Susan Butcher Interview (page: 3 / 4) Champion Dog-Sled Racer	Print Interview

And finally, another musher came along and we shot her, but not before she had killed two of my dogs, and she injured thirteen others, leaving me to scratch from the race. She bruised my shoulder. We spent the next two weeks at a veterinary hospital, saving the lives of the injured dogs.

So these things are possible, but this is very atypical. Mostly, the moose will cause little trouble. But these are some of the dangers that we have to be prepared for.

However, my close calls, my encounters with open water, have been much more severe and have been much closer to death for me and/or the team than this was. For the full team this one ended very tragically. But I've got to say, I'm a lot more scared of open water than I am of moose today.

The most important thing about my job, I believe, is to train my dogs to have a "trust-and-be-trusted" relationship. This starts with me working with the puppies, training them to always trust that I will never ask them to go any further or faster than they are capable of; and yet, everyday, in some way, I will challenge them perhaps to go a little bit farther than they know they are capable of doing. However, if they show me they are not capable of something, I'm there to comfort and praise them, to give them whatever they need. If they do accomplish it, I'm there to praise them. I do this sometimes by just letting the puppies run loose, and sometimes the dog team. That trust is fairly easy to give to them.

The other side of it is that I need to trust in them, trust that they are smarter in the wilderness than I am. Many times their lives, and my life, depends on their knowledge. I first discoverd this after just two years of living in Alaska.

I was traveling on a trail I had been using all winter long which crossed a frozen river, and my lead dog, Teckla, at the time, took off to the right. I told her to go back on to the trail. She took off to the right again. This dog never disobeyed me, so I could not understand why she was trying to do it. Finally, I gave her her head she pulled the team off to the side just as the trail collapsed into the river, and we all would have drowned. She had a sixth sense that saved our lives.
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It's mutual trust. Theirs in my guidance, and mine in their ability and instincts, in the wilderness, that has saved our lives many times.

Has the thought ever crossed your mind, out there, during the toughest part of any of these races, that you just want to give up, just quit?

Absolutely not. I do not know the word "quit." Either I never did, or I have somehow abolished it from my language. If you allowed it to enter your mind, I think during the worst times when you are so exhausted, and so cold, and the dogs may be getting tired towards the end of a four or five hour run, you'd quit.

You would. You have to see only that you are going into this specific race, whether it be a 300 or a 500 or 1,000 mile race, or individual training run. You are going to complete this.

Then, if some force, such as the moose, becomes so great, it's going to be obvious that you should quit. So you can't think about "quit." I just don't think it even enters my mind. I am always so keyed up for the challenge, and not only in a racing situation. Because I have trained for the Iditarod an entire year -- let alone many years -- just because I got a little cold and tired would be a stupid reason to give up an entire year's work.

But, even more so, I think the examples that show my lack of willingness to quit would be certain training runs. Runs where I may be out on a five hundred mile trip. There is no reason for me to have to make it from point A to point B.

There is nothing driving me but my own desire to get there. And where I am getting isn't even an important thing to me. I have been known to walk in front of my team for fifty-five miles, with snow shoes, to lead them through snow storms in non-racing situations, where I could have easily just radioed for a plane to come and get me. Instead, I will take the other way out. And it's certainly given my life incredible fulfillment.
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What's the funniest thing that's ever happened to you out there?

I love this story. Because of the lack of sleep, we do get to the point of hallucinations. I have learned now to take little 15-minute cat-naps and how to stay mostly in control of these hallucinations. But, my first years of racing, I was horrible. I had no idea how to sleep. I would usually go for two or three days without a single nap, and then I'd sleep for five hours. So I was not doing it right.

And at one point in the race, I was traveling along, and I thought there were four of us on the sled and we each had a job. My job was to lean to the right if the sled would tip to the left. Another person's job was to lean to the left if the sled would tip to the right. One person was supposed to use the brake, and I never did figure out what the fourth person was doing on the sled. But here we were going between Slatta Crossing and Ruby, over these huge hills, and I was doing a really good job in my job. Every time the sled would lean to the left, I'd lean to the right. But the others, they weren't doing a good job at all, and we would tip over. And I would get my face completely full of snow, and you would think that this would have woken me up. I would throw the sled back up and yell at these non-existent people and off we'd go.

I later found out by looking at my watch that this went on for almost seven hours. It stopped when I fell off the sled, in my hallucination, and the team was running away from me. There's a rope that drags behind the sled that we call the snub line. Well, I grabbed the snub line, and I was yanking it, and yelling, "Whoa, whoa!" as they were disappearing off into the distance. I finally woke up because I did not have a hold of the snub line. Indeed I had lost the sled.

We have a headlight that we use on our head, and it has a cord on it, and I had a hold of the cord, and I was yanking my head up and down yelling "Whoa!" and I woke up to see my team disappearing into the wilderness. And I said, "This is bad. This is not good." Luckily, they were as tired as I was. I told them to "Whoa!" and they stopped. I went up there, we camped, and I slept. But definitely, the hallucinations are pretty hysterical.

In one race, Joe Garnie and I were neck and neck -- we often are -- and traveling along in the northern arctic, up by Nome. The arctic tree line well below us. There are absolutely no trees up there. Well, I was in the lead and we got off the trail. I went up to the front of my team, and we were in a thick forest, and I had to lead my dogs through this forest. Joe came up behind me and said, "What are you doing?" and I said, "Well, I'm leading the team through these trees back to the trail." He said, "Susan, there are no trees here." And I said, "I know, but I can't make them go away." And he said, "Neither can I." We both were seeing the same trees. We could not make our minds get rid of them and make a straight line to the trail. We wove our way through these trees back to the trail. So it's quite amazing what exhaustion can do.

You didn't just go to Alaska and put some dogs together and start racing. You had obstacles to overcome. You had a struggle. Can you tell me about that?

When I went to Alaska, I did love the wilderness. I had spent a lot of time in the country, in Colorado and Maine, in some of eastern Canada, and western Canada, so I thought that I was prepared to go out into bush Alaska with just one other person. I really was not. My survival skills were nowhere what they should have been; however, I learned them the good way. I learned them by trial and error.

A friend and myself flew out to where the closest town was probably two hundred miles away, and the closest road was 70 miles away, and our closest neighbor forty miles away. I just took four dogs -- that's all I could afford to buy, I bought them for fifty dollars apiece -- and some dog food for them, a sack of flour, a slab of bacon, and a jar of peanut butter, and that was it. And this was going to be for six months, knowing this was not enough food, that we were going to have to live off the land. I have made a number of ridiculous mistakes. The most typical would be just misjudging the vastness of the Alaskan wilderness, and misjudging that there is absolutely no help out there for you if you have any problems.

The most stupid mistake happened the day we were flown in, in this little single engine plane with skis. The pilot dumped me and the dogs out on the frozen lake and flew away. I had only owned the dogs -- they were little four month old puppies -- for about a week. Individually, they were really good at being let loose and coming to me. I was learning to train them, with just my necessary obedience commands. So I let all four of them loose. Thought this was a great idea.

I started toting things over to the small log cabin that was going to be our home, and pretty soon I looked up and no dogs were around. Well, because I was doing so much work, carrying all this stuff over the quarter of a mile to the cabin, I was down to a light sweater and a turtleneck, a cotton turtleneck underneath. I suspect I had long underwear on, no hat, no mittens. And this was late November. In Alaska you can get fifty and sixty below at that time of year. We were probably at about zero or ten below during the day.

So I decided I was going to take off. I didn't even tell my friend where I was going to. I mean, I thought I was going to go around the bend and find the dogs, and I went off calling their names and whistling and everything else, following their footprints. Well, around dusk I had not found them. I was two mountain valleys over from where I was. I was starting to get really cold. The temperature was dropping phenomenally. It was probably at least thirty below, and I was getting seriously cold and really worried about the dogs. And I was to the point of: "Do I follow, continue to find them, or do I go back?" But it's really dark, and can I even find my way back, and realizing I had made a really serious judgment call. So I brought the sweater up around my head, and over my arms -- luckily it was a large sweater -- and just said, "I think perhaps, as long as I can find the dogs in a reasonable time, that is my only way out because they can find our way back to the lake." Luckily, I only went about another half hour, and by that time it was really getting dark, before the first puppy came to me and, shortly after, the others. They had stayed in a pack. I could tell they were chasing moose tracks, and that was my worry. I was having trouble telling the difference between animal tracks, at this point in the dusk, and dog tracks.

Well, I found the dogs, and being terrified of them running off again, I took off my turtleneck and left just my sweater on and used the turtleneck as a leash for two. Now I was mistaken in that because they were as excited to see me as I was them. They were four month old puppies, and they said, "Where have you been?" So we were all happy to be reunited. And luckily, the extra physical effort of holding two dogs on a leash and leading them at a dog's pace back to the lake kept me very heated, and I made it back. But this was a stupid error. And could have turned out as badly. So many people who first come to the state have frozen to death a hundred yards from a cabin, making very stupid decisions, and basically thinking they're are tougher than they are.

These were the types of challenges that I had. Learning the Eskimo and Indian cultures. It was a very new culture, but this was the first time I felt at home. I felt at home with the people. I felt at home with the country, and so, none of this was really fearful to me. I learned these lessons. I learned to have a very educated respect for nature, and a certain type of a fear, but I was never scared of what I was going forward into. And I became a little bit more and more cautious as the time went on. I am still not cautious enough. I am definitely one of those people who is a risk-taker. It seems to be just part of my life.

When I moved to Alaska -- having grown up in the city, and having disliked the city, and therefore disliked mass amounts of people, not individual people, but large groups of people -- I felt that I could do without people. After living at one point for four months alone in this cabin in the wilderness, without my friend, I realized that I did indeed need people. So this was a new revelation for me. But yet, I continued to live alone, often with closer neighbors than that. There were definitely some lonely years.

The economic problem was amazing. I was twenty years old when I went up there. I would get a summer job and make between six hundred dollars and one thousand dollars during the summer, and that had to support me and my dogs for the winter. Well, luckily, in the beginning, I only had four. Finally, I had eleven. And I was living mostly off of the land. I was eating moose, and I was making a mixture of corn meal and rabbit and whatever I could get for the dogs. So I did have very few expenses. Most of the jobs that I did get would be room and board, in addition to some small fee. I could usually work a deal where it was room and board for me and my dogs. Because there is so much fish and native food available to feed a dog team, which does not have to come from someone's pocket, I made it through the early years, until I started racing.

When I started racing, it was such a huge expense. The added high nutrition you have to be feeding the dogs, the added equipment that you need. Before that, I had just built all of my own sleds -- they weren't good but they worked. One, I'd had time to do these extra things, and two, I didn't need good equipment. Now, all of a sudden, I needed to buy harnesses; I needed to buy sleds. And so, my first race, I went about five thousand dollars in debt; luckily, it was just, say, five hundred dollars to the sled builder, so on and so forth. And they were wonderful people. They gave me the credit with no exact time it was due back. So I would finish the race, win some prize money, pay them back as soon as I could.

Then I started going into the salmon industry. And I would work what we call "7-18," seven days a week, eighteen hours a day. This is very typical of our fish industry; you can make a huge amount of money in a short season by working long hours either in the canneries, or fishing yourself, or whatever. And for five years, I worked all sorts of jobs in the salmon industry making very decent money. So I could usually bring myself up to close to zero in my bank balance, getting ready to go into the next racing season to spend five, ten thousand.

Can I say something about radar? This has happened to me well over a thousand times, so I know that it really happens. Mushing along, in the race, with this lack of sleep, you do that thing that everybody has experienced while driving, where you are kind of nodding, and you are not even sure how long you have been asleep. With the dogs mushing a fairly good trail, you might even fall asleep for a minute or two. Or a second or two. At any rate, your eyes are shut, and you are asleep, and the trails are not brushed back well.

There are often trees and things in the way that could hit you at anytime. I'll be asleep, eyes shut, and a "radar" -- that's all I can call it -- will "spot" the tree that's about to hit me, and I do not wake up in time to see it and duck. But I duck before I am really awake, turn around, and I have just missed a branch. Has happened literally thousands of times.

This is something that we human beings used to have -- coming "in contact" with things -- that we've lost by using all the technology. It's not that I think everyone should live in the wilderness, but I do think that experiencing it a little does give people a closer understanding of some of their own human nature, which is otherwise difficult for them to understand -- the emotions they are going through.

On top of that, country living keeps you much closer to death. You see death in animals much more often. You see death in humans more often. We do have a lot of tragic drowning; people freezing to death, and various violent things. Not crime, but things that are happening out there. So you do experience dead bodies of humans, of dogs, of wildlife, of everything. Death becomes much closer to you as a part of life. I think that is often something that the sterileness of some cities, at any rate, takes away from you. The bodies are whisked away; you don't see this. This is part of life, a very good part of life, and something that we shouldn't be so afraid of.

Another aspect of country living is that you actually see the gross and obvious mismanagement of the environment by man; if you live in the city you won't experience this on a daily basis. Often it's misunderstood where this bad management is happening. Or we tend to be extremists. We fish heavily in one area, and then say, "Oh, my God. The fish are all leaving this area, we should never fish it again."

A compromise is usually a better way to manage. Man exists on earth, and we do hunt animals, we do fish the fish out of the ocean, and we have disturbed nature in every far distant point of this land, whether man has ever walked on it or not. To have at one time gone in and shot a bunch of wolves, and to now say, "Never shoot a wolf again" means we are not managing nature correctly. If the wolves get too plentiful, they kill off all the moose, or they all die of starvation, and it is still man's fault. So we have to manage, and it's a compromise.

Perhaps we don't have all the right answers because this takes a lot of study, but we can see that a balance is necessary. This is what mother nature put on earth, an incredibly beautiful balance. We have im-balanced it. We have to re-balance it.

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