Slade's Glacier

by Robert F. Jones

  “I’m Jack Slade and this is my partner, Sam Healey. We’d offer you some coffee but we haven’t got any. But you’re welcome to some goose if you’re hungry.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” the old man said. He spoke as if he were still hailing us from the middle of the river. In a windstorm. “Just dropped in to see if you were all right. I’m Charlie Blue, ha-ha. Old Charlie Blue. Been here forever. Last Tlingit on the river. Ha-ha. When I was a boy, the glacier stuck its snout in the sea, like a great blue elephant sucking salt water. The mountains spouted fire and smoke. Wolves as big as horses. Giant icebergs. Schools of whales so thick you could spear them from the beach. Plenty to eat. Big timber for ancestor houses. War with the Haida. War with the Eskimos. Then the Russians came with their Aleut slaves and lied and stole our furs and tried to whip us with their big heavy whips but we pushed them into the river and killed them. Yes, thank you, I am hungry. You boys in trouble?”

  Healey sliced him a slab of dark, fat-dripping breast meat and the old Indian stuffed it in his mouth, his heavy jaws working and fat dripping off his chin. While he was chewing, I told him about the plane.

  “Oh, that’s marvelous!” he laughed, wiping his chin and licking his fingers. “Carcajou ate you right out of the sky! My goodness, he must have been hungry to eat an airplane. Oh my! Splendid! May I have some more of that excellent goose meat? Thank you, thank you.”

  Between chomps and swallows, he raved on and on about the appetite of the carcajou, seemingly growing hungrier at every mouthful, every exclamation. In five minutes, he had eaten three quarters of the goose and the greater share of the roasted iris bulbs. Then he belched and fixed his eye on the brandy bottle, which stood half empty beside the packs. I uncorked it and passed it over. He began to gulp and the level fell, fell, until there was perhaps an inch left. He belched again and then finished it off, like so much water.

  “Ah, that was fine! That was splendid! But I must be going now. Going up into the country. Have a look around. See how things are up there. Do you have any salt you could spare? Any sugar? How about bullets—.22 and .303? No. Too bad. Toilet paper? Matches? No. I see you have almost nothing. The carcajou left you nothing. Well, here—take this.” He pulled a necklace of bearclaws off from around his thick, wrinkled neck and handed it to me. “It’s magic,” he whispered, looking around into the darkness. “It will take you where you want to go, make everything all right.” He got up lithely for a man of his years and walked back to the canoe. Healey and I helped him shove off and we saw him turn out of the light and dig in for the upstream haul. “Ha-ha!” We could hear him laughing as he disappeared into the rushing darkness. “Carcajou! That was splendid! Marvelous!”

  For a long while we could hear him laughing and yelling to himself.

  “Some old man,” Sam said wryly. He rattled the bearclaws. “Did you see him scoff that goose? Did you see him chug that brandy? I know you’re supposed to share when you meet strangers in the bush, but that’s carrying it a bit too far, wouldn’t you say?”

  When we got back to the fire, the goose was sputtering fat as ever, whole and high, over the fire. The brandy bottle stood full beside the packs. A sharp-bitted cruising axe leaned against the hunk of driftwood I had been using as a backrest, its edge gleaming in the light of the flames.

  “What the hell?” Sam said. “Sleight of hand?”

  “He’s a shaman,” I said. “In this country anything’s possible.”

  The next morning, we were awakened by the sound of an airplane engine. It was Wally Mayhew’s Fairchild 71. He spotted us and wagged his wings, then put down on the river and taxied over to the gravel bar. He leaned out with a big grin on his freckled face. “Where the hell you guys been? I been looking all over the place for you.”

  When we told him, hesitantly, about our visitor of the previous evening and his little bit of food wizardry, Wally looked at us very closely, then looked away. “You guys are bushwhacky, that’s all.” We let it go at that.

  A few hours later, we were in Gurry Bay making plans to fly back to the glacier, rig the Dakota out with skis, repair the damage and fly her off.

  The carcajou was gone when we returned.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LATER, CHARLIE Blue told me more about the war between the Tlingit and Mother Russia.

  The leader of the Russian expedition was one Vassily Sergeevich Volkov, a captain in Aleksandr Baranov’s Russian-America Company, which administered Russian Alaska prior to the U.S. purchase in 1867. When the purchase was agreed to, the company’s directors ordered all captains to mount a final assault on the wealth of the country. Head deep into the interior and take as much in the way of furs, gold and copper as they could find, extort or steal. “God is on high and the Tsar is far away.”

  Volkov was a man of parts. A contemporary of Tolstoi’s, he served in the Caucasus campaigns and was twice mentioned in dispatches during the fighting around Inkerman during the Crimean War of the early 1850s. He was a concert-caliber violinist, a dedicated entomologist (he described fifteen new species of wood beetle during his five years in Russian America), a womanizer and duelist (won all three of them; two pistol, one saber). He was forty-two years old when he set out at the head of a party of Russians and Aleuts to rape the Alugiak. Blue says he was a short, wiry man with a wolf-gray beard halfway down his pouterpigeon chest, steely blue eyes, close set, and a saber scar on his forehead that gave him a perpetual frown. He spoke Tlingit and Aleut fluently, with scarcely a trace of an accent.

  The raiding party, some fifty men strong, embarked up the river from Gurry Bay (then Nova Polyana) in five whaleboats soon after breakup in the spring of that year. Ice floes and small bergs calved from the Alugiak glacier still clogged the river as they lined their way up the big rapids just inland from the trading post. It took them a week to reach the first Tlingit camp, where the men had just finished drying their winter catch of beaver, marten, mink and ermine. Volkov offered salt and blankets for the furs. When the Tlingit refused, he had his men hold them at musket point while he personally lashed the leader to death with a knout, the long, heavy bullwhip the Russians favored in putting the fear of the Tsar into their subjects.

  As the Indian breathed his last, a raven emerged from his gaping mouth and flew unharmed through a whistling barrage of Russian musket balls, heading upriver. The other Tlingit smiled, knowing this was the soul of their dead leader, flying to warn the people at the larger village up near the glacier. Seeing their smiles, Volkov ordered them shot. They laughed as the Russians charged their muskets, not trying to flee or overpower their captors, and bared their chests to the bullets. When the smoke cleared, all ten Indians lay dead on the gravel with smiles still on their faces.

  The Aleuts were frightened by this display of courage and wanted to turn back, but Volkov told them to shut up or they would follow the Tlingit to the spirit world, where no doubt they would pay for their loyalty to the Russians by suffering fearful torture for all eternity. The party resumed its upriver voyage, sending scouts ahead to insure against a Tlingit ambush. The weather turned to winter again. In the mornings, the edges and back eddies of the Alugiak were coated with thin, rubbery ice. Ice crusted the muskegs and meadow grass, making it impossible for the party’s hunters to approach game within killing range. Freezing rains fell day and night, and their cookfires gave off no heat. Even the furs which they had taken from the Tlingit seemed to provide no warmth, nor did the normally fiery plum brandy the officers drank. One afternoon, the sky lowering with icy clouds that whipped and snapped eerily overhead, they paused at the foot of a rapids to plot their ascent. Suddenly, a huge ice floe came crashing over the falls, crushing two boats together against the rocky bank. The boats splintered, foundered and sank, taking twenty of their party with them.

  Candlefish were running upriver to spawn, a variety of smelt that is the first anadromous fish to appear in Alaskan streams each year: the eulachon or “hooligan” of the literature. They are so full of fat that
one can literally light them, once they have dried a few hours, and use them for illumination. The Aleuts netted hundreds, planning to glut themselves on the fat and regain some of their strength, but these candlefish were so rancid that those who ate them vomited them back up in minutes.

  That night, a great blue glacier bear came bowling into camp and killed four Aleuts along with a young Russian officer named Chernovsky. It carried Chernovsky off into the spruce thicket and all night they heard him screaming. In the morning, as the sun rose behind a dirty gray band of sky back of the black spruces, they saw the young Russian’s head stuck on a pikestaff in the bow of Volkov’s very own pinnace. A raven was perched on Chernovsky’s head, making a breakfast of his eyes. The raven gurgled and laughed, then flew insolently over their heads with an eyeball dangling blue and tendrilous from its heavy black beak. Tears dropped from the Russian’s eye, and where they touched the glacier-scoured rock, stalagmites grew.

  Now two of the oldest Aleuts, named Vinkov and Maranovich, approached Vassily Sergeevich and pleaded with him to return to Nova Polyana. The expedition was under some awful curse. Their bullets had passed through the glacier bear without drawing blood. The ice was thickening by the hour. The sky to the north promised snow—heavy, wet, clinging snow that would freeze at night into a burial shroud. These men were trusted servants of the Company who had worked all their lives for the Russians with never a moment’s complaint, much less any sign of cowardice. Volkov placed his hands on their shoulders and reassured them.

  “This is how it must be, my sons,” he said (though he was twenty years younger than either of them). “In life, if one turns back from action just once, he will turn back again and again. We will find food and warmth and women at the glacier camp. We will find more furs than we can carry in our boats. We may well find gold and copper, enough so that all of you can leave our service and return to Adak, spend the rest of your lives around the stove tending the samovar. Have heart. We are nearly there.”

  They continued upriver through the snow, which fell in large wet flakes so thickly and silently that it was as if they were moving, heavy limbed, through the gauze of nightmare. Volkov stood in the bow of the lead boat playing cheerful airs on his violin. But the men—Russian and Aleut alike—felt only dread. Toward evening, the snow stopped falling and the sky grew clear. The country all around them lay blanketed in white and ahead of them they saw the sapphire glitter of the late falling sun on the glacier’s face. But despite the sun, despite their fur garments, despite their strenuous exertions at the oars, the men felt colder than ever. Their teeth chattered and their bones ached with the chill. Then they saw columns of smoke rising blue and thin behind a grove of bare aspens that fringed the river.

  “There it is, my children,” exulted Volkov. “The village of the Tlingit! Now we will work our vengeance upon them.”

  They beached the surviving whaleboats on the gravel bar. The aspen grove masked them from the village. Volkov’s plan was to move quietly through the trees and then, on a signal, open fire into the village, following up with a charge using axes and sabers. The glacier towered over them as they filtered through the pale, yellow-green boles of the aspens, a great rough wall of blue ice studded with sharp snags of broken granite. Their muskets primed and freshly capped, their side-arms checked and ready, they neared the end of the thicket. Peering out, they saw a sight that froze what was left of their marrow.

  Instead of an Indian camp, they saw twenty-five tall salmon racks, of the sort the Tlingit use to smoke their summer catch. As in a nightmare, they saw themselves spread-eagled on the racks, mouths working in mad but silent agony, naked, their skins bursting and bubbling to the slow heat of the aspenwood fires that smoked and licked beneath them. Volkov himself hung from the centermost rack. His beard smoldered. His violin, lying atop the hot coals, crackled and burst into flame, its strings popping in an eerie, electric singsong.

  A raven flapped slowly overhead, its bright black eye gazing down at them. As it passed under the glowering blue face of the glacier, it uttered a single harsh, high scream.

  The glacier grumbled and groaned, a deep rending scream echoing that of the raven. A single tall serac at dead center of the ice face creaked and toppled, slowly, to crash in an explosion of ice on the rocks below. Then the glacier opened. A mammoth gusher of milk-blue water roared out of the ice, water that had accumulated behind the frozen dam for years, cascading down on the men with a grinding, grating rush, carrying ice and boulders and trees and the bodies of long-dead animals with it.

  By dawn the next day, the breakout had dwindled to a trickle. The gravel beach lay bare and glistening under the first rays of the sun. Yakataga Charlie, the Tlingit shaman, found Volkov’s body bent and twisted in a tangle of timbers a mile downstream. He removed the Russian’s head and smoked it over a slow fire until the skin was cured a dark brown and the eyeballs sunk back into the skull like withered black olives. The skull hung in his lodge for many years afterward.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  GURRY BAY wasn’t much of a town back then, not even by Alaskan standards. There was the cannery, the sawmill, Hank Maynard’s boatyard and gas station; the Gurry Bay Mercantile & Fur Emporium and the Blue Bear Saloon, both owned by Norman Ormandy; a scattering of shanties, house trailers and log cabins, and the town dump at the end of the Airport Road that ran out east through the spruce flats toward the far, white mountains. Except for what folks called “the raddio,” the only entertainment of a nonalcoholic or nonviolent nature was visiting the dump of an evening to watch the brown bears feed and feud through the garbage. There was no road to Gurry Bay from the Outside in those days; you got there by boat or plane or you didn’t get there at all, not that you’d miss it.

  For most of the year, the cannery, which was owned by a Kodiak outfit, stood empty and echoing. Small boys would drop by to shoot the rats that swarmed in the pilings where the salmon boats tied up to offload during the season. The ping of .22s snapped and echoed along the empty piers and the rats chittered in panic, dragging their naked tails through the slime. The cannery came alive only during the two-month summer run. We would fly a crew in from Kodiak—a handful of tough, hard-driving supervisors, Swedes mainly, and a scruffy gang of working stiffs: boozy Aleuts and Aleut-Russkies, hardeyed knife-happy river eskimos from the Kuskokwim country, stumblebums from Skid Row in Seattle (or “Skedaddle,” as we called it) and a goodly number of cleancut college kids and schoolteachers from Outside who came up during their summer vacations for the high wages. Many of this last group quit early because of the long, hard drudgery of the lines and the incessant violence of their off hours.

  During these months, at least, the town hummed. Millions of bright fish, fresh from the salt chuck, many with the sea lice still on them, poured out of the seiners’ holds and into the belching, chugging maw of the cannery: humpies and dogs, silvers and reds and a handful of giant black-speckled gate-mouthed kings. The whole town and the woods and ocean for miles around took on a sweet-sour reek of gurry—the gluey salmon slime that gave the town its name.

  The Tlingit in this area believed that salmon gurry was akin to the secretions of a sexually aroused woman, and to be sure during the salmon season the whole town smelled like a rumpled bed at the bitter end of love. Maybe the energy of the spawning salmon had something to do with it as well, but during the season the town throbbed thick-necked with the rutting instinct. There was love in the morning, love in the afternoon: couples balling upright in alleyways, or sprawled writhing and moaning on mossy blowdowns rotting back into the rainforest floor, or guys walking away slack-hipped down the dock with goofy grins on their faces, their knees and elbows rubbed raw by their exertions on a pile of salt-dried salmon web.

  And along with the balling, of course, came the brawling. There were bar fights and street fights, fist fights and knife fights, and occasionally something serious (i.e., involving a wife) that called for the use of firearms. When you consider that even a half-blind Alaskan wom
an with palsy can shoot the eyes off a Marine Corps marksman at fifty paces, it’s amazing that more of the gunfights didn’t end with someone flaked out in the cannery ice house. There were, however, no end of perforated kneecaps and plenty of guys who emerged from the infirmary talking in a higher register.

  The unofficial town hall and social center, though, was the Blue Bear Inn and its adjunct, the Mercantile & Fur Emporium. Both were housed in the long, low-roofed building that once served as the Russian-America Company’s trading post and manufactory, a structure built of thick logs that looked furry with the moss of a century. The roof, in that wet climate, supported an ecosystem of its own, moss and lichens, and in the spring and summer wildflowers bloomed up there, low-bush cranberries bore fruit, and every few years, Norman Ormandy and his companion, a Salish halfbreed named LaFourche, would have to climb up with saws and pruning shears to remove the spruce and cedar whips whose roots threatened to invade the interior. For a number of years, a family of willow ptarmigan nested each spring near the stovepipe that came up from the kitchen. Emerging drunk and fragile in the dawn, possessed by that hollow feeling that anything is possible and nothing real, one would hear the chicks peeping and wonder if it was just the final, long-anticipated cerebral collapse, come at last.

  Though the Blue Bear was situated on a spit of land that afforded a splendid view of the Alugiak Falls and the vast blue reach of the Gulf of Alaska, there was not a window in the place. Once, when we were new in town, I asked Ormandy why.

  “Take a look,” he said, gesturing toward the gang of wool-shirted, hip-booted men and women hunched happily at the long mahogany bar. “They’re out in it all day. Lumberjacks, Cat skinners, salmon seiners, prospectors, trappers, Indians, cannery stiffs. Once they’re finished work, they don’t want to see the son of a bitch. If you worked in a factory Outside, would you want a picture window in your living room that looked right into the assembly line?”