Let There Be Light

by Melissa Storm

  Catching the concerned expression on Scarlett’s face, Lauren circled back, “No, I don’t suspect that you’ll need to with as good as you’re doing. I just know that things can happen out on the trail, and, well...if you need to scratch for the safety of your dogs or your health, do it.“

  Scarlett agreed to stay safe, but secretly she knew she would push if she needed to. She would never endanger her dogs, and luckily, she knew they were ready for this.

  Back out on the trail, Scarlett focused on the path in front of her as she ventured through a part of the state that most people would never see. The so-called Last Frontier was every bit as dangerous and beautiful as Jack London had described it in his books. Scarlett silently kicked herself now for not having named one of the puppies after a character from one of his works.

  As she pulled into the checkpoint at Ruby, Scarlett noticed an unsteadiness in Fred’s gait. She quickly checked in with the race official and returned to examine her favorite dog. He was agitated now, stamping red foot prints in the snow. He’d somehow managed to remove one of his purple booties and flung it to the side.

  No, no, no, she thought. I need Fred. He’s my wheel dog. He’s my best.

  “It’s okay, boy,” she soothed the dog before running off to find an assigned vet.

  The vet talked calmly as she examined Fred, then told Scarlett, “Looks like he’s gotten ice in his pads, and it’s caused a cut. You can rest him here. A lot of mushers choose this checkpoint as their eight-hour layover. If he’s doing better, you can bandage the foot and reboot him and see if he’ll run, but chances are you’ll have to drop him here.”

  Scarlett waited the requisite eight hours, but sleep was hard to come by. She hoped her team was doing better outside. So many worries swirled together in her mind like a blizzard. Would Fred be able to continue on? Would she be able to compete without him? And what about Henry? She still didn’t know whether he was ahead of her or behind. Unlike Lauren, she hadn’t seen him since the beginning.

  When at last the wait was up, she rushed to find the vet to get a prognosis on Fred, but had to wait while the woman finished an exam for another dog.

  Scarlett tried to be strong for Fred and the other dogs, but inside, she was breaking apart like Alaska in the springtime. “Fred, buddy. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. You tried to tell me back in Anchorage, didn’t you?” she said, thinking back to the way he had stamped his foot impatiently at the starting lineup. “I’m sorry I didn’t understand you then.”

  The vet came over to them then and bent down to check on Fred’s paw. “Seems we have a bit of good news this morning. Fred looks like he’s already on the mend. It was a small cut, and it’s doing much better. You’ve got about fifty miles to Galena from here. Take him out, and if he starts showing signs that he’s not going to be able to race, put him in the basket and drop him in Galena. The choice is yours.” She gave Fred a loving stroke between the ears. “And his. Good luck out there. Godspeed.”

  Scarlett thanked her for the help, and once the vet left to check on the other teams, asked, “What do you say, Fred? Want to go on? Or are you done?”

  Fred shook himself off and yipped happily at her.

  “Atta boy,” she said, giving him a nice scratch between the ears. “We’re not out of this yet!”

  As Scarlett waited for her clearance to continue, another sled pulled up to the checkpoint.

  “Well, well, Billionaire Bucket List,” she greeted Henry with an energetic laugh, feeling well-rested from the night before. “Looks like money really can’t buy everything.”

  “We’re biding our time, reserving energy,” Henry said as he went down the line, checking each of his dogs. “We’re only just getting started. What was that you liked to call me? Fire to your ice? Well, prepare to eat smoke.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Scarlett said as the checkpoint motioned for her to continue. “Hike!” she shouted to the dogs and they were off.

  Biding his time, sure. A part of her wondered what would happen to Henry and his family when he lost the race and thus his grandfather’s estate, but that wasn’t her problem. He could have kept things civil. He’s the one who made them personal, she reminded herself.

  More snow had fallen in the last eight hours, so the trail was harder to make out now. Still, they made it to Galena only a bit slower than average. And best of all, Fred showed no signs of being done with the race.

  A miracle! It had to be. God was on her side.

  Once the dogs were taken care of at the Galena checkpoint, Scarlett hurried back out to the trail. Now she knew Henry trailed her closely and could easily catch up to her during one of her layovers. She needed a big lead on him by then.

  She stepped back onto the rack and popped a new warming pack into each mitten. “What do you say, pups? Shall we score a victory for the bookworms?”

  Fred howled in response, bringing a smile to her face as she called, “Hike!”

  After the required twenty-four-hour layover in Huslia, Scarlett had officially finished half the Iditarod. As the race wore on, a strange mix of muscle memory and fatigue kicked in. Checkpoints came and went as she wound her way to Nome. While her body knew just what to do, her energy was lagging. It became harder and harder to focus her thoughts on the movements of the sled, and she found her mind drifting.

  To Mrs. Caputo. To Vanessa Price. To Henry.

  Shane had told her to put her anger aside, but she preferred to harness it. Use it as a driving force forward as she flew through the Alaskan wilderness toward a dream that was so close to being realized at last.

  The miles passed. The warmers lost their heat, and the cold set in again.

  A yelp of pain sent shivers down her spine.

  No, no, no! She was terrified to look, but she knew she owed it to the dogs to make sure they were well taken care of. Sure enough, Fred’s limp had returned as he struggled to put minimal weight on his injured paw.

  Muttering a few choice words under her breath, Scarlett commanded the sled to a stop and took Fred off the line.

  “I’m sorry, buddy. You tried your best, and I’m proud of you.” She wrapped Fred in a special bag that would keep him secure in the sled’s basket.

  The contraption left only Fred’s head exposed, and she gave him a few extra pets to ease the worry in his sky blue eyes. “It’s okay, my little husky burrito. You did your best, and you almost made it to the end. But your race is over for now. I’m going to strap you in so you can’t try to pull the sled anyway, because I can tell if I left it to you, you’d run yourself into the ground.”

  Just like me, she thought with a grimace.

  As they started to run again, Fred whined and struggled, wanting so desperately to be back on his feet. Her heart went out to him. She understood that dog, related to him, and she’d hate to be in his position now.

  “There’s no shame in scratching,” Lauren had said. But no, she was down a dog. The rest of them would work harder to overcome the loss. They had to do this now more than ever. For Fred.

  “Usually, I tell this story to Fantine, but today I’m going to tell it to you,” she told the dog before launching into the epic story of Jean Valjean and Javert. To his credit, Fred looked up at her from his vantage point on the sled and appeared to listen intently.

  Scarlett laughed. She would miss him once she dropped him off at the next checkpoint, and now she missed Fantine and the others who had been left back at the cabin, too. “Don’t look at me, Fred, look at the view,” she scolded. “It’s got to be better than looking at Lenny’s butt all day.”

  As she tried to recall the story of Les Miserables well enough to share it with her furry friend, she thought about everything the story had set out to say about the human condition. Sometimes right is wrong, and wrong is right. Sometimes we can’t escape who we are, but sometimes we can band together and win the day. Like her and the dogs now. Was she Javert in this analogy… or Jean Valjean? Always in the habit of choosing the characte
r she most identified with in any book, movie, or play, Scarlett was at a loss now. A part of her identified with each of the characters, yet another part couldn’t understand either.

  Maybe she wasn’t a character in a book after all.

  Maybe she was just Scarlett Cole, heroine of her own life.

  Not many people would ever read it, but maybe that didn’t matter just so long as those who got the chance appreciated having done so.

  When at least Scarlett’s team pulled into White Mountain a full hour later than she had hoped, she was pleased to see Lauren waiting outside.

  “I had a feeling you might be coming in just behind me.” Her friend greeted her with a hug, which was especially welcome because of the extra warmth it provided. “How are you holding up? How is your team doing? How are you doing?”

  Scarlett broke down in her friend’s arms. She was too tired now. She had been strong for too long. A good cry could fix everything if she let it. Everything except the fact that her best dog was no longer at her side. “It’s F-f-f-Fred!” she wailed.

  And Lauren patted Scarlett on the back and helped get her team situated next to her own. The two groups of dogs were excited to be reunited, even if it was just for a short while.

  “I’m on hour three of my required eight hour layover here,” Lauren said once the dogs were well situated. “You’ve got a full eight hours to go before you can race on to Nome. We’ll give Fred some extra love before I call Shane to arrange Fred’s return home. Okay?”

  Scarlett agreed, unhappy about the need to stop and rest, but also relieved to be spending it with her best friend in the whole world.

  “I cried my first time, too,” Lauren said with a comforting grin. “You know last year? I think these big, burly lumberjack types do, too. They just hide it a little better.”

  Tears still mottled Scarlett’s cheeks when Henry pulled into the checkpoint later that evening.

  “Ignore him. Don’t pay him any mind,” Lauren warned. “That’s what he wants—to psych you out, but he doesn’t realize what a smart cookie my bestie is.”

  Lauren’s team left several hours before Scarlett was allowed to resume her race. Once her friend had checked out, she spent the rest of her break next to Fred on his mound of straw. She told herself it was to ease his upset about missing the next part of the race, but truthfully, she just couldn’t stand the thought of Henry glaring at her.

  Because, yes, even now, his eyes followed her movements around the track points, the trails, wherever the two came into contact. It made her feel hot, like melting ice—and she just didn’t need that now. She’d have to work even harder to compensate for Fred’s loss.

  There could be no distractions, especially since the weather was deteriorating fast. By the time Scarlett and the remaining dogs resumed their trek, snow and sleet were coming down in dangerous sheets. So far, she’d been fairly lucky to have had such a temperate race. But now, Mother Nature seemed to want to make up for the miles of fair weather with this sudden onslaught.

  The Iditarod was known for putting both dog and musher through their paces, taking them to the brink—and now it seemed that the race itself wanted to test her. Well, she’d been studying for this test her whole life, and like the ancient motto of the postman, she was determined that neither snow, sleet nor dark of night would stop her from finishing right.

  The trail conditions weren’t ideal, but even still, several options stretched out before her. Left was the hillier trail, full of narrow paths into the sea. To her right, several rivers flowed out to the ocean. This time of year they would likely be frozen, but she didn’t want to chance it. She opted to take a higher path to circumvent the rivers and any possibility of an ice break.

  It would be a tight fit, but she’d rather be smushed than drowned. Few mushers were ahead of her right now, which meant it was up to her to find her way. Shane’s voice briefly echoed in the back of her mind, but she pushed it aside and headed into the foot hills.

  With a few false starts, she found her path and the dogs eagerly took to it. As the team raced on through the winds and sleet, Scarlett tapped on her headlamp to make sure she could see. Her line of sight didn’t extend past Lenny running beside Wendy in Fred’s place.

  She needed to rely on the lead dogs now. They could see where she couldn’t, and hopefully the bond they’d formed during training would be enough for them to anticipate her choices. That was what she needed most now—faith.

  And so she prayed for a safe passage, quieting her mind to everything but the words whispered to God above. She’d chosen this, or He’d chosen it for her. Either way, they would get through this together.

  Scarlett squeezed her eyes tight for the briefest of moments, trying to visualize the finish line, her and her team crossing it safely and to victory.

  The sled jolted at a sharp turn, startling her eyes back open, although Scarlett still couldn’t see more than a couple arms lengths. She leaned the other way to balance the sled, keep it on track. Had Fred been there, it would have worked. But they’d left Fred back in White Mountain, and Lenny just didn’t have the experience to overcome such a large blip.

  The young husky balked, and that slight moment of hesitation was all it took to send the sled hurtling over the edge of the slope, a sinking anchor dragging Scarlett and the dogs down into the ice.

  Cold water splashed across Scarlett’s chest as she broke through the ice. Howls rose into the night air, and she didn’t know whether they were the dogs’ or her own. Everything hurt and burned from the bitter cold. Her chest grew heavy and impossibly hard to lift with each staggered breath.

  She was drowning, dying. And for the briefest of moments, the cold feeling abated. It felt warmer somehow, being surrounded by the water’s embrace. She closed her eyes and wondered if it would really be the worst thing, dying doing what she loved…

  And then a frantic pair of paws scratched at her chest.

  Lenny!

  She’d vowed to protect him as a puppy, and he needed her now. They all did.

  With a tremendous effort, she kicked and propelled herself toward the shore. Holding on to Lenny and the sled, she struggled to keep feeling in her extremities. Each movement took an enormous amount of strength to execute as her muscles and the blood within her veins both began to freeze. But she’d trained long and hard for this. She was stronger now and braver, too.

  Back on land, movements were just as difficult as they’d been in the water. She now had to support her own body weight as well as that of the heavy clothes that had already turned to robes of ice.

  “Don’t… give… up,” she grunted, unsure whether she was talking to herself or to Lenny, who still thrashed about in the water rather than coming up to the land at her side.

  Panic rising to a fever pitch, she realized that the dogs were literally tied to an anchor. The sled had landed close to the shore and the dogs were still harnessed to it. Lenny was stuck to the others. She needed to get them all out together.

  But as each husky, eskimo dog, malamute, and mutt struggled in the water, the line became more and more tangled. These dogs were used to working in a team, though they’d never faced a challenge like this before. Their survival instincts had kicked in, and that instinct shouted, “Every dog for himself!”

  “Len-ny!’ Scarlett cried, hacking out partially frozen breaths on either side of the word. “I need you to be strong for the others. Come to me!”

  She fell to the frozen ground, ignoring the pain that shot through her knees when she did. All that mattered now was saving these dogs. They’d put their trust in her, and she couldn’t let them down when it mattered most.

  At the edge of the river, she took hold of the sled in both hands and began to drag it backward. She expected another jolt to her system, but it didn’t come. Did this mean she’d already begun to lose feeling, her systems already on the path to shutting down for the big sleep? The final sleep?

  She could still save the dogs.

  Wo
rking with Lenny and Wendy, she continued to slowly pull the sled backward. Scarlett used the snow hook to help drag herself farther from the river. It became easier as more dogs reached the frozen ground and aided in the rescue effort. They were trained to pull, and they, too, knew the danger of this situation. They trusted Scarlett completely and did her bidding even as broken and frightened as they were.

  Maybe hours, maybe only seconds had passed since their fall. To Scarlett, it felt as if time now stood still, a chasm with no past, no future, only now.

  “Hike! Hike! Hike!” Scarlett chanted as loud as her broken voice would allow.

  The dogs struggled forth, pulling away from the icy riverbank. Scarlett grabbed the basket and held on as she was pulled away with them.

  At last, the full team was safely on land and away from the water. They’d done it. They’d managed to survive this first obstacle, but what came next? None of them had the strength to go any farther. They’d fallen off the trail, and with the snow coming down, there wouldn’t be a trail anymore, which meant no one would know to look for them out here.

  Scarlett knew then that she was going to die, but she could still save the dogs. Pulling off her soaked mittens, she worked her icy fingers at each of the harnesses. She struggled to free the dogs from the line, to give them the chance.

  “Hike!” she cried weakly before at last collapsing into a bed of snow.

  A warm tongue brought her back to herself.

  The dogs. They still need me.

  Scarlett fought through the pain to pull the dogs around to circle the wagons. In the middle, she pulled out her camp stove and the last couple bottles of Heet. Pouring out as much of the fuel as possible, she lit a small fire. Thankfully, most of her supplies were in dry bags. How Lauren knew she might need those, she could only guess.

  Scarlett went through her checkpoint rituals, letting her body take over, her mind already impossibly trapped by the ice. The dogs got bits of meat from her pack and she worked on getting them all dried off. They dried quicker than she did, but the dogs came first. Always.