had changed, made his decision. He would cross the sound.
For the first twelve miles from Unalakleet, the inland trail ran parallel to the coast, up and down a series of hills with bared slopes and sharp turns, before coming back briefly to shore. The trees along the route offered some shelter but provided little protection from the wind and created their own hazards on the sharp turns.
In the rising wind, Gonangnan headed over the slippery surface of the lagoon behind Unalakleet and then turned inland and climbed steadily up a 300-foot rise into the hills. It was a steep ascent that required alternating between pushing the sled from behind at a jog and pedaling from the runners. Drifts created by the wind and a recent snowfall had built up on the trail and the dogs punched their way through, slowing down in stretches of heavy snow, then speeding up on the stretches of hard-packed trail. But the wind had gotten too much of a head start on Gonangnan. Soon, the trail became too heavily drifted with snow for the dogs. They wallowed in it, unable to get traction. Gonangnan had to stop the team and strap on his snowshoes in preparation for breaking trail.
Breaking trail was a slow and laborious process. A driver had to anchor the sled, take off his own gloves to put on snowshoes, and then jog back and forth over the trail until he had packed down enough snow for the dogs to get through. Whenever there was an easy stretch, he would get back on the sled and ride the runners to catch his breath. A trailbreaker could easily go over a bad stretch of trail three times before the ground was tamped down enough for the dogs. Usually, freighters and mail drivers hired local men to go out ahead and do the job for them to save them time and energy. Gonangnan, of course, had no such luxury.
It took Gonangnan several hours before he finally reached the abandoned fish camp at the point where the trail came back down to the shore. He had been on the trail for about five hours and had managed only twelve miles. It was dismal progress. He built a small fire in one of the abandoned huts and set the serum nearby. He knew the worst was yet to come. The wind outside was blowing harder with each passing hour.
From the fishing camp, the trail ran for five miles up and down over steep ridges until it reached the Blueberry Hills. The Blueberry Hills' summit is 1,000 feet high and the ascent to its exposed ridge top is considered one of the most difficult climbs on the trail to Nome, requiring every ounce of energy from dogs and driver. At the end of the ridge, the trail makes a sharp turn to the west and heads down a steep three-mile descent to the beach for the final stretch to Shaktoolik.
There were several wind tunnels along this route which produced unexpected gusts that hit like body blows. There would be no more abandoned camps or roadhouses for shelter. The only place he might find some relief from the wretched wind would be huddled behind his sled or a boulder, curled up into a ball inside his parka.
If all went well, it would take Gonangnan another nine hours to reach Shaktoolik. The eight dogs on his team were not fast but they were heavily coated and powerful. And they knew the trail. He had traveled hundreds of miles with these dogs along this very coastline, and they were accustomed to gales and heavy loads and the miles of snow and ice that seemed to go on forever.
After warming himself and the serum for about fifteen minutes, Gonangnan headed back out on the trail and began the exhausting climb. For the next several hours he alternated between running behind the sled and riding the runners. The varied terrain required him to be constantly on the move and on the alert. When the wind blows, it shapes the trail, and as a team climbs, the sled skids sideways and downhill. The driver must constantly fight the force of gravity. With knees bent and hands locked tightly to the sled, he pedals vigorously, trying to kick the sled back up into line with the dogs. When on the sled, he hikes out, putting all his weight over the uphill runner to create a little friction. The dogs, too, struggle against the drift of the sled, and the wheel dogs take the brunt. Each time the sled slips downhill, the
force nearly jerks the wheel dogs off their feet and they must dig into the snow with their claws to regain footing.
As Gonangnan battled up the summit, the wind came at him nearly head-on, picking up walls of snow and dumping them across the trail. Snow was "blowing so hard," Gonangnan would later recall, "that eddies of drifting, swirling snow passing between the dogs' legs and under the bellies made them appear to be fording a fast running river."
Suddenly, the world closed in on him. It was a whiteout. The horizon ahead had been swallowed up between the overcast sky of the growing storm and the endless white line of the Blueberry Hills. He could not make out the jumbled ice of the sound below. He could not even see it. He was in a world without shade or contour, where every point of visual reference had vanished. It was a northern vertigo, a physical experience unlike any other, where one loses one's sense of balance in the absence of shadows and edges. A dog driver on the trail could no longer tell whether there was a dip or a bump ahead, or whether the dogs had made a wrong turn and were heading off the edge of the ridge.
The team veered sharply to the west and the sled picked up speed. They had begun the descent back to the beach. This section of the trail, although protected from the wind, is notoriously icy and most drivers usually prepare before heading down. They will unhook a few dogs from their tuglines and begin the descent with their foot on the brake, slowing down the sled before dropping off what one musher described as "the edge of the planet." To add friction, some will wrap chains called roughlocks around the runners, and if they have to, they will inch down the slope in stretches of controlled speed, stopping whenever they begin to accelerate too rapidly. Even with these precautions a driver could find himself in trouble.
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 21
