My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian

by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

  Morning brought the light Peele wanted. It also brought wind, and the team smacked into drifts soon after leaving Iditarod. Seeking a boost, Peele dug out his personal stash of caffeine tablets. “This is worth one or two cups of coffee,” the musher told himself, swallowing the first pill.

  Radio operator Rich Runyan was supposed to close down the checkpoint at Iditarod, then follow the last team over to Shageluk on a snowmachine, towing a sled packed with his electronic gear. He was going to accompany the rear teams through to Unalakleet, a distance of about 350 miles.

  The plan had sounded reasonable back at race headquarters. The radio operator from Anchorage hadn’t given it much thought while mushers were still on the way to his remote post. His attitude changed after Peele had mushed away Wednesday morning. Listening to the wind, Runyan felt growing flickers of dread. He was alone. Left behind out in the wilderness. Runyan knew his fears were foolish. If he needed to, for any reason, he could fire up his generator-powered radio and talk to the world. This knowledge wasn’t enough to dispel the camp’s eerie silence, or the whispers from the dark corners of his mind.

  By late afternoon, the demons were gaining strength, adding urgency to the volunteer’s packing. He keyed the big snowmachine to life. After an agonizing second, the engine caught. Rich Runyan savored that beautiful roar. His confidence surged as he quickly overtook Peele a few miles from the checkpoint. Though his team was crawling, Peele appeared in reasonably good spirits, or so it seemed to Runyan, who gladly accepted the musher’s offer of fruit juice. After a brief pause, the radio operator bid the musher and his dogs good-bye and took off, his big snowmachine cutting a new trail through the mounting drifts.

  During his second trip up McKinley, nearly a decade before, Peele had frozen his hands so badly that several fingers had turned black. None had to be amputated, but he lost a good deal of feeling, and his hands remained more sensitive to cold weather. Peele wasn’t thinking clearly in the hours after Runyan left him. Fatigue and determination combined to induce a sort of madness in the musher. Battling to stay awake, he kept popping caffeine pills. And the musher took off his gloves, figuring that the pain of gripping his icy handlebar would keep him alert.

  In the front of the pack, Susan Butcher weighed the risk. A ground blizzard was raging over the ice ahead. These were extreme, life-threatening conditions. Sixty-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures to 30 below combined to produce a wind-chill factor in the 100-below-zero range. Rather than attempt the exposed 40-mile crossing to Koyuk, Iditarod’s leader took refuge in a shelter cabin below Lonely Hill, the last finger of land overlooking Norton Bay.

  Butcher had mushed from Shaktoolik holding a 45-minute lead over Swenson. He, Osmar, Buser, and Barve caught her at a shelter cabin, where she spent six hours waiting for the wind to drop.

  King and Jonrowe left Shaktoolik together, about four and a half hours after Butcher. The storm, moving inland, made for slow going. The pair hadn’t got far before they were overtaken by Joe Runyan, whose swift, strong dogs were refreshed after a long rest. Jeff and Dee Dee spurred their teams to chase the tall musher from Nenana, but his team was faster and vanished into the swirling tempest. The storm intensified, at last forcing the pair to turn back.

  Joe Runyan spied the camping teams as he approached the shelter cabin at Lonely Hill just before dark. If I can slip by here, he thought, I just might take it. He quietly crept past. For a moment, the wily former champion thought that he might actually escape unnoticed, but then he saw someone—probably from a news agency—running for the cabin door.

  Out on the exposed ice, Runyan’s breakaway was hampered when his headlamp blinked out. The musher shed his gloves to fix it. Wind instantly burned his moist bare hands. He knew he had to watch it or he’d get frostnipped. Cursing himself for such unprofessional carelessness, Joe put his gloves back on and dug out a spare headlamp. He beat the others to Koyuk, but Joe Runyan’s appetite for risk was tempered by that close call.

  Nature was keeping the game close. But Susan’s team remained unquestionably the strongest. The Butch led the pack out of Koyuk at 7:30 A.M. on Wednesday.

  The storm rolled backward along the Iditarod Trail. John Barron left Unalakleet in eighteenth place, behind the same pair of young leaders who had guided his team to victory in the balmy Klondike 200. In the village whose Eskimo name means “where the east wind blows,” his leaders were overmatched. Frightened by the gale, they swung his team back toward the shelter of the village, spinning his sled in a circle. Barron’s fourteenth Iditarod ended with that futile dance in the wind, less than 300 miles from Nome. This was his best dog team ever, but the dogs’ coats were just too thin for a storm like this.

  Barron grew protective when a reporter asked for the names of his reluctant lead dogs. “I don’t want to say their names,” he said. “Put John Barron. It’s John Barron’s fault. Dogs don’t make mistakes. The dogs don’t quit. It’s always the musher. If there’s a problem, it’s me.”

  The radio operator found Garth still wrapped in his sleeping bag. The Englishman hadn’t budged since Lee had passed the previous day. Garth had been stuck in the same spot more than 36 hours and accepted that his race was finished.

  The Englishman assured Rich Runyan that he wasn’t in any immediate danger of dying. But he was critically low on dog food, and his team still wouldn’t budge. A previous snowmachiner had promised to send back a rescue party from Shageluk. Garth asked Runyan to make sure that the word got through.

  The radio operator pulled back on the throttle and shot into the darkness. He was tired and hungry, but Shageluk couldn’t be more than a few hours away.

  It was blowing in the hills, covering the trail with loose snow. Runyan repeatedly strayed off course. Each time he got lost, he circled in a widening arc until he found new markers or some sign of the packed trail. It was hard work. The radio operator grew sweaty muscling his big machine through the soft snow. But he was, at least, making progress. Then he smacked a deep, soft drift, firmly planting the nose of the big machine in the snow. The radio operator settled down to await the rescue party Garth had summoned earlier.

  Wind, snow, more wind, Peele felt that he was holding his own—until the weather went completely crazy. Rain suddenly poured from the sky. It lasted about 30 seconds, ending as the temperature dive-bombed from zero to 20 below in the time it takes to flip a coin.

  Peele was dripping wet, exhausted, and feeling feverish—not to mention cold. His hands were stiff. He couldn’t make them work. He was beaten, temporarily at least, and tried to unzip his sled bag, intending to climb inside and warm himself. The zipper was jammed with ice. The musher realized he had to get out of the wind. The only shelter available was the sled itself. Huddling on the sled’s lee side, Peele wondered if he was going to die. Getting out the tape recorder he carried in his suit, Bill Peele recorded a message to his wife.

  “C’mon, Barry, it’s only eighteen miles,” I told Lee. “Come with us.”

  Lee could only wish. He knew too much about sled dogs to risk pushing his exhausted, dehydrated bunch any farther. Daily and I weren’t planning to leave Grayling before morning. Lee figured that gave him time to rejoin us for the long Yukon passage. Daily wanted to stay longer, but felt that he had better run for it while there was a strong team ahead. He’d lost all faith in Bogus.

  “Can I follow you?” he asked me. “The only way I’ll get to Nome is behind you.”

  The temperature was above zero. Cool, but nice. The gray light was dimming as Barry pulled Rainy and Harley by the neck line toward the street.

  “It’s supposed to be blowin’ pretty hard out on the river,” a villager said, while Lee waved good-bye to us.

  I was wearing the snowmachine suit over my bibs and about three inches of inner vests and pile garments. The warm layering was standard procedure by now. My parka remained stowed in the sled. The Burn was the only place I’d needed the heavy coat. Leaving Anvik, which was nestled between sheltering hills, the
re didn’t appear to be any cause for taking unusual precautions. Night was approaching, but I didn’t notice so much as a breeze.

  It was as if the Yukon sensed our presence. The wind rose like an angry grizzly and howled in our faces. Harley and Rainy dropped their ears and looked for a place to escape. The entire team sagged under the wind’s terrific onslaught. My dogs were on the verge of curling into balls. Running to the head of the team, I threw Harley, then Rainy, into the wind.

  Steeled by my demands, Harley clawed forward on the rock-hard snow, dragging along his more reluctant comrades. Rainy did her part as well, nudging the big dog toward the faint marks left by previous teams. The short 18-mile run became a hellish five-hour march. When I wasn’t terrified by the weather, I was appalled by Skidders’s torturous limp. The old dog never let up for an instant, pulling like a champion, but at what cost?

  At least it wasn’t snowing, or the trail would have vanished in drifts. And, thank God, it wasn’t any colder. Smarting from windburn, I parked my team across from the Grayling community hall. Daily skidded to a stop close by and staggered from his sled. It was near midnight. There was plenty of straw from the earlier teams. My dogs sniffed through it, pawing together satisfactory nests, then plunked down. In seconds, most were calmly licking their paws. I was reeling myself. That tiny chunk of the Yukon had beat us up, and we faced 130 more miles on that river. The thought made me shudder.

  The only Iditarod team in the village belonged to Doc. Williams and Lenthar had apparently left Grayling at roughly the same time that we had pulled out of Anvik. Well, let them go. I’d seen all I wanted of the river that night.

  Cooley was ensconced on the carpet of the local kindergarten classroom, one of his perks as an Iditarod official. He was disappointed to hear that Lee had stayed behind. The three of us were rooting for Barry to catch up, but we knew his chances were slim against that wind.

  I dragged Doc outside to examine Skidders. Afterward, the veterinarian advised me that the veteran sled dog’s minor toe-sprain wasn’t necessarily cause to drop him. “Maybe so, but it’s killing me to watch him.” I petted him as he licked that sore foot. “You got me to the Yukon old man, I think you deserve a vacation.” I resolved to ship Skidders home in the morning.

  Back in the community hall, Daily stoked the barrel stove until the room resembled a dry sauna. Gear steamed from the rafters. I stretched out on a bench table and soaked in the heat, trying to absorb every possible calorie before our next scheduled bout with the Yukon.

  Daily had the blues. He wasn’t sure he could face that wind again. He considered scratching. Why be macho about it? He and Fidaa could be in Hawaii right now. With such thoughts on his mind, Tom went out to check on his dogs. He struck up a conversation with a local musher, an Athabaskan who bragged he’d been raised on a dog sled. The Indian was a bitter man. He’d dreamed of running the Iditarod himself, but he said he couldn’t find sponsors.

  Daily was convinced that the villager was wrong. Any musher supporting a twenty-dog kennel ought to be able to scrape together the extra cash to run the Iditarod. Get that race experience, he told the man, and then shop for sponsors. The villager wouldn’t listen. He wasn’t interested in merely running the race. He planned to be a contender. Money was all he needed, the villager was sure of that.

  Daily left the musher stewing in his bitterness. The conversation reminded Tom how lucky he was. Bring on the Yukon, Hawaii could wait.

  Two players were left in the Great Game.

  As the defending champ prepared to leave Elim, another dog team was visible on the horizon. Butcher told KTUU’s television crew that she hoped it was Swenson. “I think it would be nice. We’re both going for our fifth. Why should I race against Runyan? I don’t respect him the way I respect Swenson. It’s fun to see Rick coming strong.”

  The odds favored Susan. Rick hadn’t won the race since 1982. That was a different era, one in which the Iditarod’s champ could confidently boast to Shelley Gill that he would eat his sneakers if a woman ever won the race. But in this year’s race Swennie was fighting to the last mile. He was the driver on the horizon at Elim. He pushed through the checkpoint there without stopping and, 26 miles later in Golovin, he was still tracking the Butch like a crazed wolf stalking a polar bear.

  For seven years running, the Iditarod had been won by the first musher into White Mountain, where teams rested a mandatory six hours before sprinting for the finish line, 77 miles ahead. Butcher was poised to make it eight straight as she checked in at 7:30 P.M. on Wednesday night.

  Her last challenger, losing ground, didn’t reach White Mountain until 8:38 P.M. Asked by a TV crew if he still had a chance, Rick Swenson snorted with disgust. “You guys have got to be realistic,” he said. “Christsake, you got a team that’s way stronger than mine, and I’m an hour behind her. Only a lightning bolt or something is going to allow me to catch her.”

  Butcher, camped nearby, radiated confidence as she evaluated her team against the competition. “I’m faster and I’m stronger,” she said. “The dogs are happy. They love the coast.”

  Midnight was approaching in Anvik. Leaving the village, Barry Lee’s dogs trotted along briskly. They were refreshed by their five-hour rest. It was the musher who wasn’t ready for the raging wind that met his team on the dark river. Barry’s cheap parka wasn’t the greatest. And the blowing powder reduced visibility to almost nothing. The trail would sure be easier to find in the morning. That decided it. Awarding this round to the Yukon, Lee returned to Anvik.

  To us, waiting in Grayling, the news of Barry’s retreat seemed like a death knell to his chances. The gap was only 18 miles, but we couldn’t risk further delay. Outside, a blizzard was forming.

  “Are you absolutely sure about this, Doc?” I shouted, mushing from the village.

  The wolf pack was breaking trail. Daily’s team held the rear. My dogs were sandwiched in the middle. There was no wind, no sound, just torrents of fat flakes cascading from above, so thick I could hardly breathe.

  Cooley laughed. “Oh yeah,” he said. “We can handle it.” His leaders were amazing. “Gee, haw, gee, gee. That’s right. Go ahead.” Cooley directed the wolf pack marker by marker, and our three teams crawled ever deeper into a featureless white sea.

  An hour out of Grayling, the snowfall was replaced by a series of wind storms. The sky would darken ahead. A churning white wall would then roll down the river and envelop us, and we couldn’t see past the wheel dogs. As quickly as they came, the storms passed on. In the breaks between them, the Yukon stretched before us, a massive alley through the wilderness.

  We traveled miles without seeing official trail markers. We relied on cut branches thrust into the snow with unnatural regularity. We guessed that snowmachiners had left these crude guideposts for the same purpose. There was no trail here. If one ever existed on this seldom-traveled stretch of the Yukon, it was forever lost now, buried by two to three feet of powder.

  Daily had an old leader named Diamond. The dog was painfully slow and hadn’t been much use on good trails, but he took orders with the precision of a marine—the perfect recommendation for this job. So Tom and Cooley rotated the point position. Mushing through the waves of changing weather and beautifully strange light, Tom felt cleansed of his recent blues. Thanks to Diamond, he had something to contribute in this stormy dimension.

  It was my turn to feel useless. Neither Rainy nor Harley was much good as a command leader where trails weren’t apparent. If I were on my own, it would have been snowshoe time. Rat was usually a good chaser. I put her in lead with Chad to give Rainy and Harley a break. It was warm, at least zero under a clearing bright sky. Cooley accelerated nearing a bend in the river, taking advantage of snow hardened by the wind. Rat kept bumping into Chad. He abruptly sat down.

  Concealing my worry, I played with Chad until he decided to humor me. I moved down the line, petting heads and massaging necks until everybody was happy. “All right!” I yelled, catching the sled as it pa
ssed.

  Both Daily and Cooley had vanished around the curve. As far as Rat was concerned, that canceled the chase. She quit next.

  Watching the other teams pull away, I had almost cried out, “Wait, don’t leave me!” Pride held my tongue, and now Tom and Doc were gone. I was alone on the Yukon fearing the arrival of another storm. Resisting panic, I calmly placed Rainy and Harley in lead. “All right.” The team promptly lurched forward.

  Rounding the bend I scanned the horizon. Tom and Doc looked like tiny centipedes far ahead. Again, I battled panic. Please, PLEASE let me catch them. It took us an hour to close the gap. And when I finally approached the others, something strange was afoot. Neither of the teams was moving.

  Drawing closer, I made out two sleds, two dog teams, and no mushers. Coasting to a stop, I jammed the hook down and trudged to the closest sled. Doc was on his back, lying on his sled bag. Snoring in the midafternoon sun.

  Barry Lee was warned before he left Grayling, where he had refueled the team during a four-hour stop. “There’s decent trail for about ten miles, after that—nothing,” said the checker, who’d surveyed the river on a snowmachine earlier that morning.

  “Well, I got the snowshoes, and I gotta go,” said Lee, feeling well rested and determined.

  Two hours later, his confidence was ebbing. The trail ahead was swamped under two feet or more of loose snow. Lee strapped on his snowshoes. They were borrowed, of course, and he’d never tried them on. The homemade bindings were incorrectly attached. Each time he applied weight, the shoes nosed downward. Lee wore himself out trying to use them. After struggling for several hours, he returned to Grayling to regroup before trying again.

  Daylight was going. Tom suggested we start looking for a sheltered camp. Doc wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to reach Blackburn’s cabin, an unofficial rest cabin, which couldn’t be more than ten miles ahead.