Susan Butcher at the Iditarod in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 7, 1987. Photograph by Rob Stapleton / AP

These are the questions that Susan Butcher, Alaskan dog musher and two-time winner (and record holder) of the eleven-hundred-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, is asked most often: How cold does it get in Alaska? How cold is it in Alaska right now? Is your house cold? What does caribou taste like? What’s your dog’s name? Susan’s first four answers are: Very, very cold. Not too bad. Doesn’t feel that way to me. Really good.

The last question has approximately a hundred and fifty answers, because Susan has approximately a hundred and fifty Alaskan Husky sled dogs, who live outside her log cabin in the Alaskan bush. Such a large number of animals strikes many people as unusual, and even unmanageable, so sometimes, instead of “What’s your dog’s name?,” she is asked if she actually bothers to name all her dogs.

The people who ask that are not fellow-mushers—dog-sled drivers—but, rather, the kind of people (including us) who came to the Plaza Hotel last week to see Susan receive the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Professional Sportswoman of the Year Award, and who find the circumstances of Susan’s life nearly unimaginable: the dozens of dogs, the rigors of sled racing, the near-isolation. (For much of the year, the only human being she sees is her husband, David Monson.) Susan, who told us she much prefers two days on a dog sled to two days in the Plaza Hotel, has accrued so much fame as a musher that she is used to being a curiosity, and she is gracious enough to answer even the most elementary dog-mushing, Alaska, or life-in-the-bush question with only a trace of exasperation. “Of course I name all the dogs,” she explained. “I name some after places and some after people. Then, for a while, I’ll have themes, like the names of book characters. One of my studs is Crackers, so another theme is to name his puppies after cracker brands. Another stud is Granite, and a lot of his puppies have rock names. I know every dog by name. I know every dog’s parents. I know every dog’s grandparents. I know which one has a cold, and which one didn’t eat well last night, and I know each one’s personality and where he likes to be scratched. You have to understand, this is all I care about, and this is all I think about. I don’t understand anything else, and I don’t care about anything else. I’m with the dogs twelve or sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. They’re my friends and my family and my livelihood.”

As she was talking, Susan kept glancing at her dog Fortuna, whom she had brought with her from Alaska to donate to the Women’s Sports Foundation for a benefit auction. Fortuna is six years old and raced in the 1984 Iditarod, but now, according to Susan, she wants to be a pet. To us she didn’t seem to like being in New York any more than Susan did, but she looked happier once she’d discovered the nice sled dog living in the Plaza Baroque Room’s mirrored columns. “She misses her friends,” Susan told us. “She thinks she’s finally found another dog.” She leaned over. “Hey, Fortuna, good girl,” she cooed. “Good girl!”

Susan is thirty-two and has a long black braid and very pale-blue eyes. For a normal day of mushing, she wears polypropylene underwear, layers of Thinsulate and Gore Tex outer garments, a beaver hat, a wolverine muff, wolfskin gloves, and sealskin mukluks. For the press conference, she wore jeans and a cotton T-shirt that said “Purina ProPlan,” which is a type of dog food put out by one of her sponsors. For the foundation’s evening black-tie cocktail party, she said, she was going to wear a long gingham skirt, a black satin shirt, and an ivory miniature-dog-sled-and-team necklace. “I do own long skirts—I need them for the Iditarod awards banquet in Nome, for one thing,” she explained, and then said, “Oh, shoot! I wish I’d brought my qiviut dress.” She was wearing that dress—qiviut is the underwool of the musk ox—last March when she received first prize for the 1987 race, and also the year before when she picked up the trophy for the 1986 Iditarod. That was the race in which she set the world record (eleven days fifteen hours and six minutes), and it made up for the previous year, when a rogue moose attacked her team, killing three of her dogs and forcing her to drop out. “No one was going to beat me in 1986,” she told us. “I was really determined.”

Susan said that her first dog, Cabee, was a Labrador mix, and her second dog was an Alaskan Husky, and all her dogs since have been Huskies. She first mushed dogs in Massachusetts, where she was born, and she kept at it when she moved to Colorado and shared a house with a woman who had fifty Huskies. By the age of nineteen, she was sure enough of herself to know that she wanted to live in the wilderness with a lot of dogs, and that there was nowhere in the Lower Forty-eight that would satisfy her. “At first, I wanted to build wooden boats,” she went on. “I really loved carpentry, and I wanted to sail around the world, because at the time I thought the ocean was the only place I could go to get away from people. But then I tried to figure out what I’d do with twenty or thirty dogs on a small boat.” When she moved to Alaska, in 1975, she lived in a “fly-in”—an area accessible only by plane. Then her work as a dog breeder, trainer, and racer made living near a road necessary, so she and her husband (they were married in 1985) and the dogs moved to a slightly less remote spot, a hundred and fifty miles north of Fairbanks and twenty-five miles from the closest village (Manley, pop. 62). She still hunts moose for food, but now there’s a gravel road to her cabin. “Where we’re living is very downtown to me,” she said. “We chose it because it’s good for mushing. There are very strong winds and it’s stormy, and that’s good, because it’s the kind of weather you get during races. I just don’t like city living. We do have a radio, and David likes to listen to it, but I don’t. He likes to read newspapers. I like to burn them for firewood.

“Someone passed out auction brochures—Fortuna was listed under the heading “Luxurious Fun”—and then a man who was wearing a World Boxing Hall of Fame tie clip and belt buckle, and who had the cauliflower ears of a boxer, grabbed Susan by the elbow and said, “Are you the girl that did that thing on the dog sled?”

She nodded, and said, “Eleven days on a sled in the Alaskan wilderness.”

The man turned to someone walking past and exclaimed, “I couldn’t do the thing she did! I can go into the ring and get bashed up, but I couldn’t do that thing she did!” ♦