On the Edge of Nowhere by James Huntington & Lawrence Elliott

Author:James Huntington & Lawrence Elliott [Huntington, James & Elliott, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Reference, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780970849335
Google: HxsbWlYs7boC
Amazon: 0970849338
Publisher: Epicenter Press
Published: 2002-07-15T17:38:49+00:00

Chapter Five

Dogsled Racing

I KEPT WORKING to build up a stake. Some years I cleared a few dollars trapping; other years I could barely pay for my outfit. One summer I bought an old scow and an older kicker and went freighting along the Koyukuk for a couple of trading posts. But the best I could do going upriver was maybe four miles an hour, and nobody gets rich at that speed. I paid for my gas. That was about it.

Around this time, 1938 and 1939, the people got all interested in dogsled racing again. It had been a big thing around Nome during gold rush days—25,000 people locked into a tarpaper town from October to the June breakup with nothing much else to do for a pastime—but when the gold played out, so did the dog derbies. Now, though, the Natives began taking it up: everybody had dogs, and most of us bragged about them, and pretty soon there was more gambling on the races than there was at poker.

It was no sport for weaklings. Endurance was more important than speed. The trails were a hundred miles and more long and laid out across the toughest terrain we could find to test a team’s staying power. You didn’t get into the sled unless you were near dead. You ran alongside it the whole way, sometimes sneaking a downhill ride on the runners. But then, going uphill, you had to be ready to push. The rules made it tougher yet. If you started out with twelve dogs, you had to come back with twelve, and many a man packed a lame husky home in the sled. Once a driver left the starting line, he was the only man allowed to lay a hand on his team. I’ve seen a musher chased up a tree by bears or moose, his dogs scattered to the four winds, and all he ever got was a wave of the hand as the next team went by.

I did pretty well in the races around home. Soon I was competing against the best teams of the other villages, and the men in Cutoff let me take my pick of their dogs. I even won a few big races. But I never thought any more about it than as a way to have fun and maybe pick up fifteen or twenty dollars betting.

Then, in the autumn of 1939, the last mail boat brought real news to Cutoff: some people were setting up a big dogsled race in Fairbanks for the following March. There was to be more than ten thousand dollars in prizes. I was still thinking about that when they handed me a letter from a gold mining outfit. It said that they were willing to pay a thousand dollars for my claims up at Clear Creek, and could I come to Fairbanks and sign the papers?

Could I? I put those two little nuggets of news together and suddenly they sounded like the answer to all my prayers.

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