HERE'S ONE MUSHER WHO IS NO LAZY SUSAN

John Skow

February 15, 1988

The best dog team anyone ever hitched to a sled was the one Susan Butcher stood behind in the 1985 Iditarod, the 1,100-mile race across Alaska from Anchorage to Nome. So says Butcher, who knows a bit about sled dogs. "Those guys were athletes," she recalls with a wistful shake of her head, "and it all just came together. No one was going to beat them or come close to beating them." Then, two days into the race, which they were leading, she and her 17 athletes rounded a bend, and there in the trail was a cow moose the size of a backhoe. Butcher stopped the sled, and the moose, by rights, should have ambled off into the brush. Instead she charged and spent the next 20 minutes stomping Butcher and her dogs. Butcher had no rifle, and by the time the next musher arrived and shot the angry beast, one of Butcher's dogs was dead, another was dying, several more were injured, and Butcher herself was pretty thoroughly roughed up. Even at that, and with the two casualties loaded on the sled, her team beat all the other entrants to the next checkpoint, the village of Skwentna, 30 miles away.