Looking for Alaska (36 page)

I could see Jeff was missing the tips of a few fingers on his left hand. “I had never been all-over wet before in a race. I remember moving my arms and fingers, trying to keep my dexterity so that when I came to the firewood, I would be able to grasp the match.”

Donna walked through with Ellen to take her downstairs and tuck her in to bed.

“I was really taken by the energy of the dogs. I was having difficulty moving. Time passed, a half hour, then an hour. I was getting discouraged, seeing no firewood. We came around a bend in the river. There in the distance was a little red dot. The dogs saw that light. They took off like a streak of lightning. There is a custom on the Yukon: trappers and others will hang out a lantern on a branch for anyone coming through.” By now the kettle had been whistling for quite some time, but Jeff ignored it.

“On this part of the river there were protruding blocks of ice the size of refrigerators. We bang into them, and they'd about throw me off the back. If I had been thrown off, I don't think the dogs would have stopped until they got to the cabin. I was still, immobile, shivering. I would try to run, holding on, to warm up and couldn't. I knew now I would live, but it seemed to take forever.” Jeff talked as if this short run to the red lantern had taken place last week. He is the kind of human who needs a challenge, a test. He actually enjoys being challenged in extraordinary ways, just not when it involves getting soaked at close to forty below.

“Finally we got to the light. The dogs just peeled out; I got off the sled to try to lessen their load and run up the bank. I was a frozen cylinder. I could not run; they dragged me up the bank. I took off their harnesses, fed them, and went inside. The trapper inside, a Cree, had his head laid on the table. Four-fifths of a bottle of rum was gone. A pot of moose stew was on the woodstove. Inside the cabin was a real strong smell of rutabagas. This guy, a Canadian, was a musher sometimes. He had a thin, black beard and is very powerfully built. From out of nowhere, he lifts up his head and says twice, ‘I killed a moose with a tomahawk yesterday. I killed a moose with a tomahawk yesterday. I ran it down through the deep snow.' Then his head hit the table.”

What a treasure that warmth inside those four walls was. And to be able to eat warm moose stew.

“It took me the better part of an hour to get out of my clothes because I had to thaw the zippers. When I woke up, there were several teams parked at the bank of the river. I asked them if anyone had problems at the water. They said everyone did—everyone got wet. I was dry again, the dogs were rested. We took off, and that was the first big race we won, the 1989 Yukon Quest.”

At the end of the story, Jeff jumped up as if he'd been asleep for a week. That was the longest I would ever see him sit still, though I spent several days with him, his family, and their dogs.

YOU READY?

During my second trip to see Jeff, we were training not far from Mount McKinley. I had been on a snow machine following Jeff and Morten, one of the handlers. Morten, twenty-three, from Denmark, and the other two handlers, Helge and Shawn, lived in a tiny log cabin off in the woods apart from the main dog yard. They kept the newly weaned puppies around them. Shawn Sidelinger was originally from Maine. Morten and Helge, twenty-two, from Norway, were enrolled in a Norwegian college similar to the monthlong wilderness programs run in this country by the National Outdoor Leadership School except theirs was a several-year program. Today Morten ran one team, Jeff another. Training is about determining which dogs that have already run the Iditarod will make the “varsity” again, have no nagging injuries or lagging competitive spirits, and then too, which of the young guns are pushing to make the team. More females finish the Iditarod than male dogs, although probably more males start out.

The thin trail wove through dense evergreen woods. It is so cold around McKinley, here on the outside edge of Denali Park, that trees grow slowly. I had seen instantly that if the dogs went the wrong way, you could crash into trees. I was following them slowly on one of Jeff's well-used snow machines. I'd seen Helge on this snow machine running the trails with the young puppies already, getting them to love running in the snow. They were already evaluating the pups' spirits, their minds, their physical prowess.

The trail broke out of the woods, and the two teams emerged into the middle of open, softly rolling country. Was this tundra on frozen wetlands? Jeff stopped, Morten stopped, and then I stopped. Jeff motioned me over to them.

“You ready?” he asked.

The dogs were barking and pulling on their harnesses, they hadn't even warmed up yet.

“Am I ready for what?” I answered, my eyes widening.

“To take over Morten's team.”

Jeff looked at me sometimes the way an eagle would a wounded rabbit.

“I don't know, what do I do?”

The dogs, all of them, were barking even more excitedly. They wanted to take off. Come on, they were saying, let's hit the trail. They live to zoom across these snow-covered wilds.

“Just hold on, stand on the runners, and watch me. I don't suggest that you stop, but if you need to, push down on this.” Jeff stepped on a metal bar equipped with long teeth. “Morten, you ride the snow machine, okay?”

I was more than a bit surprised, though I always try to be ready for surprises. We hadn't talked about me actually taking over a sled. I felt that I should have had some training, education, or at least more time to psych myself up. What if I made a fool of myself while being hauled through the snow by some of the greatest athletes in the world, these refined long-distance runners? But I couldn't say no. I knew Jeff was testing me. I knew he'd been watching me just to see if I could keep up on the snow machine, following the unmarked trails through this maze of their fierce winter world. I had already taken the wrong trail once and gotten stuck in the deep snow trying to turn the snow machine around. I had come to a fork in the trail, going downhill, and I could see sled trails and dog prints, but the trail split and the prints went both ways. They'd been on this segment maybe a few days before. I wasn't far down one fork when I realized I'd gone the wrong way. It made me understand why Jeff had waited until we got out into open country before allowing me the chance to ride. Running into an unmovable tree could be really damaging to my health.

Jeff will observe something astutely, whether human or dog. I'm not sure which he prefers or respects more; it probably depends on the individual. Then, if he can, he will push you—again, human or dog—into places within yourself you didn't know existed. As a trainer of world-champion long-distance racing dogs, dogs that can accomplish feats that are unmatched by any other athlete in the world, Jeff knows what to do. He observes, then makes a highly specific analysis. He then attempts to put the subject of his attention, whether it be a potential lead dog or me, someone who said he wanted to understand what Jeff does, through a system of greater and greater stresses. How will the dog—or the writer—respond, learn, and retain what he has learned. This was my first test; I was caught by surprise and that was part of it.

I gave Morten my camera bag, stepped onto the runners, and grabbed hold of the handlebar on the small, light wooden sled. Morten pulled the hook out of the packed snow, said “Hold on” to me in his Danish accent, and then we were zooming. The dogs were fluid and thrilled. I was stiff, unsure, but trying to let the thrill in. Morten stayed fairly far back, I could not hear him. He was probably thinking that when I fell off, he didn't want to run over me with the snow machine.

The dogs made little noise as they trotted as fast as their long legs would go. Though the pace allowed larger dogs to keep up an even trot, a couple of the smallest dogs actually ran the whole way. Jeff told me that one of his top all-time leaders, Jenna, was only thirty-nine pounds. She had already guided him to a win in the Iditarod. Although I probably knew a bit more than some about sled dogs, I was astounded at how small and slender these dogs were. And they looked this way with fur, deep, dense hair capable of keeping them warm at way below zero. These races are not weight-pulling events; they are long-distance marathons that happen to pass through some of the most demanding, isolated, frigid, brutal country in the world. It felt as if I had grabbed hold of the rope on the back of a powerful waterskiing boat and the throttle was stuck on.

Some of the best mushers believe that the kind of genetics they want in their dogs are those from animals that have survived the rigors of Alaska for hundreds, even a few thousand, years. Before electricity, planes, boats, trains, cars, government assistance, before it was called Alaska, it was the Eskimo people and the Athabascans that relied on dogs. Really the names don't work—let's just say it was the Natives' dogs, the ones whose lives were even more difficult than people's. They only got food when there was enough food for all the humans. They had no medicines, they had to fight off each other to keep their food. The dogs that did live were the ones able to convert whatever food they got into sustenance. They could use efficiently however little they got and turn it into energy. They made the best use of available body heat and white blood cells and the pads on their paws. They could travel great distances without food, not really caring if they received human attention. Over hundreds and hundreds of years in arctic conditions, dogs were the only beasts of burden until a relatively few years ago when someone introduced snow machines. Truly, only the dogs with the rarest combination of traits survived the environment and their demanding masters. They had to have great stamina, superior strength, pound for pound—hopefully the fewer pounds the better—the best disease resistance, the best use of instincts and senses, the most unassailable minds, the ability to adjust, the fastest recovery time. Then the best of these dogs were bred to each other by the Native people, who had survived with many of the same traits.

Jeff and Donna King's dog yard near Denali Park.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

This is why mushers who know have searched the isolated Native villages, where distinct gene pools could develop relatively unhampered by someone in the village bringing home a collie, say. They want Native dog genetics in their bloodlines. They understand hybrid vigor. They like to get a superior bitch leader from an Athabascan village in the superfrozen interior and cross her with a long-legged Eskimo dog from a famous line of windswept Arctic Ocean–area dogs. Breed these dogs whose gene pools have never merged and you might get some superdogs.

Natives say that many white men want “a picture dog,” a dog that looks good in a photo. Look at the ads on TV for Subaru. They use a matched set of identical-looking Siberian huskies. If you hooked them up to a sled and raced them against Jeff's team, they wouldn't have a chance. The picture has absolutely nothing to do with how capable, sound, and tough a sled dog is. How you look as a dog has nothing to do with how you can handle an open lead on the Yukon River at 2
A.M
. when it's February and thirty-eight below.

I rode for a mile or so, though it seemed to last for an hour, or for just a few seconds. The creaking of the runners over the bumps in the snow was loud at times. I was fully alive, and more. The padding of the team's feet on the semi-hard trail of snow, the dry kind that falls all around Denali, was a clean sound. Everything was so deeply quiet in winter. It was amazing how the dogs were so jointly focused on just moving fast, covering trail. The occasional smell of dog mingled with the dry, cold, blue air.

I was glad I'd followed Jeff's suggestion and ordered from Cabela's a special zip-up bodysuit with a major hood and special rubber boots rated to keep you warm to one hundred below. Your feet don't move much when you're on the runners. Plus I was probably holding my body as stiff as a scared child who just had the training wheels taken off his bike. Jeff looked relaxed. Suddenly, he stopped, right before we were to go down a different trail and enter some spruce woods. I lifted my right foot off the right runner and pressed down on the metal brake. To my surprise, the team stopped, though they clearly didn't want to.

“Let Morten take the team home. There might be some tough turns and bumps and things through here,” Jeff said. One of his dogs, then two and three, began barking; they wanted to crank it back up.

I waited for Morten to catch up on the snow machine. I got off the sled and he took off following Jeff. The trail on the way back had some sharp, severe turns, just about wide enough for the sled alone. Even Morten had to lean way over, as the sled's left-side runners came off the ground. He almost spilled the sled on its side. And there were bumps and sharp, skidding turns because the dogs sped up as they got closer to home. I didn't get the feeling they sped up because like a horse they just wanted to go to the barn, they sped up because they liked burning energy, of which they seemed to have an endless supply. They knew where they were, and it was like a runner sprinting the last hundred yards. The dogs are experts at energy use and know how much they can pump through their fantastic motors.