KOYUK -- Now down to eight dogs, 24-year-old Scotsman John Stewart is struggling to save face and finish what is his first and likely last Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

"I'm scared of everyone frowning on me,'' he said as he scarfed down his second, full-size evening meal in the checkpoint here Thursday evening." If (Doug Swingley) is there in Nome, I might turn the team right around on Main Street.''

Swingley is a four-time Iditarod champ, and Stewart is one of three mushers who entered this year's Iditarod with teams out of Swingley's kennel in Lincoln, Mont. The other two drivers -- Warren Palfrey from Quesnell, B.C., Canada, and Tom Thurston from Oak Creek, Colo. -- have already scratched.

Stewart is the last musher standing. A professional diver by trade, he is a smallish man with an accent sometimes hard to understand, the muscle tone of a professional athlete, and some sled-dog racing credentials. He was the Scottish junior sled-dog champion, albeit racing carts behind dogs rather than sleds, and he trained for Iditarod in Montana with the once-Iditarod-dominating Swingley.

Going into this year's race, Stewart -- one of two Scotsmen in the competition -- had big dreams and high hopes; high apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes. He told coach Swingley he wanted to run a 10-day Iditarod, and that's what they penciled in.

"I should have said 'puppy shedule,''' Stewart joked, "easy puppy schedule. I was 12 hours behind my schedule by Takota,'' two checkpoints before halfway in this year's race.

Everything went downhill from there. Dogs suffered a variety of shoulder and ankle injuries that forced Stewart to drop them. Then Stewart himself got sick.

"I was within five minutes of scratching at Cripple,'' he said. He was advised there at the halfway checkpoint that he should sleep until he felt better and then decide what to do. He took a long rest, woke up and chose to press on, but his Iditarod didn't get much better.

By the time the race left the Yukon River for the Bering Sea, his 10-day race had come undone. He kept trying to hitch on with any number of teams passing him along the trail, but no matter who he hooked up with, he couldn't hang on.

At Old Woman cabin on the Kaltag Portage Tuesday, he was down to traveling with Lower 48 mushing friends Trent Herbst, Scott White and Chris Adkins. They were a jolly group on something of a camping trip to Nome. As they rested in the over-heated cabin maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, Adkins, the son of longtime Iditarod veteran Terry Adkins, joked about how his dad had tricked him into doing the race by suggesting they run together and then withdrawing before the start. Herbst slept in the cool corner away from the wood stove. Stewart complained about the sauna-like atmosphere. White suggested he got out and roll in the snow. Everyone but Herbst laughed a lot.