Looking for Alaska (37 page)

When you think about life before machines, which in the great scheme of things was not that long ago, and how important animals were to man's survival, you realize that few other animals could handle the work in the Arctic. Mules, horses, ox, require too much fuel because there is too much body to keep warm. Alaskan huskies can dig burrows into the snow to escape the predator winds and storms. They can dig a burrow in the ground to keep their young alive—from whatever might eat them—and keep the species going. Like the camel who is suited to the rigors of the anvil of the desert, so are these dogs to their frozen world.

The two teams roared up the hill to the Kings' compound. They call it Husky Homestead, as there are about ten times more dogs here than people. Once this was a Native land allotment, owned by an Athabascan woman from Cantwell. At one time individual Native Alaskans could get their own one-hundred-sixty-plus-acre chunks of land in specified areas. The woman used it as a hunting camp, but decided to sell it to Jeff. He bought it before he was a musher, before he was married; he had to borrow money from his family to afford it. Long before any huskies were in Jeff's life, there was this homestead, quite a ways off the road.

KITTY

The dog yard at the Kings' is where the “front yard” of a house in the suburbs would be. We pulled in and Jeff and Morten took off the harnesses one by one and brought each dog back to its area. Each was chained to its doghouse via a metal stake that rotated so the chain wouldn't get tangled. Every dog is different, with its own personality and distinct appearance. Red, a long-legged lead dog, is dark strawberry blond in color. He sits or lies there, holding his pointed snout at a regal angle, his sharp, oversize ears alert. When he is hooked up and standing ready to go, he looks awkward, painfully shy, almost scared. But when Jeff says “Mush,” Red is a trail-eating intimidator, an unrelenting leader who will sacrifice his body. He even pulls too hard sometimes.

Jenna is one of Jeff's favorites, probably because of her eyes. She has large, dark eyes that seem rounder than the other dogs', bigger, as if they are better adapted for seeing in the dark. If you saw her on the street, you'd
know
she was a plain mutt, maybe even a stray having trouble scrounging dinner. She has the coloring of a gray wolf, but her hair isn't deep. She watches your every move, listens to your every sound, figures out your body language. Then if she loves you, she will do anything you wish, often before you ask. If you love her and she is smart enough to tell, she knows you would never ask her to do something too dangerous. She is discerning and intelligent enough to trust your judgment and know that you will trust hers. She knows you'll know how to comprehend her way of communicating. Jenna's run the Iditarod three times, won once, come in third twice. She knows the trail better than Jeff, and they both know that.

Yuksi is a dog Jeff believes will be a superstar. He belongs to Bryan Imus and will be running his first Iditarod in 2000. Bryan's mother was an outstanding sprint musher, and Bryan used to work for Jeff the way Morten does now. Jeff wants to buy Yuksi, but Bryan isn't sure. It's expensive to run the Iditarod—all the dogs, all the equipment, the months and months of training yourself and the dogs. Imagine feeding twenty, thirty dogs, much less eighty-plus puppies. Imagine the vet bills. Bryan, as tough as they come, wants to be like Jeff, a professional, but he must do well enough to get some sponsors, and soon. Bryan's girlfriend is an officer in training at National Bank of Alaska. How long will she want to live in the bush? Even in Alaska it's not easy on your neighbors if you have fifty dogs in your yard. So most mushers, like Jeff and Donna, live far enough out that they don't have close human neighbors. Although Bryan was running the Iditarod, he was renting or “renting to own” Yuksi to Jeff. Yuksi looked to have plenty of “Native village dog” blood, with some wolf mixed in. His legs are long, like those of the best human eight-hundred-meter runners, and he is never still. He prances, he walks around and around his doghouse at the maximum length his chain will allow, having worn a circle in the bare dirt. There is no other dog in this yard with his internal engine, one that could or would not shut off. The only conceivable comparison is to Jeff. It seems that mushers would prefer dogs like Yuksi. Or would they rather have dogs like Red that conserve their energy, that are languid until training or the race?

As I followed Jeff and the dogs through that fall, winter, and early spring, the retired dog Kitty roamed and watched. She was stiff and moved like any creature that has pushed its body as far as it would go, then pushed it further. She was also clearly a former champion of the world. She reminded me of videos I've seen of an older Joe Louis or Muhammad Ali. She was definitely not spry or fast anymore; it was all she could do to walk. But she still had that aura. “I should be revered.” “I should be respected for what I've done.” She has always been detached from humans. As Donna put it, “Kitty did not show love or affection for humans, even for me or Jeff. She recognized us and tolerated us, but she lived to run, to race, and especially to lead.”

When the other dogs are being harnessed and unhooked from their doghouses, which are lined with straw in winter, Kitty seems again to feel the excitement of the run. She knows they are training for the last great race, the Iditarod, or the Kuskokwim 300, or one of the others. Kitty, oddly colored, black-and-white like a sheepdog except with shorter denser hair, never raced for the fame; she did not know what that was. Her eyes were almost the color of icy snow, her nose and ears black. She didn't run for the adulation of fans or for food or prize money. She could have cared less about interviews and TV news. She needed the challenges and she needed to be in charge, to use her superior senses and stamina. She even seemed to be aware of her superiority. Some of her blood came from great Native dogs bred in the villages to help their people survive. Long ago people probably used her ancestors to chase moose into the openings in the ten-mile brush fences her people used.

Jeff and Kitty.
P
HOTO BY
P
ETER
J
ENKINS

She can no longer do what she once loved so much to do. Jeff and Donna let her roam the dog yard free to keep her blue eyes on everyone, possibly to communicate her strength to the young ones, the rowdy ones. I never saw Kitty stop walking and looking and observing the other dogs. It was all she could do to power herself up the walkway between the dog-food-mixing room with its outside puppy enclosure and the storage building with a guest apartment upstairs. The walkway has a slight incline and it leads to the house. She would look at the house but never go to it. Kitty does not concern herself with humans. It was as if she were making sure they, Jeff and Donna, knew she was still on the job. No dog dared growl or bother her as she checked on them all. She would pace around the yard all day looking at the other dogs. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking; she has always been aloof. She pays close attention to the end of the yard closest to the house, where the best dogs had their houses, including the leaders that have taken over from her. Kitty is now fourteen. She goes into anyone's doghouse and no one bothers her. Even if she sleeps in there, they'll sleep on top of their house or on the ground until she leaves. She just has that much influence, somehow all the dogs know it.

Kitty ran in six Iditarods as a main leader from 1991 to 1996. She led Jeff to two wins, in 1993 and 1996. In 1991 they finished twelfth; in 1992, sixth; in 1994, third; in 1995, seventh. In 1993, Kitty led Jeff to a win with only thirty-two minutes separating him from DeDe Janrowe, the powder-blue-dressed favorite of many Alaskans. In 1996, Jeff's team ran one of the fastest races in history, nine days, five hours, and forty-three minutes. Kitty was nine that time, old for a world-class long-distance racer, and she stumbled just out of Nome. Jeff said he knew she was tired, but the rest of the team, which was much younger, picked up the pace, knowing the end was near. After all those years of pulling Jeff over the finish, Jeff stopped long enough to put an exhausted Kitty in the sled, and she traveled the last few miles as a passenger. She certainly didn't like it, but Jeff wouldn't risk hurting her, even if it was tough on her monumental pride as a racer, as a leader, as a winner. Jeff knew she wouldn't ever wish to be a passenger, she was the captain. She was not only the head of their ship, she was the brains and the muscle and the heart.

When I think about how Donna described Kitty, saying that she was aloof and tolerated others but lived to run, lived to race, and lived to lead, well, that pretty well describes Donna's husband too.

“TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT NOT RECOMMENDED”

Before I left at the end of my first visit to go back to Seward, Jeff grabbed a blank Post-it note off the refrigerator and found a pen.

“Peter,” he said, and I was surprised to hear him say my name. “I'm going to write down a list of clothing you will need when you come back. You do want to come back, make a few long training runs with us?”

“Yes, I really do.” Maybe I'd passed Test #1. Though I got the feeling the tests never ended around Jeff.

“You have the Internet in Seward?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Well, you click onto the Cabela's site, then put the Trans-Alaska suit in the search engine. Order one of those. Where we will be going, it could get extremely cold, at least forty below. Also get a pair of the Trans-Alaska boots, they're rated at one hundred below. The problem with mushing, your feet don't move around much.” Jeff wrote down the two items.

“Oh, and get a couple pairs of Polartec gloves.”

As he wrote, I looked at what was tacked on the front of the King refrigerator. The fronts of refrigerators are some of my favorite reads. There was an Algebra I, Chapter 3, test by Tessa, the middle daughter. She had got an A, a 96 out of a possible 100. There was a chart, with a pink heart for each day, Monday through Sunday, in which Ellen, their second-grader, writes in how many minutes she has read each day. Monday she marked in fifteen minutes. There was a card someone had sent them with a quote on the front: “If you're not happy with what you have, how could you be happier with more?” There was a picture of Cali, their oldest, her latest school picture from Healy. She looked twenty years old, and sophisticated, though she was in the ninth grade. And there were four pictures made into one from the family orthodontist in Fairbanks showing Tessa's shining grin. There was a close-up of her bite, a shot of her uppers, and lowers, all straight and white—no braces anymore!

Jeff said that I would be welcome back when I got my cold-weather clothes, just to call a few days in advance to warn them. So I packed up and headed back to Seward. When I got home, I ordered my equipment, then Rita, Julianne, and I went back to the Kings' around the end of November. They had invited our family, and other friends, to share their Thanksgiving. The night we arrived, Jeff said the next morning we were going to take a forty-something-mile run down the Denali Highway. It is closed in winter but offers an unusually smooth, wide trail for early long-distance training. We would come across a large sign in glowing orange and yellow a few miles down the road, east out of Cantwell, that would offer us a chilling warning, a warning totally unheeded by Jeff and another musher, Bruce Lee, who were on the road for training this day.

The sign said, “Travel beyond this point not recommended. If you must use this road expect extreme cold/heavy snow. Carry cold weather survival gear. Tell someone where you are going.”

I had been to a few out-of-the-way places in Alaska by now on my trip but hadn't seen any such signs. Jeff told me about the road while he and his head assistant, Shawn, harnessed up the dogs. Shawn would be running a team of young dogs for Jeff, call them the junior varsity, in this year's Iditarod. They were scouting for the team of tomorrow, and this run would be a little workout.

Jeff said that a few years ago a couple and their grandchildren had driven down this road during an extremely cold winter. They had run off the road and got stuck, and eventually their gas ran out. They didn't have survival gear, and all four of them perished. They had traveled too far down the road to walk out. I wondered if we were going farther down the road than they had. But with Jeff and Shawn, I felt supremely confident, especially in my new clothing. I had the feeling I could sleep out in this black Trans-Alaska suit and not ever need a sleeping bag. The trails these guys go down in races and even in training would never have a sign this dramatic, though those trails are far more dangerous.

We drove out to the road, parked, and got ready to go. It was maybe ten below zero and perfectly still. Golden sunlight was shining down on us with a dark blue sky above. Jeff's dogs, I'd already noticed, didn't jump around much. But as always, they were ready to rock. Jeff had brought an extra sled for me to ride and attached it to the end of his. He told me we would go through this big valley; the frozen Nenana River would be on our left.