Across a Thousand Miles (16 page)

She shook her head. “I'm keeping to my schedule. I'll leave at midnight.”

“Suit yourself.” Mac pulled the knot and released the sled. “Haw over, Merlin!” he snapped, then, “On by!” as his leader veered around Rebecca's sled and lead the team back onto the packed trail. “See you in Carmacks, maybe,” he said as he passed her, and he thought he saw her nod.

For a long time after that he was grumpier than a hungry grizzly in spring, and he couldn't for the life of him explain why.

 

R
EBECCA WATCHED
until the light of Mac's headlamp faded from view, and then she stood in the darkness, adrift with uncertainty. She checked her watch. The luminous dials read 10 p.m. Her team had been resting for four hours. They were all on their feet now. Mac's departure had stirred them back to life. They were stretching and yawning and wagging their tails. She checked her watch again and it was still 10 p.m., two hours shy
of her departure time. Her team looked good. Well rested and alert. Ready to go.

Mac was gone. He had pulled foot and left her behind, and every moment that passed widened the gap between them.

To hell with her schedule!

It took her thirty minutes to snack her dogs with more of the premixed soup, bootie them and get back onto the race trail. They jumped into an easy lope, one they would maintain for an hour or so before settling into their brisk trot. She might not like these night runs, but her dogs definitely did. They ran faster at night, for longer distances and with less fatigue. No stars tonight. No northern lights. No moon.

Just the tracks of Mac's team on the trail ahead, leading them toward Braeburn. “Catch Mac,” Rebecca whispered silently to her lead dogs, willing them to set a faster pace. “Catch Mac!”

 

B
RAEBURN
L
ODGE
wasn't a designated race checkpoint, but mushers were allowed to drop any injured, sick or tired dogs there, if necessary. This early into the race very few mushers opted to do so, and not many spent much time there. Rebecca was in and out of Braeburn in less than fifteen minutes, doing nothing more than signing in, filling one of her coolers with water and signing out. Mac was ten minutes ahead of her and she had no intention of letting him get away.

She checked her watch—11:30 p.m. To get back on schedule she'd need to stop and feed her team at 5:30 a.m., giving them a six-hour layover. She had no idea what Mac's routine would be or why he'd become suddenly so abrupt. Low blood sugar? Lack of sleep?

By midnight Cookie and Raven had closed the gap.
She could see another musher's headlamp bobbing up ahead, flickering off trees, team dogs and snowy trail. It had to be Mac. And it was. When he spotted the beam of her headlamp, he swung around on his sled runners. “Took you long enough to catch up,” he said gruffly.

“What do you mean? I waited until midnight, just like I planned,” she replied, and he laughed in a way that made the heat come into her face. “My dogs weren't resting either,” she said in her defense.

“Admit it. You missed me,” he said, and she caught a flash of that brash grin of his. “And you didn't want to travel up Chain of Lakes by yourself.”

“Whatever you say,” she replied coolly.

Mac turned to the front again and that was the last they spoke for a long while as they picked up the Chain of Lakes beyond Coughlan. The trail breakers had been right. There was overflow, and Rebecca was relieved that wise old Merlin was ahead of her, feeling out the good trail, avoiding the bad. Cookie and Raven were excellent leaders, but young, and they hadn't the experience Merlin had. Perhaps they would learn a thing or two by following in his footsteps.

At 1:30 a.m. both teams stopped. Mac and Rebecca snacked their dogs, checked their feet, and replaced any booties that were wearing thin or had gotten wet. It had started to snow, a fine snow that blew out of the west and created poor visibility.

“How far to Carmacks?” Mac asked, as they shared a hot cup of tea that Rebecca had carried to his sled.

“Another sixty miles.”

“Could we push straight through? Give our teams a longer break there, eight or ten hours?”

Rebecca shook her head. “We've been running since 10 p.m. We should stop in another couple of hours and
feed, rest the dogs for six hours, and then make the thirty, forty mile run into Carmacks. There's a two-hour mandatory layover there, but we'll take another six hours. That will give us time to feed the teams, unpack our food drops, organize our gear and supplies for the next leg of the race to Pelly Crossing.”

Mac swallowed hot tea and listened. She could see the impatient flash in his eyes and waited for the protest.

“That's too long to rest!” he said. “The front runners will be in Dawson before we reach Pelly at that rate!”

“Mac, trust me. Run your team easy right now. It's a long race and this is just the beginning.” She took the cup from him and finished the tea.

Moments later they were on the move again. It was snowing harder and the trail was getting punchy. It was slow going for the dogs, and by the looks of things it would get worse. At 4 a.m. Mac voluntarily stopped his team, which surprised Rebecca. He put on his snowshoes and cleared a turnoff long enough for both teams. Then he and Rebecca snubbed their sleds to trees before setting about cooking food for their dogs.

Rebecca's food cooker was alcohol-fired. Within twenty minutes a three-gallon pot of water was boiling. She dropped a seal-a-meal pouch containing her own meal into the water to heat, then poured half of the boiling water into one of the coolers, to which she had already added the chopped, frozen meat mix. In short minutes the meat mix would be thawed. She would add the kibble, stir and serve up a nice warm meal to her deserving huskies. Meanwhile, she pulled off dog booties, stuffing them into a sack, which she tossed into the sled bag. At Carmacks she would sort through all of the used dog booties to rescue and dry those that were still serviceable. She took the feed pans out of the sled and
distributed them among her team and soon after was dishing up their supper.

It was gratifying to watch the huskies eat. They ate with great enthusiasm, licked the bowls clean and caught frozen chunks of liver out of midair with a loud snapping of jaws. Nothing wrong with their appetites! Once fed, they immediately dug into the snow and curled up. Because it was snowing, Rebecca covered each of them with a blanket. She gathered up the dishes and stashed them in the sled. She picked her seal-a-meal packet out of the remaining water, filled her empty thermos, and to the cooler, which still held a couple of quarts of the dogs' supper mix, she added the remainder of the hot water. In five hours she'd water them with this rich broth before setting out on the trail again.

Now it was time for her own supper. Or was it breakfast? Mac was still laboriously cooking his dogs' meal, and from the looks of things his dogs were going to have to wait a while for their chow.

“I didn't get water at Braeburn,” he explained sheepishly when she walked up to see what was taking him so long. “I was in such a hurry I completely forgot.” Mac was melting snow to make the water, and melting snow was a time-consuming process. His dogs gradually gave up their anxious wait and made their beds, curling up to sleep. Rebecca sighed. Mac was learning, but he had chosen a tough race to learn in.

“How about a cup of tea and some hot chili?”

He glanced up from stirring the water pot. “Chili?”

“Homemade. No guarantees. Ellin let me use her seal-a-meal machine, and I prepared a lot of my race meals so I could heat them in the dogs' water.”

Mac yawned hugely and then grinned. “No thanks.
My pockets are stuffed with gorp, smoked salmon and Ellin's fruitcake. What more could a musher ask for?”

Rebecca left him to his struggles and sat down on her sled, cutting her meal packet open with her pocketknife. No fork, no spoon. She squeezed the chili into her mouth, chewed and swallowed. Not the best she'd ever eaten, but it was hot, it was food, it was filling, and she was hungry. To hell with Mac if he didn't want to share it with her. Did he think she couldn't cook? Rebecca glared at him. Let him suffer! Let him starve! Bumbling idiot!

She finished her meal in a bad mood and poured herself a cup of tea. She sipped it, relishing the warmth, the spicy orange fragrance, the sweetness of the honey. Let Mac eat snow, she thought as she swallowed. Let him eat snow!

He was dishing his dogs' meal out now. Her dogs had been asleep for nearly an hour, and he was just beginning to feed. His dogs woke up grudgingly. Some of them turned their noses up at his offering, others stood and shook the snow off and bent their heads to the feed bowls. It was still snowing—another inch had fallen since they had stopped and showed no signs of letting up. By the time their rest break was up, there could be six inches of fresh snow to contend with. It would slow them down, but it would slow everyone else down, too. “Mac,” she heard herself say, “come have a cup of tea.”

He was standing and watching his dogs eat, and at the sound of her voice he turned as if surprised to see her there. “All right,” he said, and when she had poured him a cup, he said, “Thanks,” and drank from it with such gratitude that she felt a twinge of guilt. “Rebecca,” he said, lowering the cup, “you shouldn't have done
what you did.” She had turned off her headlamp, but his was still on, and she could see fatigue in the lines of his face. “The watch,” he said. “You should have just let it be.”

Rebecca could think of no good reply. She watched the snow fall in the beam of his headlamp. He looked so damn handsome standing there in the swirling white that she wouldn't have been able to speak even if she could have thought of something to say.

“I owe you,” he said, lowering the cup, “and I don't like it.” He handed her the empty cup. “I've never lived like this before, hand-to-mouth, relying on other people's kindness.”

He paused as if waiting for a response. Rebecca just stared.

“And I can tell you right now that things are going to change. I'm going to pay you back for everything. Sam and Ellin, too. No matter what any of you might think.”

He turned on his heel without another word and walked back to his sled. Rebecca watched as he lay down and pulled the top flap of the sled bag over himself, and prepared to take a much-needed three-hour nap.

T
HE ONLY TROUBLE WAS
, Mac couldn't sleep. What he wanted to do was leap up, march back to where Rebecca lay, lift her to her feet and kiss her. Rebecca needed kissing, and lots of it. He was just the man to oblige. So why didn't he? What kept him glued here to his own sled while the snow fell silently and his dogs slept? What kept him away from the woman he felt so passionately about that he couldn't fall asleep in her presence?

Fear. He was scared to death of being rejected by her.

“This isn't going to work,” he muttered to himself. “We can't travel together. It just won't work.”

But there was no denying that Rebecca knew the ropes. She'd forgotten more than he'd ever know about driving dogs. For the past three months he'd watched her, listened to her, picked her brain. She was driving a good team, as good as or better than his own. Traveling together made sense. They could look out for each other, help each other out over the rough spots.

Mac shifted, drawing his hood closer about his head. Cold! This was cold country, all right. He wondered if a person ever got to the point where they didn't notice it. Didn't shrink up and shiver when thirty below bit to the bone and a stiff wind blew the ice straight through the soul. Beautiful country in spite of the killing cold. Untamed and wild and far-flung. Yukon. The very word conjured up images of the frozen North, of huskies run
ning hard, of breath frosting and snow falling and silence, unimaginably vast silence.

Rebecca belonged here. She was a survivor. She may not believe it, but she could take any situation the north could throw at her. Sure, that fall through the river ice had shaken her. And maybe if he hadn't been there, she would have been in trouble. But maybe not. She was a sharp-minded lady, loaded with common sense. She knew what to do.

Still… Mac shifted again. Even the best of the best could run into trouble. Sometimes circumstances conspired to strike down the finest. Ellin had implored him to watch out for her. “She means the world to us…”

She meant the world to
him!
Mac thought. If anything ever happened to Rebecca…

The snow was falling harder. The wind had picked up, too, and was blowing through the darkness with a soft moan as it worked through the trees. Mac drew a deep, cold breath. Oh, to be in a warm cabin with Rebecca in his arms. Let it snow, let the cold wind blow. Let the wolves and the huskies howl. Just give him Rebecca and the night and a warm cabin and he, too, would know exactly what to do…

 

I
N SPITE OF HER EXHAUSTION
, sleep eluded Rebecca. The fact of the matter was that Mac's presence disturbed her, that the very nearness of him caused her heartbeat to accelerate. She was torn between feeling glad for his company and guilty that she felt so glad. This wouldn't work. She couldn't continue to travel with him. It was too emotionally stressful, and the toughness of the race demanded total focus. If she wanted to do well, she would have to part company with Bill MacKenzie.

She shifted, tried to find a more comfortable position
on her sled. Mac. Oh, God. She felt herself being drawn into something too powerful to resist. She felt herself weakening. She felt herself becoming vulnerable in ways too dangerous to contemplate.

She tried to sleep. Couldn't. The darkness was dizzying, her muscles cramped with cold. But still she tried. She needed sleep… She needed…

Hands. Hands on her arms, squeezing firmly, and a man's voice saying, “Rebecca?”

She struggled out of the black abyss and into the snowy night. A bright headlamp blazed. She squinted and turned her head away. “What time is it?”

“Time for us to be moving along. It's still snowing and there's got to be six inches of fresh powder on the ground.”

Rebecca stood up slowly. She felt awful. Her muscles ached and her eyes burned from lack of sleep. The dogs. She must care for them. A thick, white blanket of freshly fallen snow covered them. They slept beneath it, warm and content. She retrieved the feed pans and the cooler from the sled and at the sound of the pans, her dogs awoke, eager for their next meal. They stood and shook the snow from their thick coats. They wagged their tails and whined anxiously. Enthusiastic hunger was a good sign. She dished out a soupy snack and they devoured it while she gathered their blankets and stashed them in the sled bag. This snow would slow their travel time considerably, but she wasn't too alarmed by that. Some runs were fast and some weren't. That's just the way it was.

To her surprise, Mac was ready to go before she was. “C'mon, Turtle Woman!” he called impatiently from the back of his sled while she finished booting her dogs. “Hurry it up! Let's rock and roll! Let's burn some
trail!” And moments later, when she pulled her snub line and released her team, she heard Mac's voice behind her, deep and resonant, and it made her feel dangerously glad. “Carmacks, here we come!”

 

T
WELVE HOURS LATER
Carmacks had come and gone. Another twelve and Pelly Crossing was behind them. The trail, the checkpoints, the rest stops, the catnaps, the ever-present cold, the constant fatigue—these things became so much the norm that Rebecca could hardly recall living any other way.

“Where are we?” Mac asked when she stopped to throw a snack to each of her dogs and check their booties. It was nearing noon, and the sun felt good.

“I figure we're two hundred miles shy of Dawson,” Rebecca said.

“That far?”

“It's 235 miles from Pelly Crossing to Dawson, and we've only been on the trail for four hours since leaving Pelly. What did you expect?”

Mac grabbed his snack sack out of his sled and commenced to dole out fist-sized chunks of frozen fish to his dogs. “I was kind of hoping you'd say we were almost there.”

“Not quite.”

They ran for three more hours before stopping to feed and rest their teams. Mac, Rebecca noticed, was becoming much more proficient in his role as a canine chef. He was dishing up his dogs' meal within minutes of her feeding her own team. He came up and sat beside her on her sled bag when he'd finished. “Smoked salmon?” he offered, holding out a slab of the dark, greasy fish.

“Thanks,” Rebecca said, accepting it. “Homemade
chili?” She held out the sealed bag, and he took it from her without hesitation.

“Homemade chili!” he said. “My favorite!”

They shared their meal in companionable silence, and when they were sipping their hot tea, Mac said, “We're in fifth and sixth place right now. The way I figure it, you're three seconds ahead of me.”

“That could change in the blink of an eye,” she said.

“I've been thinking about our race strategy.”

“Oh?”

“Well, since we're traveling together, we might as well devise a strategy that takes into account both our teams. Your team is slightly faster than mine, so on the good sections of trail it makes sense for you to be in the lead and for my dogs to be drafting off your team. On the bad stretches, it makes sense for Merlin to be up front blazing the way. And another thing. I think we should start making longer runs and giving them longer rests, snacking them every hour or so on the trail.”

“Every hour?”

“Just small snacks. Bite-size snacks. To keep their blood sugar levels constant.”

Rebecca stared at him, amazed. “Do you have enough snacks?”

“Sure. So do you. You can use fat snacks, pieces of frozen liver, scoops of soaked kibble and meat mix, anything they want to eat. That way when you stop, you don't have to bother cooking a big heavy meal. All you really need to do is give them a quart or so of hearty soup and they can curl right up and go to sleep.”

“Huh,” Rebecca said.

“I think it'll work. It'll keep them fitter. Keep them happier.”

“I don't know…”

“Why don't we try it from here to Dawson? See how it works.”

Rebecca sipped her tea, then glanced sideways at him. He was three days unshaven and had never looked better. “I suppose we could,” she said, still unsure.

“Good,” Mac said, nodding. “Good!” He stood and checked his watch. “We'll plan to get rolling around 2100 hours. We'll run until 0500, rest until 1300 hours, run till 2100, rest till 05, and be in Dawson by 1100 hours on day five.”

Rebecca stared blankly at him. “Right,” she said.

“That's the halfway point of the race, right?”

“Right.”

“We'll take our thirty-six-hour layover there, and our handlers can take care of the teams while we rest, right?”

“Right.”

“Then, somehow, in the next four or five days, we've got to pass the four guys in front of us and hope to hell no one else overtakes us.”

“Right.”

“Now, when it comes down to the finish line, this is my suggestion. If we're still running together, let's make it a photo finish. Let's put the noses of our lead dogs over the line at exactly the same moment. What do you say?”

“Dramatic,” Rebecca said, “but if you think I'd let you do that, you're out of your mind. If we're still running together, my team will cross the finish line first. You can count on that.”

Mac's eyes narrowed. “You told me once that you weren't competitive,” he said.

“I'm not,” Rebecca replied. “I just don't like to lose.”

 

M
AC'S STRATEGY WORKED
. They stopped their teams every hour, religiously, for five to ten minutes. They snacked and checked the dogs, then continued for another hour. The difference in the huskies was remarkable. They'd been cheerful enough before, but now they were also quicker. Rebecca thought that the new routine increased their overall speed by as much as two miles an hour. On the long rest break, they fed their teams a soupy mix, and in less than an hour their chores were completed, the dogs were sleeping soundly, and she and Mac were sitting side by side on her sled, sharing their meal.

“Smoked salmon?” Mac said, making his greasy offering. Rebecca took the strip of salmon and automatically handed him the remaining half of her seal-a-meal. Mac held it in the light of his headlamp for a closer scrutiny. “Why, it's Rebecca Reed's homemade chili!” he enthused. “My favorite!”

When they were finished, they both agreed that it was the best meal they'd ever eaten. They shared a thermos of hot tea, and Mac produced Ellin's fruit cake, or what remained of it, from the depths of his parka pocket. He handed it to her. “Try it. You'll like it.”

Rebecca took it and stared at it with distaste. “Looks like some wild animal has been gnawing on it,” she said.

“Don't worry, no matter what kind of deadly diseases I might carry, nothing would survive on that fruitcake. I only wish she'd made twenty more of 'em.”

Rebecca bit off a chunk of the frozen cake and chewed. She swallowed. Blinked her eyes. Stared at the cake. Lifted it for another bite. “My God,” she said. “It's pure rum!”

“Good, huh?”

“Alcoholic beverages are prohibited on the race
trail,” Rebecca said. “But I guess a fruitcake doesn't count.” She took another bite.

“Careful. You'll get drunk.”

She laughed and handed him the cake. “It's delicious. And you're right. Any more of it and I'd be tipsy.”

“Tipsy enough for me to take advantage of you?”

She laughed again and bumped him gently with her shoulder. “Get some sleep, Mac.” Reluctantly Mac repaired to his own sled for a four-hour snooze. Rebecca lay back on her sled and closed her eyes. She was dizzy with exhaustion and the insides of her eyelids felt like sandpaper, yet she wasn't the least bit miserable. She wondered if that one bite of rum-soaked fruitcake had actually made her a little bit drunk, because as strange as it seemed, she was actually beginning to enjoy the Yukon Quest…and the company of her traveling companion.

 

T
HEY REACHED
Dawson City at 7 a.m. on day five, a full four hours earlier than Mac had predicted. Ellin, Sam, and Brian were awaiting their arrival, and Kanemoto was so excited that his English was unintelligible.

“I think he's trying to tell you that you and Mac are only six hours behind the leaders at the halfway point,” Ellin interpreted, giving Rebecca a warm, welcoming hug. “My dear girl, you look as though you've just run five hundred miles without stopping or sleeping!”

“I take that to mean I look awful.” Rebecca grinned. “Well, Ellin, the strange thing is, I feel just fine! It's good to be here!”

“Did your dogs try to take you home when they recognized the trail?” Sam asked, because they had all discussed that possibility. Mac and Rebecca both shook their heads.

“Raven and Cookie might have dragged me back to my cabin, but when Merlin went right on by the turnoff, they just followed,” Rebecca explained. “Merlin's an incredible leader.”

“Yes, he is.” Brian nodded. “Which reminds me. Mac, there's someone here who might be interested in the team. I mean, a seriously interested buyer.”

“Can't it wait until after the race?” Mac said, his voice terse. The checker was looking through Mac's sled bag, making sure he was carrying all the mandatory gear, and a veterinarian had already begun looking over the dogs. Mac turned his back on his brother to help the veterinarian. The sooner these procedures were attended to, the sooner he could feed and bed down his team. He glanced over to where Rebecca's team was parked.

She was like a drill sergeant whenever she stopped for a rest break. This was done immediately, then this was done after that, and then this and this and this, just so! She had a strict, regimented routine from which she never varied, and that was undoubtedly one of the reasons her dogs got more rest at each checkpoint than probably any other musher's. Mac heard her politely but firmly ask the veterinarian to please return after she'd had a chance to feed and straw her dogs, and damned if the veterinarian didn't back right off! Mac turned around and tried the same tactic with his own veterinarian.