by Henry, Sue
Jessie pointed to one of the stakes with its distinctive reflector. The Quest race committee worked diligently each year to be sure the trail was clearly marked with the thousands of stakes made by the inmates of Fairbanks and Whitehorse prisons.
Debbie smiled, cheering up.
“Okay. See you. Thanks again for the tea.”
Calling up her dogs, she was soon pulling away.
Jessie watched her go as she put the thermos back in her sled bag before turning her own team back onto the trail. Half an hour later she passed Debbie with a wave, as the girl moved her team off the track on request.
“See you in Braeburn,” she called out as Jessie went by.
She had almost forgotten the young woman’s query about the snowmachine, but would recall Debbie’s question later, with good reason.
6
“After that all the world began to flock into the north. I was a poor man: I sold myself to be a driver of dogs.”
—Jack London, “An Odyssey of the North”
NOT LONG AFTER HER MEETING WITH DEBBIE TODD, JESSIE pulled off the trail and settled her team for the long rest she had planned. Most mushers follow a racing schedule of equal hours of rest for hours of travel, giving the dogs plenty of time to recover before going on. She was no exception, knowing that rest, along with good nutrition, was essential to making good, steady time in a race. When she found she was yawning and hungry, it was time to take care of herself as well.
First-time rookies, and some veterans who should have known better, would go too far, too fast the first day, wearing out their dogs and themselves in enthusiasm and adrenaline left over from the start, with its unusual conditions that included many more teams and people, both racers and spectators, than they were used to. It was an easy mistake, but one that Jessie was too experienced and trail-savvy to make.
Almost automatically, adept with much practice, she found her cooker in the sled bag, filled it with snow, and started her propane stove. As the snow began to melt, she got out the rich mix of frozen chicken, beef, lamb, and some dry food that was her tried-and-true working diet for the dogs. Several times she added more snow to the cooker and, when sufficient water finally boiled, dropped in the meat to thaw and cook slightly.
Mitts was on her feet, attentively watching Jessie’s every move. Though this female always seemed excessively proud of her own long-legged, white-ruffed appearance, she was a gobbler when it came time for dinner. If she wasn’t monitored closely, she would gulp her own, then finish Goofy’s and anyone else’s that she could reach. Easygoing and undefensive, Goofy was often inclined to let her.
“Give it up, greedy,” Jessie admonished her. “You’re not getting more than your share this time. Lie down and take a rest.”
Mitts obediently lay down, but continued to concentrate on the mechanics of food preparation.
Walking down the line of resting dogs, Jessie put a familiar, battered aluminum feeding pan next to each one. Before carrying the cooking kettle along the line to fill their pans, she watered them from what she had put in the cooler before the start of the race. In short order they were all eating hungrily, contentedly settling down to snooze as soon as they had licked their bowls clean.
Refilling the cooker with snow for water to carry along, Jessie tossed in a sealed plastic package of frozen spaghetti for her own meal. When it was hot, she poured the water from the cooker into the insulated container to keep it from refreezing, and sat down on her sled to enjoy her dinner.
As soon as she had finished, she checked each of her dogs for sore feet, gave them a little attention and praise as they curled up to rest, got out her sleeping bag, and found a semi-comfortable spot on top of her sled to spread it out. The two Darryls watched her closely from their position nearest the sled, ready to go again at the slightest suggestion. When she crawled in without removing her cold-weather clothing, they put their heads down, resigned to the fact that she didn’t intend to resume the trip anytime soon.
Shutting off her headlamp, she lay listening to the silence of the night. It was utterly still. Nothing rustled the underbrush or chirped from the trees. Most of the birds had flown south and many of the squirrels and other small animals were curled up in their cozy dens to snooze fitfully until spring. Though the ravens hung around all winter—a stark contrast of black on white—even they flew away to a secret roost in the wilderness night, the last echoes of their raucous cries disappearing with them on the cold air.
For a few minutes it was quiet. Then, just as she was drifting into a light sleep, vaguely aware of a team that had quietly passed on the nearby trail, Jessie heard the call of an owl not far away, then the soft whir-r-r of its wings, and the whump of its landing. It had heard a mouse moving under the snow and, with its uncanny sense of hearing and direction, glided swiftly and silently to the kill, for there was one tiny squeak that betrayed the successful capture of the tiny rodent.
You should have stayed in your nest, mouse, Jessie thought, and sank into a temporary hibernation of her own, sleeping bag pulled up to her ears.
In just over three hours, rejuvenated, she was back on the trail, passing other racers who had also wisely opted to rest their dogs.
The country she traveled through on either side of the dark road felt open at first, having been burned and cleared for homesteads and hay fields. It rolled gently along, easy trotting for the team.
This ended when the trail left the road and became tight and winding, more like a snowmachine track, constantly changing direction. Things happened quickly as the team swung around turns and made several portages between creeks and a number of small lakes. Somewhere on this part of the trail Jessie came to a cabin where a trapper had opened his small living space to racers. Three other teams had stopped there to rest.
“Hi, there,” a voice greeted her as she stepped in and closed the door, thermos in hand.
“Gail. How’re you?”
It pleased Jessie to see another distance racer that she already knew, especially one she recognized as a caring, friendly person, as well as an extremely competent professional. Gail Murray had once reduced her own chances for placing high in the Iditarod standings to help transport an injured racer back over a storm-blown trail to the last checkpoint for medical attention.
“How’s your first Quest so far?”
“Good. It’s fun to be on a trail that’s new. I don’t know almost every foot of it, like the Iditarod.”
Gail grimaced and shook her head. “Maybe too new. I hear there’s a bad stretch coming up between Braeburn and Coghlan Lake—that new section of trail. Supposed to be a wild bumper-car ride through the trees.”
“I’ll be sure to watch it and slow the mutts down. You ran the Rocky Mountain Stage Stop last year, didn’t you?”
“Sure did.”
“Like it?”
“Yeah, I did. It was a lot of fun and a really different kind of race—more of a sprint, really. Running just thirty to seventy miles a day turns it into more of a speed race than the real distance ones where you’re traveling all the time. It’s only four hundred miles, but it takes nine or ten days, so you run the day’s quota and stop for the night, and wherever you stop they feed you like it was the last meal you were ever going to have. I actually gained three pounds, and I usually lose.” She grinned. “Won’t happen here.”
A fairly new race, the Rocky Mountain Stage Stop annually went through a series of towns in western Wyoming and, like the Tour de France bicycle race, was run in daily timed stages. The communities through which it passed all had celebrations for the day the teams came in. Banquets, pig roasts, dances—all kept the residents and racers well fed and entertained. It was definitely not an endurance race like the Quest, where an important part of the concept was for the mushers to be almost totally self-sufficient and able to handle whatever the trail and weather threw at them. Still, it was extremely competitive and required much of both dogs and drivers, who burned up calories almost as fast as they could i
ngest them, and clearly there were plenty of opportunities to ingest them.
Jessie and Gail talked racing while Jessie refilled her thermos. The friendly trapper who owned the cabin was keeping plenty of water hot for the mushers, which Jessie welcomed, though she already had the water in the thermal container for her dogs. She washed her hands and face, brushed her teeth, and, feeling reasonably clean and more awake, drove on.
As she pulled away from the cabin, another racer in a blue and yellow parka pulled in. She didn’t recognize him, but remembered that he had been behind her on the Takhini River most of the way to the bush trail turnoff. Well, she thought, time enough to find out who it is later.
“Let’s go, guys. Next stop we’ll rest again.”
For the remainder of the night she traveled steadily, passing only one other team. As it was growing light in the east, she saw a power line ahead, ran under it, up a small hill, and was suddenly coming into Braeburn, startlingly full of dog teams, vehicles, and people; strange to see, 110 miles from Whitehorse.
Though not an official checkpoint, Braeburn was an official dog drop, where drivers could leave an animal they felt, for one reason or another, should not continue the race. A dog or two had already been dropped—one for a sprained wrist, one that wasn’t eating well and could be coming down with some virus that the musher was probably praying it hadn’t already passed on to the rest of the team. Other mushers would be hoping so as well; because dogs came in close contact with other dogs during races, viruses were easily passed from team to team.
Time altered for participants in distance sled dog races, spun out in long threads of seemingly endless running, then knit itself together into hours that appeared to pass instantly. Racers stopped measuring time in terms of day or night and, instead, calculated it in terms of running and resting, whatever the clock might say. Obviously, this also became true for the handlers and those concerned with the operation and reporting of the race. Vets, checkers, volunteers, cooks, pilots, media people, even fans—all accommodated themselves to the coming and going of the teams and the schedules of their passing along the trail, just as the mushers, if they were wise and savvy racers, accommodated themselves to the needs of their dogs for rest, food, and water.
For these reasons, Braeburn was a busy place, full of teams still running fairly close together, constantly coming in and stopping, or going on through, and the parking lot was crowded with the vehicles of handlers and a number of hardy spectators. Those who elected not to stay long usually at least halted for coffee in the bustling restaurant, since the lodge was famous for its much-anticipated plate-sized cinnamon rolls.
Still feeling the relief of being by herself and appreciating Debbie’s idea of settling into her own race, Jessie found the hubbub frustrating and irritatingly noisy. But she took a long, six-hour break, for there was a good fenced area for the dogs to rest, and a cabin in back of the lodge for mushers to sleep mostly undisturbed by the activities and enthusiasm of those who were not racing.
By the time Jessie woke and readied her team to start the fifty-mile run from Braeburn to Carmacks, the first official race checkpoint, it was well after noon, the place was twice as crowded as it had been when she had arrived, and the fenced holding area was jammed full of dog teams.
Watering her dogs and moving them back into harness on the gang line, she took a few minutes in the restaurant for a quick lunch. As she ate a sandwich and bowl of soup, nodding to people who stopped to speak encouragement and recognition, she found herself listening to a conversation that was going on at the table next to hers, her attention caught by the surprising rancor of its tone.
An older Alaskan, into what sounded like a well-worn gripe, was haranguing a younger woman with a pile of camera equipment, probably a photographer for some newspaper, who was forced to listen, clearly unable to insert more than a few words into pauses in the ongoing tirade.
“Nope. Not gonna get back into the racing game. Never again. Got rid of all but six of my dogs two years ago and that’s enough for anything I want to do, but it won’t ever be these big races.”
“But you even ran the Iditarod at least once, didn’t you, Cal?”
“Yeah, more than once, back when it was a race, not a commercial media event. The Quest, too—first three—same thing. That’s what burns me. After the Iditarod got so big and expensive—when they started using all the name boots and clothes made out of that whore-tex stuff to accommodate the demands of their big corporate sponsors, and got all involved in that uncalled-for gear and sleds that cost a fortune—a few people organized this race so it was tougher and supposed to be for real mushers. They kept the entry fee low enough so that Canadians, who don’t usually have that kind of money or sponsorship, and some of us Americans who could race with the best but finished in the middle of the pack out of the prize money, could still run it and not go bankrupt in the process. Now it’s the same old rotten story. If you can afford it with all the fancy trimmings, that’s fine—you’re in. Otherwise, you’re a second-class citizen and nobody gives a good goddamn. They’ve even raised the entry fee. Now it costs what we used to spend on the whole race.”
“But doesn’t it cost a lot more now to put this race on than it did in 1984?”
“Aw…well, maybe it does, Linda. So? I still think they forced out a lot of good racers—let it get out of hand. They forced me out, that’s for damn sure. I had to quit so my family would have food on the table. Guy shouldn’t have to make that kind of choice to do something as basic as driving dogs. Is that fair? Put that in your newspaper column.”
Cal? Jessie glanced over her shoulder to get a look at the musher with the bitter attitude, while searching her memory of the Iditarod for someone named Cal. He was a rugged-looking individual in jeans and a brown flannel shirt, his skin as tanned and creased as old leather. Dry skin and frostbite had always laid distinguishing fingerprints on the faces of those who ran dog teams in the far north, marks as unmistakable to other mushers as the scars from injuries sustained on hands and fingers numb and awkward from the cold. They willingly suffered the ravages of cold weather and resigned themselves to having character rather than handsomeness, counting it an acceptable exchange.
As the older man raised his head to look out the window at something in the parking lot, Jessie got a look at his profile—battered nose and sharp chin—and suddenly recognized him though they had never met. Cal “Hoo-Doo” Wilson. He had run the Iditarod back in the days when it was still building its reputation and strength—long before she had found her way into the racing circuit.
He, like others, had dropped out during its rise to fame and all but disappeared. Only their names remained on the old lists, like those who fought their way into the Klondike during the gold rush, the freight and mail carriers, and earliest of sled dog racers in Alaska—the Leonard Seppalas, Charlie Biedermans, Scotty Allans. The Mushers Hall of Fame was also filled with names that had a familiar ring in the history of the sport—Joe Reddington, George Attla, Dr. Roland Lombard, John “Iron Man” Johnson, Earl and Natalie Norris, Herbie Nayokpuk—but not the also-rans.
Wilson was correct in his assessment that the entry fees and the equipment and gear required to successfully run modern races had become too expensive for many. Sponsors tended to put their money on winners, or high finishers who might win, not on those who simply ran and had no chance of winning. The latter were the ones who, sooner or later, vanished from the scene, and some were more than a little bitter about it. Wilson’s argument was one Jessie had heard before, from more than one musher who no longer entered the big races, but his upset seemed more deep-seated and unsettling than most, more virulent in a way she couldn’t quite define.
He raised his right hand to rub his temple and she saw that it was missing the little finger.
“One of these days someone’s going to do something about it,” she heard him bluster. “There’s got to be some kind of equality and somebody’ll take just so much of it before they get m
ad enough to stand up for the rights of the little guy. And it may be sooner than you think. You just wait and see.”
That was an approach that Jessie hadn’t heard before—one that gave her an even more uneasy shiver. What could he mean? What could a little guy do? Racing had gone beyond doing anything, she decided before determinedly shrugging it away. There was no way to make the sport run backward in time. His anger was understandable, but he would simply have to learn to live with it—probably had, mostly. But once or twice a year, when the annual running of the famous races made the papers, he would be reminded and his resentment would flame up for a few days. The rest of the year it would be only a pilot light that claimed a hot spot in his memory now and then. The best thing to do would be nothing—to leave it alone until it faded into a repetitious garrulousness that expressed his disappointment but contained no fire.
But why did he come to watch, if it bothered him so much? No, she shook her head slightly, answering her own question, knowing that the love of sled dog racing would not easily disappear if she stopped running these events. It got into your blood and became part of how you defined yourself. Next month when the Iditarod started, she knew she would yearn to be out on the trail heading north to Nome, though forgoing the Iditarod was a choice she had made in order to try this new race.
When she glanced back once more, “Hoo-Doo” Wilson was looking straight at her, having caught the movement as she turned her head, and clearly knew she was listening to his complaints. He scowled resentfully and stared, as if daring her to butt in, or object to his point of view, though perhaps he had merely taken offense at the fact that she could afford to run the race and he could not. When she found her temper rising slightly in response to his uncalled-for rudeness, she knew it was time to leave.
Laying down her spoon by the empty bowl, she finished the last of her coffee and, slipping a tip for the waitress under the edge of the plate, made her way through the crowd into the cooler air outside, ready to get back on the trail and leave all such arguments behind. There might come a day when she could not afford to enter the races, either, but for now all she wanted was to get back on the trail as soon as possible, munch a cinnamon roll as she drove, and be glad she had arranged to meet her support team in Carmacks instead of Braeburn. She hoped for more peace and quiet at the next stop, which would give her dogs and herself a better quality of rest without interruptions.
