Word: musher
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DIED. Susan Butcher, 51, champion musher who won the Iditarod dogsled race four times, the first in 1986; of complications from a bone-marrow transplant to treat polycythemia vera, a rare blood disease; in Seattle, Wash. Of the grueling, 1,152-mile slog through the Alaskan wilderness Butcher once said, "I do not know the word quit. Either I never did, or I have abolished...
Still, like many of Alaska's native villages, Shishmaref clings to its subsistence culture. The town supports 10 dog teams, and a local musher, Herbie Nayokpuk, is known statewide as the Shishmaref Cannonball for his top-place finishes in the Iditarod race. Walrus-tusk carving is taught in school, along with the Inupiaq language. And if the town itself is ugly, it is balanced by the desolate beauty of the slate-colored sea, the ducks flying in formation over the lagoon and the musk ox roaming in emerald meadows dotted with wild cotton. Some two-thirds of the local diet...