Guts Read Free

foul-up and they had somehow failed to ship our dog food to the checkpoints. The first time it happened, the mushers got together and hired a helicopter to fly food in, though we had already paid for shipment. When it happened again, there was a three-day hold on the race while we all sat and waited for the food to arrive at drop points ahead of us. Eventually the race went on but the tempo (and yes, there
are
a flow and a plan to the race) was altered, perhaps destroyed. It became a clawing run to try to get in front and stay there.
    Libby Riddles won the race, the first woman to do so, by heading across sea ice in wind and storm so strong that nobody else would attempt it. I tried a day after she left and my sled dogs blew back on top of me in a furry pile. Caught on the sea ice and unable to compete, I got word to Nome—by telling a musher, who told another musher, who told still another musher, who told a ham-radio operator at the checkpoint where I was—that I was ready to get off the ice. My handler, waiting in Nome, found a bushplane to come and get me and my dogs.
    At first I could not believe that a plane could do that. I had heard stories about the amazing feats of bush pilots and their planes, but I always thought the tales were exaggerated, almost mythical.
    The conditions have to be fully understood to appreciate what the pilot did. I’m not sure of the wind speed—I later heard that it was gusting to over ninety knots. All I know is that it was so powerful that it was impossible to stay on my feet. My dogs were tucked back in a pressure ridge with the sled jammed in at their rear. I lay with the dogs at my side and if I tried to go out and stand, the wind simply blew me flat or got beneath me and blew me away. Later I heard stories of men being blown off their sleds and out across the ice for several miles before they could stop. The only reason the dogs didn’t blow away was that they were low and their claws could grip the ice. It had been rumored that an entire team had been blown away and was found by a plane two days later, forty-five miles away. This proved to be untrue but not one person doubted it at the time.
    In this maelstrom of wind and blowing snow and ice the pilot left Nome, only ninety miles away, and came to find me. When he saw my bright yellow sled bag, he set the plane down on the ice near me and waved at me to come. He didn’t land the plane so much as fly it down to the ice and hold it there, the prop roaring and the nose into the wind while he signaled me. Coincidentally, the plane was another Cessna 406.
    But I still could not stand up, and it seemed an impossible thirty yards to the plane. I crawled to my lead dog, the same Little Buck who had felt for the trail with his toes, and pulled him out of his relative comfort in the ice ridge. Still on my hands and knees, I dragged him and the rest of the team over to the plane. But as soon as the sled pulled clear of the scant protection of the ridge (it was less than four feet high), the wind took it and it spun out like a weather-vane so that the dogs and I had all we could do to drag it. I crawled back down the line of fourteen dogs and used my knife to cut it loose—it blew away, along with all my gear— and then crawled back to the leader and pulled him with me to the plane.
    At the side I stood and opened the door, holding on to a handle just inside, and pulled in the dogs, all still harnessed together. They had never been in a plane, or even close to one with the engine running, and for half a second it seemed that they would drag me off in their fear. But they have enormous trust, and Little Buck at last let me throw him up and through the door. With the leader inside, the rest of them decided to follow and allowed me to grab them by the backs of their harnesses and throw them into the plane. The problem was that while they trusted me, they were still terrified. The incredible roar of the engine was