Dog sled racers don’t let little things like a winter storm get in the way of important things, like dog sledding, so the sprint races were still held the next day. The snow had dwindled off a lot; Shay won the three-dog two-mile kids’ race, and Cody the two-dog one-mile race, tacking down their claims on the future. But late that afternoon, as people were starting the drive home, the snow started again, and even more seriously. It continued through the night, and on into Monday morning. Schools were cancelled, and that was something the Spearfish Lake schools did with reluctance; they were used to winter and didn’t like to let a wussy little snow get in the way of classes.

It was probably the right move. As of Monday morning, there was a lot of snow on the ground in view out the Evachevski window, and Gil allowed how it seemed unlikely that anyone would want to shop for appliances on a day like this, anyway. Carrie put on her cross-country skis and headed in to the Record-Herald like usual, stopping by the store to put a ‘Closed for storm’ sign in the window. Danny finally got a chance to spend some time with the book about Carole and Brenda. The story seemed even more amazing as he read through it, and it kept him wrapped up all day.

Danny’s mom skied back home about noon, announcing that they’d even packed it in at the paper. Mike had driven a dog sled to work like he usually did in heavy snow; now he was heading home, too. By mid-afternoon, it had started to let up a little, and the city plows were making a little headway on the streets. Danny suggested that he and his dad hike down to the store and get started on the sidewalk – he’d done it many times during winter storms when he’d been a kid – but Gil told him not to worry. These days, the city crews did the heavy work on the sidewalks downtown with a Bobcat loader while cleaning out the gutters, and there was no point in busting their backs for something that the loader could do in seconds.

So, it was a slow afternoon at home. The snow let up on towards evening, and radar out of Camden showed that was about the end of it. Along in the evening, the phone rang, and it proved to be Josh. "The test tube was right," he reported. "Tiff ran a team into the doctor’s today, so I guess we start whelping kids in the fall."

"Well, congratulations," Danny said, more than a little envious. He’d yearned for fatherhood all the years he’d spent with Marsha, even after he realized that it would be a bad idea with her, and now he was further from it than ever. Jennifer on Thursday, and now the news about Tiffany, just left the pangs hurting in him a little more.

"We were planning on getting started this year anyway," Josh said. "It just turns out we’re a little ahead of schedule. It’s not all bad, that way Tiffany’ll be able to get some training miles on next winter. Anyway, any chance I can get your dad to bust you loose tomorrow? We’ve got some switching to do. We’re going to take all three Studs as engines to push the big plow, but we may have to break up into two units so I need an extra brakeman."

"I’ll have to ask, but probably no reason why not," Danny replied.

"While you’re asking, see if maybe you can get free for over the weekend, like Thursday through Monday," Josh said. "Something may be coming up, it’s not settled yet, but we should know by morning."

It turned out that Gil had no objections to Danny taking off, and he was able to tell Josh so. "OK, fine," Josh said. "I’ll swing by with the truck about twenty after five and pick you up. We can have an early breakfast before we get going, but we want to maximize the time we’re on the track in daylight. You probably won’t be doing much but sitting on your butt and shooting the shit, so it’ll be a good time for us to get caught up, just the two of us. We’ll probably be all damn day and into the evening, though. Bring some warm clothes; we may have to be out in the cold a bit."

At 5:30 the next morning, Danny and Josh were in the Spearfish Lake Café, which was nearly empty except for two other guys. "This place opens at 5:30, but Rick’s doesn’t till 6:30," Josh explained as the waitress took their orders when she brought their coffee. "Chris, you might remember Danny Evachevski, Gil’s son. He braked for us five summers up till about ten years ago, and he’s gonna be with us again this summer. Danny, this is Chris Lincoln, in case you don’t remember."

"Yeah, I do remember," Danny smiled. "You started braking maybe the last year I worked here, maybe the year before. I don’t remember us running together, though."

"Don’t think we ever did," Chris nodded. "But I do remember you."

"This is Dave Ames," Josh continued. "Chris is our main winter engineer anymore, although I spell him once in a while. Dave is a switch-hitter; he brakes in the winter and is an engineer in the summer. We’ve got one more summer engineer, a retiree by the name of Harry Anson; we won’t see him until April sometime."

"I’ll warn you right now," Dave smiled, "Anson is a grumpy old fart at the best of times, but he knows his stuff."

"That’s the truth," Josh smiled and continued his explanation. "This summer, Dad and Bud and me will be backing the regulars up. I don’t know how much Bud is going to be around, and I don’t want to hit on Dad too hard. Anyway, Dave, Chris, just for background, when Danny left he was about as good as Stormy is now and had more experience, but that was ten years ago, and he has to be rusty as hell. Right at the moment, I figure on having Stormy on Peddler normally, but we’re going to get Danny brushed up before the rock trains get running so he can back up Stormy if we need him to. That probably means you two are going to have to do most of the brushing while I’m in Alaska, but that also gives you a backup while I’m gone. It looks like we’re going to have one newbie college kid and the Rakestraw kid is going to be back. The new kid has worked with me at the store and with the dogs; he’s a good worker. The Rakestraw kid is supposed to finally be all healed up, but I’m not real sure how well he’s going to hold up; we’ll have to see." Josh shook his head and turned to Danny. "He hit a deer on the way home one night and it came through the windshield; he was in the hospital for a couple weeks and never made it back all summer."

"That shit happens, doesn’t it?" Danny nodded.

"Should work," Chris smiled. "Assuming Stormy doesn’t roll his sled into a ball between now and spring."

"There is always that possibility, which is another reason I’m glad we got Danny as an ace in the hole," Josh nodded. "Danny, Stormy is on the snowmobile racing circuit this winter, I guess doing pretty well from what I hear but I don’t hear much. He only started last year, but he can work the full summer season, not just the college break, so we all worked at teaching him to be a real brakeman, not just a guy to keep the engineer awake and who can move EOTs, the end-of-train signal devices. That’s another reason we need to get you brushed up before Dave has to go on the throttle. I should have gone over this with you last week, but things were a little apeshit, not that they’re not worse now."

"Tiffany?" Danny asked as the waitress brought their orders.

"That’s part of it," Josh nodded. "And just the racing and getting ready for Alaska, but I’ll talk to you about that later. OK, guys, the plan for the day is that we’re just going to make the normal Peddler run, but with the wind direction what it was during the storm, we’re probably going to have some cuts a little full; we might as well clean them the hell out and be done with it. With all three Studs and the big plow we shouldn’t have to slow it down too much. If it proves thicker than I think, we’ll go ahead and split up into two sections, plow with two of the Studs and switch with one. Or something. I don’t know; this is one of those deals."

"Actually, sounds like a plan," Chris said. "There can’t be anything out there we can’t motor through with all three Studs, but there’ll be some places that switching would be a pain with all three of them."

"We’ll just have to wing it," Josh nodded. "Just as well, it’s been ten years since Danny’s been up this pike and we need to give him a little reorientation, anyway."

It was still dark when the four were out in the engine shed behind the railroad office. It was the first time since the fall of ’91 that Danny had been on the property; some things had changed, and others hadn’t much. The "Studs" that Josh and the others had been referring to were General Motors Electromotive Division SD-40s, big, six-axle, 3000-horsepower engines, not unfamiliar to Danny. Two of them, 601 and 602, came to the railroad the third year he’d worked there, but along the way a third had been added. They were the real workhorses of the railroad, the usual power for the summer rock trains. In the summer, the way-freight switching was done by a pair of four-axle GP-9s, 401 and 402, nearly fifty years old, now, but still good, reliable units, although one was currently sitting in the back of the engine shed, torn down for its annual maintenance. The "Studs" were more comfortable for the crews in the winter, so once the rock trains ended, the bigger units got called into play, a single unit at a time, normally – they were about as powerful as both the older units combined.

They took another few minutes mating the third engine to the other two, then all three ran down another track, to where the big black snowplow sat waiting. "We don’t use it much, anymore, especially since we got the Studs," Josh explained to Danny. "But we’ll hit some cuts today where we’ll be glad to have it. It’s a pain in the ass to run, though, since someone has to be riding in its cab; you can’t see shit from the engine behind it. We’ll probably all take turns, but I think I’ll only let you up there if it looks like it’s going to be easy, since the rest of us have done it and you haven’t."

Once they got the train out on the main line, Chris took the duty up in the cab of the plow, while Josh let Dave drive the engines. Since Dave hadn’t done a lot of work with the big plow, this was a good chance for him to learn, just as it was a good chance for Danny to re-familiarize himself with the railroad. He’d never been out on it in the winter, but found himself remembering a lot of it. Well, it had gotten pretty familiar over the five years he’d run these rails.

Within a couple of miles, it was clear that this day was really going to be an exercise in coffee drinking – the three engines weren’t even working hard. "Think about it," Josh commented once they blew through the first deep snow-packed cut hardly slowing down. "Back during the Warsaw fire, Bud had about all he wanted to handle and then some with just the Rock and the big plow. He had, what, twelve hundred-horsepower on four axles. We’ve got nine thousand with eighteen axles and engines a fair amount heavier to boot."

Josh didn’t say anything else, but that got Danny to reflecting – his old buddy was almost as old as Bud had been then, and had many times more experience at the throttle than Bud had in those desperate days. A lot of water had gone down that river while Danny had been gone, too, and his old buddy wasn’t a kid anymore. "So, what’s the deal about this weekend?" he asked finally. "Braking again?"

"No," Josh shook his head as the two of them got over in the corner of the cab so they could talk without bothering Dave at the throttle. "Are you up for doing pit crew at the Beargrease this weekend?"

Danny had heard Josh and Tiffany and Phil and Candice talk about the Beargrease, a big dog sled race in Minnesota, the longest Iditarod-style race run in the lower forty-eight, run on a network of trails on the Lake Superior north shore in an area known as the "Arrowhead District."

"I suppose," Danny admitted. "Bearing in mind that I don’t know jack shit about it. Something come up?"

"Yeah, Tiffany," Josh nodded. "She’s still barfing a lot. Neither Shovelhead nor Candice seem too worried about it, and they both say it’s a phase she’ll go through. Candice calls it ‘worshipping the porcelain princess.’ But she can’t do a 500-miler like that."

"I suppose not," Danny said. "You’re just going to run one team, then?"

"Well, no," Josh said. "The Beargrease is a lot different than the Warsaw Run, a lot more like the Iditarod. We’re sorta committed to Phil to get both teams out for the 500-miler to evaluate the dogs, and Phil can’t go, the race this weekend and then the storm already messed up the training schedule some. I mean, he’d understand under the circumstances, but we don’t want to wash it out. I hate like hell to leave Tiff right now, but there isn’t much I can do to help, and there’s not a lot of other ways to do it. So, we had a long go-round about it last night, and we finally worked out that Tiffany is going to stay back and help Phil catch up on training as much as she can while Candice is going to fill in for her."

"Candice?" Danny smiled, eyebrows up a little. "Isn’t that kind of a big step for her?"

"Yeah, it is," Josh nodded. "But she can handle it. There’s some stuff she hadn’t done in quite that way before, but it’s nothing she can’t do. Anyway, we are a little stuck for pit crew. Originally, Candice was going to do it, but she’s obviously out now."

"Well, yeah, I’m willing to do it," Danny said. "But you’re going to have to tell me what to do."

"Mostly it’ll be just drive the pickup and meet us at several checkpoints," Josh said. "The rules are sort of like the Warsaw Run, the musher has to do most of the work, about all you can do is get the stuff off the pickup and set it on the ground, the musher has to go from there. The trick is being at the right place at the right time, and it might involve a little juggling trying to cover the two of us. But, unless something goes goofy Candice and I are going to try to run pretty close together. I’ll go over what’s going down in detail when we drive over Thursday, so you should do fine. I’ll find a good heavy sleeping bag for you, you should be able to cork off in the truck for a bit while you’re waiting on us."

"Yeah, sure," Danny grinned. "After all, I haven’t been back in Spearfish Lake for two weeks; I’m ready for a road trip."

*   *   *

Josh had made pit crewing at the Beargrease seem pretty simple, and on the surface, it was. That left out the fact that Danny had to drive about 900 road miles to cover 500 miles of race course, in weather that rarely rose above zero, and spend a lot of time outside in that weather as well – with blood still Florida thin, but finally beginning to thicken up just a little. For several days, food was grabbed on the run from checkpoint stewpots or the occasional country café, and the times he had to be at checkpoints could be any old hour of the day or night. He didn’t get to change his clothes for any of the four days, nor even get his boots off in that time.

At that, he had it easy. Josh and Candice had been the ones busting their butts, after all. All in all, it had been worth it. Candice finished fourteenth in a much more serious race than the Warsaw Run, and had just missed Rookie of the Year there. Josh, with less-proven dogs, was half an hour behind, in seventeenth. Neither of them seemed dissatisfied with their runs, but mostly they’d been yawning while the three of them broke the teams down and loaded the truck for the trip back home. They weren’t even out of the finish line parking lot when Candice was sprawled on the back seat, sound asleep. Josh was up against the right door, sawing logs as well, while Danny tried to figure out how to get through Duluth and headed toward the right road for Spearfish Lake.

Danny had been pretty impressed with Candice from the moment he’d met her, and was a lot more impressed now. It was hard to remember that less than a year before, she’d been a bookkeeper in a bank, wearing a business suit, and, to her, doing something in the outdoors meant a bike ride in a city park. But then, from hearing the stories, her husband was just about as amazed at the transformation that had come over his wife.

Once again, Danny was awed at how lucky John had been. A good-looking, pleasant, active and adventurous wife, two great sons, a nice job in his home town – and for a couple who had been facing a lot of trouble with lost jobs and lousy schools ten months before, they sure had landed on their feet! John and Candice had taken a number of lemons and made lemonade out of them, and when he stopped to think about it, it made Danny just a little bit jealous. Considering everything that had happened to him – the divorce, with all that entailed, losing his home, essentially going broke, and having to head back home to start over from square one himself – he couldn’t help but wonder if things were going to work out half as well for him. Although he’d only been back in Spearfish Lake for two weeks, things really weren’t very optimistic. Oh, yes, he was working, not for a lot of money, but that would improve over the summer – but still his annual income would probably wind up being less than the hated herbal supplements sales job. At least he was back home, among friends, making a few new ones, reopening ties with old ones. So, there was some reason for hope, even though a lot of things about the future were unclear.

But again, Candice was representative of a frustration on his part. If Danny could have summed up his dreams at that moment, or for any time in the past several years, they would have been basically to have a loving wife and family, a decent home and a stable, reasonable job. Those were further away now than they had been in over ten years; Candice and John had all of them. How different it had been with Marsha – how little hope there had been of accomplishing much of those! Really, having her gone actually put him a little closer to his goals – at least she wasn’t a roadblock anymore. But that didn’t mean a heck of a lot, either. Although he wasn’t looking at the moment, other than just as a casual interest, he knew there weren’t a lot of eligible prospects running around Spearfish Lake, certainly not as interesting a person as Candice if were she single.

So, in spite of an interesting and adventurous weekend of his own, one that he would have not believed possible three months before, Danny was feeling a little lonely and frustrated as he drove the pickup down a road through the empty snow-filled countryside. It was not the first time since the airport in Las Vegas almost a month before that the vision of Amy had come to his mind, although, with Josh asleep in the truck next to him, it seemed both more poignant and more repulsive to be thinking of her at that moment. To give Amy her due, she was both prettier and more pleasant to be around than Marsha had been, and not for the first time Danny wished that the first double date years before had fallen the other way. It might have worked out a lot better all the way around. Josh would still have most likely lost Marsha early on – the breakup with Amy had been partly Marsha’s doing, he now knew – and it seemed likely that things would have gone better in Amy’s life as well. But, there was no point on dwelling on it, he knew, and even thinking about getting into contact with Amy led to a number of unpleasant possibilities, among them the fact that not only was she Marsha’s sister, she was a prostitute and had been for a while.

Danny still felt guilty about that – working at the Redlite had seemed so much more an admission of the truth than anything else. Should he have done something? After all, he knew Amy, knew her family – he didn’t particularly like them anymore, although he once had gotten along with them – and knew at heart Amy was basically a decent individual who had made some bad choices.Could he have done something a month ago? Realistically, down that road lay a mirror image of Frenchy and her husband as a likely outcome, and he just could not make himself imagine how Charlie – if that was what his name was, he wasn’t sure – how Charlie managed to deal with that. Frenchy had been a nice person, a true friend who more than anyone else brought him out of his depression following the divorce, but Lord Almighty damn, he wouldn’t want to be in Charlie’s shoes . . .

The general thought pattern continued on, both more depressing and disturbing the more he drove. It didn’t help that the big Dodge Ram 3500 was a diesel, and the lifters rattled so bad that Danny expected the engine to explode at any second even though that was how it normally sounded. Finally, in the failing light, he saw a convenience store at the edge of a small town ahead. There was a price for "diesel" on the signboard, and hell, tanking up and maybe getting some coffee and something sweet like a candy bar might get his mind off Amy and his guilt.

But something even better happened. The stop and the hassle of filling the saddle tanks brought both Josh and Candice around, so he’d have someone to talk to. They roused themselves, lost a layer of clothing, used the john in the station, got coffee and candy bars of their own, and otherwise seemed to rejoin the living a little. In fifteen minutes, they were back on the road, with Danny in a better mood because he had someone to talk to. "Candice, I hardly had a chance to talk to you back at the finish," Danny smiled as he took a sip of his big cup of coffee. "But now that you’ve had a chance to sleep on it, are you satisfied with how things turned out?"

"Oh, yeah," Candice grinned from the back seat as Danny pulled the rig back out on the highway. "That was fun! What an adventure! It was better than the Warsaw Run, which almost seemed like it was over before it started. This time, I really felt like I was out in the wilderness, really experiencing it. I can’t imagine how much neater Alaska would be!"

"Glad you talked us into it," Josh laughed. "Danny, you should have been there. John kept wanting to say something but didn’t quite dare, Candice was so enthused."

"Oh, he was tickled, that’s just how he is," Candice grinned. "Even when he was down in Decatur, he’d rather bask in the glory of his relatives than get out and do something like that himself. I mean, in a place like that people are always trying to one-up each other about the vacation adventures they have, the stuff they do. John just had that big ‘Iditarod Run-8’ poster on his office wall, and he had everybody permanently one-upped."

"That would do it," Danny grinned. "Josh, how do you think it went?"

"All right, considering," Josh replied thoughtfully. "The problem is the same problem it’s always been. It’s a good test of the dogs against Minnesota dogs, it doesn’t tell us as much about how they do against Alaska dogs. Back in ’93 and ’94 when we ran the Beargrease, we did pretty good, and we got to Alaska and we found out we weren’t as good as we thought, which is why we started running the JV team in the Iditarod itself. It’s a little more cost effective than just running one team, and it gives the young dogs better experience. We thought we’d see this year if our experience might balance that out a little, and I really can’t tell. I think it’s the same problem all over again. I’m not saying that we might not do this race again; it’s good experience for the young dogs, but it’s something I need to kick around with Phil over the next few months."

"You’re saying that you’re thinking about running a B-team in the Iditarod again?" Candice asked from the back seat.

"Like I say, I want to talk it over with Phil," Josh frowned. "But that opens up another problem. It’s a bear for me to get away this year as it is, there’s no way I could do it like we did it in past years without flying the team up, which we’re doing for the first time this year. As far as that goes, I hate to leave Tiffany at home alone for that long, now that she’s pregnant. I may just fly up, get Phil going, and fly home, leaving Shelly Goodlock to handle things on the Anchorage end during the race."

"Shelly?" Danny frowned. "She’s a girl Brandy used to run around with, along with some others?"

"Yeah, she teaches school outside Anchorage," Josh said. "She’s handled stuff on the Alaska end for us off season and during the race for years. Very nice lady, has done a hell of a lot for us, and the only thing she ever asks us to do is to drop by and say hello to her fourth graders. Of course, we always do, and we’ve always listed Eagle River Elementary as one of our sponsors."

"That’s a possibility," Candice observed from the back seat. "Really, there’s no reason you couldn’t stay gone, though. Are you turning into a nervous daddy like Blake?"

"You want to know the truth, Candice," Josh laughed. "Yes, I am. You think Blake was nervous, wait till you see me next fall."

"Oh, it just takes getting used to," Candice laughed. "After all, we women have been doing this for a long time; it really only takes a man’s help right at the beginning. But, what would you do? Fly back to Nome for the end of the race?"

"Maybe not," Josh smiled. "If the basketball team gets blown out anywhere before the quarterfinals, Brandy wants to fly up and greet Phil again. She did it last year. She knows the drill on the Nome end and can handle it. She’s got the ticket already. If the team does get into the last rounds, well, I could take the ticket and fly up instead. Or, maybe you could. It’d give you a little taste of the big one, anyway."

"That would be fun," Candice laughed. "It’d only be a few days; I can probably talk John into that. But, you’re saying that you’re thinking about the big one again next year?"

"Not really," Josh replied. "Like I said, it’s tough to get away now, and it will be worse next year. I always knew I was going to have to go to work in the winter sometime, and now here it is. And, next year, we’ll have a six month old or thereabouts. And Tiffany and I made up our minds a long time ago that we want to keep the spacing as close as possible on either two or three kids, so we’re mostly going through the same issues at the same time."

"That’s sort of how Dad and Mom did it," Danny observed. "It did simplify things for them a little."

"That’s our thinking," Josh agreed. "But that means that it puts Tiffany out of the race for at least another year, minimum, and realistically several years. But, there are a couple other options; there’s a couple guys locally that would like to do the big one sometime, but they’re not qualified for the Iditarod yet. But, we do have one Run-8 musher who is."

"We do?" Candice frowned uncertainly. "Josh, what are you talking about?"

"All you have to do is to finish a 500-miler in good order to qualify," Josh laughed. "Now who else besides me in this truck did that today? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t Danny."

"Ohhhh . . . myyyyyy . . . Goddd . . . " Candice said, shaking her head, but in a voice that echoed of cold, distant, wild horizons yearning to be seen – and now within reach. "I can’t believe . . . Josh, don’t even hint about that to John! If I don’t drop it on him just right, he’ll blow every fuse he ever had."

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