Fast into the Night by Debbie Clarke Moderow

Author:Debbie Clarke Moderow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In the end Mark completes Copper Basin, but it isn’t pretty. He stops for ten minutes at Tolsona, twenty miles from the finish, to go inside and fix a failing head lamp. When he returns to the dogs and asks them to continue, they refuse. Kanga sits down in a huff, leading the others into a full-blown mutiny. Mark eventually walks in front of the team. He reports later that it took an hour before they agreed to move down the trail. My husband hallucinates on the way to the finish about For Sale signs that he still swears lined the wilderness trail.

A few weeks after Copper, Mark enters the Tustumena 200, hoping to regain the respect of the team. This time I decide to stay home, leaving the race to the musher and his dogs. They do well for the first 150 miles, and with each report it’s apparent that Mark and the team have hit stride. At 11:00 P.M. I’m elated, driving 200 miles south hoping to be there in time for their triumphant, long-awaited finish—when my cell phone rings.

“Debbie, I just scratched. We’ve come back to Rockies. They won’t run in the wind.”

Rockies is the last checkpoint on the race, a mere fifty miles from the finish.

I’ve just scratched.

I’m thinking the team must be refusing to leave the checkpoint, which is bad enough, when Mark elaborates.

“We left Rockies just fine—but Deb, it’s blowing a gale out there. Kanga kept jumping off the trail and into the snowbank. She won’t go. I tried everyone up front before returning to the checkpoint.”

“No!” I respond.

In an emotional mix of empathy and armchair criticism, I plead with my trail-weary husband, “You must keep going.”

I beg him to try anything, even an overnight layover. Another mutiny would compound my own failure on the sea ice.

“They cannot balk again,” I say.

But they do.

He calls back within a few hours to say his scratch is official. That they went out again but shut down within a few miles.

“I’m okay with it, Deb,” he tells me. “But I’ve got to say, you can have Juliet. I loaded her when she wouldn’t go, and when we were finally moving, I look down to see her face popping out of a hole she chewed in the side of my sled bag!”

Now I’m laughing. Juliet has never cooperated for Mark; he’s way too matter-of-fact. Of course she’d chew or wriggle her way out of a sled bag, particularly if she’s not tired. The image of her little gray head peering at Mark is actually funny, until I hear more.

“I had to put her back onto the line. We went for a while, but when we got back into the wind, Kanga sat down. She’s not cut out for this either.”

Kanga. Of course she can do this.

I want to believe in Kanga, but this report haunts me, echoing advice from a friend soon after my scratch: “It only takes one to start a mutiny, Debbie. You need to figure out who it is and take that dog out of your team.

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