The war had been good to me, too, but in another way. It took me off the dirt-poor mountain farm in Vermont where I’d have been busting my balls to this day, and it fed me better than I’d ever eaten before, and it pinned gold bars on my collar and wings on my chest. But mainly it showed me the way into empty country.
Ever since childhood I have been in love with empty places. I had no playmates, not even a brother or sister, only my books, my rifle and the mountains. When my chores were done, I wandered the ridges above the farm in all weather, hunting out forgotten caves and abandoned cellar holes, excavating ancient dumps and salvaging old tools: broad-ax heads, adzes, crosscut saw blades, rusty milk jugs, handblown brown and green bottles, once a fine long octagon barrel from a squirrel rifle. These, I painstakingly restored and hoarded in my loft bedroom, until one day my mother sold them to an antique dealer (keeping the money for herself).
Mainly, though, I loved the solitude, the taking care of myself in hard country. I fished the brooks with a burlap sack, spreading the mouth with rocks and twigs at the outlet of a trout pool and then spooking the “natives” (as we called brook trout) into it by disturbing the pool itself. Three or four pools produced enough squirming, gleaming six-inchers for a meal, which I fried over an open fire in a pan I’d found high on the mountain. I learned where the squirrels and rabbits used, and the deer, and took them at any season with rifle or snare. Often, in good weather, I climbed to the top of the three-thousand-foot mountain and lay on the bare, lichen-grown rock reading a book of adventure from the town library: Baker’s hunting stories from Ceylon, Selous on southern Africa, Sheldon pursuing the Arctic sheep, the journals of Lewis and Clark. Kipling, who once lived in Vermont, was well represented in the library, and I can still recite whole passages of Kim from memory. Jack London, though, was my favorite and I yearned with all a boy’s aching ardor to see that harsh cold country “North of Fifty-three.” To be coursing the crisp snow behind my own dogs with the Aurora blazing overhead and the wolves howling all around us as we ran—that would be heaven.
Though my father was a man of few words and fewer emotions, I believe he shared my dream. Often he would tell me about the Vermont of his youth, when there were still wolves and panthers and many more bears than we ever saw sign of. But the farm had him, and he the farm, and his time was taken with work and sleep. But he was of a strongly independent bend of mind, that hard old man. On the far end of our land there was a flat rock that had a gigantic footprint in it. One summer a group of scientists came and said it was a dinosaur’s footprint. The state chose to exercise the right of eminent domain and take the farm for a park. They told my father he would have to accept the price they set.
That night, he went out and planted dynamite under the rock. I helped him drill the holes and place the charges. When the state delegation showed up the next morning in their fancy buggies and suits and ties, he blew it up.
Ker-pow! A sky full of dinosaur toenails.
Get fucked, he told them.
CHAPTER THREE
WE WERE clear of the spruce flats along the coast and well past the big rapids where the Alugiak River pours out of the Dead Mounties when the wolverine got loose. We had him caged back there with a couple of new Gray Marine diesel engines and two drums of av-gas and a few dozen cases of canned goods we were hauling to Fairbanks. The first thing we knew, the plane began to shake as if we’d been caught in clear air turbulence. Then we heard a kind of grating, ripping sound and we worried that an engine was tearing loose from its mount. But the wings held steady and the rivets looked sound so it wasn’t that. Then we heard him growl. You couldn’t mistake it. A kind of low, vibrant metallic grumble like a stick of bombs makes when they hit a target thousands of feet below you and you feel the explosions rapping on the belly of the plane, but then escalating into a higher, deeper ripping sound, as of saws through punky hardwood.
“Oh no,” moaned Healey. “It’s that frigging fur ball.”
The fuselage jolted and shuddered.
“We’d better shoot him,” I said.
“You shoot him,” Healey said. “I’m not going back there.”
I took the .45 and jacked a round into the chamber and opened the hatch. It was dark in there and the wolverine went quiet. I closed the hatch.
“Can’t see him. And if I shoot, I might hit that fuel.”
“Take a flashlight.”
I shone the beam back into the hold and I saw his eyeshine, hard yellow, and then he ducked behind one of the engine crates.
“I’ll have to go back in there.”
“You’re a better man than I am, pally.”
I crawled back into the hold. The wolverine had smashed the canned goods all over the cargo deck. My knees squished around in creamed corn and green peas. There was a stink of Spam all through the hold. I poked the flashlight beam into all the corners but I couldn’t see him.
Then I saw him.
He was coming for me, fast, with a low growl and his teeth glinting in the light beam. I got out as quick as I could, but not before he’d ripped my hand and grabbed the flashlight. We could hear him eating it—crunch, crunch, tinkle.
“Why didn’t you shoot him?”
“Sure. Where’s the first aid kit?”
“Back in the hold!” Healey was laughing.
I ripped off the sleeve of my shirt and wrapped it tight around the holes on the back of my hand. The blood was coming fast and now the pain was setting in. They have a strong jaw, those wolverines. We could hear him banging on the hatch right behind us. Up until I’d opened it that first time, he didn’t know we were there. Now he knew and he wanted us. We could hear him digging and ripping up aluminum back there.
“Oh shit oh dear,” Healey said. He wasn’t laughing now. “Look at the oil pressure.” It was flattening out to zero. “He got the feed line or something. Doesn’t it run through back there?”
“You’d better pick a place to put her down,” I told him. The engines would seize up in a couple of minutes. Healey wheeled around in a big circle to the right, banking her over so we could scout the ground. It was all mountain peaks and glaciers down there. None of them looked very flat. The starboard engine chugged and farted blue smoke, then quit. We were falling fast now and I saw a glacier coming up that looked fairly level. Big black unitaks stuck up through it like granite tree stumps but near the edge where it joined the face of the mountain it was pretty well free of obstacles. A long black moraine ran like a racing stripe just in from the rock.
“Put her down near the moraine,” I said. “Bobby Reeve told me there’s not so many crevasses near the edge. And if they’re there, they’re shallower and narrower than the ones in the middle of the glacier.” Reeve was the guy who invented glacier landings. We’d never tried one before, but now there was no choice.
“Goddammit,” Healey said, laughing again. “Shot down by a frigging what-you-may-call-it? What did that guy say it was called? A kinkajou?”
“Carcajou. Indian Devil.”
“Shot down by a frigging carcajou. Who’d of thunk it?”
The port engine froze.
It was dead quiet except for the whistle of air over the fuselage and the ripping creaking sounds from the cargo deck where the wolverine was eating the plane. The ice came up to meet us like falling off a roller coaster, sun breaking like daggers on the blue ice, the surface of the glacier coming clear now, covered with small boulders and big streaks of dirt, some of them with spruce trees growing out of them, the ice wrinkled and bent and shot with big holes, then nose up and tail heavy with the wheel in his gut to scrub off airspeed, Healey touched her down, thump-clank-screech, and we were skidding sideways, around again, gear up and the props bent backward, one engine wiggling like a loose tooth in the socket of the wing, thump again, and we were stopped.
“Switches off?”
“On the way down,” he said. “When the other engine went.”
“That was sweet.”
“I love y
ou too.”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE QUESTION now was how to get out of the plane. We couldn’t take our leave by the side door, our usual mode of exit, because the wolverine was still back there. Fortunately the tool kit was in the cockpit and Healey unscrewed the window panels, skinning his knuckles and cursing all the while (he never was much good with tools), and we were able to hang by our hands and drop down into the snow that covered the glacier. It was cold and clear. All we had on was our long johns, khakis, coveralls and the old air corps leather flight jackets that were sheepskin-lined, but didn’t cover your ass. No hats. No boots. Just sneakers.
“We’ve got to get that bastard out of there,” Healey said.
“Can’t open the cargo door from the outside.”
The radio had broken on the crash landing and we hadn’t been able to get off a May Day, so it didn’t look like help was going to come winging in anytime soon.
“We’ll have to rip a hole in the fuselage and hope he comes out.”
“We’ll be a couple of popsicles if he doesn’t,” Healey said. “Jack-O, my boy, we’re in trouble.”
There was a dead spruce snag over near the cliff, and I broke chunks off of it and started a fire in the lee of a big lichen-blotched boulder. That way, at least, we could avoid popsicle paradise. The plane had been intended for the Russian front and was painted white. Apart from stenciling the fuselage with our corporate name—Conundrum Airways—and a logo of a grizzly bear scratching its head, we had not repainted it. Perfect camouflage. Even if aircraft flew by every hour, it was unlikely that anyone would see us. All we had were the clothes we stood in, the .45 caliber Colt Model 1911-A automatic pistol I’d stolen from the air corps and with which I’d failed to assassinate the wolverine, two packs of Kools and Healey’s Zippo lighter. There was a load of food in the plane, along with tarps and boots and sleeping bags and a bottle of Courvoisier brandy and a .30-caliber Johnson rifle that I’d bought in Delhi from an old Marine Corps warrant gunner toward the end of the war—swapped him, actually, for a case of Ballantine Scotch in the days when Ballantine was still worth drinking, before they thinned it and lightened it and took the hair off its balls.
But the wolverine was in there.
“I’ve got to plug that son of a bitch,” I said.
“Be careful,” Healey said. “I’ll tend the fire. And don’t shoot up the plane too bad. We’re underinsured.”
Samuel Patrick Healey was a dreadful man in many ways, as he proved to me later, but there was no way to hate him. He didn’t care what he said, and when he said it, you had to laugh. In a land like Alaska, where everyone is honest, he was the truest of them all, even though he was a cheat and a coward and a backstabbing double dealer from the word go. I loved him then and I love him now, when I’m going to kill him.
But that was long, long ago. We dragged a treetrunk over to the cockpit and I climbed back into her. There was silence in the hold. I found the flashlight, badly gnawed, but working. The batteries were starting to fade but it was better than nothing, and I crawled in, the .45 slippery in my clenched palm. Over the years, I have gone in after bigger animals, animals that could rip you from asshole to armpit with one lightning slash, a wounded brown bear once in a tangle of devil’s club on the coast across from Afognak where you had to get down on your belly and inch your way into the green gloom, cold water dripping down your neck, the dank reek of skunk cabbage and drying bear blood in your nose, poking a .375 ahead of you and hoping he was dead, and if he wasn’t, that you could shoot straight in that one damp tangled brown hairball of an instant when he came, but never—not even the day I dangled from my fingernails in a thousand feet of empty air and the Dall ram stamped at my hands over there in the Mounties—did I feel the hair stand as stiff as it did that late afternoon on the glacier when I went in for the carcajou.
I couldn’t see him but I sure could smell him. He’d crapped on everything in the hold. The smell was mixed in with the smell of peas and beets and corn and baked beans, and it had that same reek of bones and old hair and the guts of a moose coming up through the skiffs of snow in August that you smell when you go into an old wintering yard in the country back of Platinum Bay, where there aren’t any wolves left. I could feel him all around me. Silence. I crawled clear back to one of the diesel engine crates and climbed up onto it. The wind was working on the plane and for a while all I could hear was the squeak of flexing aluminum and the bumping of blood in my temples. Then I heard a kind of hissing, purring sound from the darkness behind me.
I turned around very carefully with my thumb on the hammer of the pistol and stared back into the black. Gradually, he emerged from it, a denser kind of blackness, solid, like when you have a fever and you can feel your teeth getting thicker and thicker in your throat, tasting like oiled mahogany, bitter, and I shut off the failing flashlight. Yes, I could see him better in the dark than in the light. I could make out the flat snaky wide head and his shoulders bunched in heavy dense coils and hear the rasp of his breath. The sight picture through the shallow notch of the .45’s barrel was clear enough. I was square on the inch of space between his eyes.
They had a flat, barely visible sheen to them, not a glint so much as a shimmer, unblinking, steady, the essence of wild malevolence. I felt myself starting to shake. Just as the hammer snapped, the eyes moved.
The roar of the .45 slammed my ears and filled the hull of the Dakota with an instant of nova. I blinked. Of course I’d missed him.
“Get him yet?”
It was Healey, leaning in the cockpit window with his Clark Gable kisser about to break into a laugh.
“No.”
“Listen, you dim shit. I’m cold out here. Go get that damned weasel and kill it and then throw me my sleeping bag. As long as you’re about it, throw down that brandy bottle too. What do you think I’m paying you for?” He growled with mock rage and went back down the treetrunk.
I stood there shaking and feeling hollow. Then I went over and threw the dogs on the cargo hatch and swung the door open. Light and fresh air poured into the plane and right away I felt better. While I was collecting unruptured cans of food and our emergency packs the wolverine kept still. I could hear him breathing but at least he wasn’t attacking. I threw the sleeping bags down to Healey and then handed him the Johnson rifle in its sheepskin-lined case. Just as I was about to swing myself out, with the pistol tucked into my belt, the carcajou attacked again. He came fast and low, a dark blur, silent, and slashed me on the left knee. Then he was gone, where I could not tell. I dropped down into the snow.
“Hit you again?” Healey asked beside me. “Shit, Jack, that doesn’t look so good.”
“Let him have the plane,” I said. “He’s welcome to it. I’ll give him flying lessons free of charge. By mail. But I’m not going back in there again.”
It had socked in by now and there was the taste of snow on the air. We rigged the tarpaulin as a lean-to over by the rocks and cut spruce boughs to bed our sleeping bags. Then we opened the emergency kits and had lunch—corned beef hash out of the can and a can of cold peaches—and a couple of stiff belts of brandy. I’d poured sulfa powder over the wolverine slashes and bandaged them properly, but both wounds were aching badly and stiffening up. The brandy helped. It started to snow in earnest.
“There’s no one going to see us,” Healey said. “The goddam plane’s as white as the glacier. And now with this snow . . .”
“They’ll miss us in Fairbanks and they’ve got our flight plan.” I didn’t even want to think about siwashing out of that country, not with my knee chewed up. We’d been forced down before—it’s part of the bush pilot’s way of life, perhaps the most interesting part—but we’d always been picked up in a matter of a day or two at most. Once we’d had to put down on a gravel bar over on the coast near Dillingham in Bristol Bay. An oil leak. We patched the leak and then found we didn’t have the spare oil along. But Healey went out for a hike and found a whale carcass beached not far fr
om the plane. We hacked off some blubber and melted it down to oil over the fire, and presto! Back in business.
Another time, I was flying Charlie Hall’s gullwing Stinson while he recovered from the flu, lugging the mail up to Eagle, when I spotted a nice young bull moose on the flats below me. We needed the meat, so I picked a spot well ahead of his line of travel and put down on a bar in the river. I was sitting pretty behind some down timber when the moose came by, trot-trot-trot, like he was late for a hot date in Dawson City, his neck all swollen with the rut, and I hit him pretty hard, I thought, with a round from my .303. He went down. Not thinking, I leaned my rifle against the log I’d used as a rest, and went over to butcher him out. Whoops! Up he got and came for me. I barely made it up a tree. Then he found my rifle and stomped it into a steel pretzel. Then he saw the plane. His eyes caught fire. In two minutes, he turned Charlie’s pretty little red-and-black gullwing into a heap of slashed fabric and splintered struts. Then he trotted on over the horizon as if nothing had happened. I must have just creased him. At any rate, I made a cold camp and shivered until noon the next day when Healey came over looking for me in Billy Forbes’s Ryan B-1. “Christ, Jack-O,” he said when he landed. “After I spotted that wreckage, I figured I’d be collecting you with a soup spoon. What happened?”
“Don’t ask.”
So I figured we’d best just sit tight here on the glacier and wait for them to come to us. I reckoned without the carcajou. It snowed all that afternoon and most of the night. Healey gathered a big pile of deadwood and we had a hot supper and turned in early, our heavy kapok bags warm and toasty near the fire. On toward dawn, I woke to Healey screaming.
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