Iditarod Nights (11 page)

Deshka's enthusiasm got them to Takotna
shortly after 3:00 in the morning. Dillon arranged Maverick's drop,
loaded a bail of straw and kept moving. From Takotna, the trail
followed an old mining road to Ophir and the last remnant of
civilization – a 1930s cabin belonging to a couple who flew out
every year to help man the checkpoint. Lantern light in the window
welcomed the teams.

Clyde lost interest in running, the rest of
the dogs either pushing or pulling him to keep up. And he stopped
eating. Dillon made the tough decision to drop him. As much as he
hated to do it, there was no point dragging the inconsolable guy
all the way to Nome.

He began the long, isolated stretch to
Cripple with thirteen dogs in harness. Minus 30 degrees under a
clearing sky, they traveled an easy trail of low rolling hills,
creek crossings and sparse vegetation. By mid-morning, one hill and
creek looked like the next. They camped trailside, other teams
passing them as Dillon checked and fed dogs. Once they were
comfortable and sleeping, he rolled his bag out on a bed of straw
to grab some down time for himself. As sleep pulled him toward
unconsciousness, he thought of Claire's concern and his bullheaded
insistence that he'd be alright.

Two hours later, he thrashed awake shouting
one word. "No!"

***

Approaching midnight of day six, Claire
cranked the volume on her MP3 player, hoping the noise would keep
her lucid. She rocked with the Bee Gees to "Stayin' Alive," belting
out made-up lyrics. "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, stayin awake, stayin
awake. Hey!" she shouted to her dogs, "We're stayin awake!"

They panted along, keeping pace with the
beat.

"Huh, huh, huh, huh," Claire grunted, "stayin
awake, stayin awake."

The song faded and staying awake felt like
too much work. The next song began, her own mix – she preferred
older tunes over the newer stuff – a heart-tugging ballad by Eric
Clapton.
Would you know my name...
Her head drooped and her
eyelids drifted shut. Just a few seconds, she thought. What can it
hurt? Her body relaxed forward over the handlebar.
Would it
be...

The sled dipped and she jerked upright. Her
headlamp flashed on a steel cable stretched neck-high across the
trail, coming straight at her.

Powerline!
her mind screamed.

She ducked hard and slammed her forehead on
the handlebar. The MP3 buds popped from her ears, cutting Clapton
off mid note. "Ow, shit!" She winced at the explosion of pain
across her skull. "What maniac put that there?" Tears sprang to her
eyes. "Whoa! Please. Whoa."

The dogs stopped and looked back.

To her amazement, her headlamp was still
intact. She twisted and shined the light on the trail behind her,
hoping to spot the guilty culprit lurking in the dark. "You could
kill somebody!" she hollered. "You know that, don't you?"

No response. She squinted through the tears
blurring her vision. Nothing but empty trail and trees.
Fine. I
know the law. Whoever's responsible will pay
. In the meantime,
she should mark the cable somehow so other mushers would see
it.

Setting the hook, she pulled half a dozen
florescent dog booties from the bag and walked back down the trail.
She went several yards before she realized there was no cable. Lots
of trees and snow. No maniac and no cable. "Oh man."

She'd heard stories of mushers imagining
things that weren't there: sweeping tree limbs on a treeless
stretch of trail, roaming elephants, mysterious lights and
buildings on sea ice, a train whistle when the nearest tracks were
hundreds of miles away. Hallucinations brought on by exhaustion and
dehydration.

She returned to her team and pulled up the
hook. "Sorry, guys. Let's go. Hike."

Handsome and Ranger got the team moving. As
if sensing a need to reach the next checkpoint before their driver
went any crazier on them, they picked up speed.

"Take it easy," Claire said. "What's the
hurry?"

And that's when she spotted the glimmer of
lights in the distance. She blinked several times to convince
herself she wasn't seeing stars from the smack to her forehead. The
lights grew larger. Ruby checkpoint.

"Good dogs!" she called, and winced.
"Straight on! Ow."

They would take their first mandatory
eight-hour rest at the former gold-rush town, its streets tiered
into a cozy bowl along the river. After the marathon run from Ophir
to Cripple to Ruby, she and her dogs had covered 495 miles and were
in thirty-fifth position, too late to claim the seven-course
gourmet meal and cash price for the First Musher to the Yukon
Award. But volunteers kept a smorgasbord going that included local
favorites like moose and fish stew for the mushers.

When Claire checked in, she discovered she
had missed Dillon by half an hour.
Good. He's still in the
race
.

Chapter 18

From Ruby, the Iditarod Trail traveled the
snow-covered frozen Yukon River. The next checkpoint was Galena,
fifty miles away, and then Nulato, another fifty miles. Claire and
her team were somewhere between Galena and Nulato when the setting
sun bled brilliant red and orange across the horizon. "Isn't that
the most gorgeous thing you've ever seen?" she called out to her
dogs. Picking up on her enthusiasm, they trekked along as though
eager to reach it before it disappeared.

Almost two miles wide in places, the Yukon's
vastness commanded awe. Chunks of pack ice interrupted an otherwise
flat surface bordered on the right by a low range of mountains.
Claire ski-poled to help her dogs maintain their speed and to
lessen the bite of the thirty-below air frosting the fur rim of her
parka hood. The temperature seemed to drop another ten degrees when
they passed through the shadows cast by the high bank. Thankfully,
they had the wind at their back.

Watching the sun dip low and the colors wane,
Claire decided this moment alone made the whole Iditarod experience
worth it. "How about it, guys? Does it get any better than
this?"

In the pause between sunset and darkness of
nightfall, she saw what looked like steam rising from the river ice
in the distance. She stared for long seconds, thinking it might be
another hallucination. Her forehead still smarted from the
powerline delusion. But the steam remained steady, reminding her of
Bagby Hot Springs in the Mount Hood National Forest.

"What on earth?" The dogs ears stood up.
Claire understood their skittish curiosity. Ice should not steam.
And there certainly weren't any hot springs out here. The trail
appeared to head straight for it. "Easy, guys."

As they got closer, she saw the slice of open
water to the left of the trail markers. The cold river water
condensing as it hit the colder air above it created the steam
cloud. "Would you look at that," Claire said. "Hold up. I need to
get a picture."

***

At 3:30 in the afternoon of day seven, Dillon
and his team left Kaltag, the last checkpoint on the Yukon River.
Here the northern and southern routes converged and headed
southwest to Unalakleet, eighty-five miles away. After traveling
the frozen river for almost two days, the trail followed an ancient
portage and marked the transition from inland river to the coast of
the Bering Sea. The first fifteen miles climbed through wooded
country to an eight-hundred-foot summit. Dillon took it slow and
peddled often. Each passing mile made it easier to compartmentalize
the nightmares. Get on with the race. Shake it off. He made caring
for his team his soul focus.

"How's it going, Deshka? You like being in
front, don't you. Elliot, you keeping everybody on their toes?"

By nightfall, they'd navigated the descent to
Tripod Flats. Dillon opted to rest at the BLM cabin a hundred yards
off the trail. He fixed his dogs a hot meal, boiled a bag of beef
wieners and chili for himself, and caught an hour of uninterrupted
sleep before another team arrived.

From the cabin, the trail ran across low
hills and ridges on the south side of Unalakleet River, then along
the sloughs of Old Woman River. Fifteen miles later they passed the
original Old Woman cabin, said to be haunted by the woman who lived
there years ago and died checking her traps, her body never found.
Dillon heard a female voice singing on his last trip through, the
lyrics indecipherable. He left a candy bar peace offering, just in
case there was any truth to the stories of being haunted by bad
luck if you didn't. In disrepair, the cabin still served as a
shelter when needed.

The trail emerged onto open tundra and the
BLM sign for the new Old Woman cabin. Half a dozen teams were
parked in the clearing. Dillon didn't want to share an over-heated
cabin with a bunch of other mushers, so he drove his team a short
while longer and found a cluster of straggly trees as shelter
against the tundra's pervasive wind to rest and snack his dogs.

In the darkness of early morning, they pushed
on. His headlamp spotlighted the backs of his dogs as they ran into
an endless void. He missed Claire, missed her smile, her laugh. The
easy way she had of making him feel wanted. The hours and miles
blurred. He faded in and out of consciousness until staying on the
sled became his greatest challenge. He imagined he saw a moose at
light's edge, head down, ready to charge. His dogs motored on as
though the beast didn't exist.

Because it didn't. Dillon knew this, yet when
he saw the second moose lurking in the shadows some time later, he
shouted, "Whoa!"

The dogs stopped. Deshka looked back, waiting
for instructions. Dillon shined his headlamp over both sides of the
trail. Nothing. No sound but the impatient whuffs of his team.

"Sorry, kids. Let's go."

The dogs ran on, the rhythm of their gait
hypnotic. He thought he saw the green and white flash of
Unalakleet's airport beacon but couldn't be sure. He felt himself
nodding off again and jerked. The beam of his headlamp cut a swath
mid gangline and picked up splotches of red in the tracks of his
dogs. He stared for long seconds, his exhausted brain struggling to
make sense of something that didn't make sense. It looked like
blood.
Is one of my dogs hurt?

With the team churning it up, he couldn't
tell. "Whoa!"

The dogs stopped again. He set the hook and
walked the gangline, shining his light on each dog's paw. No
obvious injuries. Unsurprisingly, Clyde lacked a right front
bootie. Dillon squatted to examine the exposed paw. His headlamp
caught the bloody print of a thumb and forefinger in the snow
inches away. His stomach shoved into his throat.

Straightening, he swung his headlamp in a
wild arc. A dark-hooded figure knelt in the middle of the trail in
front of the team, hands planted in stains of blood. Recognition
tore through Dillon. He swallowed against the urge to vomit. The
figure's head came up and his lamp shined full in the eyes of a
dead man.

Chapter 19

Just before noon, Claire arrived at
Unalakleet checkpoint in time to catch Dillon in the process of
packing to leave. "Hey!" she called as volunteers led her team to a
parking spot a few yards away.

He walked over. "Hey yourself."

The spooked look she saw on his face at
McGrath had returned. She masked her concern behind a tired smile.
"Tough run?" she asked.

He expelled a heavy breath. "The
hallucinations are hell."

Claire smirked and lifted her hood to expose
the goose egg on her forehead. "Tell me about it. I ducked a
powerline that wasn't there coming into Ruby."

"Ouch." He leaned in and brushed his chapped
lips to the edge of the bruise.

"What about you?" she asked when he pulled
back.

"It's not important."

"That bad, huh?"

He didn't answer.

Claire shrugged to cover the sting of his
unwillingness to talk. "Well, I'd better get my dogs taken care
of," she said and turned away to grab a snubline.

Dillon took her arm and coaxed her to face
him. When she did, his haunted eyes implored her to understand. "If
I don't talk about it," he said, his words measured, "then it's not
important."

Yes. She did understand. She knew how it felt
to carry a wound so deep that bottling it up was the only way to
deal with it. And she understood the destructive consequences of
keeping it locked inside to fester.

Lifting her chin, she pressed her mouth to
his. Like kissing a snowman wearing medicated lip balm. "When
you're ready to talk, I'm ready to listen."

He gave a brief nod. "Take care of yourself
out there."

"You too."

***

A ground blizzard drove snow and ice sideways
through the narrow wind-tunnel of Kwik River valley, obliterating
the trail. It tore at the little warmth remaining in Claire's
exhausted limbs and scoured the exposed areas of her face with a
gale of pellets like course sand.

"Hey there, Zach," she shouted through her
neck gaiter, "how're you doing? Riley, you still with us? How's
that Pepper and Trouble doing up there?"

They had endured frigid gusting winds on the
barren coastline from Unalakleet to Shaktoolik, crossed pressure
ridges serenaded by the unnerving sound of cracking sea ice over
Norton Bay to Koyuk, and finally headed inland, hoping to make Elim
checkpoint before dark. If they kept moving, they'd make it.

The wind and cold weren't her only enemies as
evening neared. Fatigue made every move and decision an effort in
determination. Talking to her dogs helped her stay awake, if not
alert. She wondered if this was how it felt to be an addict trying
to go clean, her mind obsessed with that next fix – in her case, a
good night's sleep – while her body just tried to survive.