My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian

by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

  A few miles later, Chad dove down another side spur for no apparent reason. I didn’t dare stop him. Nothing is more frustrating than having a dog team quit on you. We were rolling. I didn’t care where. The trail lead to a subdivision road. The sled whipped sideways, careening off berms, as the dogs loped down the icy, hard-packed road. I was hoping we’d come across another trail, but the subdivision road spilled onto Chena Hot Springs, the busiest road in the entire area. We were within a few miles of home, and I considered making a dash for it. But it was icy and dark. The sight of an oncoming dog team might send a car or truck spinning into us. I could lose the entire team in an instant.

  Stomping the hook into the snow, I walked up front, gripped Chad by the collar, and turned the team around one more time. Chad shrank at my touch and wouldn’t even look at me. The other dogs weren’t much happier. On a whim, I tried Skidders in lead. The old stud immediately took advantage of his freedom to circle back and sniff the girls. Nice try. And for our next act.

  I bedded the team in a sheltered spot near the main road. Cyrus, an 18-month-old pup we’d just acquired from Rattles, was bewildered. He remained on his feet, eager to continue. Five minutes later, he was still whining anxiously. I knelt down in the snow and stroked his tight belly, settling him down at last.

  Turning off my headlamp, I was struck by the brilliant stars painting the sky. It was one of those nights when you see dazzling, ghostly depths, hinting at mysteries no mere human will ever grasp. Mushing forces you to spend time outside. That was one of the sport’s unexpectedly rewarding aspects. Whether it’s watching a woodpecker digging away on a trunk, or catching the sunset through trees ablaze with clumps of ice, some sort of rare experience is always waiting in Alaska’s outdoors.

  I was sitting there on the snow berm, marveling at the stars, when I heard Mowry’s truck chugging up the hill. The sports-writer was on his way home after a late shift. I flagged him down.

  The Coach was disgusted by my incompetence. “You’re just like Chad,” Mowry said, as we loaded the dogs into the truck.

  Revolting bloody soup filled our bathtub.

  “Christ,” I said, recoiling from the fermenting atrocity. “What the hell is it?”

  “I’m making honey balls. It’s one of Joe’s inventions.”

  Picture 100 pounds of raw chopped beef, 20 pounds of honey, 2 gallons of corn oil, 2 pounds of bonemeal, and other assorted Redington spices—slopped a foot deep.

  “I don’t know, Bri,” said Mowry, stirring the mess with a broken hockey stick. “It seems sort of gooey.”

  We’d already spent two days cutting meat and stuffing sacks with provisions for Mowry’s first Iditarod. He grabbed a handful and tried handpacking it into a baseball-sized glob. Meat goo oozed through Tim’s fingers. We scooped a couple bucketfuls and took them out on the porch. There, we dabbed globs of the bloody muck on the surface of flattened garbage bags, hoping it might freeze into something usable. By morning, the honey balls had changed. The Mowth and I now had a porch full of half-frozen cow pies, run together like cookies baked too close on the sheet.

  “I have a lot of bucks tied up in this shit, and I don’t think it’s supposed to look like this,” said Mowry, his eyes bloodshot and his dirty blond hair sticking from his head like loose straw.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “and our tub is still full of it.”

  There is, apparently, more than one kind of honey. Redington’s recipe called for thick granular honey, not the syrupy brew my roommate had used. The Mowth’s dogs did without honey balls that year. And he cleaned the tub. There’s a limit to friendship.

  Recalling the chaos of Mowry’s first big race, I allotted four full days to assemble my own Iditarod food drop. It wasn’t enough.

  The first setback occurred when I had to unpack twenty-six checkpoints’ worth of fish. I’d forgotten to paint my name on the sacks. It was probably just paranoia, but I had been scared the fish might become contaminated in the labeling process. So, dumping the fish, I spread out the sacks in our driveway, thinking I could knock out the job using spray paint and a stencil. It was 40 below, and the paint nozzle froze, forcing me to shift operations inside our cramped A-frame. Space constraints there limited me to painting two bags at a time. And there was no damn room for anything to dry. The quick task ate up three hours.

  Two friends from the paper, Mary Beth and Anna, were in charge of my personal food. They came up with a delicious assortment of precooked meals, breads, brownies, and cookies, but it took precious hours to assemble the packets. Anna’s efforts, cooking dozens of steaks and pork chops, fell behind when her propane stove quit.

  For heating water out on the trail, I planned to use a fancy cooker borrowed from another local musher. But when I tested it against the Coach’s battered old unit, Mowry’s cooker boiled water in about 25 minutes, or roughly 30 percent quicker, despite the fact that it used toilet paper for a wick. Of course, I wanted that faster heating unit, and that meant another run to town for 50 more rolls of toilet paper.

  The Coach concentrated on the real athletes, leaving me to deal with the food drop—and with Rattles, a strutting peacock of a dog man with a handlebar mustache, who’d become a constant presence as the race drew near.

  Mike “Rattles” Kramer had earned his nickname working a jackhammer in a hard rock mine. That was before he took up dogs and became a boisterous fixture in the Two Rivers mushing scene. Now he bounced between washing dishes and seasonal farm or construction work. He, his new wife, and their infant son were among the 20 percent of Fairbanks-area residents who lacked running water at home. He didn’t seem to mind hauling around water jugs; it provided a good excuse for visiting the neighbors and, perhaps, peddling a few eggs gathered from his chickens.

  I enjoyed Mowth’s company as long as he didn’t get started talking about the Feds, the gold standard, or the threats to personal liberty posed by Social Security numbers. Rattles knew a lot of tricks about tuning snowmachines or rigging sled lines. In his excitement about the race, however, the old musher was getting on my nerves, following me around, but lifting nary a finger to help as he relived his own doggy deeds.

  “Rattles,” I cried at last, “if you’re not going to help, get the hell out of here.”

  The old musher chuckled, amused by my jitters.

  I hit the panic button with 36 hours remaining until supplies were due at Iditarod’s Fairbanks collection drop center. I called Anna, my photographer friend Nora, Sam the editor, Wilda and her husband, Charlie, everyone I knew—begging for help. Sunday, the yard was full of helpers bagging toilet paper, fish, spare underwear, batteries, headlamp bulbs, and runner plastic.

  Wilda dragged along her dad, who was visiting from Kentucky. He pitched right in, chopping meat with an axe. Our whole operation fascinated him: the dogs watching from the woods; the sleds leaning on the shed; even the cabin interior, strewn with harnesses, lines, and cold-weather gear. The day spent helping an Iditarod musher became the highlight of his Alaska trip.

  By nightfall, the work party had filled 60 sacks, each color-coded for one of the 21 checkpoints where we mushers could expect to find our provisions waiting. The next day friends and I delivered the sacks to a local freight company that was assisting with the race. My contributions were weighed, sorted, and added to the pallets bound for various checkpoints. Freight handlers waited until the pallet loads reached about 6 feet tall, then stepped forward to seal them with giant rolls of plastic wrap. Fairbanks handled only a third of this year’s Iditarod field, yet the sheer tonnage was immense. My team’s load alone weighed 2,094 pounds and cost me $523 to ship.

  Rounding a turn, I saw a moose on the river ahead. It was a tall bull, plunging through deep snow. The dogs quickened their trot as they caught sight of him. I lifted my foot off the brake, letting the dogs break into a free lope. It was unlikely the moose would change direction and bother us, but you never knew. Moose are unpredictable as hell.

  I didn’t want any surprises to m
ar this gorgeous day. It was 15 below, just cold enough to envelop the team in a flowing fog of exertion. The sun hung low over the river, creating orange streamers between the blue trees. Seven dogs were pulling my sled. The sunlight set their breath ablaze, wrapping the team in a warm glow.

  As we neared the river, the trail rose and fell along a series of man-sized dips. Topping one of the rises, I saw a dark mound ahead. The trail dropped again before I could make it out. Something odd was coming up. I braced as the sled climbed another slight hill. Hair, I could see hair. A moose. Oh God.

  Then I realized it was dead.

  The dogs slowed to sniff the carcass. “All right! All right!” I cried, forestalling any thoughts of stopping. Where there’s one, there are often others.

  “A person’s crazy to go out without a gun,” Rattles had said. “With all this snow, those moose are desperate. They won’t give up the trail.”

  I didn’t even own a gun, so I was a real Alaskan oddity. I’d arranged to borrow Cyndi’s .357-caliber pistol for the race. The gun was waiting for me 360 miles south. Here in town, Madman had offered me his old rifle—if I ever got around to picking it up. I’d been trusting luck to dodge the sort of encounter that postponed Susan Butcher’s first appearance in the Iditarod winner’s circle.

  1985 was supposed to be Susan’s year. No woman had ever won Redington’s Great Race, but Butcher had placed second in two of the three previous years, and her 17-dog team led the race crossing the Big Su. Traveling through a spruce thicket soon afterward, Butcher and her dogs came upon a large cow moose blocking their path. The musher threw her sled over and braced for the moose’s charge, which, experience told her, would carry the brute through the team. But this angry cow was far more destructive. Wading into the middle of the team, the moose reared on its hind legs and began stomping and kicking.

  The carnage lasted for about 20 minutes until fellow racer Dewey Halverson mushed to the rescue. He emptied his .44-caliber special into the enraged moose, which continued kicking dogs until the last bullet brought it down. Susan’s dog Johnny was dead. Another dog named Hyde died after five hours on the operating table. Two more needed surgery, and thirteen others were injured. The distraught Butcher scratched, clearing the way for Libby Riddles’ march to glory.

  This year Alaska’s interior was reeling from an invasion of the long-legged brutes. Starving, irritable from battling the unusually deep snow, moose were in no mood to mingle peacefully. Finding it easier going on packed trails, roads, and railroad tracks, many refused to surrender their right of way to anything, including trains. The carnage was particularly gruesome along the northern railroad corridor. It got so bad that the Alaska Railroad provided counseling for engineers freaked by the nightly gore. At least locomotive drivers knew they would come out on top. Moose held the advantage over unarmed mushers.

  Dave Dalton, a fellow Fairbanks musher, could testify to that. A few miles after leaving his kennel, his Dalton Gang team had met an angry moose head-on. The moose’s charge didn’t do any damage, but it was likely to get a second shot. The team had no other route home. Dalton had his pistol ready on the return trip. Sure enough, the moose was waiting. It flared its nose and barreled into the team. Taking aim, Dalton squeezed the trigger.

  The gun jammed.

  The moose crashed into the sled, sending the musher flying. The Gang made a clean getaway. Dave’s situation remained ticklish. He was chest-deep in snow, looking upward at a huge bull that was snorting with anger.

  Very, very carefully Dalton backed away from the trail, watching the moose the whole way. When he was safely out of view, he slowly circled around the trail’s new owner and walked home. He found the Dalton Gang waiting for him there.

  I’d had my own creepy moments—nights when the dogs’ ears had suddenly perked up and the headlamp had revealed fresh tracks ahead. So far, today’s carcass was the only moose we’d actually touched. Close enough. I was a fool for putting off getting the gun from Madman.

  Leaving the river behind, I relaxed. That dead moose was miles behind us. The trail broke into the open, crossing several fields, then turned down a narrow tree-lined tunnel. Midway down that shaded passage, like apparitions, two menacing brown shapes rose from the snow ahead. It was a large cow and her calf. They blocked our path, only 15 yards ahead. The dogs were wild to chase them. I dug in with the brake, but the soft, deep snow offered almost nothing to grip. It was a struggle holding them back. No way could I secure the sled and turn the team around.

  The cow moose was eager to avoid us. She lurched into the woods, but the calf wouldn’t follow. It continued stumbling down the center of the trail, breaking through the crust with its spindly legs. The cow took a parallel course, plowing a new path through the deep snow blanketing the woods.

  The dogs clawed steadily forward. It was all I could do to maintain a gap. The trail finally emerged onto a plowed road. The moose scrambled to get away. I let off the brake, and we chased them until they ran back into the woods. Another crisis, passed.

  Mowry and I dropped by Madman’s the next day. We left toting a .306-caliber rifle.

  Training an Iditarod team made a mess of my working life. At top speed my dogs covered, maybe, 10-12 miles an hour. Add in the time required to get the team ready, then put them away, and it took as long as four hours to complete a 20-mile training run. Try to take a team 50 miles, and a whole day would be shot.

  My bosses at the paper were supportive. Sam, the city editor, had grown up with a dog team. He knew what I was talking about when I’d show up an hour late, explaining that Rainy had got loose again and danced, just out of reach, for 45 minutes. But even Sam failed to grasp my overall predicament. Owning a recreational dog team didn’t compare with preparing for the Iditarod.

  Take the meat shipment from Montana. For nearly a week, Mowry and I were on call, waiting for word from Rick Armstrong, the organizer of Two Rivers’ bulk delivery. The day Tim fled east for the holidays, I found a message waiting on my return from the airport. Naturally, the damn delivery truck was finally here. And I was already late to work.

  Rushing over to the pickup site, I found Joe Garnie and half a dozen other mushers waiting by the semi in their empty pickups. Garnie was from Teller, an Inupiat village northeast of Nome. He’d recently moved to the Interior.

  Like the knuckle hop, ear pull, and other traditional contests held at the annual World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, sled-dog racing has long been a source of friendly rivalry among Alaska’s regional and ethnic communities. Athabaskan mushers from the Interior river villages held the edge during the early 1970s, dominating the established sprint circuit and Redington’s new race to Nome. Advances in nutrition and conditioning strategies helped mushers such as Rick Swenson and Susan Butcher eventually outdistance the Athabaskan drivers, but the kennel bloodlines of most champions were still rooted in the Indian villages.

  Like other racers from the Seward Peninsula, Garnie’s dogs excelled in the coastal wind, as his former partner Libby Riddles proved with a famous charge into a storm. Joe had come within an hour of winning the Iditarod himself, something no Eskimo musher had ever done. This year he hoped the change of scenery and the cheap dog food available in the Interior would enable him to correct that previous affront.

  Armstrong was finishing his paperwork with Doug Swingley, our Montana meat supplier. Thirty minutes stretched to an hour. I could imagine the questions starting to circulate in the newsroom. “So, any bets on what time Brian will make it in?” But there was nothing to be done. I had $1,866 of meat in that truck: 3,000 pounds of ground beef, 900 pounds of liver, and 600 pounds of lamb.

  Deadline Dog Farm’s meat was in the very front of the truck, so I had to help clear out everybody else’s load before I could begin collecting mine. Stacks and stacks of frozen 50-pound blocks were passed out, forming new piles in the waiting pickups. Minutes ticked away, and I fought the urge to scream.

  I finally rolled into work four hours late and physically d
estroyed. I was exhausted and close to the breaking point, but luckily nobody said a word, and it was a quiet shift. All I had to do was swing by the cop shops, write up the crime blotter, and slap together a graph on historic weather records. Another day in training.

  By January the time demands of my race preparations were out of control. Dan Joling, the managing editor, agreed to let me cut back to contributing a single weekly column for the duration. The column, “Off to the Races,” described what it was like to be a rookie preparing for Alaska’s Great Race. The Associated Press distributed a condensed version statewide. Of course, my pay dropped accordingly, but time was the currency that mattered at this point.

  One day in mid-February, less than three weeks before the race, I found a message waiting at the News-Miner. Virginia, the newspaper’s business manager, wanted to see me. There had been a mistake, she said. As a part-time employee, I no longer qualified for free health insurance. To maintain my medical coverage, I’d have to come up with several hundred dollars in premiums.

  “Cancel it,” I said.

  I wasn’t the only one putting dogs ahead of the job.

  A year before, Jon Terhune, an abrasive oil company machinist from Soldotna, had approached his plant manager at Unocal Chemicals. Advising the manager of his wish to enter the next Iditarod, Terhune asked what could be done. A month of unpaid leave was subsequently approved, so long as the machinist took the time off in conjunction with his vacation. In July, on the first day entries were accepted, Terhune signed up, becoming the twenty-fourth musher on the list.

  The former army paratrooper was a dour man, with little patience for fools. One day in 1969, Jon, his first wife, Nancy, and their daughter, Heidi, had thrown everything they owned in the family’s station wagon and left the East Coast for good. Traveling westbound out of Albany, they saw cars on the other side of the highway backed up three lanes deep. The Terhunes learned from the radio that the traffic was caused by people heading to a big music festival. Nancy wanted to turn around and join the procession to Woodstock.