Guts Page 2

  At first I could not believe that a plane could do that. I had heard stories about the amazing feats of bush pilots and their planes, but I always thought the tales were exaggerated, almost mythical.

  The conditions have to be fully understood to appreciate what the pilot did. I’m not sure of the wind speed—I later heard that it was gusting to over ninety knots. All I know is that it was so powerful that it was impossible to stay on my feet. My dogs were tucked back in a pressure ridge with the sled jammed in at their rear. I lay with the dogs at my side and if I tried to go out and stand, the wind simply blew me flat or got beneath me and blew me away. Later I heard stories of men being blown off their sleds and out across the ice for several miles before they could stop. The only reason the dogs didn’t blow away was that they were low and their claws could grip the ice. It had been rumored that an entire team had been blown away and was found by a plane two days later, forty-five miles away. This proved to be untrue but not one person doubted it at the time.

  In this maelstrom of wind and blowing snow and ice the pilot left Nome, only ninety miles away, and came to find me. When he saw my bright yellow sled bag, he set the plane down on the ice near me and waved at me to come. He didn’t land the plane so much as fly it down to the ice and hold it there, the prop roaring and the nose into the wind while he signaled me. Coincidentally, the plane was another Cessna 406.

  But I still could not stand up, and it seemed an impossible thirty yards to the plane. I crawled to my lead dog, the same Little Buck who had felt for the trail with his toes, and pulled him out of his relative comfort in the ice ridge. Still on my hands and knees, I dragged him and the rest of the team over to the plane. But as soon as the sled pulled clear of the scant protection of the ridge (it was less than four feet high), the wind took it and it spun out like a weather-vane so that the dogs and I had all we could do to drag it. I crawled back down the line of fourteen dogs and used my knife to cut it loose—it blew away, along with all my gear— and then crawled back to the leader and pulled him with me to the plane.

  At the side I stood and opened the door, holding on to a handle just inside, and pulled in the dogs, all still harnessed together. They had never been in a plane, or even close to one with the engine running, and for half a second it seemed that they would drag me off in their fear. But they have enormous trust, and Little Buck at last let me throw him up and through the door. With the leader inside, the rest of them decided to follow and allowed me to grab them by the backs of their harnesses and throw them into the plane. The problem was that while they trusted me, they were still terrified. The incredible roar of the engine was magnified by the wind so that the sound was truly deafening. To those dogs the inside of that plane was the most dangerous place in the world. They turned and ran away from the noise as fast as they could, into the tail of the plane.

  Fourteen dogs, about fifty pounds each, meant that suddenly seven hundred pounds was jammed back in the tail, in a plane that was essentially already flying. The tail dropped like a stone and the plane seemed to hop about a hundred feet in the air. I had a tight grip on the handle by the door and had one leg inside when the plane jumped, and for what seemed an eternity I hung there, half out of the plane, before it snapped a little on a gust and tipped me up and in.

  Thanks to the angle of climb caused by the weight in the tail, I tumbled back on top of the dogs, adding another two hundred pounds to the problem. I was upside down in a pile of dogs, all howling over the roar of the engine, when I heard the pilot scream, “There’s too much weight in the tail! Throw the dogs forward or we’re going down!”

  I lunged to my feet, grabbed a dog and threw him to the front of the plane so hard that he hit the pilot.

  And he immediately ran back to me.

  I threw another, then another, then another, every time hitting the pilot, who was swearing at me and screaming at the dogs as we took off. I would keep throwing frantically, and I’d gain a little, with three or four dogs in the front. But they would always run back.

  By now we were over open water in the Bering Sea and I had visions of the plane— which seemed to be barely wallowing through the sky—stalling and sinking into the waves and taking us all with it. I renewed my efforts, throwing dog after dog on top of dog beneath dog over dog, and they would run back, and I would imagine the plane settling into the water and would throw harder still.

  I was still wearing my full winter gear, which included a down parka, and the dogs bit me and the pilot and ripped my parka so that soon the plane was filled with small white feathers and flying dogs and swear words and blood.

  It took just twenty minutes to fly to Nome, and every one of those minutes I was sure we were going down into the water. I kept throwing dogs. Later I figured I threw a dog every five seconds, which is twelve a minute, so that in twenty minutes I threw 240 fiftypound sled dogs fifteen feet—the length of the plane. When we landed at last in Nome, the pilot had two men put a cart under the tail, because it dropped to the ground and dragged as soon as our airspeed decreased.

  He charged me eight hundred dollars for a twenty-minute flight and I started to complain until I looked at him and the inside of his plane and decided I was lucky it wasn’t more.

  I learned to fly when I got out of the army.

  I was honorably discharged in May of 1962, my term having been extended to fight a war with Cuba, which never happened. While I didn’t like the army at all, I did fall in love with flying while I was in uniform. Before I enlisted I had been on only one airplane ride in my life, when I was nine and a half and returning from the Philippines. When I enlisted in the army I went to basic training in Colorado by troop train and didn’t get to fly then. But after I attended demonstrations of small fixed-wing aircraft at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Fort Bliss, Texas, I knew I wanted to learn to fly. I probably would have pursued it in the army—in fact, I took the physical and written tests for helicopter school—but I disliked the military so much that I waited until I was out.

  When I was discharged I went to work in California in the aerospace field, at a lab at the China Lake Naval Ordnance Test Station. Within a week I’d signed up for lessons at a nearby airport.

  I started out in a small Aeronca Champ, a two-seater with one seat behind the other. The instructor’s name was Joe and he sat in back and we took off and I will never forget the movement when the wheels first broke free of the runway and the plane slid a bit to the side. It was an incredible feeling of freedom, as if the earth no longer held me, and I knew then I was doomed, doomed to always love flying.

  I kept up the lessons and soloed in the Aeronca, but with the freedom of flight came additional knowledge—that flying was very expensive. I made a decision then that was foolish and that I have regretted ever since: I had wasted so much time in the army, had fallen so far behind in my life (I thought), that if I was to support a family and have a career in aerospace engineering I could not spend the time and money it would take to get my pilot’s license. So I stopped. I would take it up again, now that I have more time and some money, but my heart has gone bad and I wouldn’t be able to get a license because of my health.

  But I had soloed, I had learned to fly, and the knowledge stayed with me and became part of Brian when I put him in the plane and made him fly.

  CHAPTER 2

  MOOSE ATTACKS

  . . . he saw a brown wall of fur detach itself from the forest to his rear and come down on him like a runaway truck. He just had time to see that it was a moose . . . when it hit him.

  HATCHET

  I have spent an inordinate amount of time in wilderness woods, much of it in northern Minnesota, some in Canada and some in the Alaskan wilds. I have hunted and trapped and fished and have been exposed to almost all kinds of wilderness animals; I’ve had bear come at me, been stalked by a mountain lion, been bitten by snakes and punctured by porcupines and torn by foxes and once pecked by an attacking raven, but I have never seen anything rivaling the madness that seems to
infect a large portion of the moose family.

  I first witnessed this insanity when I was twelve, in northern Minnesota. I had just started hunting with a rifle. Back then there were none of today’s modern hunting weapons and I was, to put it mildly, financially disadvantaged. I worked hard at setting pins in a bowling alley, selling newspapers in bars at night and laboring on farms in the summer (hoeing sugar beets for eleven dollars an acre and picking potatoes for five cents a bushel) to make enough money to buy clothing and supplies for school. There was little left for fancy weapons, and after saving for a long time I finally managed to come up with enough money for a Remington single-shot .22 rifle. It was bolt action, with a twist safety on the rear of the bolt, and had to be loaded for each shot by opening the bolt, which extracted the empty shell if you had just fired. Then you put a new cartridge into the chamber by hand, closed the bolt and fired. It was a long process and the end result was that it forced the shooter to pay attention to his first shot and make certain it was accurately placed. It also made the hunter careful not to waste his shot. Within a short time I was very accurate with this little rifle and was steadily bringing home rabbits and ruffed grouse, which I cleaned and cooked.

  Just as they do today, game wardens had a great deal of say in how game laws were enforced, and if a family was poor or there were other special conditions, the wardens would sometimes overlook minor infractions. The legal hunting seasons were in fall and winter, but sometimes I hunted in spring as well, and it gave me food at times when my parents were on long drunks and didn’t keep the refrigerator filled. I would like to thank those game wardens who looked the other way now and then when they saw a scruffy kid come out of the woods with a not-quite-legal grouse or rabbit hanging on his belt.

  Before I acquired that rifle, I had hunted a great deal with a bow, but on the day of my first moose incident I had been out with the rifle only a few times. It was early spring in the north woods of Minnesota, not far from the Canadian border, and I had seen many rabbits but hadn’t shot any. I wanted grouse because I liked the taste of them fried in batter, especially in spring, when they have been living on frozen high-bush cranberries all winter and have a crisp taste they lose in summer.

  There was still snow in patches, and I was studying a large plot of old snow filled with budding willows because grouse like to hide in willows, when I heard something that sounded like a train about to run me down.

  There was a kind of bleeeeekkkk, hoarse and very loud, coming from directly behind me and accompanied by a crashing in the brush, and I turned, raising my rifle (about as useful as a BB gun in these circumstances but we use what we have), to see two glaring red eyes coming at me at what seemed like sixty or seventy miles an hour.

  I had hunted in these woods for several years and I had never seen a moose or even a moose track. I had heard of them, of course, and seen pictures of them. But there were very few left in Minnesota because they had been hunted out, so I had always dreamed of hunting moose up in Canada.

  At the first instant I didn’t realize that it was a large bull moose. He’d lost the previous year’s antlers and hadn’t grown new ones yet. I just saw brown. I saw big. I saw death coming at me, snorting and thundering. I think I may have thought of phantoms, wood spirits, wild monsters—I most certainly did not think of moose.

  I wish I could say that with cool precision I raised my trusty little .22 rifle and deftly protected myself. The truth is (and I would never again do this when confronting a moose) that I closed my eyes and waited to get hit. It had come so fast, the snorting, the crashing, the huge whatever it was, that I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything except close my eyes.

  A second passed, then another, and I opened one eye to see him pass me not three feet away. He had to be nearly seven feet tall at the hump. This move would have done credit to a pass in a bullfight. I knew then what he was and I fell back away from him. But the truth was that (a) he was a moose and (b) he was therefore insane, so at this time he hadn’t the slightest interest in me. His target was something else.

  Immediately behind me was a pine tree not more than six feet tall. It looked no different than other small pine trees, cute and well formed, like a little Christmas tree, but in that bull’s mind maybe the tree had done something to insult him, or gotten in his way, or called him out, because he absolutely destroyed that tree.

  Meanwhile, I scrabbled away into the willows on my back and then re-aimed my rifle, just in case—as if it would have helped to stop him. But he couldn’t have cared less about me. He stomped and ripped and tore at that tree until it was broken off at the ground, and still he didn’t stop until he had used his front hooves to break it into pieces (a method a cow moose would later try to use on me) and then shattered those into little more than splinters. Then he snorted, urinated on his work and walked off into the trees, leaving me to gasp (I had been holding my breath the whole time) and feel a strange pity for the tree.

  I have since read that there is a kind of parasite that moose can pick up from eating in the water (they love water-lily roots) that attacks the brain and can cause madness. I wouldn’t know about that, but not a year later I had another experience. I was sitting in a 1938 Ford truck with a farmer I was working for that summer. He had just stopped to roll a Bull Durham cigarette.

  We had just passed through some woods that bordered a field where he wanted me to pick up rocks. Of all farm work, I hated this the most; every spring the frost pushed rocks up through the soil and they had to be gathered by hand and thrown on a skid behind a tractor, then dumped in a large pile in a fence corner. I dreaded the work but he was paying me the huge wage of five dollars a day plus room and board so I was glad of the job.

  The road to the field was little more than an old logging trail through a thick stand of small poplars. The farmer had just finished rolling the cigarette and was snapping a match with his thumb to light it when a bull moose came out of the woods directly in front of us. He looked away, then at us, then raised all the hair on his hump (a signal I would later come to dread) and charged head-on into the truck.

  “What in—”

  I’m not certain what the farmer would have said next because he didn’t have time to finish the sentence. The truck slammed backward and the moose backed off, lowered his head and hit the truck again, and again, and again, until we had been pushed back a good thirty feet. The grille was smashed into the radiator, which ruptured it and made the water boil out in a cloud of steam. The farmer used words I would not hear again until I enlisted in the army. Then the moose snorted and walked off and we had to walk four miles back to the farm and get a tractor to pull the truck home. It took weeks for us to repair it.

  There seems to be a river of rage just below the surface in moose that has no basis in logic, or at least any logic that I can see.

  Other times, when an attacking moose could easily have killed me, the creature just turned away and stopped charging. It’s as if it had a sudden burst of good humor.

  I was in a canoe once in summer, working my way along the side of a lake, angling for sunfish with a light rod and line, when I came around a bend in the lake and saw a moose with her head under water. I smiled because she looked so comical. Moose frequently nuzzle around lily-pad roots and they look silly, almost as if they intend to be funny and come up with leaves and roots hanging over their heads or mud streaming down their faces.

  I had taken a stroke with the paddle just as I saw her, and while I was smiling the canoe drifted close to her—not four feet away. She raised her head, dripping with water and mud, and before I could even take the smile off my face she raised one enormous front hoof, put it on the gunwale of the canoe and pushed down as hard as she could.

  The canoe did an instant and perfect barrel roll. One second I was sitting there and the next I—and all my gear—was in the water beneath the canoe, rod still in my hand, eyes wide open. With blurry vision I saw moose legs right in front of me and I turned and scrabbled/swam/dragged my
self a few feet away and blew to the surface. I thought she would continue the attack and drive me into the mud on the bottom. But no. She decided to play with the canoe. The canoe had shipped a bit of water but it had rolled upright. With great deliberation, the moose reached out with a giant cloven hoof, put it on the side of the canoe and spun it again. Three times.

  She watched it spin until it finally didn’t come right side up again but lay overturned like a green log, and with that, apparently bored, she turned away. I was still standing there in four feet of water and mud. She walked off to eat lily-pad roots while I tried to find my tackle box and cooler and paddle. It had all been a joke.

  I would not learn how truly serious a moose attack could be until I was in Alaska training for my first Iditarod.

  Alaska was more than just a new and beautiful place to me. I grew up hunting and fishing in the north woods of Minnesota, and also spent time in the Colorado Rockies, the Wyoming Bighorns and the wilderness of south central Canada (where Hatchet takes place). But none of it had prepared me for the vastness, for the stunning size and beauty of the bush in Alaska.

  And none of it had prepared me for the difference in moose—either in size or temperament. A fellow and I took my dogs up from Minnesota in an old truck, driving on the Alaska Highway for eight full days, and got to a place north of a trading post named Trapper Creek. I moved farther back into the woods and set up a winter camp. This was on a cold dark night in December three months before the race.

  I went to sleep in an old vehicle used for a shelter. That first night I had dreams that could have been written by Jack London and edited by Robert Service, filled with prospectors and trappers and dogs named Fang and wild storms and cold so deep it froze the eyes out of men. (All of these things, except for a dog named Fang, later came to pass for me.) I was deep in this dream world when a scream tore me awake. It was a mix of terror and pain—I will never forget it—and I ran outside, barefoot, in my long underwear and my headlamp. (It was pitch dark around the clock except for about an hour and a half of grayness in the afternoon.) I was standing in four feet of snow with my light sweeping back and forth before I was quite awake.