My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian

by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue

  Standing on the runners, I rezipped my suit, buttoning the top button. I adjusted my layered face masks, gloves, and mitts, and then—lacking any other good excuse for delay—pulled the hook.

  “All right! Rainy, Harley. All right! Let’s Go!”

  Dodge Corporation was bankrolling a toll-free Iditarod information line. Jeff Greenwald, an old buddy, dialed the 800 number several times a day to track my progress from his home in San Francisco. Information was sketchy regarding teams like mine, traveling far behind the leaders. Making matters worse, the folks answering Dodge’s phone knew next to nothing about mushing. They were merely reading statistics faxed from Iditarod headquarters.

  One of the numbers readily available was the size of each musher’s team. Jeff noticed early on that my dog team was steadily shrinking. Their numbers had dropped from 17 to 15 dogs when I had left Gnat and Daphne in Skwentna. He saw I was down to 14 after Grayling, where I had left Skidders to recuperate; and that I had just 13 dogs upon leaving Kaltag, where I had dumped Denali.

  The statistics didn’t explain that dropped dogs were placed in the care of checkers and veterinarians, or the effort devoted to evacuating them via Iditarod’s volunteer air force. The numbers didn’t hint at the attention dropped dogs received from prisoners at a state corrections facility near Anchorage, where the dogs were held for pickup by designated handlers.

  Jeff had no way of knowing that most of my dropped dogs were already lounging in the woods at Cyndi’s house in Wasilla, and that—except for Skidders, with his bandaged rear paw—there wasn’t anything wrong with them. All Jeff knew was that my dog team, like most in the race, was getting smaller. He asked the people answering Iditarod’s toll-free phone what was happening.

  “Gee, I don’t know,” Jeff was told. “A lot of people ask about that. The dogs must be dying in those bad storms.”

  “Man,” Jeff whispered, hanging up the phone, “it must be a bummer for Brian—having all those dogs die!”

  Six dogs did die over the course of the race. Two dogs in Adkins’s team died of exposure while he was saving Whittemore’s life out on the ice. Mackey had a dog drop dead of heart failure outside McGrath. Suter had a poodle die of exposure in a storm near Unalakleet and had to drop the rest of his shivering poodle victims before continuing on, pulled by the team’s true sled dogs. More violent were the deaths of two dogs and the injuries to two others in Rollin Westrum’s team.

  Westrum was nearing White Mountain, about 85 miles from the finish line, when his team was illuminated in the glaring headlight of a snowmachine.

  “It came head-on,” the musher told reporters later. “I thought it was all over. It hit the dogs and then glanced off to one side and went right by. It sounded like he had the throttle wide open. He didn’t even slow down.”

  The collision left Westrum cradling a dog named Jeff, who was crippled, and weeping over the loss of four-year-old Ace and eight-year-old Bandit, his favorite lead dog.

  The grim toll should be placed in perspective. Approximately 1,400 dogs chased mine out of Anchorage. The fallen six were magnificent athletes. They died giving all—too much, perhaps—pulling a sled with their teammates, as breeding and training inspired them to do.

  We began descending into a ground blizzard less than a mile out from Unalakleet. So this was the haze I had noticed in the distance. It started with a flowing white carpet, which broke into streamers on contact with the paws of the dogs in front. The carpet steadily swelled to a foot deep, creating an illusion of a chain of disembodied heads floating on the gang line ahead. I could only guess what lay concealed in the approaching white tide. It kept rising until it swallowed the dogs, the sled and, finally, me.

  We weren’t in any immediate danger of charging off a cliff. Not crossing these flats. I knew it couldn’t be more than a few miles to the clear area I spotted near the hills. It wasn’t even that cold. But my headlamp was useless in this soup. And where were the markers?

  The wind was kicking up all kinds of debris: snow, chunks of ice—I even tasted gravel on my lips. I had to content myself with glimpses of the leaders. But I noticed they were acting a little odd. Rainy’s ears were up, but the bossy little lesbian looked unusually tentative. Damned if Harley wasn’t leading her for once.

  The team suddenly bunched in a mass tangle. Harley was to blame. The big dog had stopped, with his nose thrust into a half-buried plastic bag, ignoring the other dogs piling into him. As I ran up front, Harley wrenched the bag loose and furiously shook it in his teeth. The plastic tore as I snatched the bag away, spilling empty cans, used coffee grounds, and other trash.

  Pig and several other dogs lunged for the scraps dancing on the gusts. I threw the bag away, but the wind caught it and slapped it back at the dogs. It skipped across the ground to Digger and Spook, which triggered a ruckus in the middle ranks. More dogs grabbed loose scraps as I snatched the bag away again. This time, remembering my merchant marine days aboard S.S. Sam Houston, I heaved the damn thing with the wind. Most of the garbage had already spilled, and the feather-light bag took off like a punctured balloon, flapping and sailing on the currents. Bouncing up the side of a tall berm, it finally left us.

  Dragging Harley forward by the collar, I sent him on down the trail. Where were those trail markers? The garbage bag should have been a clue. But I was too rattled to digest the surroundings. I was more in the mood to nurse my sufferings this morning. Give me a marker please!

  I should have noticed that we weren’t on a trail—it was a snow-covered road. The lesbian had been flashing me concerned looks. But Harley seemed so confident. His head was high. He had the team really rolling. So I ignored Rainy’s silent protests. That was my big mistake. As if Harley ever gave a hoot about anything but his stomach. He was following his nose toward El Dorado.

  Disaster struck quickly. Scar sunk his teeth into one of the mounds and yanked out a trash bag. Rat, Harley, Cyrus—in a matter of seconds they all joined in. Thirteen dogs each tearing into buried garbage bags, or wrestling over scraps. I yelled. I screamed. I picked dogs up and threw them as far as the lines would allow, tearing their greasy prizes away with my bare hands. But the dogs were beyond control. They were rioting before my eyes, intoxicated by the smells and gripped by instincts far more persuasive than my tenuous authority. As fast as I pried dogs loose, their companions burrowed deeper into the rotting treasure trove. There was nowhere to tie them down. On all sides and underfoot—I was surrounded by trash.

  Evidence was literally piling up around me in snow-covered heaps, but I didn’t grasp what was happening until Harley had followed his nose to the center of Unalakleet’s village dump. I had to get the team out of this place. God knew what diseases were lurking here. But dragging my well-muscled Iditarod team out of the god-damned dump was just more than I could manage alone. I finally admitted defeat and gave up, barely holding back tears in my weary state. I’d never felt more enraged, or hopeless.

  Realizing that I had to get help, I abandoned the team to its feeding frenzy and scrambled some 20 feet up the side of a trash pile. The wind was fading, and in the distance I saw snowmachine lights. I flashed my headlamp until they turned my way.

  It was the guys who had led Doc out of town. The three of us wrestled my dogs out of the trash and over the side of the dump. The checker hopped on my sled and, displaying mastery far surpassing my own, rode it careening off garbage piles to the valley below. Firing up their snowmachines, the pair led me several miles into the hills. They wanted to make absolutely sure that this woeful excuse for a dog musher was headed someplace else.

  The tunnel of trees gave way to a windy clearing in the hills. Day was breaking. Gunnar and several other mushers were parked parallel to each other, in what didn’t seem like a social gathering.

  “None of our teams can lead in this wind,” Johnson yelled. “Think yours can do it?”

  “Mine are pretty good in the wind,” I said. “I’ll give it a shot.”

  Harley and Rainy
charged across the clearing, but my team tangled shortly after reentering the forest. I straightened the dogs out and was reaching for the hook when Gunnar called for the trail. He had some nerve.

  “I can’t believe you, Gunnar,” I said, waving him by.

  As I could have predicted, Johnson’s team slowed immediately after the pass. We traveled bumper to bumper for several miles until Johnson’s dogs found another team to chase.

  Tom Daily had overslept. Instead of leaving Unalakleet with Cooley and me, he snoozed straight through the morning in his cozy cabin bunk. Like me, Tom had no idea where to find the trail out of the village. Seeking directions, he dropped by the village cop shop. After chatting with the local patrolmen about Mugsy’s overnight escapades, Daily paid one of the officers $15 to guide the team into the hills.

  It was bright and windy. Gusts raking the trail were so savage they knocked Daily’s fully packed sled sideways and ripped the officer’s goggles from his head. Tom speared them with one hand as they flew past. When the pair parted company in the hills, he surprised the officer by returning his goggles. Daily didn’t need any extra souvenirs. He and his dogs were traveling alone, miles behind everybody, lugging the burden of the Red Lantern.

  We climbed ever higher. The sheer beauty of these hills was staggering. Sunlight streamed through scattered clumps of trees. To the west, I caught glimpses of the frozen Bering Sea, a wasteland of glimmering blue-white shards extending to the horizon

  I ran as much as I could to lighten the dogs’ load, borrowing occasional rides to catch my breath. The temperature was near zero, and the air was crisp. Hot and sweaty from the exertion, I steadily stripped off gear. The snowmachine suit went back inside the sled, as did the wind shell Nora had made me. I unzipped the sides of my bibs. What a day!

  Terhune’s team was directly behind mine. I couldn’t mistake him in that fluorescent orange musher’s hat. Cresting the barren top of one of the hills, I stopped to get a picture of him passing a wooden tripod. Seeing me, he raised a pair of army mitts. “Missing something?” he hollered.

  Few items are more precious to a musher than his mitts. Mine were linked with a nylon rope that had a large hole to slip over my head. From the moment I stepped on the sled until I made camp, I almost never took them off. When I wasn’t wearing them over my gloves, I let them dangle at my side. Sometimes it felt annoying having those mitts swinging free, but it kept them within reach.

  Four years earlier, Peter Thomann, a thoughtful musher driving beautiful burly Siberians in these same hills, had gotten careless on what appeared to be a mild, delightful day. Figuring he could dispense with his heavy beaver mitts, Thomann stowed them inside his sled bag.

  Later that day, Peter suddenly found himself in a wind so wicked his fingers stiffened at its touch. He stripped off his gloves, intending to place on dry liners for extra warmth. The wind sucked the life from his bare hands before the musher could get the liners over his fingers. Thomann’s mitts would have come in handy then, but they remained out of reach, locked away by the frozen zipper on his sled bag.

  He managed to get a glove over his right hand. The fingers on his left hand were “frozen stiff like pieces of ice,” as Thomann put it later, in a hospital-bed interview with Medred.

  Thrusting the frozen hand under his parka, the musher had raced for the village like Napoleon’s army fleeing. “You panic for a minute. But once they are frozen, it is not a problem,” he told the reporter. “They do not hurt anymore.”

  Thanks to an abundance of foolish climbers, mushers, and victims of unlucky outdoors accidents, Anchorage doctors possess great expertise in treating frostbite. Thomann didn’t lose any digits. And rather than bow out of the sport, he developed new defenses to protect that damaged hand from further injury.

  Out on the Quest Trail, one 40-below night, I quietly watched, prompted by usual reporter’s curiosity, to see whether Thomann would skimp on dog care owing to his injury. I was surprised to find the musher working barehanded as he tended those paws with a diligence I’ve never seen surpassed. The trick was a small can of flaming Sterno, which he set down in the snow between his knees. Thomann worked a few seconds, then warmed the bad hand over the flickering blue fire, as he patiently nursed each of his furry friends.

  Terhune smiled, something he didn’t do often. I clutched at my sides, hoping to prove him wrong. No such luck. Changing out of my warmer clothes, I had carelessly rested the mitts on my handlebar or sled bag. Trailing us, he found them by the side of the trail.

  “I figured you might want them back,” Jon said, slinging the mitts over to me.

  We both knew that the loss of those mitts could have proved disastrous in bad weather.

  We continued through the hills for about 20 miles before the trail dropped into a frozen marsh. Looking down from the last ridge, the view reminded me of standing on top of a ski hill. The trail formed a winding white path through trees. Puffs of snow marked the progress of half a dozen mushers already descending. I was a little nervous as I launched my team over the edge, but the snow was deep, giving me fine control, and the ride was a joy.

  I don’t know if a frigid breeze suddenly picked up, or if it was there all along, waiting for me. But I hadn’t gone 50 feet out into the marsh ice when the cold bit hard. Jamming the snow hook into a patch of crusty snow, I tore open my sled bag and grabbed the snow suit. With awkward, herky-jerky steps, I slipped my legs inside, thrust my arms into the chilly sleeves, and flipped the cowl over my head. Back to the wind, gasping, I leaned on the sled with my hands tucked under my armpits and collected my wits.

  “That was close,” I whispered.

  I don’t know how cold it was. It wasn’t very windy, but the slight breeze sliced through living flesh like a laser. Perhaps it felt worse on the marsh because of the shocking transition from the warm hills. It was time for the arsenal anyway—that was definite.

  Warming up a bit, I broke some fat sausages and threw each dog a piece. I had to keep them happy. Then I dug out my big parka and put it on over the suit for the first time since early in the Yukon trek. And I put hand warmers in the mitts. This was very likely the place where Thomann froze his hand. It was easy to see how it might happen, descending out of the warm hills.

  My parka hood proved invaluable as we crossed the marsh. Zipped all the way to the ruff with the string drawn tight, the hood formed a narrow tube extending about ten inches in front of my face. Vision was a little limited, peering through the soft-ball-sized gap in the fur, but I was amazingly warm inside.

  The marsh was riddled with parallel snowmachine tracks, some were hard-packed and fast; others made for slow going. Johnson, I, and several other mushers traveling close together took different trails, and our dog teams soon fanned out across the icy flats. It felt as if we were an assault party of Arctic nomads, swooping down from the hills.

  A narrow strip of ramshackle houses puffing smoke from oddly jutting pipes—that was Shaktoolik. The village had a harsh look to it. Not surprising for a community locked in snow drifts bordering Norton Sound, an immense frozen gulf, 125 miles long and 70 miles across. By the time we arrived, Wednesday, March 20, the annual excitement of the Iditarod had faded for the village’s 160 residents. The local volunteers were burned out, and the streets were littered with windblown race trash.

  I found the others camped outside the Shaktoolik armory building in the shelter provided by a line of rough drifts. Our supplies were stored at another house, several hundred yards away. I trudged over and dragged my sacks back to the team. It me took several trips, and I felt drained and dizzy by the time I finished.

  It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, but we all knew that the calm was deceptive. Directly ahead lay one of the most infamous sections of the entire Iditarod Trail: the oft-stormy passage across sea ice to Koyuk.

  In 1982 Nayokpuk and his Shishmaref dogs—conditioned in the polar-bear country surrounding his remote coastal village, 20 miles shy of the Arctic Circle—met their match o
n the trail that lay ahead. The bold Eskimo had attempted a solo breakout during a storm that had penned front-runners in Shaktoolik. No one else dared to follow him.

  “It’d be like trying to go fishing in a ten-foot skiff in forty-foot seas,” commented Dean Osmar, a fisherman destined to win the race two years later.

  The Shishmaref Cannonball shot 22 miles out onto the exposed sea ice before the storm proved too intense for even his leaders. Humbled, with his dogs locked in tight balls, the musher spent a long, sleepless night shivering in his sled bag. In the morning, Herbie Nayokpuk turned his team around and returned to Shaktoolik.

  “I’ve been out many years in the cold,” Nayokpuk told a reporter. “But that was the coldest night I ever spent.”

  Swenson had won the 1982 race, with Butcher trailing 3.5 miles behind. It was the pair’s first one-two finish and foreshadowed the rivalry that dominated the sport in the next decade. Nayokpuk spent a day regrouping and then mushed into Nome in twelfth place, slipping from Iditarod’s top ten for the first time.

  Three years later, in 1985, Libby Riddles clinched her victory in a similar situation. Arriving in Shaktoolik on a stormy afternoon, a few hours ahead of Barve and Swenson, Riddles fed her team and then agonized over whether to set out along the 58-mile trail to Koyuk. She was packing, yet struggling with her decision, when Barve mushed into the checkpoint. The blocky printer couldn’t believe the woman was even considering going out.

  “If it’s anything like what I just came through, it’s impossible,” Lavon declared.