Chapter 14

It was easy to resist the urge to race into the fire station and check his time and restart position, but Josh knew that would be fruitless: it would be several minutes before his time was posted, and the restart position wouldn't be firm until the starting time differential for the teams behind him passed, anyway. Besides, there were more important things to do.

Mike took Alco by the collar and with the help of some finish line handlers, led him down the alley beside the fire station, to the parking lot out back, which had been turned into a dog lot. As they turned the corner off the street, Mark joined Josh as he followed along behind the sled. "Hey, good time," he said.

"How good?"

"By my watch, just under three hours."

That was a good time, however you cut it. "How about the restart?"

"I think you'll have Tiffany ahead of you, but it's pretty close. Unless someone behind you had a real good run, you shouldn't be any worse than second out of here."

With virtually anyone else in the field ahead of him, Josh would have been satisfied indeed to have the second restart spot, but getting past Tiffany and staying there was going to be tough, indeed. "How about Phil?" Josh asked.

"Pulled in here with about a 3:10 or so," Mark said. "That ought to get him in the top five on the restart."

Josh let out a whistle and a "Ho-ly shit!" That was a terrific time, especially considering that Phil wouldn't have been likely to have been as efficient at the rest stop as he had been. "The dogs look OK?"

"Good as these. Now I see why you had such a tough time deciding which dogs to use. I'll go get the truck."

The dog lot behind the fire station stretched between two rows of parking meters, which were used to tie the teams off front and rear. The teams took up spots in the order they arrived. Mike led the dogs into position, and stretched a tieline from the front of the gangline to the front parking meter, while Josh tied off the tieline to the sled. In the first Pound Puppies demonstration, they'd picketed the dogs here, but now, most teams just left the dogs in harness, picketing only troublemakers, harness chewers, or females in heat. Josh had none of the above; it would save him a little effort.

One of the rules that had been started with the second Warsaw Run was that the musher had to do all the team maintenance by themselves; assistance was limited to parking the teams, and parking the team's support vehicle. Along with making things more fair, it also was better for the teams, since the musher would know exactly the condition of each dog, and could be sure that everything that needed to get done was done. Josh had no more than gotten the sled tieline fastened to the parking meter when Mark was backing his truck up to the parking meter on the far side of the row.

With a late start, and a relatively short stop, getting some food and water into the dogs was imperative, now; Josh liked to have the team get around four hours to digest a heavy meal before running them, and he was going to be cutting it tight. Mark hadn't even gotten the engine turned off before Josh had dropped the tailgate, and grabbed a handful of stacked metal feeding pans, and pulled the cooler full of dog food to the tailgate. He'd mixed the food with hot water back at the dog yard, just before leaving; he checked, and it was still comfortably warm. There was rather more meat and fat in the mixture than normal, along with the dog food, and it was soupier than normal, to get more water into the dogs. He reached further inside, pulled out a kid's toy plastic sled, set it in the snow, and set the cooler and pans on top of it, as Mark and the rest departed for the warmth of the fire hall, more to get away from the temptation to help than to get out of the cold.

He drug the sled with the dog food across the lot, just as the eighth musher into Warsaw, Fred Linder, was parking his team. He had a friendly word for Fred, but was really more interested in his own dogs. He plopped the feeding pans down into the snow in front of Alco and Geep with a few words of encouragment, and dipped out a saucepan full of food from the cooler into each of the pans. The two dogs tied into the food like there was no tomorrow, then repeated the process for Scooter and Shack. Down a few rows, he could see Phil spreading straw, for the dogs to sleep on, and farther past him, he could see Tiffany giving everybody a paw check.

In a few minutes, he had all the dogs fed; there was just enough dog food left in the cooler to make up for spillage, if needed, or if any dog seemed to need the extra hydration, and to bait warm water for another watering just before they left. He could hear the dogs slurping the wet food up quickly; already, Alco and Geep had finished the process.

Next up was straw. Though the dogs could curl up in the snow, they used their food more efficiently if they didn't have to use as much to keep warm, and the straw made good insulation on the parking lot. There was a bale of straw in the truck; Josh cut the strings, took about half the bale, and exchanged the cooler on the toy sled for the straw. Again starting with the leaders, he put out a thick square of straw for the dogs to lay on, picking up with the leaders, and picking up empty pans as he went by.

Getting straw down didn't take long; now was the time for a careful paw check of his own. He worked his way down the line, checking each dog carefully in the headlamp. This was a little harder, as the dogs were already winding down and starting to get their naps. On most of the dogs he'd bootied earlier, he removed the booties; he didn't want the dogs to spend good sleep time trying to get them off. Most of the paws got salve, more as a preventative, than anything else, because everybody's paws seemed in good shape, even Pumper's, who tended to be a little tender.

At that, it went fairly quickly; there'd be another paw inspection before they left, and a lot more booties would go on, except on a couple of the real iron-footed dogs; the snow on the way back tended to be looser, and paws would pick up more ice. It took a good half hour of working as efficiently as possible to get everything done, exchanging a few comments with the mushers on either side of him as he went. By the time he finished, the dogs had pretty well managed to lay down and fall asleep, and Josh got a seat on the pickup's tailgate while he watched the rest of them lay down.

All in all, a good stop, so far, he thought. Things would be different on the Beargrease, next weekend; he'd be even busier. He'd have to warm water for dog food at every other stop, and cook two batches, one for eating on the spot, and the second to go into the cooler for the next stop; he'd have to carry the cooker and the cooler in the sled with him, although he wouldn't have to carry food for more than one feeding at a time; Mark would bring the food to him in the truck, along with straw, charcoal and starter fluid. At the places where there were stops he couldn't get to with the truck, there would be straw provided. As a result, the stops would take longer, and there would be more to do. He'd practiced a Beargrease (and Iditarod) style stop a couple times over the course of the winter, and hoped to be able to get in one more such practice stop in the next week.

Only when the last dog was down, and the dogs in the teams on either side were pretty well down, too, did he get off the tailgate, close it up, peel off the bib and parka, put it in the front seat, and head for the fire station.

It wasn't exceptionally warm in the fire station, although it felt hot after the time he'd spent in the now sub-zero night outside. He stopped by the huge coffeepot and drew himself a styrofoam cup full, and wandered over to the restart board, actually nothing more than a clothesline, with a line of cards on it, the numbers written in felt pen. The cards could be shuffled around as the order changed, but by this time, the early part of the restart order was settled. The cards hanging on the clothesline were interesting, indeed:

He checked his watch: 11:30. A little over three hours to go, and he'd want to spend half an hour or 45 minutes getting ready to go, so he'd have to start getting ready around 2 AM. That meant about two and a half hours to kill. With that settled, he started thinking about what those numbers meant for the race.

Four minutes behind Tiffany wasn't all that bad a place to be, but now Josh was kicking himself for not pushing the team a little harder on the way up; he'd really rather be ahead of Tiffany on the way back. Figuring out pace on the way up to Warsaw was always a crapshoot, anyway, since you didn't have much idea of how fast your real competition was running. Push too hard, and you could find yourself in Warsaw very early, but with exhausted dogs; take it easy, and you could have half the field in front of you, and you'd have to scramble like hell to pass on the harder-to-pass trail. He could have run faster; Phil's time, twelve minutes more than his with a probably less efficient pit stop, with the backup dogs, proved that it could have been done.

Phil's 3:08 was actually the most interesting number on the board. Fourth out of Warsaw! With those dogs, he'd made a hell of a trip. Whether Switchstand could make it back with those kind of times was hard to predict, but he'd have to see. The interesting thing was that he was restarting just three minutes behind Mears, who had also had a hell of a time. Greg would have to run hard, or he'd have Phil right on his butt before they left town, and Phil would run hard, because there was always the tendancy to try to keep up with the team ahead. That meant he'd have to run hard, because it wouldn't take long to make up that nine-minute differential if he didn't. But, he'd have to run hard to keep in contact with Tiffany, and she'd have to run hard or she'd get flattened by the steamroller coming up behind her. Linder wasn't out of it by any means, either.

On the other hand, if Phil had worn the dogs down more than he thought, he might not be as fast, and Greg might not be as fast, with no one on his ass. Josh was sure he had plenty of reserve in the dogs, so taking it a little easy coming up meant that he ought to be able to hold his position, at least for a while.

There was no use worrying about it too much, since the answer was obvious: run very hard at the beginning, try to get more or less in contact with Tiffany, and keep checking six. Let her stay out in front, wearing her dogs down breaking trail -- it wouldn't be the job that had been done on the rail grade -- and then drag race when they got back to the rail grade, when her team might be a little more tired. Squeeze the pickle harder if someone came up behind. Assuming everything went smoothly for everybody, there wasn't much else he could do. At least, on the way back, you had some idea of what your position was, at least some of the time.

He checked farther down the restart board: a couple of people he'd expected to do well had poor times, and there were a couple people he'd been surprised to see doing so well. Dave Stitely, for example, was going to be eighth out of Warsaw -- that was pretty well settled, now -- so he'd done damn well.

When he felt he'd assmiliated about all he was going to out of the restart board, Josh decided he'd better sit down for a few minutes, then get some rest. He looked around; Tiffany and Phil were at a picnic table, along with Mark, Mike, Jackie and Kirsten. He didn't want to spend a lot of time talking with Tiffany, as under the circumstances it could easily lead to playing mind games, and Phil was smart enough to do it, too, especially with that good a run. One thing he and Tiffany had made clear to Phil: once the starting gun sounds, you're competition, whether you're a friend or not, and you get no special consideration; that was the way he and Tiffany played it with each other. He did want to talk to Phil for a minute, though, so wandered over to the table. "Hey, real good time, guy," he said, quite sincerely.

"It surprised me," Phil said. "I mean, I passed some teams, but I figured that a lot of people behind me had to be running faster. It wasn't until I got nearly here and I realized I hadn't been passed that I started to think I might have a good time."

This was quickly leading toward mind game country; he didn't mind bullshitting some of the other mushers, but Phil and Tiffany were another story. "Dogs do all right?" Josh asked.

"Solid all the way, no problems," Phil said. If he did have any serious dog problems, Josh expected that Phil would have been honest with him. "Did have a heck of a time getting Switchstand slowed down, but once we got a pace established, it went pretty good." That was verging on mind games, and Josh decided not to push the issue any further.

"Well, you know the drill," Josh said, draining his coffee. "Just bring 'em back in good shape."

The empty coffeecup gave him all the reason he needed to get away from the table. He refilled the cup, grabbed a donut, and got a seat at a table with Greg Mears and Fred Linder. He wouldn't mind bullshitting them.

"Hey," Mears said. "You've done pretty well with those mutts of yours. All of them."

"I like to think so," Josh said. "You know, you did pretty well, yourself. If you'd get away from those purebreds, the way you train, you'd blow everybody's doors off."

"Yeah, but showing them is as big a thing with me as racing them," the Camden musher said, "And you can't show mutts."

"Those two pups you gave me a couple years ago, jeez, they've turned into good dogs," Josh said. "You let some real good dogs go, there."

"Yeah, I know it, every time I see their assholes go past me," Mears smiled.

"Hey, sorry I didn't make it over to your camp earlier," Josh said. "When we decided that Phil was going to run the spare dogs, we had a lot of catching up to do to get him ready."

"You and Tiffany have got a lot of dogs, there," Mears said. "Keeping ten racing dogs is enough for me. If we could cut this race back down to seven, I'd probably cut back a little."

"Ten really is a little big for this course," Josh agreed. "But, I keep pushing to extend it out to 200 miles, and that's just about the right size team for that."

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," Mears counseled. "This is short enough that it's about right for someone that wants to do a little long-distance mushing, but doesn't get into it the way you do. This race keeps growing every year, and it's just the right size for a lot of people to work towards."

"Yeah, you're probably right," Josh said. "It's just that I'm looking at longer races, and there aren't that many in traveling distance. It's sort of tough to build the kind of teams we're looking for on shorter races. When you're talking middle distance or long distance, you've got this, the Michigan 200, and the Beargrease, and this isn't really long enough to be a good test. This is getting a little automatic, a little programmed, if you know what I mean."

"I think I know what you mean," Fred agreed. "It's getting more like a long sprint. Something a little longer would get away from that."

Josh nodded his head, and went on, "A couple weeks after we ran the Michigan 200 last year, well, Tiffany and I had some ideas from that we wanted to work out, so we made a 200-miler that could work. We came up through Warsaw, like this, then on to Walsenberg, then down the tracks to Kremmling and Hugo, around south of Thurow Lake, then back up logging trails to here, then back home up the NCT."

"How'd it go?" Greg asked.

"Oh, pretty good," Josh went on. "We really weren't at racing speeds, since I didn't want to go through the schmozzle I went through with Alco and Switchstand in the 200, so I had Crosstie lead. But, it was kind of neat. We carried everything, even some foam pads for the dogs, and slept in the sled baskets. We left on a Friday night, and got back late Sunday afternoon. With a good leader, we could probably get it down to somewhere around 36 hours, with good stops."

"That would be kind of fun," Fred agreed. "A lot more like the Iditarod. We ought to do that some time."

"If the snow holds, we might just do it again a couple weeks after the Michigan 200, just for the practice," Josh said.

"You're saying, the second weekend in March, right?" Fred asked. "I could do that. You know, Mark and Mike started this race with a bet over a six-pack of beer. I'll even donate a six-pack."

"You've still got the time, you could spread the word a little," Greg suggested. "There might be half a dozen guys here that would be interested in a fun run like that. Hell, I don't think I've got anything that weekend, either. But, you don't have time to organize everything that needs to get organized."

"Aw, just keep it simple," Fred said. "That's the beauty of it. You don't need organized checkpoints, and restart times, and all the trail marking and stuff. You don't have to tie it into a winter festival, with all the hoopla and the kiddie rides. Take it as it comes, keep it just for the mushers. Carry everything, no pit crews. Maybe even do one of those LeMans type starts, you know what I mean, so you don't even have to fart around with a start gate and timing and all that stuff."

"You mean, a scramble start, like where the musher has to start the race in a sleeping bag, pack up, harness the dogs, and go?" Greg asked. "That always seemed a little goofy to me."

"Wouldn't have to do it that way," Josh said. "Just start with all the dogs and the sled and gear on the truck, and set everything up."

"That'd work," Fred agreed. "Maybe we could even do it at Mark's airstrip, so we wouldn't have to dink around in town."

"I'd have to talk to Mark, but he'd probably go for it," Josh said.

Greg shook his head. "It's too late this year to set it up as a sanctioned race," he said. "But we could call it a trial run, and work on sanctioning for next year."

"That'd have to be your end of it," Josh said. "You know what hoops have to be jumped through." As much as there was a state association of mushers, it was the Camden Dogsled Association, and Greg was the president, although it was pretty much a paper association, with zero dues and no other officers, in place only for racing sanctions and things like that. In the years before the Spearfish Lake crowd got involved in dogsled racing, the CDA had sponsored the "state championships", more to keep the sport alive than anything else. Sometimes, they'd been lucky to have more than four teams show up for the championships, but it had become a much bigger deal in the last five years.

"I'll call Monday and see if I can get a provisional sanction," Greg said. "The big thing is, they're going to want vet supervision."

"Well, Doc Kunkle is here," Fred said. "We could ask him right now. We can use Warsaw as a checkpoint, both ways, and he wouldn't even have to leave town."

"Go see," Greg suggested. Fred got up, and headed over toward the coffeepot, where Kunkle was standing, talking with a couple mushers. He was an old country vet, going back to the time when Jim Horton used to come to him with dog problems, and he'd served as race veternatian since the second Warsaw Run.