RUBY -- The bad luck that haunted musher Emil Churchin for more than 500 miles north along the Iditarod Trail finally caught him four miles shy of the Yukon River. His Iditarod dream died there in the dark Sunday night, although the painful realization that his race was over would not come until after yet another night spent camped along the trail in the 40-degree-below-zero cold that brutalizes both dogs and people.

Musher and team would rise half-frozen and stiff Monday morning and struggle two miles toward the top of the last hill outside of this old gold mining town of 150 to 200. They were not a pretty sight to watch on a morning with a friendly sun shining on the spruce trees thick atop the rolling hills back from the mighty river locked in ice.

No dog wanted to lead. The males in the team were all more interested in a bitch in heat than moving on down the trail. Churchin limped among the gang, moving this dog to the front, that dog to the back, trying to find some combination that would work. His efforts to snap and unsnap dogs were hampered by a bulky bandage on one hand.

The bandage covered the spot where he'd sliced his palm near to the bone while trying to cut off an earlier bandage covering a split finger. The limp was the result of a hamstring pulled early in the race. The confusion in the dog team was the fault of simple rookie mistakes made daily almost from the beginning of Churchin's attempt at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

The rookie musher spent so much time caring for his dogs that he forgot to care for himself. He forgot to drink and let himself get dehydrated. He found it impossible to sleep and left himself in the stupor of sleep deprivation. All of this contributed to the decision to make one long push on the 75 miles of trail between the Iditarod halfway point of Cripple and the Yukon.

It was a march too far. It went on too long. Only a couple of miles shy of the top of a hill that marks the drop into this village, the dogs decided they'd had enough. They declared their own break.

Had Churchin known how close he was to the top of the hill, he could have taken the lead dogs and walked them over the crest. But for the bad hamstring, he could have walked the team all the way into town. It was not far, and it would have been better for everyone than a lengthy camp out in the bone-numbing temperatures. But Churchin did not do these things. Instead, he cut some spruce boughs to form beds for his dogs and settled in to wait until they were ready to get up and walk over the hill on their own.

"My toes got very cold,'' he said. "The dogs were shivering all night," despite being swathed in coats and bedded on those spruce boughs.

When worried Iditarod race judge Kevin Saiki and Ruby checker Jimmy Honea went out from the village on snowmachines early Monday to determine what had been keeping Churchin for almost 24 hours on the 75-mile run from Cripple, Churchin was still waiting for his team to rouse itself. Saiki told the Anchorage musher the time had come to see if he could get the dogs going on his own.