Reach Into ·four Read Actively Background Set 4 Pi.rposefor When you read the stories of people's Re�di�q i1ioqr4pky lives, you often learn about the. chaUenges You will learn much more by setting a they faced to achieve their goals. Called purpose, or goal, for reading a biography. biographies when written by someone .In doing this, consider what you already other than the subject, these true-life sto know about the person and what you'd like ries can tell about challenges that are men to know. tal or physical. With a group, do one or This biography is about Susan Butcher, both of the following activities: a star of a famous Alaskan sled-dog race • Note the most difficult challenges called the lditarod (l DIT uh rod). Use the that people have to face. Without map and the photographs on the following using words, act out some of these pages to imagine some of the challenges challenges. she faces, Then set up a three-column • List the people whose biographies you KWL chart to guide your reading. In the would like to read. • WhatI Knowcolumn, list what you already know about Susan Butcher. In the What I Want to Knowcolumn, list what you hope to learn,, in the f,prmof questions. Fill in the WhatI Learnecfcolwmn as you read.
.,. flesh, gi:en by tenants to their lords. as payment. Carmige has come to be used to describe the W�rds to Know Here is the complete list of Words . bloody slaughter of soldiers in a battle. to Know for "Susan Butcher": grueling prophecy prolonged SpellingStr ategy: Prophecy, a noun that means a congestion potential hallucinate "prediction," is commonly misspelled, as is the remote carnage capable verb prophesy, which means "to declare or predict incentive something." Point out the following strategy to use with words that are often misspelled: Say the word Vocabulary Strategy: The word carnage creates aloud, slowly and carefully. Then close your eyes in the reader's mind an unexpected and ghastly and visualize the word spelled correctly. impression of the lditarod. The term, which comes Teacher's Resources Follow up with the from feudal times, initially referred to the meat, or 1, nl\f I· Words to Know Practice Page. iF•120 120 Literary Forms: Biography or Susan Butcher, .it was a day like any other: brutally cold, winpy, apd snowing hard enough so that it w'as impossible to see more ' , than a few feet in front of the heavy four-wheel vehicleF her sled dogs were dragging for practice. In short, as far·•· as she was concerned, everything was perfect. • Then suddenly Butcher's lead dog went "gee" (right) when Butcher shouted "Haw!" (left). and the four-. wheeler, the dogs, and Butcher piunged off a twelve foot cliffand into a clump of alder trees. There was, of course, no path out. The trail Butcher and the· dogs had fallen from was little trav eled, and she figured it might be several days before somebody happened by. She had no saw and no ax. It was only supposed to be a little training run. With pli ers, a wrench, and a broken screwdriv�f; she chopped at the alders. She got the dogs working together, and they pulled the four-wheeler up the hill. Sometimes they'd make as little as twelve inches of progress before Butcher would have to begin hacking away with her pliers and wrench again, but five hom,s after· they'_d fallen, Butcher and her dogs wen: on the road back to Butcher had learned' not to leave home, ,; ii! ,t
Susan Butcher 121 selves. In a funny way, Butcher's preparation for the lditarod began before the race ever existed. When she finally entered it for the first time in 1978, Butcher must have felt like she'd finally discovered where she belonged. As a little girl growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Susan Butchernot only knew where she did belong. She hated the congestion of the busy streets, the constant noise of the traffic, and the even for practice, without all her tools. pollution all around her. She And she hoped her lead dog had learned begged her parents to move to that "Haw!" meant "Haw!'; the country, or at least to let her live in a On that day when . she and her team tent in the backyard. Her best fri�r1d1;L· fell off the trail, Susan Butcher was train were the dogs she kept. In first grade she "01 :· ' ' } ~If and her qogs for the Iditaroo, 1 wrote an essay entitled "I Hate Cities." ·u'al ' , race that c6yers the That was the first, last, and only sentence · i' n Arichor ~, . $;" ld, ip the paper. t Whens
some of the tale_s of her )i:aming runs are settled in a town ca led Eureka, which no less dramatic·tha:h the races them- you will not find on many maps. There I. Iditarod (I OIT uh rod) she cobbled together four one-room cab ins, a doorless outhouse, and 120 dog- 5 houses. Butcher's dogs have outnum- bered the two-legged citizens of 3 adj.: Eureka by as many as · , ----� .. . ' grueling (GROO ling) Verytiring; exhausting 150 to 13. congestion (kuhn JESadj.: chuhn} n.: Crowds; traffic remote (ruh MOHT) Isolated; removed; far from people
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:·.122 122 Literary Forms: Biography Eureka is a fine place to prepare for mushers runalong behind them or kick the Iditarod, since a chief feature of both with first one numb foot, then the other. is isolation. A pitcher who's gone to a full When the teams are traveling downhill, count on the batter with the bases loaded the mushers hold on for their lives and in the ninth inning of a tie game might pray that the wind won't freeze their eyes feel lonely. A marathoner who has run shut or tear the sled from their hands, beyond whatever certainty her training leaving them without even the company can provide and still has miles to go of their dogs. For as long as they can might feel that way, too. But the Idit_arod stand it, they swerve over frozen rivers, exists primc\rily as a tribute to the navigate through the stumps of burned conviction2 that everybody ought to be over forests by the insanely inadequate able to take care of himself or herself with glow of a single small headlight, and hope the help of a dozen or so dogs, and there they won't suddenly crash headlong into is perhaps no loneliness like the loneli a bear or a moose or the dog team of ness of someone lost and snow-blind in some poor fool who has become com the middle of Alaska. pletely confused and started racing back A very fast and disciplined dog team ward on the trail. with an experienced and fortunate mush All these obstacles appeal to Susan er can complete the race in a little over Butcher, who's felt since early childhood 7I eleven days. Some competitors take as that taking heat, light, and shelter for I long as three weeks, and a lot of starters, granted was missing the point. Only .as high '1� 30 or 4? percent some years, when she has felt close to ·1 · ,s ·ke spend
Susan Butcher 123 only from a great distance. He called the race the Iditarod after an 7 Alaskan ghost town bearing the 9 name, which is an old Indian word meaning distant place. As an incentive to take up this J crazy challenge, Redington offered $50,000 to the winner of the first Iditarod, though when the race started he didn't have the money. Twenty days later, when that first race ended, Joe had the dough. He'd hustled it from various indi- 1 10 vidual and corporate3 donors. But _J over the years the payoff for win ning the Iditarod continued to be a little on the shaky side. Winners have sometimes had to settle for their prizes in installments, unlike all the professional baseball, bas ketball, and football players who are secure in their guaranteed contracts. Joe Redington first met Susan Butcher a fewyears after he'd come 7 up with the Iditarod, and right 11 away he was sure she'd win it one day. Or he was almost sure. He proposed a sled dog trek to the J summit of Alaska's Denali, also known as Mount McKinley, per she has feltchallenged has she felt entire haps partly to test the mettle4 of this ly alive. remarkable young woman who'd come to Joe Redington invented the Iditarod the far north in search of escape from cars, in 1973. He'd always loved the wilder buildings, and too many people. Together ness, particularly the Alaskan wilderness, with seven dogs and a sled, Butcher and and he was worried- that what he loved Redington made the 20,320-foot climb was falling into the hands of snow through hundred-mile-an-hour winds and mobilers and settlers with satellite dishes. over 2,000-foot-deep crevasses. 5 It took He scratched his head and wondered how to remind everybody of the toughness and 3. corporate (KOR puh rit) adj.: Business. independence that Alaska had always 4. mettle (MET I) n.: Spirit or courage. demanded of its residents, and he came 5. crevasses (kruh VAS is) n.: Deep narrow openings caused by a crack or split. up with a race that would require sled drivers andtheir dogs to brave screaming winds, blinding blizzards, hunger, lack of Words to KJ-tow sleep, and a dozen other hardships that incentive (in SEN tiv) n.: Something that most athletes would just as soon consider makes a person want or try
•124 124 Literary Forms: Biography them forty-four days. Nobody'd mushed that route before. Nobody's done it since. When they were fin ished, Redington was absolutely sure Susan Butcher would one day win the Iditarod. But the extent to which Ms. Butcher fulfilled his prophecy must have surprised even Redington him self. Perhaps it shouldn't have. By the time she. began to pile up first place finishes in the Iditarod and other races in the late eighties, Susan Butcher had paid her dues. She'd learnedfrom her limping pups to line up several friends year-round to help her knit booties for race days. Run I out of booties on the trail, and the ice 13 would cut the best team's paws to hamburger. She'd learned how to rec ognize a potential lead dog in a litter and how to raise all the dogs in her team to have confidence in her. And perhaps most important, she'd learned that her loyalty and attention to the needs of her canine partners would sometimes be rewarded by the special gifts the dogs had to give. Eight years before she ever won an Iditarod, Butcher was mushing perhaps her best lead dog ever, Tekla, and fourteen other huskies across a frozenriver in a practice run when suddenly Tekla began pulling hard to the right. Butcher kept tug Butcher finally shrµgged and decided to ging on the team to follow the trail. but follow Tekla's lead. A moment after she'd Tekla wouldn't respond. Though she'd made that decision and left the track, the never balked6 before, the dog insisted on whole trail itself sank into the river. "She pulling the sled off the trail to the right. [Tekla] had a sixth sense that saved our 1 lives," Butcher told Sonja Steptoe of 6. balked (BAWKD) v.: Stubbornly refused. l Sports fllustrated years later. 'That day I learned that the wilderness is their 14 domain. The dogs know more about it Words to KKOW than I do, and I'm better offtrusting their prophecy (PRAHF uh see) n.: A predic instincts." Of course instinct is only part of it. J tion about the future potential (puh TEN shuhl) adj.: Possible; Courage, stamina, and a cool head help, capable of becoming too. In 1985, with a superb team and
Susan Butcher 125 high expectations, Susan Butcher seemed smile will freeze on the lips for hours, and to be on her way to winning the lditarod maybe forever. Susan Butcher proved she
for the first time. But she7 ran into a prob could brave the most vicious weather, but lem no measure of preparation or instinct by the time she started winning the could have forestalled. Veering around a Iditarod, she'd learned to prepare herself sharp bend in the trail one night, she was and her dogs so well that all but the most startled to find in the beam of her head hideous storms seemed routine. She'd light a full-grown female moose. The dog also learned that by working closely with team hit the animal before Butcher knew her dogs every day from the hour they the moose was there. By the time Butcher were born, she could build a level of trust could figure out what had happened, the and loyalty that her competitors could moose was hopelessly entangled in the only envy. Of course, this relationship harnesses that connected the dogs. In the demanded a good deal from Butcher, too. l carnage that followed, two of Butcher's In 1991, she passed up the chance to win 15 dogs were kicked to death and several her fifth Iditarod when she decided that a � others were badly injured. While Butcher blizzard raging over the last hundred 16 't fought to free the remaining dogs from miles of the course would unreasonably 1 their harnesses, the moose stomped on endanger her team. She prolonged a rest j , her shoulder and might have killed her, stop, waiting for the weather to improve, too, if another musher hadn't arrived on and finished second that year. the scene and shot the moose. Butcher Even when the blizzards hold off and and her team limped to the next check the moose stay out of the way, the point and resigned from that Iditarod in Iditarod demands a tremendous amount the low point of her racing career. from a musher. The rules requi£e one And then, beginning in 1986, the high mandatory rest period of twenty-four points began coming in quick succession. hours during the race, and once having -�-· Between 1986 and 1990, she won the met that requirement, no serious com- Iditarod four times. The hottest selling T petitor stops for more than four hours at shirt in the state bore the legend "Alaska: a time. Nearly all of the four hours of .," Where Men Are Men and Women Win the each stop are taken up by feeding the ' l Iditarod." After Butcher's third win in a dogs, melting snow so they'll have water, row in 1988, Joe Redington laughed and checking their paws for cuts or cracks, told a reporter, "It's getting pretty hard for mending the harnesses, and maybe 17 a man to win anything anymore. Maybe we catching something to eat-hot chocolate · should start a race especially for them." if you're fortunate enough to be stopping j It has been sugge,1_ted that the formu at a checkpoint where somebody's cook- la for winning the Iditarod involves having ing, melted snow if you're not. good dogs, a good musher, and good That doesn't leave much time for luck-in about equal measure. The good sleep, so the Iditarod's exhausted com- musher is the one who can smile into Words to K"1ow the wrath of an unexpected hundred mile-per-hour wind, but he or she better v.: make sure the smile is behind several carnage (KAR nij) n.: A bloody scene; a slaughter layers of ski mask, because when that prolonged (proh LAWNGD) Extended; made (for STAHLD) Prevented; avoided. 7.wind forestalled joins below-zero v.: temperatures, a longer hallucinate (huh LOOS in ayt) v.: See or hear adj.: things around one that are not there capable (KAY puh buhl) Able to do things well; powerful; skilled
-•126 126 Literary Forms: Biography petitors have been known to hallucinate her dogs probably know her too well to be on the trail. In a book entitled Woodsong, surprised by anything she could say or a musher named Gary Paulsen wrote of a d o. Certainly she knows them 'Yell fellow who appeared on his sled wearing enough to astonish her friends. "I;'o�ks horn-rimmed glasses, clutching a stack of ask how I can call one. hundred and fifty important-looking papers. "He is the most of them by name," she says, "but it's 11at- boring human being I have ever met," ural. They're like chi!tlren. If you h d ·one 1 8 � Paulsen says in his diary-like account. hu dred and fifty k i
8. susceptible (s1.)h SEPT uh buhl) adj.: ~asily ·•s affected: very sen sitive.
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Susan Butcher 127 has Sti!l, success at the Iditarod changed Susan Butcher, if only a little. Before she became a celebrity, at least by Alaskan standards, she used to go offand live alone for six months or so. No people, no running water, no nothing. Now, in deference to the fact that people want to contact her and because raising and training 150 dogs takes the sort of money only sponsors can provide, she has a phone in her cabin. She has a husband there, too. His name is David Monson, and as a matter of fact the phone was probably his idea. He serves as Susan Butcher's business manager, and he probably got pretty tired of hitching up the dogs and mushing more than twenty miles eve1y time he had to make a call. Which is not to suggest that David Monson is exactly a softy. He got to know his future wife when they were both unknown mushers competing in the 1981 Iditarod. Monson was struggling to climb a hill and lost control of..his sled, sport has never turned Susan Butcher's which wound up off the trail in the I head, though it has gone some way brush. It was the same stretch of brush toward fulfilling her dream. "I never got Susan Butcherk had already fallen into a into this to make a Jot of money," she told 1 9 few minutes earlier, and while they were an interviewer before winning her fourth both woring to straighten out their dog Iditarod, in 1990. "But to live just the way teams, a third musher also skidded off l you want, to do what you love to do. . . . the trail and landed on them. Monson How could you have anycomplaints?" remembers it as chaos: forty-five dogs and three mushers, including a very angry and competitive woman and one guy (Monson) who didn't really have much idea what he was up to. When they all finally got back on the trail, Butcher told Monson he'd better rest his dog team, and that was the last he saw of her in the race. If it wasn't Jove at first sight, it was close enough for the two mushers, now partners as well as competitors. Not all the others who tackle the l Iditarod have been as comfortable with Susan Butcher's triumphs in the race as 21 David Monson has been. Rick Swenson, the only person to have won the race as 1 often as Butcher has, tried for some years
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to get the Iditarod's organizers to adopt a keeping herself in shape-is an eleven handicapping system that would, in month proposition. Small wonder that effect, penalize Butcher andother women sometimes she racers for weighing less than the men thinks about who mush against them. When that turning her didn't work, Swenson took to intimating attention that Butcher won only because she had a exclusively lead dog of supernatural strength and to some of endurance, an unintentional" compli Alaska's short ment, since Butcher had raised and er races-the trained the dog. Butcher herself tends to three-, four-, or shrug off the bitterness of the men who five-hundred resent a woman's success in a sport mile jaunts. they'd like to claim as their own. "Yes,Body I She already amand aSoul. woman," she told writer Carolyn knows these Coman in an interview for the book races well. "Yes, it is a victory for me to She holds the win the Iditarod. But it isn't amazing that records in most I, a woman, did it. I did it because I am of them, just as capable, and women are capable." she does for Being capable may never before have the Iditarod. So easing up a little is a involved such an effort. Butcher has said pleasant possibility that occupies Susan on several occasions that training for the Butcher sometimes when she thinks Iditarod-which involves raising, feeding, about a post-Iditarod future. 9. unintentional running, and training(un in TEN her shun dogs uh!) asadj.: well Not as Unhappily, there's an unpleasant deliberate; chance; random. possibility that concerns her, too. She has adjusted to the modern improvel Bill Littlefield ments David Monson has made in their cabin, but other 'tf1justments won't come so easily to the woman who hated the (1948- ), 22 a sports commentator for noise and pollution and hustle of Cambridge when she was a little girl. The � National Public Radio, says 3 this 'abput exceptional authorities have begun to improve the athletes: .-.!,· roads up Susan• Butcher's way, and · Our best athletes Butcher has watched "progress" suspi fire our imaginations. ciously. "In ten years we may have ten or Within their games they give us images fifteen neighbors," she was overheard to of excellence, which are pften hard to say. "If that happens, we'll be gone." find elsewhere. But the most adrnirable of our athletes do even more., They demonstrate in their work such qualities �Respond as perseverance and gmce under pres sure.... The stories of their lives give us patterns, and from these patterns we • Of the lditarod's challenges, which can learn. something about finding a would you find the most difficult? Why? passion and working hard and believing • With a partner, list questions you still in ourselves. have about Susan Butcher.
' Susan Butcher 129 F•· REINFORCE ANO EXTEND - -111111111111- MAKEMEANI-NG
• Explore Your Readin9 � Ideas for WrHins took i>Mkmec(tH) �- Bill Littlefield has written a biography of an 1 . What obstacles did Susan Butcher overcome in lditarod racer. However, this famous race might becoming an lditarod champion? inspire other types of writing as well. Tki�k It vver (li1terpret) Mi.sker's Joi.r11e.l Imagine you are training for the lditarod. What elements of the Alaskan course 2. Why wasn't Joe Redington absolutely sure would concern you most? Draftthe journal entry Susan Butcher would win the lditarod when he you would write the night before the race began. first met her? i1ook Review Imagine you have been assigned to 3. Describe the relationship between a musher and review the Susan Butcher biography for an Alaskan a dog team. tourism magazine. Tell readers what they can learn 4. Why is Susan Butcher a successful musher? about Alaska from this biography and whether they Rank her qualities in order of importanceand should read the book. explain your ranking system.
ao i>eyo�d (Apply) ( s,.��, . • g; ' Ideas for Projects 5. Explain why men and women should or ,....; ' , Sports l11terview Choose a school ath- shouldn't be allowed to participate in the lete or local sports personality to interview. Before same lditarod. the interview, jot down what people would want to know about this person and then write yourques •1 �� D�telop Re�d1n9 and tions. If possible, videotape your interview. � ... Literary Skills [Social Studies Link] U�derstM-1d i1ioqr(tpky Medie. Review Form your own "Thumbs Up-Thumbs Down" media review team. With a partn$·�. determine There are many reasons for reading a biogra . what makes a good biography. Then ma'.ke a list of phy, a writer's account of someone else's life. Your biographical movies and books and evaluate each purpose, or goal, for reading m,w have helped you according to your standards. learn about one or more of the following things: • What Susan Butcher values Exercise Report The lditarod is an extremely • Challenges she has faced and goals she has demanding race. Research and explain the exercis achieved es that could increase an athlete's strength and • Her personal life 9- endurance for this contest. Share your findings with • The background of the lditarod the class. If possible, demonstrate some of the • What Alaska is like exercises. [Science Link] Use your KWL chart to help you answer these questions: ff'ow tlm l Doing? 1 . For each of these items, describe something you Spend a moment with a partner to discuss learned from this biography. these questions: 2. What information in this biography did you find How did the map and photographs help me to most interesting? Why? What would you like to understand Susan Butcher's experiences? Why? learn more about? In what other kinds of assignments could the KWL chart help? How would I modify it?
·130 130 Literary Forms: Biography
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