Across a Thousand Miles (23 page)

His dogs were extremely energetic, having had a full twenty-four hours of rest since he'd left them. They whirled around on their short picket lines and howled their joy at seeing him again. Merlin jumped up and put his paws on Mac's chest and stared into his eyes. “Hey, Merlin. Give me a few minutes to get things together and we'll be out of here.”

The volunteers at Slaven's Roadhouse had taken excellent care of his dogs. They had been fed every six hours, religiously, in the exact way that Rebecca had specified before she left. They looked good. Hell, they looked great. Mac bootied them in record time, and less than one hour after arriving at the roadhouse he was back on the river with his team, heading for Circle and hoping he wouldn't finish this race dead last.

 

R
EBECCA REACHED
Central ten minutes behind Wilton but fourteen minutes ahead of Beech. The run from Circle had been tough. Birch Creek was without a doubt the most twisted, contorted river she'd ever run. No wonder it was an eighty-mile run, when by road the distance was a mere thirty-three miles. She had stopped her team twice to feed, and four other times to snack, and still she had caught up with the front-runners. Kanemoto met her at Crabb's Corner, the Central checkpoint, and before she could ask, he said, “Mac's okay. He's back with his team by now, and he says for you to kick ass.” Kanemoto grinned.

Rebecca felt more like lying down and sleeping. The storm was intensifying, and the final few miles into Central had seemed endless. It was midnight, and she felt as though she hadn't slept in years. Worse, throughout the entire run she'd been anticipating the next leg of the trail, the most dreaded stretch of all, Eagle Summit. In this weather it would be unbelievably nasty. Her only hope of getting over it was to tuck in behind Beech and Wilton when they checked out.

“Kanemoto,” she said when both the checker and the veterinarian had given her team a thumbs-up, “I'm going to try and grab a little nap. Watch Wilton and Beech. When they start getting ready to leave, wake me.”

Kanemoto nodded vigorously. Kanemoto wanted her to win. He would watch Wilton and Beech like a hawk, and when one of them so much as stirred, he'd wake her. Rebecca felt confident enough in this that she was able to lie down on a warm mattress in the checkpoint's back room and fall asleep instantly.

To be woken instantly by a shake on the shoulder. “Rebecca!” Kanemoto said. “They are getting ready!”

She felt miserable. Her muscles ached, her eyes burned, and she was nauseatingly dizzy. “How long…?”

“They have only been here three hours,” Kanemoto said. “But you told me to wake you.”

Three hours! Rebecca had hoped that given the severity of the weather conditions, they would have waited longer. She sat up. Kanemoto handed her a cup of something hot. She took a sip. Coffee, black and strong, and Lord, it tasted good. In spite of her resolve not to drink any caffeinated beverages, she downed that cup of coffee in jig time.

By 4 a.m., Wilton, Beech and Rebecca were signing
out of the Central checkpoint. Rebecca's dogs were disgruntled. She had broken some unspoken pact between them, cheating them out of much-needed rest, but without Cookie she couldn't see how this team would ever get over the summit. The weather was just too fierce. If they could follow Wilton and Beech, they might just make it.

 

A
T MIDNIGHT
Mac was checking into Circle. He was a good eighty miles behind Rebecca. In this dirty weather that meant at least twelve or fourteen hours, not counting the time he'd have to spend at Circle feeding and resting his team. It was little consolation that three of the teams he'd passed on his snowmobile trip back to Slaven's were still at Circle. He wanted to be in Central, where Rebecca was.

By 4 a.m. he was on the move again, his team trotting into the stormy darkness. The trail was soft, visibility was nil, and the wind strong enough to sap the heat from his body and suck the breath from his lungs. Merlin kept on, never once questioning Mac's judgment. The husky's courage was humbling. Five thousand dollars? Hell, Merlin was worth ten times that. How did one put a price on the best sled dog that ever lived?

Only by winning the race could Mac have afforded to buy the team, and he had lost all hope of that the moment he'd offered to fly Johnson to Fairbanks. He didn't regret his actions; he'd had no choice in the matter. But the thought of losing the team, losing Merlin, was the same as his fear of losing Rebecca. He'd never really possessed either, but in the past four months his entire life had become the sum of both.

 

T
HERE WAS NO UP
or down to the world, just the endless white and the polar cold and the sound of the wind howl
ing across a treeless landscape. There were no dogs to be seen, just the dark blotch of her sled bag. There was no trail to follow, just the punchy, blown-in trough left by the teams ahead, and the teams ahead were running blind.

Running? Hah! Walking. One step at a time.

Up and up. Higher and higher. Each upward step brought a stronger wind, a more blinding snow. Rebecca stopped her team and labored to the front. She pulled off one mitt and held her hand across Raven's eyes to melt the ice that had frozen them shut. She did the same for Thor. Moments ago she had caught a glimpse of what she had assumed was either Wilton or Beech, but now she was as alone as she had ever been, and in the most awful weather she had ever seen.

The conditions would get even worse, for the Summit was still four miles away. Four miles of uphill struggle in a blistering wind that topped seventy miles an hour. She couldn't believe that her dogs were still moving forward. She wouldn't have blamed them at all for quitting on her. “You're a good girl, Raven,” she said, her voice wavering in the wind's onslaught, her words whipped from her mouth and shredded into unintelligible fragments. She turned her back to it and sank to her knees to catch her breath, leaning backward to keep her balance on the steep grade. If it got much worse, they'd have to stop, though stopping on this barren dome was not something she wanted to do. The longer she waited here, the farther ahead of her Wilton and Beech would get. She opened the bag of snacks and worked her way slowly down the team, tossing each of the dogs a chunk of meat mix. When she reached the sled, she caught hold of it to steady herself and stuffed the snack bag back
inside. She peered ahead through her goggles. The front end of her team was completely obscured in the blowing snow. “Ready?” she shouted, and she saw her wheel dogs stand up, leaning into the wind. “All right!”

The gang line tightened and the huskies began to move forward, using all their strength, endurance and agility to battle their way toward the summit. Rebecca walked behind the sled, her hands gripping the driver's bow so tightly that they began to cramp. She stared down at her feet as they plodded slowly forward. Her leg muscles burned. She gasped for breath. She counted out her steps in a muttered monotone, “…eight, nine, ten…,” and knew that these next four miles would be the longest four miles of her life.

Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Forty. The minutes seemed like hours. The wind increased and Rebecca's hands tightened. If she let go, she'd be blown clear to the moon. Her dogs were belly deep in the snow, pulling hard, giving everything they had to give, and somewhere up in the front of the team, invisible to her, a small black female named Raven was leading them on. She was about to stop the team for another snack break when of their own accord they halted. This was it, then. They were quitting on her.

Rebecca fished the snack bag out of the sled. She crawled on her hands and knees up the length of the gang line, handing out liver snacks this time, giving each dog a brief rubdown, a word of encouragement over the howl of the wind. At the front of her team she snacked Raven and Thor. “It's okay, Raven,” she said into the leader's ear. “I don't blame you for stopping.”

And then she heard something. A muffled shout. She looked ahead and saw the figure of a man emerge from the whirl of snow. He, too, was crouching on his hands
and knees to avoid being knocked over by the wind. It was Wilton, and if she looked half as bad as he did, they were all in sorry shape.

“Our leaders have quit on us!” he shouted when he had drawn near enough for her to hear. “Do you think yours will go ahead?”

Rebecca was astounded. She looked back at her team. “I don't know,” she shouted back. “They've been doing all right, but we've been following your tracks. I'm going to give them a breather, and then we'll see.”

“Okay,” Wilton shouted. He turned around and crawled back up to where his sled was stopped. She could barely see it through the snow even though it was no more than a few feet ahead of her.

She gave her dogs a ten-minute break and then made her way back to the sled. “Ready?” she shouted to the team. She watched her wheelers stand, brace themselves sturdily and shake. “All right!”

The gang line tightened and once again the team moved forward. Step by slow step they pulled ahead, veering out around Wilton's sled and passing his dogs one pair at a time. “Good luck!” Wilton shouted as she passed his sled. Beech's team was right in front of Wilton's, and Raven passed them, too. Here was the true test. Would her young leader be able to feel out the trail beneath a foot of new snow? Would Raven have the motivation to keep the team moving without Wilton's and Beech's teams up ahead? Could she possibly keep forging ahead into the teeth of this awful blizzard? Rebecca didn't think that any dog could, yet Raven was trying. “Good girl, Raven!” Rebecca shouted, hoping she would hear. “Good girl!”

Ten feet, twenty feet. Ten minutes, twenty. Climbing steadily until it seemed as though they must be near the
top and yet it was still just out of reach. Rebecca knew she couldn't lift her foot for one more step, but she did. She knew that Raven and Thor were going to quit on her, but they didn't.

Then something happened that changed everything. A freak accident that occurred for no other reason than that they happened to be in that particular place.

The trail to Eagle Summit curved as it climbed, until instead of climbing straight into the wind, they were at an angle to it. Rebecca's sled, its bag stuffed with gear and drawn taut on the sled frame, acted like a sail, catching the full force of the wind. By walking on the uphill side of the sled, she was able to lean her weight against the driver's bow and keep the sled from flipping away from her and back down the hill, but the struggle was a mighty one, and it was a struggle she ultimately lost in one awful moment, one slip of a foot, one ferocious gust of wind. She felt the sled jerk over and there wasn't enough of her to counterbalance the wind's force. She clung on desperately and went over with the sled, her feet flipping into the air.

The rest was a blur of dizzying motion and the sickening sensation of falling, tumbling, rolling forever and ever until all at once everything stopped, and there was nothing, nothing at all.

M
AC'S TEAM POSTED
the fastest run from Circle to Central. He checked in at Crabb's Corner at 3 p.m. with a trail time of just under twelve hours, in spite of the slow conditions. He'd passed two teams in the past three hours, and Kanemoto was still in Central when he pulled in. This surprised him, because Kanemoto should have been driving Rebecca's dog truck up to Mile 101 on the Steese Highway. Mile 101 wasn't an official checkpoint, but it was a place where spectators and handlers could watch the teams as they came over the summit, and it was also a place where mushers could drop dogs if they had to.

“The road is still closed,” Kanemoto explained. “Rebecca checked out of here at 4 a.m. but no mushers have passed Mile 101.”

Mac paused in the act of firing up his dog-food cooker. “What?” he asked stupidly.

“No mushers have passed Mile 101,” Kanemoto repeated. “Officials think the storm is so bad that they're all stuck up there. It has happened before. One year they say the teams were backed up for more than twenty-four hours.”

“Mile 101 is only forty miles from here. They've been on the trail for nearly twelve hours and they haven't reached…?” Mac's voice faded into silence. He lit his cooker and the flames burned hot. There was water to
be had at Crabb's Corner, so at least he didn't have to melt snow. “It must be hellish up there,” he muttered, putting the water on to boil. He began chopping his frozen block of meat while Kanemoto watched. Lord, he was tired. His movements were sluggish, his thoughts equally so. When he'd arrived at the checkpoint, he'd stood on the runners of his sled for several idiotic moments, wondering what he should do next.

Rebecca had kept a cheat sheet, small and laminated, clipped to the driver's bow. On it was a concise list of what to do upon reaching each checkpoint or stopping to feed the team. Mac had laughed when he'd first seen it, way back at the beginning of the race when clear and conscious thought came easily, and she'd gotten all fired up. “Just you wait,” she'd said. “A week from now you'll wish you had one of those.”

Once again, she was right. Kanemoto had to coach him through the act of feeding his dogs, taking off their booties, staking them out on beds of straw. Without Kanemoto's polite and carefully worded suggestions, Mac might never have gotten his team fed. He ate something inside the checkpoint, muttered unintelligible responses to questions asked by reporters, checkpoint staff and race followers, and told Kanemoto to wake him in two hours. Kanemoto nodded gravely. Two hours. Not much time to sleep.

No, Mac thought, closing his eyes. Not much at all. But Rebecca was only forty miles away. So close…so close…

 

R
EBECCA OPENED HER EYES
on a strange world. She felt odd, as though something was lying on top of her, pressing down on her, smothering her. She moved cautiously and a bolt of pain shot through her right arm. The pain
was bad enough to make her ears ring and her stomach turn over. The object that was smothering her was the sled. Somehow she'd gotten underneath her sled, but why would she have done that?

A jolt of adrenaline rushed through her as she remembered what had happened. Her sled and her team had been blown off the summit! She moved abruptly, shoving with her left arm and twisting out from beneath the heavily loaded sled. Daylight! Relief helped her deal with the incredible pain of moving. At least she could see, although darkness was approaching.

She was on her knees and moving through the deep snow, holding her bad arm against her side. “Raven! Thor!” At her shouts there was movement all around her, and where before there had been only snow, she now saw heads poking up. She counted them. They were all over the place, no semblance of a team, but all the heads were there. All her dogs were alive and looking back at her. Relief weakened her muscles, and she slumped against the overturned sled. Tears flooded her eyes and froze on her cheeks. Her dogs were okay. Nothing else mattered.

She'd been underneath her sled long enough for her team to curl up and be covered by the snowfall. They'd be hungry. She'd better get them sorted out and snack them. She looked around—it was still snowing hard. Had Wilton and Beech seen her sled go over the side? Did anyone even know she was down here?

She tried to shift the sled but couldn't with just one arm, and so she reached underneath to grab the snack bag. It took her a long time to get to each dog, untangle the lines and harness, unsnap the tug line and deliver a snack. They all seemed fine, but she couldn't be sure because they were standing chest-deep in snow. She
didn't know exactly where she was, but at least the wind in this gully wasn't nearly as bad as it had been on top; they were protected from the brunt of the storm. Rebecca unhooked Raven, and her little black leader followed her to the sled. She made a place to sit in the lee of the wind. She leaned her back against her sled, and Raven curled close beside her. Rebecca closed her eyes. Her head ached terribly and her arm throbbed with pain. She tried to move her fingers but couldn't. The entire appendage hung uselessly at her side like the arm of a stranger, but the pain definitely belonged to her. If she'd had the energy and the ambition, she might have felt sorry for herself. Instead, she sat with her good arm around Raven, her bad arm hanging by her side, and watched the stormy sky grow darker.

 

“H
ERE'S THE SCOOP
, Merlin. Rebecca's out in that mess somewhere and we're going to find her. Not only are we going to find her, but we're going to beat Beech and Wilton across the finish line. Got that? Okay, let's do it.” Mac stood up from a private consultation with his lead dog and shook Kanemoto's hand. “Quit worrying,” he said. “She'll be fine. Get the truck to Mile 101 as soon as you can and wait for her there if she hasn't already passed through. If she has, head down to Angel Creek.”

Kanemoto nodded. Anxiety and sleeplessness made the prosperous Japanese businessman look much older than his forty-five years. He watched while Mac walked back to the sled, giving each dog a brisk rub and a cheerful word. He stepped onto the runners as Merlin's blue eyes watched from the head of the team. “All right,” he said, untying the snub line. The team surged forward into the darkness.

Anxiety had a firm hold on Mac, as well, but he didn't want to make Kanemoto any more concerned than he already was. The storm was predicted to blow itself out by morning, but that still left another twelve hours of pure misery to deal with. “All right, good dogs,” he crooned, coaxing them along at a solid trot. They plowed ahead as the trail began to ascend Eagle Summit. Forty miles wasn't far, but Mac had already learned that a mile can be traveled so many ways, not all of them swift. Not by a long shot.

His headlamp beam focused on a narrow vortex of swirling snow. Watching it made him dizzy, so he switched the lamp off, only using it periodically to check for trail markers. He didn't have to worry about Merlin losing the trail. The grand old leader could probably run it blindfolded.

In an hour he had passed two more teams, both of them bogged down in the wicked wind. One of them tried to get his team to follow but soon gave up, and Mac was alone again on the steepening trail. He didn't stop the team to snack. He broke all his own rules in that run up Eagle Summit. He worked harder than he ever had before, running beside the sled in the deep, soft snow, pushing the sled to help the dogs up the steeper sections, righting the sled when the wind blew it over.

Had there ever been such a wind as this? He'd already seen one of his dogs swept right off its feet. The others were creeping on their bellies, each making itself as small a target as possible for the fierce gusts. The darkness was both a curse and a blessing, a curse because he couldn't see a damned thing, and a blessing because if he could, he might have become discouraged at his slow progress. “Good dogs!” he praised frequently. “Good boy, Merlin!”

A strange feeling began to build inside him, pressing upward against his diaphragm. As he slogged ahead into the stormy darkness, the pressure continued to build until it became difficult to breathe. He pushed his team harder, and his voice carried an edge that he'd never used before, a curt, demanding sharpness that left no doubt as to what he wanted. Merlin gave his all, head down, eyes closed against the sting of the wind and the ice and the snow, feeling out the trail with his paws and pulling for all he was worth. His teammates followed suit.

Rebecca was in trouble. Mac was as sure of this as he'd ever been sure of anything. She was in terrible trouble somewhere up ahead. The minutes stretched like hours and each step only brought him twelve inches closer to her. Sled-dog racing! he fumed. Whoever thought up such a ridiculous sport! Who in their right mind would ever willingly indulge in such torture?
He
had, true, but only because he hadn't known any better. Never again would he race a team of dogs. He was finished with it. When this race was over, he was going to turn his back on all of this craziness. “All right!” he bellowed angrily. “Get up!” The team struggled valiantly on his behalf.

Where the hell was the summit? They must be getting close! They were nearly seven hours out of Central. The summit must be just up ahead, had to be! “Merlin! Get up!”

When Merlin stopped, unbidden, a mindless rage filled Mac. He struggled up to the head of the team, cursing the loyal dogs who had pulled so hard for him. He reached Merlin and raised his mittened hand to swat the dog's rump in angry retribution, and all of a sudden his arm froze. He looked ahead into the swirling darkness. Was that a sled right in front of them? Mac took
one step forward and reached out his hand. It connected with the solid wood of a driver's bow. “Hey!” he shouted. “Rebecca!”

The top line of the sled bag ripped open in the wind, and a man sat up. It was Wilton. His face had the blank expression of a man who had reached the limits of his endurance.

“Where's Rebecca!” Mac roared.

Wilton shook his head and pointed. “Down below! She and her team got blown off the summit. It was quite a while ago, just past noon.”

Mac turned to look where Wilton pointed. The slope dropped steeply away into the darkness. He pushed past Wilton's sled, and sure enough at the head of Wilton's team was another sled. “Hey, hey! Get up!” He was so full of rage and fear that he nearly jerked Beech up and out of the sanctuary of his sled bag. “Where's Rebecca!”

“Down below! We couldn't see her, the snow was too thick. We saw her sled get blown over, and her team got dragged down with it. We couldn't see how far down they fell.”

“Where was her sled when it went over?”

“Just ahead of me, in front of my leaders,” Beech shouted.

Mac stared down into the bottomless void. How in God's name would he ever find her in this whiteout? She could be anywhere along this slope. Or she might have tumbled clear to the bottom, wherever that was.

He turned and plunged back through the deep snow, falling several times as the wind knocked him over. His team was lying down, trying their best to get out of the wind. Mac rummaged in his sled bag for the first-aid kit Rebecca had given him for Christmas. He shoved four
spare batteries and a flare into his parka pocket, threw each of his dogs a chunk of meat, tipped his sled over to reduce the wind's effect, and walked back to the front of the team, where he unhooked Merlin from the gang line.

“Merlin, come!” he shouted to the dog over the howl of the wind. Merlin rose to his feet, his blue eyes somber in the light of the headlamp. “Come, Merlin,” Mac repeated, then turned his back on the husky and began a careful, step-by-step descent of the slope, panning the beam of his headlamp back and forth as he went.

Looking for Rebecca.

 

R
EBECCA OPENED HER EYES
on the darkness. She didn't know how long she'd been sleeping, but something had woken her. What? The wind was howling at the same demonic pitch and the snowfall was just as heavy. What had changed? Raven stirred beside her, lifted her head from Rebecca's lap. Rebecca turned on her headlamp and panned the area around the sled. Nothing. Her dogs were invisible again, buried in their snowy beds. She switched her headlamp back off and leaned back against the sled. Raven sat up, and in the dark Rebecca could feel the rigidity of the animal's small muscular body as she strained to see or hear something in the night. “What is it?” Rebecca murmured. “What do you hear?”

Something came at them out of the darkness. Raven let out a rumbling growl, and Rebecca flashed her headlamp back on. Two eyes glowed bright red in the glare of it. Her first thought was wolves, but then the eyes moved and she saw the black-and-white of the furry coat and the familiar handsome mask. “Merlin?” She stared, incredulous. “Merlin, come here! Good boy! Come here!”

Mac's lead dog closed the distance between them. His cold nose brushed against Rebecca's cheek and then he whirled and disappeared back into the darkness. “Merlin!” she called after him.

A moment later she heard a faint shout and she answered it. She left her headlamp on, and before too long she spotted the dim glow of another headlamp working its way toward her. She knew it was the man who belonged to the dog. His calm, low voice was a balm to her, his presence an intoxicating elixir. Mac! He was here! He was beside her now, kneeling down, talking to her, saying something she couldn't quite make out. “Mac?” she said, reaching to touch him, her mittened fingers grasping. “Mac, is that really you?”

“Rebecca!” His voice was right in her ear. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine,” she said. “But I think my right arm is broken.”

She heard him swear. “You're not fine if your arm is broken!”

“I can't believe you're really here!” she said. She felt as though she were floating, as if she were looking at Mac from some distance above him, watching as he bent over her and very carefully manipulated her right arm. The intense pain cleared her head and brought her back down to earth with a jarring crash. “Hurts!” she gasped. “Don't touch!”