The dining room downstairs was packed, with people standing around, waiting for tables. "Looks like a long wait," Josh commented, but as it turned out, they only stood there for a moment. A middle-aged woman, with long, braided dark hair spotted them and waved them over to two vacant seats at a table for six.

Josh was pulling back his chair before he realized who the woman was -- Susan Butcher, herself! She hadn't been racing this year, the first time in almost twenty years, having taken time out to try and have a child, but was out on the trail anyway, as a TV reporter for Alaska Television. They'd met her briefly at the pre-race meeting, but really hadn't crossed tracks with her on the trail; she'd just been leaving McGrath when they'd pulled in. "Well, if it isn't the Jenny Easton Productions kids," a man at the table said. "You've had every racer on the trail wondering how you both cornered that particular sponsor."

It took a moment for Tiffany and Josh to recognize the tall, thin man with the thin, sandy hair. In cold weather gear, the only way they'd seen him before, he looked like a bear. It was Rick Swenson, Susan Butcher's arch-rival.

"But I thought . . ." Tiffany said.

"That Rick and I are deadly enemies?" Susan smiled. "We are, out on the trail, but we bury the hatchet for Iditarod Week in Nome."

"Once in a while at other times, too," Swenson smiled. "I gave Susan away at her wedding. Married life didn't slow her down any, though. Seriously, how did you corner that sponsor?"

"To tell the truth, she cornered us," Josh said. "See, she lives in the town where we come from, and we'd been doing our best to raise money, but we were way short. I was just about ready to give up, and pass what I'd raised along to Tiffany, when she called us over to her house and gave us each a fat check."

"I've known Jenny all my life," Tiffany added. "She was my babysitter, when I was real little and she was still in school."

"Is all the publicity that you're still in school the truth?" Swenson asked.

"I'll be back in class as soon as I get home," Tiffany admitted. "I graduate in June."

"You two ran a heck of a race for the first time out," Susan said. "I was twentieth, the first time I ran it, and it was a lot smaller race, then. That was quite a finish you two provided yesterday. I was watching. You both had strong teams for the finish of the Iditarod."

"I think we could have paced ourselves a little better, and finished higher," Josh said. "But, our first year out, we didn't really know what to expect."

"Are we going to be seeing you next year?" Swenson asked.

"I don't know," Josh said. "As far as I'm concerned, I did what I set out to do, which was to finish in the top half. It's so damn expensive . . ."

"I don't know yet, either," Tiffany said. "I worked toward this for years, and now that it's over, I need to collect my thoughts. Maybe by next summer, I'll have a better idea."

"It'd be a shame to let the experience go to waste," Susan said. "You did very well for rookies, especially for being from down below. I knew there was some mushing down in your neck of the woods, but we don't often see racers from there."

"Well, you're the one responsible for our being here," Josh said. "In fact, you're probably as much to blame as anyone for the mushing we have at home."

"How's that?"

"You remember that TV show, `Race Across Alaska,' that was done about you about nine years ago?" Tiffany said. "I saw that, and I knew that what I wanted to do in life was this race. That show got my dad and Josh's brother-in-law interested in mushing."

"Was that the two couples that were following you in a Cessna 185?" Susan asked. "I talked to them yesterday."

"I'm glad they got the chance to meet you," Tiffany said. She briefly told the story of how the two had started with dogs from the pound, and with the help of a retired musher from Warsaw, the only person they could find that had experience mushing, had built them into two strong five-dog teams, and how she and Josh had raced the end of the first Pound Puppies race.

Josh picked up the story. "Until the first Pound Puppies race, none of us knew that there were any other mushers in the state. Well, after the race, we got invited to the state championships. It turned out that there were a grand total of six other teams in the state. The race proved to be on a snow-covered golf course, and all the trophies in the race must have come to a total of thirty bucks. Well, Tiffany's dad won the five-dog sprint, and my brother-in-law, Mark, came in third. After that was over with, we shuffled the teams around. I took seven of the dogs, and won the seven-dog sprint, and Tiffany won the three-dog class with the other three."

"You were ten years old?" Swenson frowned at Tiffany. "Didn't they have you in a junior race?"

"I've never run a race as a Junior, and never run a woman's race," Tiffany said proudly. "Even back then, I raced as an adult. They didn't even have junior races till I was fourteen, the last year I was eligible for them, and I was defending champion in several of the open classes, so they had to let me run them. I ran my first hundred mile enduro at twelve, and won it with my own team. Dad was third."

"Susan," Swenson said wonderingly. "The young'uns are out to get us." He turned to Josh and Tiffany. "You know, dog mushing was almost a lost art in Alaska until Joe Reddington started the Iditarod, and now it's come way back, but sometimes it's hard to realize just how far it's spread."

"It's taken hold at home," Josh said. "In fact, that was the turnaround down there. The next year, the state championships were held at Spearfish Lake. We had almost double the number of teams, and half of them were from Spearfish County."

"We had them at home again this year, last month," Tiffany said. "We had over a hundred teams, and it was the first year I didn't do well, since Josh had all my best dogs up at Talkeetna, getting them ready for this. I had to make do with the ones we'd left behind, and I was only fourth in the seven-dog sprint, and fifth in the Warsaw race."

"Yeah," Josh said. "First Warsaw Run I've missed. I've won it three times."

"They just started a high-school league this year," Tiffany said. "Well, not a league exactly, but we had a high-school state championship, over the Christmas holidays. I still had the dogs that came up here, and won all three classes. They had a pep rally for me before I left to come up here, and they gave me a varsity letter. The band played `The Iditarod Trail', and Jenny even came down to the pep rally to sing it."

Susan smiled. "I've heard Hobo Jim sing that for years," she said. "It sure would be different to hear Jenny Easton sing it."

Swenson shook his head. "A varsity musher's league, of all things. You know, Susan, some one of these days, someone from the lower forty-eight is going to walk in here and go home with all the marbles, and we're never going to know what hit us. I mean, Doug Swingley came up here from Montana and won it this year, but he's been here, what? Seven years? He's almost an Alaskan, anyway."

"I don't know," Josh said thoughtfully. "Experience with the trail has a lot to do with it. I don't think anyone can come in here without previous Iditarod experience and win it. Plus, it takes time to acclimatize to Alaskan conditions, both for the mushers and the dogs. It's a lot colder normally than we hardly ever get at home, and it makes a difference."

"Yeah, but once in a while, things get screwy," Susan said. "Remember '84, Rick?"

Swenson nodded ruefully. "Dean had no business even being in the top twenty, and he beat everybody to Nome by almost a day." He explained to Josh and Tiffany. "It was real warm that year. We even got rained on. Well, Dean Osmar trained his dogs down at Keini, where he lives, down in the banana belt, and most of the rest of us had trained back where we live in the interior, where it was thirty and forty and fifty below. Everybody was acclimatized to real cold weather, and Dean, with his warm-weather dogs walked away from us."

"It was a fluke," Susan said. "But flukes happen, and I think they happen more here than they do in anything else I can think of. You heard how I got knocked out of the race in '85?"

"You mean, when the moose stomped your team?" Tiffany said. "That was in the TV show."

"I should have won," Susan said. "Except for that damn moose. She'd still be kicking hell out of my team if Dewey Halvorsen hadn't come along with a .357 and shot her." Josh nodded. They had the show on videotape, a tape that had almost been worn out with repeated watchings over the years. Both he and Tiffany had carried .44 magnums as far as Unalakleet and the end of moose country as a result. "Flukes happen," Susan continued.

"Not just here," Josh agreed. "I've won races and lost races over the damndest things. They say, `Expect the unexpected.' The most unexpected thing of all is when everything goes right."

"Ain't it the truth," Swenson said. "Everything's so different from how it was twenty years ago, even ten years ago, but, well, shit happens. I ran into it deep, this year."

"Hard to believe, it's been that long," Susan said. "I wasn't a lot older than Tiffany, here, when I ran my first one, and, oh, it's night and day. It used to be that the idea was to get out to Unalakleet with your team in the best shape possible, and that's where the race really began. Now, it gets serious right on Fourth Street. Was the race like you expected it to be?"

"In a lot of ways, yes," Josh said. "But in a lot of ways, no, too. I think the thing that struck me the most was how big and empty it is in the backcountry. There's nothing around home that can prepare you for that. I mean, we've both run the Beargrease, and a lot of shorter distance races, so we thought we were ready for the next step, but it's a heck of a lot bigger step."

"How long have you been working toward this?" Swenson asked.

"Since we saw that video the first time," Tiffany said seriously. "That's when I knew I wanted to come up here and do it."

"This is our eighth year running dogs," Josh explained. "We made the decision five years ago that we wanted to work in the direction of developing teams capable of it. Two years ago, we made the firm decision to try to run it this year."

"And, now you've done it," Susan said. "What next?"

"It's tough,"Tiffany agreed. "We've been working toward this for so long, and now we've done it. It's not in front of us, any more. What's next? Ask me this time, next year. Maybe right here. Maybe not. I wish I knew."

There was a long row of trophies sitting on a shelf in the living room of his trailer back in Spearfish Lake, going clear back to the seven-dog state championship he'd won eight years earlier, and there had been a lot added to that first one since that time -- quite a collection for eight years of trucking to dogsled races, both sprint and long-distance. But the place of honor was reserved for this piece of brass, about three inches by five, not for first place, or second, or third -- the Iditarod Finisher belt buckle that Leo Rasmussen handed him on the stage of the musher's banquet in Nome a few days later. Though he might run the race again, might even do better, might even win it if he worked hard enough, spent enough money and time, this was the symbol that he was a success at what he'd started out to do those many years before. There were only a couple of hundred people that had won similar bits of metal over the past quarter-century, but the possession of that buckle would forever set him apart from the common run.

He'd never paid a lot of attention to what it had cost. Many thousands of dollars, here and there, over the years, in dog food and gasoline for the truck, in harnesses and vet bills. And then, there were the hours -- uncounted thousands of hours, on the back of a sled, feeding and caring for dogs, driving to and from races, just sitting on an engine thinking about the problems he faced and how to solve them, all for this buckle, and every dollar and every hour worth it.

There was a great deal that he felt like saying in response to Rasmussen's congratulations, but "Thank You," covered it pretty well, so that's about all he said. A few minutes later, Tiffany sat at the table beside him, carrying her own buckle., a big smile on her face. "We did it," she smiled at him. "This proves it."

"Enjoy it, Tiffany," he said. "We might run this race twenty times, like Rick or Susan, but this is the only time there'll be a first time. We've come a long way from the first Pound Puppies."

"About a thousand, forty nine miles," she agreed.

"More than that," he said. "More than that, any way you can measure it. Did you ever think, back there when I gave you that twelve-pack, that it'd end here?"

"I was only ten," she said. "I knew that this was what I wanted to do, but I never realized how much I was going to have to go through to do it. It was a long time before I understood that, and that I could really do it."

"It was about five years ago that we started to work toward it," Josh agreed. "It seemed pretty unrealistic, pretty far off, even then."

"And now, we've done it," she smiled, then a frown crossed her face. "You know, ever since we finished, people have been asking both of us if we're going to do it again, and I don't want to admit, I'd never thought very far past this evening."

"Yeah," Josh agreed. "Now that we've done it, what comes next is a pretty reasonable question. Do we do it again? Do you or I do it again, individually? Of something else. If that, what? I don't know, either." He smiled, then said, "Maybe it's time for something new."

"What could that be?" she asked.

"We're on the way," he said. "Think about it. All those years, you were just a little girl, and you had this big `OFF LIMITS' sign painted on your forehead, so to speak. It's a little hard to realize that it's gone."

"Are you glad you waited for me?"

"Of course, I am," he said. "I guess it's only been the last couple of days that I've started to realize that I was waiting for you to grow up. And, yes, Tiffany, you have grown up. You know, I think back to when I was going with Amy, and it seemed so important, so passionate, and now, it seems so superficial."

"I remember back then," she said. "I knew it would never last."

"I wish you had told me that the summer she left me."

"I could have," she smiled, "But you wouldn't have believed me. I was just a little girl."

"I agree, you're not any longer." He shook his head. "I see it this way. I figure I've got to have have a wife that isn't going to complain about having a yard full of dogs," he smiled.

"That's how I see it," she smiled. "I figure the man I marry is going to have to have an Iditarod Finisher's buckle."

"I've got one," he smiled.

"You qualify," she said.

The next morning, they stopped by Rasmussen's Music Store on their way to the dog lot to get the dogs loaded for the trip to the airport, and on to Anchorage, and whatever new adventures the future would bring. The store had a small jewelry section, and Leo was glad to sell them an engagement ring.