A group of sled dogs grind to a halt on a trail carved out of six feet of snow in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness. Jen Nelson is following behind a snowmobile with six more Alaskan huskies on a line, and she is listening to a song in her earphones. She doesn't know why Watkins stopped. She does not see the moose.
Watkins is supposed to compete in her first Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Feb. 3, but she isn't initially scared because the moose is about 800 or 900 pounds. Watkins is an ER nurse who has seen a lot in her 38 years and mushing has taught her that a moose will usually leave.
When Watkins sees it a third time, she reaches into her right pants pocket and pulls out her gun. Watkins gets off her sled and walks to the front of the team to see if the moose is gone.
It is 150 yards away, and now it is charging at them, head down.
Watkins is yelling "Get out of the way!" The moose is coming. She throws off her glove and points the gun at the moose.
She says that this is really happening. She counts to three and takes a deep breath.
The moose barely flinches as she fires three shots. Her gun discharges. She is almost certain that she is dead, but the moose is stuck in a pile of leashes, gang line and dogs.
She tried to get the bullet out of the snowmobile, but she caught her thumb in the slide of the pistol while clearing the jam. As she fires more rounds, her hand is bleeding.
She is out of bullets.
She told Nelson there was no plan B.
Watkins reaches down and cuts the line on the six dogs attached to the snowmobile, and all of them run except for Razz, who is on Watkins side.
The other dogs are not as lucky. The moose tilts its head and stomps on them when they move or cry.
She calls her husband, who is 50 miles away, when she is on the edge of the cell tower range. He called the Alaska State Troopers and gave them his wife's coordinates. Nelson is talking to a man who owns a cabin on the river. He doesn't reply. Everyone she knows in the area gets a text from Watkins. Help, help. I need help. The moose is killing us. I need help with a gun. Some people say they are on their way, but Watkins knows she is far away from humans. She wonders if anyone will get there in time.
Jones, who was 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 He knows he has to pick up the phone when it rings again 10 seconds later. Jones hears dogs and women screaming. All he can say is three words: dogs, gun and moose.
Watkins told him that they were above the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He takes off on his snowmobile, and then rushes back to grab a first-aid kit. It will take 32 minutes for him to get there.
Jones sees a pile of dogs in a knot. He says that the moose danced on the dogs for about 15 seconds, but he doesn't know if one of them moved or barked.
Jones grabbed his hunting rifle off his back. He is holding a gun.
The women told Jones from 75 yards away that it was okay to shoot the moose.
Shoot it! They scream at you to shoot it.
Jones calls Watkins from his cellphone. He says they are in his line of sight.
They cover their heads as they leap over a mound. Watkins phone rings after one shot.
Jones told her that it was down.
Watkins will not sleep for the next three nights. The moose is coming through the wall and she has nightmares about it. She is not sure if she can get back on the sled and training for the Iditarod after having chest pains. On Sunday, she was asked if she was going to run. She feels like she is going to vomit. She stares at her dogs as she walks outside. They are playing and jumping.
Watkins and Nelson hold hands and pray.
The 50th Iditarod starts this weekend in Alaska and will not be won by Bridgett Watkins. She knows it.
A rookies dream is to finish the race. It crosses two mountain ranges, spans more than 100 miles of the Yukon River, and is covered in blinding whiteouts.
Watkins isn't expecting cell phone service for most of the route. If she sleeps much, she will sleep on frozen earth.
In eight days, experienced mushers can finish the Iditarod. If things run smoothly, Watkins thinks it will take her two days longer, and up to four if they don't.
She can't help but think about the things that could go wrong, four weeks after the moose attack.
The drive to the Watkins cabin is frightening. The highway is packed with ice when you leave the second-largest city in a state that is larger than Texas.
The house has no street name, so it doesn't show up on maps. It is after a building and a 1,000-foot hill. It is narrow, with four-foot snowbanks on both sides, and Watkins advises to accelerate and not let off the gas. You are going to get stuck. It is OK. Watkins drives the car 800 feet down the road and charges it forward until it is in front of the garage.
Watkins is in between a load of laundry and a trip outside to scoop dog poop on a Friday. When they bought the house last year, Scotty was going to dig a giant hole and let nature do the work, but then it snowed a foot. It was October. She empties the scooper into a garbage bag next to a pile of white bags.
She says dogs eat a lot when training.
They consume between 10,000 and 12,000 calories a day, and today they will have a bag of food that says Redpaw PowerEdge 32 and sounds like it came from a GNC. She pours the food in two buckets, adds water and scoops it out with a ladle for 28 dogs waiting on a wooded hill. The dogs are chained up near their doghouses, which are partially sunken into the snow.
The description of the scene might prompt comments from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and occasionally Watkins gives a nod to the group when one of the dogs cuddles up to her. She says that many of them will stay in the same spot even if they are not tethered.
Four of her dogs were seriously injured during the moose attack, and when they came home from the emergency vet, they slept in the living room with their pills on top of the crate. Watkins moved from the couch to the floor.
Three of the dogs will not compete in the Iditarod because of their injuries. She borrowed several dogs from another kennel because the race requires participants to start with 14 dogs and finish with five. Jefe had to be stapled up after the attack, but he is healed and ready to run.
She told the excited dog that she was done talking about him.
Watkins walks her dogs to the door. They howl at the same time.
She is in the living room. There is a hockey puck on the floor that one of her boys left. She used to treat her most severely injured dog with an IV on the wall.
Watkins should have avoided dog mushing. Nelson accidentally ran over Watkins with a snowmobile at the start of last season, breaking her leg and tearing her meniscus. They know what to do because they are both nurses.
Aliy Zirkle hit the back of her head when her sled tipped over at the Iditarod last year. She was dragged by her right arm until the dogs became entangled in a tree.
Which leads to an obvious question: Why is she doing this?
Scotty Watkins tries to make sense of it in simple terms. He says it is her peace and her love.
When she leaves the yard in training runs or in Iditarod, you are always watching that tracker. There is always concern. I don't want to tell my kids that mom isn't coming home. At the same time, I know her dad and how amazing he was raising her, and she is pretty much figuring out any situation no matter how bad it is.
Her father, Allen Moore, worked as a carpenter and a taxidermist after earning a degree in biology. The family moved to the cold city of Fairbanks when Watkins was 5 years old. The family got its first sled dog, a Red Siberia husky with a curly tail and one blue eye, and it was named Grizz.
Watkins and her sister convinced their parents to get another dog, and soon she was competing in junior sprint races. She won a gold medal at the winter games, but her interests changed and she devoted more time to basketball and boys.
Watkins moved back to Arkansas with her mom after her parents got divorced when she was 15. She realized she did not like it quickly. It is not who I am, you know? There is too much pavement and people.
The man was drawn to the woman. She was the one wearing a skirt and flipflops in the middle of winter. They played T-ball together when they were 3 and 5 years old, and now he is the star pitcher on the baseball team. They were dating within a few months.
He went to Arkansas-Monticello on a baseball scholarship and his freshman year was the only time they were apart. Watkins was able to skip her senior year of high school and join him in Monticello because she took enough college prep courses.
They shared a love of dogs. When they met, he was training a black lab puppy to be a hunting dog. Rembo for short, was able to open the refrigerator door and grab food by following hand signals. He was known to wait in the locker room while Scotty was throwing.
Everyone on the campus knew him. He was a great dog.
The success story of Rembo helped Scotty take on a side gig. After six years of dating, the two of them got their degrees and moved to Missouri, where Scotty worked as a duck hunting guide. But he wanted to go home. She received a two-year contract offer at the regional hospital in Nome that included paying off her student loans, and they packed up and moved without visiting the remote town.
They considered it an adventure. They thought they could live anywhere for two years. He was a bank teller when she delivered babies. They were so broke that they had to borrow salt and pepper from a neighbor. They built their life in a place where the snow hit sideways and people got around on snowmobiles and bikes. They feel connected by a sense of community when they are in the wilderness.
They spent six years in Nome. By then, Allen Moore was a successful dog musher and his daughter was going to help him train his teams. She decided to sign up for the Iditarod after competing in the midrange races. She found out she was pregnant a month before sign-ups. The Iditarod would have to wait.
She is very strong- willed and she needs things as well. She isn't like the independent woman who says she can do everything by herself. From what I have seen, her capabilities are endless.
We work well together as a couple. She relies on me for a lot of things, but at the same time, if it snows 6 inches, she can jump in the plow truck and plow the road.
The dogs were ready to run when the weather was perfect for mushing. Nelson snapped a photo of Razz and Sparta jumping up and down in their black boots. There was no time to post it on the social network. She put the phone in her pocket.
The run was supposed to go 52 miles and take six hours to complete. One of the more challenging parts of the run is the bridge. Dogs are hesitant to run on it because they see through the slats and it scares them, so she put Pullup and QT in front of Jefe and flash.
Bill and Gravy lined up behind Bruno and Bronze and Hercules and Brute.
Watkins says the scariest part of that day was when the moose was shot. She ran to the pile of dogs to see if any were still alive. They were too scared to move. The trail became the center of a dog fight. There was blood everywhere. The dogs were wrapped in parkas by Watkins and Nelson. Bronze had internal organ damage and Bill had a broken leg. No one could find flash.
He was one of the first two puppies that the Watkins family acquired. The boys named him.
The helpers who saw Watkins' SOS text arrived and were riding around in snowmobiles with kennels hitched to the back, and they took care of the runaway dogs. The only one they could not find was flash.
Watkins had to make the difficult decision to get the other dogs out of the way of the snowmobile. It took 45 minutes to get to the emergency clinic in North Pole. When they arrived, veterinarians were lined up at every station with IVs and morphine ready.
A man is going to his cabin. The dog had a hoof print on his head after he was kicked by the moose. The vets were going to kill him because he was wracked with seizures.
Watkins was torn. She did not want her emotions to get in the way of what was best for the dog. She waited. Medicine helped abate the seizures after flash was snoozing for 24 hours.
The day after the attack, a photo of the moose hovering over the dogs was posted by the animal rights group. If they were not forced to train for the race, this would not have happened.
Watkins says the only thing she has in common with the group is their passion for animals.
Watkins loaded up more than a dozen dogs for their health screening three weeks later. They had full blood panels. Some dogs needed new identification.
Volunteers in animal medicine travel from all over the country to help with the screening for the Iditarod trail. They look into the eyes of the dogs during the tests, something they wouldn't do in their clinics. She says that sled dogs are different.
She says that the dogs are pack animals. They are around a lot of people.
They are not trying to eat us because there is no fear that we will do anything to try to bite them. It is very rare that we have an aggressive dog.
Most of the dogs pass the health check before the race. Dogs that get sick or injured can be dropped. As the dogs arrive or as they rest, veterinarians at each checkpoint examine them. A dog dropped at a checkpoint is flown back to Anchorage and the team goes on without the dog.
Nelson says their goal is to finish with all of their dogs and have a smooth race.
Susan Butcher was one of the favorite mushers. Watkins wanted to be her when she was a little girl. Butcher won three straight Iditarods from 1986 to 1988, but became Alaskan folklore before that. She was leading the Iditarod when a moose ran into her team and killed two dogs. A musher shot and killed the moose after the butcher held it off with an axe and parka.
The newspapers had differing accounts of the moose's disposition, ranging from crazed to sick and dying.
The moose that attacked him wasn't dead. A moose carcass was loaded onto a sled and dropped off at the Trooper Post in Fairbanks, its meat donated to charity.
Tony Hollis says that moose have been hampered by the harsher-than-normal winter. The average winter total in the area is 53.8, but more than 90 inches of snow has fallen. A layer of ice was created by a freak rainstorm in December.
oose can get away with some pretty deep snow, but there is a thick ice crust in the area. It keeps them where they have to step high and then they punch through it, skinning up the fur on their legs, and it is difficult to walk in the snow. It is particularly hard on the calves.
The moose probably retreated to the groomed trail where the snow is not deep. In the summer it eats leaves and buds off the willows, but in the winter it only eats sticks.
Like Watkins, the moose was scared. Wolves are the top predator of moose, and in that moment it was staring down a pack of running dogs.
There has been a sharp rise in what he calls nuisance moose. He starts to tell a story about another attack that happened the week after Watkins, one that was more gruesome, and it was not all over social media. But he stops himself. He gets a few moose incidents in the winter. He is getting several weeks now. Some of the calls are going to the state troopers, so he can't quantify it.
The area has about 35,000 moose. He doesn't know how the thaw will affect the adult population, but he knows a lot of calves have died.
According to Hollis, moose are not generally aggressive. A large moose and a calf are roaming the streets near downtown. The Lower 48 has deer popping up around towns.
He says that moose are a calm animal until they are not. They are fat and happy when there is lots of food.
moose are pretty spooky when you leave town.
Watkins was told that the moose had been hit five times by bullets, in the face, shoulder, lungs and heart.
She had a.380 gun on the day of the attack because a lot can happen on the sled, and if she is dragged, a higher caliber gun could kill her. She needs to take her chances now.
She can not decide which gun to use on the Iditarod. She will wear a holster on her chest if the.44 is too heavy.
She says that if she shot you, you would die. I am not going to kill these animals. Every single musher behind me is going to have to help clean the animal if I kill it. It will take hours, and it is the last thing I want to do.
It is a no-win situation. I don't want to hurt the animal, but I will take the 9mm. I want him to leave me alone.
The dogs were loaded into a truck and taken to Alaska. A group of adults, children and at least one dog cheered for her and held up signs.
Bugsy made the cut for the race. Watkins gets along with the other 13 because she is smart. Razz will be a lead dog with her son Pullup. Watkins says Razz is her steering wheel. She will do anything for her.
She was going to make a series of recordings for her children to play while she was away.
She says that her kids have seen a lot of hardship and trauma, and if she gave up now, that would be what they would picture for their future. They are watching my every move, so I can't quit. I don't want failure to be the final answer.
Timber understands what his mom is doing, as much as anyone can understand how a 160-pound woman is embarking on a 1,000-mile trip alone on a sled.
River is sad that his mom is going away. They will track her and wait for her bib to inch closer to the finish line. Her dad has told her stories about the hard parts of the Iditarod.
If you want to see nastiness, she says, just search the Bering Sea. I could lose the trail. I have had 20 years to hear these stories. I am almost numb to it at this point.
The hardest part of all is not covered by this.
Getting to the starting line.
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