Chapter 30

Tuesday, January 15, 2002

The next weeks after the holidays went by in a blur for Duane and Michelle. The only unifying feature for them was looking at dog assholes. Somewhere, Duane remembered hearing the phrase, "Unless you're the lead dog the view is always the same," and that seemed especially true for the musher at the tail end of the affair.

Though training had lightened up a bit over the holidays, now it got even more intense. Night runs had been a relative rarity before the holidays; now they ran at least as much at night as they did in the day, to take advantage of the colder conditions and to get the dogs used to running at night. That was why they were out on this trail well after midnight, with the temperature well below zero. It was cold and clear; the stars were blazing pinpoints in the dark blanket of the sky; his breath and that of the dogs left vapor trails as they pressed on through the forest. Michelle was not all that far ahead of him although he only occasionally got a glimpse of her and her team in the bright light of the moon – a "Runner's Moon" he remembered hearing Josh call it, well named indeed. It would be setting about the time they came off this run with light starting to build in the sky. Then, when they got back to the dog barn, they'd have time for a cup of coffee before each of them hooked up another set of dogs and went out to do it all over again.

Sleep had become something grabbed on the fly, any old time of the day or night. They ran farther, too, sometimes putting as much as a hundred miles on a team in a day. The only thing that kept things under control, was that after some discussion, they backed off on the training of some dogs that clearly weren't going to be much help this season; with the local mushing season in full swing, some were even sold to local mushers. They also increased the sizes of the teams they were running, from a normal of ten dogs to twelve, fourteen, even sixteen.

There were some breathers. The second weekend after the holidays, Josh, Michelle, and Duane took some of the younger dogs, that weren't going to Alaska this year but had potential in future years, into Wisconsin, for a hundred-mile race run through the Chequamegon National Forest. It was as much to give the dogs a new place to run as anything else. It was a new experience for both Duane and Michelle, especially the start of the race and the excitement there. Even though they were all running third-rank dogs, Josh managed an eighth-place finish, and Duane a fifteenth. Michelle wound up in eighteenth. The following weekend, they did the same thing in the Chippewa National Forest in northern Minnesota; there, against a smaller field, Duane managed a top-ten finish, with Michelle right behind him at eleventh despite running a team that they figured wasn't good enough to keep up. The next big race that lay ahead of them was the big local race, the Warsaw Run; a hundred miler which Josh and Tiffany had won five times before moving on to do the Iditarod. Michelle would be in the Bahamas for that, and time would be getting short on going to Alaska, but Duane looked forward to doing that race.

But all the training involved, along with the racing, meant that Duane was spending an awful lot of time on a dogsled. It was cold, even cold for January around here, which was good for training the dogs for Alaska where temperatures could be expected to be a lot colder. Duane did his best to ignore the cold and think about other things. Fortunately the back of a dogsled was a good place for that, since it really didn't take much attention to work the team on a familiar and beaten out training trail.

Of course, one of the things he thought most about was the upcoming season in the Grand Canyon. There were a lot of unknowns about running a new fourth team for Canyon Tours. The schedule remained a mystery to him, although Al had hinted that the new Team Four or whatever it wound up being called would be doing at least a couple of the trips inherited from GCR. He didn't even know when his first launch date would be, and perhaps Al and Karin didn't know yet either.

That was complicated by the trip to Alaska, which also wasn't tied down very tightly. Phil, Josh, and Candice were all reluctant to spend much more time away from home than they had to – Candice had her two boys, and Josh had a new baby, born back in the fall. In the old days, Josh and Tiffany had spent over three months in Alaska each winter, starting right after the holidays and not usually getting back until early April. Granted, part of that was driving the Alaska Highway with a truckload of dogs, sleds, food, and gear, but part of it was for training time in the colder Alaska conditions, too.

Since Phil had taken over the actual racing end, things had changed. They didn't drive the dogs to Alaska anymore: they flew them – sometimes on a commercial jet, sometimes on a charter, depending on how prices happened to settle out. In the old days, driving up the Alaska Highway meant the loss of almost ten days of training time and the muscle tone on the dogs was reduced, a loss that Josh and Tiffany had never quite been able to make up. Now, they lost one day at most. As long as it stayed bitterly cold around here, Phil had decided that they might as well stay here and enjoy the comforts of home, which would cut down on the time that everyone would be away. Of course, it meant the date they'd leave for Alaska was still up in the air. They wanted to hold off until the middle of February, but if a warming trend showed on the horizon they might find themselves taking off for Alaska on at most a couple days' notice.

The final training would be done out of Run-8's travel trailer in a campground near Talkeetna, where, for years, they'd put the finishing touches on the dogs and gotten them used to Alaskan conditions. Duane was looking forward to it; Alaska was one of those places where he'd always wanted to go.

Michelle being gone for two of the next four weeks or so meant there was a very good chance he would be in Alaska by the time she got back. Depending on how things worked out he might not make it back to Flag until about the first part of April. That was a long time to go without seeing Michelle; they were getting a lot closer together, although there were several issues with her that weren't clear in his own mind. It still seemed a little unbelievable that she would want to stay with him, that she had turned down a chance to go surfing in Florida to stay here. Oh, well, she'd have that break in the Bahamas, anyway.

Would he like being on that Bahamas trip? Oh, yes! As much as he was enjoying the dogsledding, he was getting tired of winter. At one point, there had been the possibility that he might be on it, but then the chance to go dogsledding came along and he'd taken it, so couldn't back out now. A winter trip like that seemed like a reprieve from the seemingly endless sentence of waiting for spring. It would be a ball, too. Once again, he visualized Michelle down there, wearing a tiny bikini – there were stories from other Bahamas trips of her wearing a thin thong that turned virtually transparent with just a rise in humidity – sailing around under a warm, blue sky, partying in bars, hanging out with friends. Dreaming about those activities would be torture while he was up here or in Alaska without her.

They'd had a terrific six weeks or so, with things that he would remember all his life, and not just in bed. But was there anything there, or were they just fuck buddies who got together for a while when the time was convenient? Michelle was, well, Michelle, unique, and a literal legend, at least among Canyon boaters. Wild, yes – he'd seen her in action more than once; her reputation was deserved. While he had been known to have his fun from time to time, he thought of himself as solid, steady, reliable. Michelle was a will-o-the-wisp, following her own path. Try as he might, he couldn't imagine anything permanent developing there. It had been fun while it lasted, but somehow he had the disturbing feeling that it was probably close to running its course.

But who knew? This was Michelle, the Wild Woman of the Grand Canyon, unpredictable, almost superhuman. Duane had never heard of her even coming close to a serious relationship, although there probably was a first time for everything. Although there was no telling about the future, the thought that things might be winding down with her probably was pure paranoia. After all, they were going to be a trip leader and assistant this next summer, and possibly for a while after that.

He'd thought about it a lot, but even after much time on it, he couldn't quite buy her theory of being a follower rather than a leader like she'd talked about on the way back from his dad's right after Christmas, though there might have been some sense to it. If true, it would explain a few things about her. She was a good boatman when the chips were down; in spite of doing some hairy things, he'd never really heard of her doing anything that was beyond her skill set. When she set out to do something, it usually got done, even if it was something she didn't particularly like doing, like working in the Canyon Tours office off and on over the past three years. She'd been quite competent and steady working with the dogs the past weeks; he'd never seen her do anything wild or dangerous for the thrill of it. He hadn't seen anything of her trademark superhuman antics since she'd been in Spearfish Lake.

It was something to think about, to worry about, while he was riding around on the back of the dog sled. Whatever happened, happened. It came down to the fact that she was going to be gone at the end of the week, anyway. If he was still in Spearfish Lake when she returned from the Bahamas, they'd have another week or two together, and then he'd be heading to Alaska for a month or six weeks or so. Then it would be time to be getting ready for leading a Canyon Tours team, something he hadn't expected would happen for years, if ever.

There was one good point about the whole deal, he thought, trying to wrestle his attention around to those problems he'd be facing in the not too distant future. Theirs being a new team and him not being around during the annual March rigging season, he figured that he'd get the short end of every stick possible when it came to which boats and what equipment they'd be taking. While he knew Al wouldn't let him head out on the river with pure junk, if no one was around to fight for Team Four they would wind up with the least desirable boats and the least desirable support equipment. But if Michelle were in Flagstaff, there'd be someone to ease that problem. They may be the junior team, but she was the senior boatman, and that counted for something. Moreover, she was Michelle, which counted for even more at Canyon Tours.

Whenever it was decided he'd be heading to Alaska, she ought to head back to Flag right about the same time, which would put her there for most if not all of the rigging, so that part of it would work out. There was even a little extra time in there, time she'd said that she was going to spend with her grandparents in ... Roswell?

Oh, come on, he thought. You don't really believe that! She was probably just pulling Randy's leg; he'd left her an opening and she'd taken advantage of it. As far as he knew her family was all around Flagstaff, more or less. Her parents lived out at Grand Canyon Village, where their gift shop was located ... and they did look awful young for their age, just like Michelle...

He didn't know Michelle's parents well, but had met them a few times, at season wrap parties or hanging around the office, and on part of a Canyon trip one time. As far as he knew, they didn't drink ... he'd never paid much attention to it, but if Michelle was pretty impervious to alcohol, and it was genetic, it'd have had to come from her parents, wouldn't it? They might have learned long ago that it wasn't worth the effort. Let's see, her folks are in their early fifties, so that meant they'd had to have been born around 1950, give or take. That UFO supposed to have crashed in Roswell was in 1947 if he remembered correctly, so yeah, there'd have been time for her grandparents... "Aw, you're full of shit, Duane," he said aloud to the huskies in front of him.