There would be no such preparation time for Gonangnan. In the whiteout, he did not even realize he had reached the edge until he flew off it like a runaway locomotive. On a steep grade, a sled picks up speed faster than the team and can run right over the wheel dogs. The driver struggles for control of his unwieldy vehicle. He must jam the brake into the icy trail until his leg hurts and at the same time lean into the high side of the trail. The sled bangs into hard drifts and can slide at a right angle to the team. If the runners catch an tdgt, the sled may flip, tumbling the entire team, the contents of the sled, and the driver hundreds of feet down to the beach. '
That day, Gonangnan was lucky. As he neared Norton Sound, the whiteout conditions cleared and he could see the beach below. The sled began to slow down. He had made it safely down the descent. But as he well knew, the final miles once he returned to the shoreline would provide a different yet equally unnerving challenge. Out in the open on the sound there was nothing to block the wind, which shot down the Koyuk River valley and across the sound, slamming into the low-lying spit of Shaktoolik in a noise like thunder. The headwinds can be in excess of 50 mph, the gusts even more. They can polish the trail into slick windows of glare ice, which sparkle the colors of jade and light blue. Dogs struggle for a toehold and drivers fight for every inch of ground.
By 11:00 a.m., the wind was blowing at gale force, about 40 miles per hour. The wind chill was down to at least minus 70 degrees, for the air that feeds the gusts comes down from the Arctic. Gonangnan and his dogs had been traveling for about nine hours now, and it would take him another three or four hours to make it across this stretch of ice. Gonangnan mushed on. The drifting particles of snow and sand hurtled toward him like a white wall. Four grueling hours later, Shaktoolik appeared on the horizon.
It was about 3:00 p.m. when Gonangnan arrived at Shaktoolik, and still there was no sign of Seppala. No one actually knew where Sep-pala was on the trail. It was possible that he had been delayed or that he had already come across the sound, passed through Shaktoolik without resting, and was now on his way to Unalakleet. Gonangnan, however, had not seen him on the trail.
Mark Summers had prepared for this eventuality, asking Henry Ivanoff, a Russian Eskimo who captained a schooner on the sound in the summers, to be ready to take the serum. Ivanoff sat in the store waiting for the serum to warm while Gonangnan gave him the last few details about the weather outside. While he might not be the ideal man for the job, Ivanoff would do his best. And so he set off along the shore ice of Norton Sound, bound for Ungalik.
That same Saturday afternoon, Welch and Morgan continued their vigilance. For the past eleven days, they had been monitoring and caring for an increasing number of patients. Today, three more children had come down with the disease, pushing the caseload to twenty-seven. There were thirty suspects and at least eighty people who had come in contact with the bacteria; and now there was no more antitoxin. A new fear had taken hold of Welch. Among his patients was Margaret Curran, whose father ran the roadhouse out at Solomon. Margaret had recently gone out there to help her father cook for guests. Had she spread the disease beyond Nome? Welch was not taking any chances. "Would advise keeping all government nurses at their stations as they are all I have to depend on outside of Nome and it seems inevitable that diphtheria will occur at some of these stations in near future," he wired to the authorities in Washington. "If things get bad may have to establish separate contagious hospital for Natives..."
Mayor Maynard urged people in town to avoid using the telephones to keep the lines clear for emergencies.
A freelance reporter in Nome working for the Universal Service press agency captured the mood in Nome. "Nome Situation Critical; All Hope Rests on Dogs," E. R. Hyldahl wrote in a story that was picked up by the Seattle press. "The situation in diphtheria stricken Nome is extremely critical...There is nothing left to stop the ravages of the disease. Nome is in a state of terrible anxiety while the entire population is waiting for the dogs. All hope is in the dogs and their heroic drivers...Nome appears to be a deserted city. All streets are empty."
Later that same day Welch was given an update on the relay: Gonangnan had left Unalakleet early that morning and all the mushers on the line had been told to keep an eye out for Seppala. With or without Seppala, it was hoped that the serum would reach Nome as early as the next day.
Welch heard the news with relief. In a telegram to the Public Health Service, he wrote: "...have received information that 300,000 units antitoxin will arrive tomorrow at noon STOP If you could be here alone you could realize what this means to me STOP."
Around the same time Seppala, too, was feeling confident. Earlier that morning, just a few hours after Gonangnan had set off on the inland route, Seppala had thrown off the cautions of Summers and others and chosen the shortcut across Norton Sound. It was a good move. He had made the crossing.
The wind was behind him now and he was grateful. A storm was clearly brewing and the wind continued to blow hard. The snow was lifting up off the ground in an explosion of hard, fine crystals, but he was moving with the wind so it did not matter much to him. In fact, the tailwind had made for a fast journey. He had just left the fishing camp of Ungalik and now the dogs were speeding toward Shaktoolik over the last twenty-three miles of shorefast ice.
Seppala had covered nearly 170 miles in the past three days and so far he had been lucky with the weather and the ice. Although he could not see the town through the haze of snow, Seppala knew that Shaktoolik was only minutes away. When he reached the roadhouse there, he would decide whether or not to push further down the coast to Unalakleet. To avoid a delay, he wanted to be off the Bering Sea before the storm hit full force. As far as he knew, he still had more than 100 miles to travel before meeting the serum, and he needed to spare himself and the dogs the exhausting ordeal of battling a storm and dangerous ice.
Suddenly, Togo and the dogs picked up speed. They were racing but after what? And then he saw it. There was another sled dog team up ahead. It wasn't moving. Instead, the driver was standing in the middle of the team, flailing his arms. A reindeer had wandered out on the trail and his dogs were fighting to get at it, all snarled up in a tangle of lines and flying fur. Now Seppala's dogs wanted to join the pursuit of game and they put on a burst of speed. Seppala held on tight. It was like being at the end of the line in a game of "crack the whip," which Nome's children played on their ice skates out on the Bering Sea.
When the other driver saw the Siberian Huskies coming toward him, he knew he had more important things to do than get his dogs away from the reindeer. There was only one man who could be out on the trail today with a team of Siberians heading in the opposite direction. He began to wave his arms frantically, determined to catch Seppala's attention.
But Seppala, who could not make out what the driver was shouting above the whistling of the wind, had no intention of stopping to help. He could not afford the delay.
Togo was approaching the team rapidly. Henry Ivanoff made one last attempt. His dogs had probably broken a few harnesses in the fight and some may even have been injured. If he failed to get Seppala's attention, he would have to return to Shaktoolik and take the time to mend the harnesses and find more dogs.
Ivanoff ran toward Seppala as the musher raced past: "The serum! The serum! I have it here!"
Seppala at first did not believe what he had heard. He slammed on the sled brake. The brake made little purchase against the snow and it was only after some distance that he managed to stop the dogs and turn them around, into the wind. By the time Seppala made his way back to Ivanoff, the driver had stopped the fight. He ran over to Seppala with the serum and told him of the change of plan. The epidemic had spread rapidly since Seppala left Nome on January 28 and more drivers had been added to the relay in order to speed it up. It was Seppala's job now to carry the serum back across Norton Sound and on to the roadhouse at Golovin, where Charlie Olson was waiting for the handoff.
Alarmed by the news, Sepp
ala started off at once for Ungalik, the fishing camp twenty-three miles to the north. He had to decide what to do. The route back across Norton Sound had become much more dangerous since this morning. The wind was building and it was beginning to get dark, so he would not be able to see or hear the ice. He could take the long route around the shore, but neither he nor Nome could afford the extra day of travel. Seppala had his own daughter to worry about. Sigrid was only eight years old, his only child, and he had no way of knowing if she was on Dr. Welch's growing list.
Seppala may have had his doubts about recrossing Norton Sound that afternoon, but the rest of the world did not. In the lower 48 that same Saturday afternoon, former residents of Nome were regaling the press with tales of the courageous musher who would save the town. No one back in the states could even assure the press that Seppala would meet up with the relay, given the change of plans. But none of that mattered. Most of those talking were former sourdoughs, who had moved to the states several years ago, but who still had the gambling spirit of the gold rush days in them and were "ready to bet their final ounce of dust" that Seppala would reach his destination in record time.
"There is no man in Alaska better fitted to undergo the great hazard than he," Esther Darling, who used to work with the musher Scotty Allan, told the Berkeley Gazette. "Only a man of long experience on the trail dares to take a trip such as that Seppala has undertaken when the thermometer goes to 58 below. The slightest misstep will result in death. The danger is that a man usually does not realize he is freezing until his brain becomes numb. Then he goes crazy and that, of course, is the end."
Bob Lilly, who once drove with Seppala, chimed in from his home in San Francisco: Seppala "always argued that there's nothing—animals, airplanes, automobiles—that can beat the dog for transportation in Alaska. He's going to prove it or they'll pick him up frozen in death. This race means everything to Seppala. For years he has trained his dogs with the belief that they are the only sure source of the North...When Nome called for aid, and men measured the route...the airplane was unsafe, and the package that meant life to Nome was entrusted to the sled dogs—Seppala's sled dogs."
"There isn't any quit in him," said a former mayor of Nome, George Baldwin. "There isn't any quit to any of those chaps, for that matter—Kaasen, Wild Bill Shannon—he's an Irishman—Edgar Kallands or any of 'em. Those dogs of theirs will get them there quick."
The kind of confidence these Alaskan sourdoughs had in Seppala, Seppala had in his lead dog, Togo. When he saw the huts of Ungalik up ahead, Seppala turned left without hesitation and headed out across Norton Sound. It was now dark. The temperature, as he would later estimate, was minus 30 degrees and the gale was in his face. With the wind chill, it was a brutal 85 below. There was nothing Seppala could do but drive as if he were in a race.
Seppala had been out on the sound with Togo once before in a northeast gale. He had been just a few miles offshore when, in a lull between gusts, he heard an ominous crack. He ordered Togo to "haw," but the leader had already felt the crack and was heading at top speed toward the nearest point on land. He was closing in to shore when Togo inexplicably reared up and somersaulted back onto his teammates. Seppala shouted angrily. This was no time for circus stunts. He ran up to Togo to see what was the matter and as he neared the dog, he saw why he had stopped. No more than six feet ahead was an open channel of water. The lead was growing wider before Seppala’s eyes. He was on a floe, drifting out toward the sea. He straightened out the dogs and skirted the edges of the floe, looking for an opportunity to escape, but there was none. It had been noon when he set out from shore at Isaac's Point and now night was falling and the temperature dropping. There was nothing he could do but curl up with his dogs, conserve his strength and his warmth, and hope for a shift in the wind to bring him in to shore.
Several hours later, no such shift had occurred and Seppala's anguish grew. His dogs sensed the change in his mood and let out a long and low plaintive cry. Then Togo gave a short yelp.
The leader had sensed a shift: the wind was beginning to blow onshore. Seppala hitched his team back up and waited. He drifted for nine more hours until he could see the shoreline only a few hundred yards ahead. The ice raft was closing in on a floe that had jammed up against the shorefast ice. Seppala mushed along the perimeter to find a place to jump off. The closest point on the raft to the floe was about five feet—too wide for Seppala to jump. But if he could get Togo to the other side, the dog could pull the two floes together. Seppala tied a long towline to Togo's harness, picked him up, and hurled him across the open channel. Most dogs would have run away after a stunt like that, but as Seppala later reported, "Togo seemed to understand what he had to do." Once on the other side, Togo dug his nails into the floe and lurched toward shore. The line snapped. Togo spun around and looked back across the chasm at Seppala. The line slipped into the water. Seppala was speechless. He had just been given a death sentence.
Animal psychologists have a phrase for the ability to find solutions. It is called "adaptive intelligence." The icy lead separating Togo from Seppala was keeping the dog from his reward: reuniting with his master and his team. Togo had been born and bred a northern sled dog and it was part of his instinct now to pull. From an early age he had been exposed to an amazing array of daily challenges that had improved his ability to learn and in some cases to solve problems. He had traveled over various terrain in summer and winter and had spent most of his entire day for the past twelve years watching and working with Seppala as the team traveled out in the gold fields and to towns across Alaska.
As Seppala stood staring across the lead at Togo, the dog dove into the water, snapped the line up into his mouth, and struggled back out onto the jammed-up floe. Holding the line tightly in his jaws, Togo rolled over the line "until it was twice looped about his shoulders" and began to pull. The floe started to move and Togo continued to pull until it was close enough for Seppala and his teammates to jump safely across.
Now, as Seppala and Togo crossed Norton Sound in the late afternoon of Saturday, January 31, Seppala had no choice but to put his faith in Togo one more time. It would be the last time the two would cross the sound together. As Seppala feared, it was already too dark for his own eyes to see anything. The wind was deafening. Occasionally, he leaned out over the sled listening for any clue that the ice was cracking up. The sound was holding, and Togo seemed unfazed by the wind, covering the miles of trail with his head held low and his body level in deep concentration. He kept a straight course, despite the hummocks and slippery patches of ice that loomed up in his path.
At 8:00 p.m. that evening, Seppala and Togo pulled up the bank at Isaac's Point on the other side of Norton Sound. The dogs had traveled an incredible eighty-four miles that day, half of it against the wind, and they were all worn out. Togo and the team had averaged eight miles per hour. They were hungry and needed a rest before battling the wind for the next fifty miles to Golovin. Seppala unhooked the dogs and fed them salmon and seal blubber. They wasted no time in curling up their tails and going to sleep.
With the dogs cared for, Seppala drew his sled into the roadhouse and unlashed the package. He undid the wrappings of fur and canvas down to the paper cartons enclosing the serum. From the appearance of the cartons, Seppala was certain that the serum inside had frozen, so he placed it as close to the fire as he dared. While the serum warmed, Seppala slid into his reindeer sleeping bag and took a few hours of rest. At this point, he could only hope.
Outside, the wind roared down the peninsula and out onto Norton Sound, where the ice exploded in rifle-crack reports. The low-pressure system, which had moved up from the Gulf of Alaska, had arrived. By the following day it would reach its height, unleashing storm-force winds of at least 65 miles per hour as the mushers made the final dash to Nome.
11: Cold Glory
Leonhard Seppala camps on the edge of a frozen lake for the night. (Photograph courtesy of Bill Hanks and Sigrid Seppala-Hanks)
"Th
ere are only three things that a Northern dog is really afraid of: a blizzard, thin ice and the cracking sound of ice on a cold day."
- Scott Allan
At 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, February 1, the fifth day of the relay, Nichuk, the owner of the roadhouse at Isaac's Point, shook Seppala awake. The storm that had been heading up from the south over the past two days had arrived, and it was time for Seppala to leave. Removing the serum package from its spot near the stove, Seppala wrapped it inside his sleeping bag, covered it with a sealskin robe, and tied it down with a blanket in his sled. As an extra precaution, he covered it with additional animal skins. With a storm like this, he was taking no chances. He pushed the sled out the door.
The wind was howling and the ice on Norton Sound hissed and cracked. While Seppala harnessed the last dogs to the gang line, an old Eskimo emerged from the roadhouse and headed toward him.
"Maybe you go more closer to shore," he said quietly. Eskimos did not take unnecessary chances on the trail and this time even Seppala understood that he had to be cautious.
The trail between Isaac's Point and Golovin, where according to the new plan Seppala would hand the serum off to Charlie Olson, was a few miles offshore, bypassing a number of craggy points that jutted out from the coast. Although the trail would be rougher, Seppala decided to stay within a few hundred feet of the land
The Cruelest Miles: the Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic Page 22
