by Henry, Sue
Nevertheless, his angry words still bothered her and slipped back into her mind for the next few hours. She did not at all like the last threatening concept he had expressed, “One of these days someone’s going to do something about it…. Somebody’ll take just so much…before they get mad enough to stand up for the rights of the little guy. And it may be sooner than you think.”
It gave her a shudder. “Someone walking over your grave,” her grandmother had often said of the feeling. But chances were slim that it was anything but talk, she decided, and purposely began to think about something else. He was probably just getting it out of his system.
As she had pulled out of Braeburn, she had seen Debbie Todd working with her team and waved, but hadn’t stopped for conversation. The younger woman hadn’t seemed to notice the wave, possibly hadn’t seen it, for she seemed to have acquired an interested fan or reporter, a male figure in a green jacket patched on one sleeve with silver tape. Clearly not a musher, he had stood leaning on the fence with his back toward outgoing teams, his attention focused on Debbie as she repacked her sled. Remembering, Jessie smiled to herself and turned her attention toward crossing the highway and taking her team up the long hill from the lodge in the valley. She soon found herself heading east through another aspen forest.
The change in the route had not helped racing conditions on this section of trail, which had not been well cleared or worked. Very narrow and tight, it wound around trees and brush in steep short runs that yanked the sled back and forth dangerously; this kind of track made it very easy to damage sleds and injure dogs. Paws could drop into holes, spraining wrists or shoulders, sharp turns might pull a team dog that worked in the middle of the string into a stump or tree as the line tightened between leaders and sled.
Big timber had forced the trailbreakers to put in sharp turns and switchbacks that swung sharply around to almost meet themselves coming back and Jessie was soon thoroughly tired of wrestling the heavy sled to get through them. Hot and sweaty, her clothing grew damp and she hoped the temperature wouldn’t drop suddenly with the coming dark before they dried. She unzipped her red parka and tossed back its hood, cooling herself as much as possible.
Suddenly there was a huge downhill drop and things were a little smoother for a while, but the team was soon back into trees that seemed to go on and on through low rolling hills. Eventually, when her shoulders ached with the strain and she thought it would never end, she reached Coghlan Lake: first in the Chain of Lakes that ran south to north between Lake Laberge and Carmacks. Far to the west lay the highway she had crossed and the Yukon River swung to the east in a huge bend. Between them the trail snaked its way through the trees to rejoin the old route of the Yukon Quest and she dropped down onto the smoother lake ice with a deep sense of relief that she had neither damaged her sled nor any of the dogs, glad to have run this part in the daylight.
Ahead of her the race leaders would reach the Carmacks checkpoint, fifty miles beyond Braeburn, approximately thirty hours after leaving Whitehorse. In the clear, cold weather, temperatures hovering between five and ten degrees below zero, perfect for running dogs, they would cover the distance quickly.
She had packed extra wool socks, knowing that the weather near Whitehorse tended to be warmer than that of the rest of the race and that the lakes in the chain often had slushy, if not wet, surfaces. The temperature had dipped and stayed cool, however, and Coghlan Lake, first in the series, was solid and dry when her team dropped onto it after the harrowing wooded trip from Braeburn.
The Chain of Lakes country was beautiful to travel through. Between the lakes, the portages took Jessie and her team through heavily forested spaces where the trail once again wound back and forth among the trees, but the ice on the lakes themselves made for easier traveling. They were approximately a mile wide and six or seven miles long and she enjoyed gliding quickly over the hard, snowy surfaces. Large outcroppings of granite went down to the lakes between forested parts of the banks, and here and there small creeks ran into them, frozen now. There was overflow in some parts where the portages began or ended on the lakes, where the dogs’ feet found little purchase and both team and sled slid along the slippery spots. Thankfully those parts were short, but Jessie had learned to listen for the toenails of her dogs scratching at the ice, as a warning.
In the portages between lakes the trail writhed like a snake and she found herself growing tired of stepping on and off the brake. She tried to anticipate the turns and, though physically challenging, the trail was pleasant enough to travel through.
The team was as tired as she was, however, and not even Goofy was inclined to lope. By the time they reached Mandana Lake, last and northernmost in the chain, it was time to take a rest. It was a big lake, full of bays and inlets, with a small cabin on the east bank. She pulled up at the cabin, passing a musher who was in the process of feeding his team. Another team of dogs was resting beside the building, nose to tail in the cold, with no driver in sight. The purr of a generator broke the stillness.
As she stopped and set the hook, the door opened and a short, heavyset figure shrugging on a down parka stepped out, closed it quickly behind him, and approached Jessie’s sled.
“Hi, I’m Wayne, unofficial checker at this unofficial stop. How’s it going? Need a place to get some Z’s?”
“Yes,” she told him. “I definitely need to get over the last few miles.”
“Everybody says that. The part before the lakes is new trail that hasn’t been finished yet. It needs attention before somebody gets hurt. The portages between the lakes are older, but still take it out of you, don’t they?”
Jessie agreed and stepped gratefully off her sled. A break was definitely in order before running the last leg to Carmacks.
“There’s plenty of room for your dogs, some back there”—he pointed to the trees behind the cabin—“if you want to get a little away from teams coming through.”
Knowing it was good advice, she drove the team in that direction and found a good space to tie off her gang line, spacing the dogs out in a line under the trees.
In a little while, she had gone through the routine of caring for and feeding her dogs. All were uninjured and healthy, eating and drinking well. She pinched up the skin on the back of each dog’s neck and watched to see if it retained the pinch or quickly sprang back to its normal position. Retaining the pinch would tell her a dog was dehydrating and in need of fluids. All seemed fine, and soon lay down to sleep.
From the smoky scent of a wood fire that drifted from a metal chimney on the roof, she knew it would be warm inside, so as soon as she had taken care of the dogs and checked each one over thoroughly to make sure no hidden injuries had been suffered on the hazardous run, she headed for the cabin with her sleeping bag under her arm to warm it up before climbing in for her own nap.
A blast of heat from a wood-burning stove hit her as she went in and closed the door. It was so warm that she immediately peeled off her hat, gloves, and parka, before she sat down on a handmade bench to have her snack. Frozen soup, heavy with vegetables and beef, soon thawed in a pan on the cabin’s wood stove and went down well with some garlic bread, toasted close to the glowing stove. It all disappeared quickly, interspersed with two Snickers bars and some conversation with the “unofficial.”
He informed her that thirteen teams, counting the two outside, had already passed through on their way to Carmacks. She was now fourteenth. Though Jessie had not been keeping close count of those she passed and that passed her, she was pleased to note that she had moved up a couple of places. She had been glad to start in the front half of the forty-seven racers. The snow of the trail softened as hundreds of dog feet and sled runners passed over it, making it punchy and more difficult for those who followed. In below-zero temperatures, this was less of a problem, but it might warm up.
Finished eating, and yawning in the heat, she made more tea in her thermos, adding a generous amount of sugar—instant energy—and gave up the idea of s
leeping in such a small space. It was crowded with even three people in it, including a bearded musher who was snoring with his hat over his face on a bench across the room, and more were definitely on their way. When she heard the yips of a dog or two as another team pulled to a halt outside, she could tell it would be much better to retreat to her sled and snooze a little next to her dogs.
Four hours after she stopped, she had shut off the alarm, watered the dogs, packed up, and was ready to pull back onto the ice of Mandana Lake. From here, she would go all the way into Carmacks, where a two-hour layover would be mandatory and welcome. Stress as well as the poor trail had been catching up to her, but sleep had cured her attack of the yawns. The team was also more than ready to go, full of energy and sass, straining at their harnesses.
A question to the unofficial checker told her Debbie Todd had not stopped in or passed the cabin while she snoozed. Too bad, she thought. It would have been nice to see her and she couldn’t have been far behind. She would probably catch up at Carmacks or soon after. Maybe even Dawson, if Jessie’s team continued to make good time and stayed ahead.
“Okay, Tank. Take us out, boy. Good dogs.”
Stowing the snow hook, she let her dependable leader guide the string of fourteen back onto the trail, once again passing the unknown musher in the blue and yellow parka, who was bent over, working on his tug lines. Must be pacing me, she thought. Likes the speed of my team.
Some mushers found it easier to follow another that was traveling at a comfortable pace. Keeping them in sight was a good way to let someone else do the thinking and, if it was an experienced musher, make the decisions that can be more difficult for a rookie. It was also a good way to learn from someone who knew just when to run and when to rest.
She was not surprised, therefore, when she noticed that he had followed her out onto the ice of Mandana Lake and wasn’t making any attempt to catch up, seeming content to follow along at the same speed.
7
“The trail, packed down fully a foot by the traffic, was like a gutter. On either side spread the blanket of soft snow crystals. If a man turned into this in an endeavor to pass, his dogs would wallow perforce to their bellies and slow down to a snail’s pace. So the men lay close to their leaping sleds and waited.”
—Jack London, “A Daughter of the Aurora”
IT WAS DARK AGAIN ON MONDAY BY THE TIME JESSIE REACHED Carmacks, the first official checkpoint in the race.
The trail after the Chain of Lakes had not improved, it had been worse, and running it in the dark, which made it impossible to see beyond the reach of her headlamp, had added to the tension. Though parts of it were fairly smooth and fast, hard-packed where the trailbreakers had passed, to either side deep soft snow made for difficult going if the dogs for any reason moved from the track. The heavy sled would slide into the drifts and force a musher to struggle to get it back on the more solid surface.
The area was heavily forested with lots of willow and alder that had forced the trailbreakers on their snowmachines to set a track that took teams up and down banks, and back and forth among the trees in ninety-degree turns that made them feel as if they had been propelled from paddles—a section some racers wearily referred to as Pinball Alley.
If it had been wide enough for their machines, the trailbreakers had hoped it would be wide enough for the sleds that followed, though even without considering a line of dogs in front, the heavily weighted sleds were significantly longer than the machines. Mushers shook their heads and widened their eyes at the concept as they later recounted incidents of lines hung up in the willows, broken brakes, smashed brush bows, crushed stanchions and side rails, ripped sled bags, and sometimes bruised and battered dogs and drivers. Wild survival stories circulated among trail-shocked rookies, sweatily angry about shoving sleds, coming around tight turns to find themselves staring down the light from their headlamps on eighty to a hundred feet of Yukon River bank as they swung perilously past it.
“Saw more crossed stakes in a few miles than I thought were possible. Thought about stopping at a couple to add a skull to the crossbones.”
One Alaskan rookie racer, who slowly limped his team in to scratch from the race in Carmacks, related a collision that had wedged his sled so firmly between two small trees he was compelled to hack one of them down with an ax before he could remove the splintered remains and duct tape enough of them together to hold while he cautiously traversed the remaining fifteen miles. On arrival, he disgustedly tossed the worst parts into the first fire he came across, loaded his dogs, sled bag, and anything salvageable into his truck, and hit the road back to Whitehorse and points west.
Another caught a branch across the face that blacked an eye and broke his nose, but decided to continue at least as far as Dawson.
“I’ll just take it like I always do—one checkpoint at a time. If it gets so I can’t breathe, or hurts too bad, I’ll bag it there. I been damaged worse’n this a time or two and still made it to the finish line. Cold air’s a convenient ice pack for the swelling.”
After listening quietly to a few of the comments, a veteran dog driver leaned back in his chair and smiled serenely. “Aw,” he told the younger, less experienced group, “we haven’t even got to the good parts yet.”
Before reaching Carmacks the trail left the quick little downhills, tight turns, wicked brush, and thirty-foot-straight-down, and once again dropped onto the Yukon River. The switch onto ice was more than welcome to Jessie, though this ice was rougher than the smooth surface of the lakes she had crossed.
As the upper, narrower part of the Yukon freezes each fall, it does not do so all at once or over still water like the lakes. Ice forms slowly, creeping outward from the banks as the temperature fluctuates above and below freezing. Above freezing, what has already solidified breaks up easily into chunks and is conveyed by the still rapidly flowing water of a young river into piles of ice rubble, producing an irregular, uneven surface that is too rugged in places to be successfully traversed by dog sled and must be avoided. Between the chunks and blocks, there are often sections of open water—black steaming water—dangerous water. The trailbreakers attempt to pick the smoothest route through such sections, but at times they are forced up onto the banks in order to create a passable track away from these holes in the rough ice.
Hundreds of miles away, across Alaska, where the Iditarod is run, unlike the narrow upper part that grows slowly deeper and wider as it is joined by many other creeks and streams, the lower part of the more than fifteen-hundred-mile river is a mile wide and moves much more slowly. For this reason it freezes to a more smooth and level plane without forming an impassable obstacle course of random irregularities, blocks, and black-water holes.
It was just after midnight, after little more than an hour along the river’s ice and banks, having covered the last ten miles in the dark with no problems by carefully following the trail, when Jessie ran under the bridge and pulled up the bank into Carmacks, a town of nearly four hundred inhabitants, where for the first time she was required to go through the official checkin procedure.
“Hi, Jessie. Everything going okay?”
She did not recognize the checker, a Canadian wearing a Quest jacket and carrying a clipboard, but appreciated his cheerful welcome. Through several years of running the Iditarod she had become acquainted with many along the route who annually donated their time and effort, so it seemed odd that most of the volunteers in this race were strangers. She assisted him in locating all the required gear in her sled bag and signed the checkin sheet. He established that she had the packet of promotional material every driver carried for the race committee and took a quick look at her veterinary record book.
“You’re legal,” he told her with a grin, and waved a hand toward a building she could just see in the dark, though lights danced around it from people coming and going with headlamps and flashlights. “Find your dogs a space over there behind the community center and I’ll let the vet know you’re here. They
’re checking heart rates and will want to have a look at your guys as soon as they can. Your bags of food and straw for the dogs are right next door.”
She pulled away from the checkpoint and circled the Carmacks community building to find the holding area where she along with the rest of the racers would settle their dogs. She found a place for her team at one end of a group of five others, all resting quietly except one that had obviously come in just ahead of her, for the musher was still spreading straw for his dogs. Locating the three white poly-bags that bore her name, Jessie dragged them to a space beside her sled. Their contents would replenish the supplies she would carry in the sled for the next part of the run, including her own food, and she was ready for something new on the menu. Breaking open a bale of straw, she spread out a patch of it for each dog, providing insulation between dog and snow. While their food heated in the cooker, she took the booties off each one and carefully checked their feet, a never-ending concern that was more important than ever after the grueling run they had just completed. She rubbed foot ointment into many of their paws, but even Tux was doing well, his sore spot completely healed.
“Good feet,” she told him. “You have such good feet, Tux.”
As she was completing this chore with a sigh of relief, two veterinarians appeared out of the dark, headlamps bobbing, to check her team.
“Hey, Doc,” she greeted the taller of the two—her own vet from Palmer, who was head veterinarian for this race. “I wondered when and where I’d see you.”
