Across a Thousand Miles

by Nadia Nichols

  The vet checked her team, and as soon as they were strawed and fed, Rebecca took advantage of the hospitality and hot meal offered at the Trading Post. Mac had not arrived yet, but road reports were that the drifts were very bad over the Summit and the plows were working hard to clear them. She wouldn’t leave Circle until noon. Mac was sure to be here by then.

  Noon came, and still no Mac. Rebecca’s team was all dressed and ready to go, and still she watched the road, waiting and hoping. The checker walked over and handed her the sign-out sheet. She took the pen and clumsily scrawled her signature, noting that Wilton and Beech had left two hours ahead of her. Her dogs were getting a lot more rest than theirs, and she hoped her strategy would keep her in striking distance. She released her snub line. “All right, Raven. Good girl, Thor.”

  Her team trotted out of Circle. They looked good, and while a long rest might have been an extravagance at this checkpoint, she thought it would pay off on the long slog to Central. It was still snowing hard, and that would slow the teams down considerably. She would stick to her schedule and try not to think about Mac.

  Of course, trying not to think about Mac was like trying not to think at all.

  Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “NOW SEE HERE, son,” Wardlow said the following morning when Mac returned to the oil truck, shovel in hand and weaving a little—both from the onslaught of the fierce wind and the unsteadiness of his legs. “You can’t shovel your way through sixty miles of snowdrifts. Get into the cab and relax. You heard me radio the plow truck. They’re almost here.”

  Mac climbed slowly into the cab. He stashed the shovel behind the seat and closed the door. He let his head tip back and his eyes close. He felt awful. It was more than just a hangover, much more. It was the idea of Rebecca out in this storm by herself, and also his team being looked after by people he didn’t know. It was the certain knowledge that he was out of the money, that he wouldn’t win a damn cent when his team crossed the finish line. He wouldn’t be able to pay Rebecca with his race winnings because there wouldn’t be any. He’d have to sell his Rolex again—maybe he’d get a better price in Fairbanks—and then he’d have to hope for some kind of financial miracle.

  And of course there were the dogs. His dogs, not Brian’s. They belonged to him, and yet Brian was going to sell them. Mac would probably never see them again after this race, never feel the power of Merlin’s loyal gaze on him or the incredible rush of driving fourteen top dogs in the toughest sled dog race on earth.

  How could he have fallen so far so fast? Just yesterday morning he’d been counting his chickens, and now he was finding out that none of them were destined to hatch. Rebecca had warned him against doing that and she’d been right. As usual.

  “Well, now,” Wardlow said. “She’ll be comin’ around the mountain, didn’t I tell you, son? Sure enough, here she comes! Sum bitch!”

  Mac opened his eyes. Wardlow pointed. A spume of snow was arcing high into the air, being caught by the cold, stiff wind and whipped to the side. The huge plow truck itself was invisible until it was nearly upon them, and then it veered slightly to clear the oil truck. They caught a glimpse of a driver, the flash of a brief wave, and then the plow truck swept on.

  Wardlow started the oil truck. He waited for the oil pressure to come up and then put it into low gear. “Don’t you worry, son,” he said as the big truck eased forward through what moments before had been a six-foot-high drift. “We’ll get you to Circle in time to catch your taxi.”

  BY THE TIME they got to Circle it was 2 p.m. Kanemoto was still there, and when he spotted Mac, he rushed toward him. “She’s gone!” he said, pointing out of town. “Gone to Central. Waited for you, hoped you’d come. Left two hours ago!”

  Mac looked around. “There’s supposed to be someone here to take me back to Slaven’s,” he said. “The race official in Fairbanks said he’d arranged it.”

  Kanemoto nodded. “He is at the Trading Post. He waits there for you.”

  “How is she? How was she? I mean, was she okay?” Mac felt foolish asking, but Kanemoto would know.

  Kanemoto looked at him and nodded somberly. “She’s okay. Her dogs are okay. But I think, MacKenzie, she misses you.”

  IT TOOK THREE HOURS for Mac and his snowmobile driver to reach Slaven’s Roadhouse. It was a slow, fumbling slog through whiteout conditions, the trail markers obscured by the heavy snowfall. By 5 p.m. darkness had fallen, and Mac was beginning to despair. They’d passed five oncoming teams, each of the drivers anxious to ask about the trail ahead of them. Mac felt his spirits sink lower. There were now seven mushers between him and Rebecca. He had fallen hopelessly behind. His spirits picked up a bit when they rounded the curve in the trail and the glow of oil lamps framed by windows beckoned through the stormy darkness. He’d made it to Slaven’s.

  His dogs were extremely energetic, having had a full twenty-four hours of rest since he’d left them. They whirled around on their short picket lines and howled their joy at seeing him again. Merlin jumped up and put his paws on Mac’s chest and stared into his eyes. “Hey, Merlin. Give me a few minutes to get things together and we’ll be out of here.”

  The volunteers at Slaven’s Roadhouse had taken excellent care of his dogs. They had been fed every six hours, religiously, in the exact way that Rebecca had specified before she left. They looked good. Hell, they looked great. Mac bootied them in record time, and less than one hour after arriving at the roadhouse he was back on the river with his team, heading for Circle and hoping he wouldn’t finish this race dead last.

  REBECCA REACHED Central ten minutes behind Wilton but fourteen minutes ahead of Beech. The run from Circle had been tough. Birch Creek was without a doubt the most twisted, contorted river she’d ever run. No wonder it was an eighty-mile run, when by road the distance was a mere thirty-three miles. She had stopped her team twice to feed, and four other times to snack, and still she had caught up with the front-runners. Kanemoto met her at Crabb’s Corner, the Central checkpoint, and before she could ask, he said, “Mac’s okay. He’s back with his team by now, and he says for you to kick ass.” Kanemoto grinned.

  Rebecca felt more like lying down and sleeping. The storm was intensifying, and the final few miles into Central had seemed endless. It was midnight, and she felt as though she hadn’t slept in years. Worse, throughout the entire run she’d been anticipating the next leg of the trail, the most dreaded stretch of all, Eagle Summit. In this weather it would be unbelievably nasty. Her only hope of getting over it was to tuck in behind Beech and Wilton when they checked out.

  “Kanemoto,” she said when both the checker and the veterinarian had given her team a thumbs-up, “I’m going to try and grab a little nap. Watch Wilton and Beech. When they start getting ready to leave, wake me.”

  Kanemoto nodded vigorously. Kanemoto wanted her to win. He would watch Wilton and Beech like a hawk, and when one of them so much as stirred, he’d wake her. Rebecca felt confident enough in this that she was able to lie down on a warm mattress in the checkpoint’s back room and fall asleep instantly.

  To be woken instantly by a shake on the shoulder. “Rebecca!” Kanemoto said. “They are getting ready!”

  She felt miserable. Her muscles ached, her eyes burned, and she was nauseatingly dizzy. “How long…?”

  “They have only been here three hours,” Kanemoto said. “But you told me to wake you.”

  Three hours! Rebecca had hoped that given the severity of the weather conditions, they would have waited longer. She sat up. Kanemoto handed her a cup of something hot. She took a sip. Coffee, black and strong, and Lord, it tasted good. In spite of her resolve not to drink any caffeinated beverages, she downed that cup of coffee in jig time.

  By 4 a.m., Wilton, Beech and Rebecca were signing out of the Central checkpoint. Rebecca’s dogs were disgruntled. She had broken some unspoken pact between them, cheating them out of much-needed rest, but without Cookie she couldn’t see how this team would ever get over
the summit. The weather was just too fierce. If they could follow Wilton and Beech, they might just make it.

  AT MIDNIGHT Mac was checking into Circle. He was a good eighty miles behind Rebecca. In this dirty weather that meant at least twelve or fourteen hours, not counting the time he’d have to spend at Circle feeding and resting his team. It was little consolation that three of the teams he’d passed on his snowmobile trip back to Slaven’s were still at Circle. He wanted to be in Central, where Rebecca was.

  By 4 a.m. he was on the move again, his team trotting into the stormy darkness. The trail was soft, visibility was nil, and the wind strong enough to sap the heat from his body and suck the breath from his lungs. Merlin kept on, never once questioning Mac’s judgment. The husky’s courage was humbling. Five thousand dollars? Hell, Merlin was worth ten times that. How did one put a price on the best sled dog that ever lived?

  Only by winning the race could Mac have afforded to buy the team, and he had lost all hope of that the moment he’d offered to fly Johnson to Fairbanks. He didn’t regret his actions; he’d had no choice in the matter. But the thought of losing the team, losing Merlin, was the same as his fear of losing Rebecca. He’d never really possessed either, but in the past four months his entire life had become the sum of both.

  THERE WAS NO UP or down to the world, just the endless white and the polar cold and the sound of the wind howling across a treeless landscape. There were no dogs to be seen, just the dark blotch of her sled bag. There was no trail to follow, just the punchy, blown-in trough left by the teams ahead, and the teams ahead were running blind.

  Running? Hah! Walking. One step at a time.

  Up and up. Higher and higher. Each upward step brought a stronger wind, a more blinding snow. Rebecca stopped her team and labored to the front. She pulled off one mitt and held her hand across Raven’s eyes to melt the ice that had frozen them shut. She did the same for Thor. Moments ago she had caught a glimpse of what she had assumed was either Wilton or Beech, but now she was as alone as she had ever been, and in the most awful weather she had ever seen.

  The conditions would get even worse, for the Summit was still four miles away. Four miles of uphill struggle in a blistering wind that topped seventy miles an hour. She couldn’t believe that her dogs were still moving forward. She wouldn’t have blamed them at all for quitting on her. “You’re a good girl, Raven,” she said, her voice wavering in the wind’s onslaught, her words whipped from her mouth and shredded into unintelligible fragments. She turned her back to it and sank to her knees to catch her breath, leaning backward to keep her balance on the steep grade. If it got much worse, they’d have to stop, though stopping on this barren dome was not something she wanted to do. The longer she waited here, the farther ahead of her Wilton and Beech would get. She opened the bag of snacks and worked her way slowly down the team, tossing each of the dogs a chunk of meat mix. When she reached the sled, she caught hold of it to steady herself and stuffed the snack bag back inside. She peered ahead through her goggles. The front end of her team was completely obscured in the blowing snow. “Ready?” she shouted, and she saw her wheel dogs stand up, leaning into the wind. “All right!”

  The gang line tightened and the huskies began to move forward, using all their strength, endurance and agility to battle their way toward the summit. Rebecca walked behind the sled, her hands gripping the driver’s bow so tightly that they began to cramp. She stared down at her feet as they plodded slowly forward. Her leg muscles burned. She gasped for breath. She counted out her steps in a muttered monotone, “…eight, nine, ten…,” and knew that these next four miles would be the longest four miles of her life.

  Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Forty. The minutes seemed like hours. The wind increased and Rebecca’s hands tightened. If she let go, she’d be blown clear to the moon. Her dogs were belly deep in the snow, pulling hard, giving everything they had to give, and somewhere up in the front of the team, invisible to her, a small black female named Raven was leading them on. She was about to stop the team for another snack break when of their own accord they halted. This was it, then. They were quitting on her.

  Rebecca fished the snack bag out of the sled. She crawled on her hands and knees up the length of the gang line, handing out liver snacks this time, giving each dog a brief rubdown, a word of encouragement over the howl of the wind. At the front of her team she snacked Raven and Thor. “It’s okay, Raven,” she said into the leader’s ear. “I don’t blame you for stopping.”

  And then she heard something. A muffled shout. She looked ahead and saw the figure of a man emerge from the whirl of snow. He, too, was crouching on his hands and knees to avoid being knocked over by the wind. It was Wilton, and if she looked half as bad as he did, they were all in sorry shape.

  “Our leaders have quit on us!” he shouted when he had drawn near enough for her to hear. “Do you think yours will go ahead?”

  Rebecca was astounded. She looked back at her team. “I don’t know,” she shouted back. “They’ve been doing all right, but we’ve been following your tracks. I’m going to give them a breather, and then we’ll see.”

  “Okay,” Wilton shouted. He turned around and crawled back up to where his sled was stopped. She could barely see it through the snow even though it was no more than a few feet ahead of her.

  She gave her dogs a ten-minute break and then made her way back to the sled. “Ready?” she shouted to the team. She watched her wheelers stand, brace themselves sturdily and shake. “All right!”

  The gang line tightened and once again the team moved forward. Step by slow step they pulled ahead, veering out around Wilton’s sled and passing his dogs one pair at a time. “Good luck!” Wilton shouted as she passed his sled. Beech’s team was right in front of Wilton’s, and Raven passed them, too. Here was the true test. Would her young leader be able to feel out the trail beneath a foot of new snow? Would Raven have the motivation to keep the team moving without Wilton’s and Beech’s teams up ahead? Could she possibly keep forging ahead into the teeth of this awful blizzard? Rebecca didn’t think that any dog could, yet Raven was trying. “Good girl, Raven!” Rebecca shouted, hoping she would hear. “Good girl!”

  Ten feet, twenty feet. Ten minutes, twenty. Climbing steadily until it seemed as though they must be near the top and yet it was still just out of reach. Rebecca knew she couldn’t lift her foot for one more step, but she did. She knew that Raven and Thor were going to quit on her, but they didn’t.

  Then something happened that changed everything. A freak accident that occurred for no other reason than that they happened to be in that particular place.

  The trail to Eagle Summit curved as it climbed, until instead of climbing straight into the wind, they were at an angle to it. Rebecca’s sled, its bag stuffed with gear and drawn taut on the sled frame, acted like a sail, catching the full force of the wind. By walking on the uphill side of the sled, she was able to lean her weight against the driver’s bow and keep the sled from flipping away from her and back down the hill, but the struggle was a mighty one, and it was a struggle she ultimately lost in one awful moment, one slip of a foot, one ferocious gust of wind. She felt the sled jerk over and there wasn’t enough of her to counterbalance the wind’s force. She clung on desperately and went over with the sled, her feet flipping into the air.

  The rest was a blur of dizzying motion and the sickening sensation of falling, tumbling, rolling forever and ever until all at once everything stopped, and there was nothing, nothing at all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MAC’S TEAM POSTED the fastest run from Circle to Central. He checked in at Crabb’s Corner at 3 p.m. with a trail time of just under twelve hours, in spite of the slow conditions. He’d passed two teams in the past three hours, and Kanemoto was still in Central when he pulled in. This surprised him, because Kanemoto should have been driving Rebecca’s dog truck up to Mile 101 on the Steese Highway. Mile 101 wasn’t an official checkpoint, but it was a place where spectators and handler
s could watch the teams as they came over the summit, and it was also a place where mushers could drop dogs if they had to.

  “The road is still closed,” Kanemoto explained. “Rebecca checked out of here at 4 a.m. but no mushers have passed Mile 101.”

  Mac paused in the act of firing up his dog-food cooker. “What?” he asked stupidly.

  “No mushers have passed Mile 101,” Kanemoto repeated. “Officials think the storm is so bad that they’re all stuck up there. It has happened before. One year they say the teams were backed up for more than twenty-four hours.”

  “Mile 101 is only forty miles from here. They’ve been on the trail for nearly twelve hours and they haven’t reached…?” Mac’s voice faded into silence. He lit his cooker and the flames burned hot. There was water to be had at Crabb’s Corner, so at least he didn’t have to melt snow. “It must be hellish up there,” he muttered, putting the water on to boil. He began chopping his frozen block of meat while Kanemoto watched. Lord, he was tired. His movements were sluggish, his thoughts equally so. When he’d arrived at the checkpoint, he’d stood on the runners of his sled for several idiotic moments, wondering what he should do next.

  Rebecca had kept a cheat sheet, small and laminated, clipped to the driver’s bow. On it was a concise list of what to do upon reaching each checkpoint or stopping to feed the team. Mac had laughed when he’d first seen it, way back at the beginning of the race when clear and conscious thought came easily, and she’d gotten all fired up. “Just you wait,” she’d said. “A week from now you’ll wish you had one of those.”

  Once again, she was right. Kanemoto had to coach him through the act of feeding his dogs, taking off their booties, staking them out on beds of straw. Without Kanemoto’s polite and carefully worded suggestions, Mac might never have gotten his team fed. He ate something inside the checkpoint, muttered unintelligible responses to questions asked by reporters, checkpoint staff and race followers, and told Kanemoto to wake him in two hours. Kanemoto nodded gravely. Two hours. Not much time to sleep.