Slade's Glacier

by Robert F. Jones

  He was as good as his word. After we’d eaten, he led us up over the frozen scree slope to the blue face of the glacier itself, and on into a deep crevasse. It was dark and dank in there, slippery going.

  “Here,” said Charlie. “Here is the entrance.” He smiled and ducked his head and crawled inside the twisting vertical ice-edged slot that gaped between the boulders. We followed.

  The dark dissipated quickly into a pervasive blue light, day permeating the height of glacier above us, filtered as through a thick lens carved from pure corundum. Muck and ice water soaked our knees, but soon the twisting passage angled upward, and we clawed our way along, using elbows and toes and the waning friction of wet mukluks until we began to skid more than we climbed.

  “Grab this,” said Charlie. I groped and felt a curved projection, cold as the ice but grooved to accept the clutch of my fingers. I heaved myself up on it and reached back for Josey. Above us through the blue shadows, I could see an irregular ladder of these semicircular protuberances, some closer together, others a short leap apart. Then it came to me: this was ivory.

  Above us, hundreds of feet of ice above us, the sun broke through the cloud and the intensity of the light in the tunnel went up by megalumens. Through the ice wall, I saw dim shapes from which the ivory circles grew, slope-backed, thick-legged, elephantine, hairy. We were climbing a ladder of mammoth tusks. A smell of rotting meat wafted down the tunnel from the exposed flanks of animals long buried, creatures wandering on crusted earth-covered ice in the thawing of that time, who crashed through into the crevasses, caught these many millennia in the deepfreeze of my glacier.

  “Chaw a hunk,” said Charlie, grinning. He had whittled a sliver of mammoth meat from the exposed flank, close to the ice where it was still fresh. I took it and chewed. The meat was rich and red and, as it thawed in my mouth, it tasted sweet. It could have used some salt and pepper. Josey tried some and agreed.

  “We’ll have to bring some back to the cabin,” she whispered as Charlie climbed ahead. “Mammoth tartare!”

  Farther up, my eyes growing accustomed now to the fact of frozen prehistory within the ice, I discerned the shape of a huge, bobtailed cat, broke-legged on its back, its foot-long fangs angling out so that one of them stuck through the ice and served as a convenient handhold. Above it, barely visible, the figure of a giant dog—a dire wolf, no doubt victim of the thaw.

  Cave bears, giant sloths, long-horned bison, marmots the size of calves; here a great beaver grinning bucktoothed out of the wall, its ears rotted, its eyes like floating opals; there a small and ugly horse no bigger than a Labrador retriever with a square, unfinished head and the stripes of a quagga.

  Our voices, as we murmured awestruck in this miraculous gloom, echoed down the twisting tunnel, rose back to our ears as faroff hisses, so that it was easy to imagine the dead creatures themselves muttering and sighing in their icy jail, denied the freedom of entropy.

  We emerged finally into a cavern. The light was much brighter now and half-thawed bones littered the floor. The sour smell of cold rot pervaded the room, such as one whiffs on opening a long-uncleaned freezer. The legs, tails and flanks of animals showed through the ice, in some places masked by only a shallow film of it, in others protruding through into the open air.

  “Plenty meat here,” Charlie said. “Good meat too. These animals no longer live on the earth, but they are not poison. Many times I feed them to my dogs, eat the meat myself. It’s good! Rich meat! Good as whale meat!”

  His voice echoed and reechoed through the cavern and down the long tunnel we had followed. The ice creaked and groaned in response. Josey squeezed my hand and I too was fearful that Charlie’s decibels would bring the whole glacier tumbling down around our ears. The few times we had shot a rifle near the ice, we had sent small seracs snapping and tumbling down the glacier’s snout.

  “But this meat you better not eat,” he said, his voice falling to a whisper. He led us over to the far corner of the cavern and pointed up into the gloom. Staring down at us through the blue ice was a human face. It was that of a white man, heavily mustachioed, his eyes not much darker than the ice that locked him in his grave. On his head was a sombrero with a chin strap stretched taut by his gaping jaw, his mouth wide open as if he were still yelling with the fall down the crevasse that had killed him. His broken limbs were clad in what appeared to be a heavy chain-stitched wool sweater, corduroy trousers stagged into cleated leather boots, and around his neck a set of smoked glasses of the sort Arctic explorers use to prevent snowblindness. One hand had melted free of the ice at some previous time and it groped out into the air above us, fleshless, but with a few cold-withered tendons still clinging to the clawlike bones.

  “That’s Doctor Moran,” whispered Charlie. “A great shaman in his own country, but worse than a fool up here.”

  “Did you know him?” Josey asked.

  “Like a brother,” Charlie answered. “A stubborn, younger brother who will not listen. This was in the days of the Stampede, ’98 or ’99, and I was down on the coast then. I was very poor, trying to live like a white man. Doctor Moran had bought a map that showed lost gold fields in the mountains behind the glacier. He asked me to guide him and his men over the ice. The men he had picked himself after much searching in New York, where he came from. One man knew all about rocks. Another how to build tools of steel. A third could bend tin into useful shapes. They all knew how to read. They all were very big and very weak, though Doctor Moran said they had worked hard at exercise before leaving their homes. I didn’t know what exercise was. To me, it meant living. They were stupid as well as weak. I told Doctor Moran that there was no gold over the glacier. ‘How do you know?’ he asked. ‘Would I be here in Gurry Bay, poor and listening to nonsense, if there were?’ I answered.

  “But I agreed to take them over the ice. For dogs they had six large, weak ones from New York. Saint Bernards and Newfoundlands, I learned they were called. They were bigger than wolves but weak as wolf puppies when their eyes are still closed and they wiggle and whine in the den smelling of sour milk and spittle. Each of the men had a thousand pounds of food and equipment. They also had a great huge motor-driven sled that was so heavy that they left it on the beach. Such fools have rarely come to this country, though recently we have been seeing more of them.

  “We came up the river to the glacier. They pulled everything up on top. Days passed, weeks passed. Then it was all up there and they found the dogs could scarcely move the sledges. Blizzards blew in off the sea. They waited them out. The sun broke through and the men began to turn red, their skin peeling away in long slippery tatters. Some went snowblind. More storms. The men began to go mad. They found one strangled out on the ice. His partner said a ‘glacier monster’ had appeared out of the driving snow and attacked them.

  “Weeks passed, then months. Soon it was winter again and still they were on the glacier. Men walked out into the storms to die. You will find them somewhere here in the ice. When their food was nearly gone—though there was plenty of food just a day’s march on snowshoes off the glacier, down in the protected valleys, as you two have seen—they decided to make a final dash across the ice to the valley of the lost gold. I told them there was no gold. They called me a fool and a liar.

  “‘If you go ahead in weather like this, you will fall into the mouths of the ice bear,’ I told them. They went ahead. I went back. You see what became of them.”

  He sighed and reached up to touch the bony fingers.

  “The only ‘glacier monster’ was in their bellies. The hunger for gold.”

  We set to work cutting slabs of mammoth meat from the protruding flesh and skidded a good-sized pile of it back down the passageway. Charlie helped us carry it to the cache and stow it. There was enough now to tide us through the rest of the winter, dogs and humans alike.

  “That ivory is valuable,” I told Charlie as he harnessed his dogs and prepared to leave downriver.

  “Vraiment, certes!” he bell
owed. “Do you need money? Do you need a thousand professors from a thousand museums from all over creation pouring in here to examine those carcasses? Try that fox scent I gave you. It is quieter.”

  He whipped up his lean, wolf-eyed team and slithered out onto the frozen Alugiak, the Aurora arching and surging above him as he sang and roared his way into the nearly-always night.

  The next day, while Josey went out on snowshoes to hunt willow ptarmigan along the Alugiak, I stayed behind to mend a binding on the sled runner. When I was finished, I went back up into the cavern. The day was bright and the light much more intense than on our earlier visit, and I counted fully two dozen mammoths buried in the ice, ranging in size from an infant as big as a Buick to great tuskers with ivory that possibly weighed two hundred pounds the side. The herd must have crashed through the ice in panic, pursued perhaps by a pack of dire wolves. In the big cave, I avoided Doctor Moran’s eyes and picked up the tip of a tusk that had cracked off and fallen to the floor. It was smooth and heavy, the color of old gold; a shard of the dead past in that eerie underwater light: palpable antiquity.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THUS BEGAN what I have come to call, after the manner of certain painters, my “Greed Period.” It was fortunately brief, but its intensity and the agony with which it ended made the scars sting all the more smartly. I could not get that ivory out of my mind.

  Josey was all she had promised to be, a harem and a half of sensual variety and delight. At a time when most women doled out their favors with a sour parsimony (we could have called it “scrooging” in those days), demanding payment in the coin of guilt and gratitude, she gave and gave and gave until I hurt. Not that I’m complaining: it was a delicious exhaustion, a fine frazzling, and we were so full of pep—charged with the cold electricity that comes from a hundred miles a week at a dog trot on snowshoes, chuffing in clouds of crackling steam, wreathed in the smoke and snowspume thrown back by our racing dogs, reading and decrypting at a run the hieroglyphs of other hardy animals traveling the snows—that when we returned to the warmth of the cabin, spicy with its smell of herbs and of the moose stew bubbling on the stove, our hunger for one another was indistinguishable from that we felt for our food. And often the moose stew was only dessert.

  So I should have been content. We were happy and in love. The cabin was snug and we had plans for many improvements. Thanks to Charlie’s fox lure, the trapline was producing enough furs to keep us in store-bought supplies for the coming year. (I couldn’t bring myself to use his wolf-killing technique; the very thought of it made my tongue pucker.) Nonetheless, as the winter wore along, I grew itchy.

  Some of it, I knew, was that Healey’s disappearance with the Dakota had left me on my own for the first time in my life. From the farm, I had gone to an even more rigid life, the air corps, and from there to the mindless back and forth of air transport, with Sam making most of the major decisions. Now, I was feeling the need to prove myself, to show myself and the world that I could succeed on my own without Sam’s help.

  The enthusiasm I had felt that first night as Sam and I camped below the glacier discussing our hunting and fishing lodge came back full force. American sportsmen had been frustrated for the better part of fifteen years, first by the Depression and then by World War II, both of which kept them hunting and fishing pretty much in their own backyards. Or on the battlefield for enemies. Now, with the wave of affluence and high hopes that followed the war, they were out and around, spending money they had never dreamed of earning on safaris and shikars to Africa and India, on big-game hunts and wilderness fly-in fishing trips in Canada and Alaska. Lodges sprang up all over the North Country, from the Labrador, where huge world-record brook trout lurked in crystalline flowages, to the bare, high spine of the Continent, the sheep country of Alberta and British Columbia and Alaska where Bighorn and Dall and Stone sheep clattered their curl-and-a-half horns, where huge moose and towering bears and herds of long-legged, forest-browed caribou wandered, all of them innocent after years of peace while the world of man was at war.

  Our country, there under the glacier, was ideal. When the winter settled in for good, with cold, heavy, windless air and clear skies, we rolled out the Cessna, refilled her oil sump, 90 and went up to scout the country from the sky. Josey took to flying as she did to everything else: with high enthusiasm and low-keyed, quick-study competence. In the bare foothills of the Dead Mountie Range not twenty minutes flying time from the cabin, we found clots and clusters of wintering Dall sheep, browsing on the windcleared slopes for lichens and moss, their wool looking like skiffs of snow against the olive rock, the rams’ horns catching the low light in rings of frozen honey. Flying down the intervales, we spotted bands of moose yarded up in the dwarf willow and popple, gazing up at us with their huge hammer heads and stupid, bovine eyes. They looked in good shape. The winter, harsh as it seemed to us at times, had been gentle on them.

  Except for the wolves. Charlie Blue was right, there were too many of them in the country. I read, nowadays, that wolves are truly a benefice in the wild, that they kill only the weak, the old and the sick, thus working nature’s cruel pruning shears on a moose herd to strengthen it. Somehow, it didn’t look that way to us. We saw wolf bands harrying big, strong moose that were neither sick nor old nor weak enough to keep from running miles through deep snow, the moose turning at last to fight off the circling, slashing wolves for an hour more before falling finally to a severed tendon and the gut-seeking jaws of the hunters.

  “Let’s take a couple of those bastards,” I said one afternoon to Josey. We were flying at low level over a long, wide valley between two steep ridges. Below us, four wolves loped after a lone moose that sank nearly belly deep in the snow with every lunge. The wolves were padding easily on the surface crust, biding their time until the moose would be too winded to run anymore and would have to turn and fight. I landed on the skis well behind the chase and removed the door while Josey checked the Mannlicher. Then we took off again and caught up with the wolves.

  “I’ll take her back to nearly stall speed when we come up on them,” I yelled to her over the roar of the wind. “Pop the lead wolf first and see what the others do.” She nodded and leaned out the door, held by her seat belt but with her head out in the slipstream, the rifle at her shoulder and her elbows braced on her knees, and as we eased past the running wolves that looked up out of the corners of their eyes, their tongues lolling and tails flat out behind them, she shot—snow spurted ahead of the lead wolf and he kept going—and then worked the bolt, the brass flying back into the cockpit, and corrected her aim, shot again and rolled the wolf sideways in the snow, him biting at his shoulder where the bullet had smashed him, then lying doggo, or dead. The other wolves kept running.

  “Take the next one.”

  I circled and came back in behind them again.

  Pow! Another one down.

  The two remaining wolves slowed, looking up and around, then angled off toward the ridge to their right. We let them go, circling back and landing to skin out the two Josey had shot. Two more hides for the wolf bale, plus fifty dollars apiece in federal bounty, and one moose spared to breed again.

  But furs alone would not bring in enough money to expand the cabin into the lodge I had in mind, nor would they pay for the boats and motors and generator and freezer and pack-horses and all the other things necessary to turn Carcajou Creek into a successful hunting and fishing lodge. So my mind kept circling back to that ivory.

  Josey was against it.

  “You know Charlie’s right,” she said. “The moment you try to sell one of those tusks, a thousand paleontologists will learn about it. They’ll be in here like black flies, with government backing, and they’ll either kick us out of here or at best buy us out.”

  “Maybe there’s a black market. Norman Ormandy knows a guy in Anchorage who smuggles deer and caribou antlers out of the country, sells them to Red China and Taiwan. The Chinese make soup out of them. They believe that it give
s them vigor, better hard-ons, something like that. Especially when the antlers are still in velvet.”

  “I thought one of the main reasons you came north was to get away from that kind of crap.” She was angry now, her eyes sparking. “You get tied up with the black market and you’re no better than those sleazy operators on the Outside that you’re always bitching about.”

  “It would only be until we got the lodge built the way we want it.”

  “It’s hackneyed to say it, I know, but you can’t build a palace on a swamp. Ends and means. Like that. And you haven’t asked me how I feel about the hunting lodge to begin with. How do you know I want to hang around the lodge all day washing dishes and changing sheets and cooking three-star dinners for some fat cats from Dallas or Baton Rouge while you lead them around by the hand to plug moose and bears?” She was up and pacing now, high color in her cheeks, and I knew she wanted to slug me. I’ll bet she could hit a ton.

  “Honey,” I said, trying to laugh. “We’re having our first fight.”

  “Fucking A,” she said, turning and squaring at me, her hands on her hips. “And don’t tell me I’m beautiful when I’m mad or I’ll paste you one in the chops.”

  The daughter of a gunner’s mate, sure as shooting.

  “You don’t pronounce the terminal g in that,” I said.

  “In what?” She started and blinked.

  “Fuckin’ A,” I said.

  Then we both laughed and I hugged her, and I told her that if she was against it I wouldn’t do it.

  But still the idea was there, and growing.

  The days grew longer now and the chinooks began to blow in from the sea, warm wet winds that turned the snow from fine grit that squeaked like mice underfoot to heavy, web-clogging sludge. The rivers rose under the ice and we could not run the sled on them for fear of overflows—layers of water forced up over the ice and unfrozen in long stretches. If you ran into one of them, you soaked your mukluks up to the knees. It was still cold enough at night so the overflow water froze to a thin skin on top. Wet feet were doom in that country all the way up to mid-April. So the trapping season was over, and breakup not far off when we decided to fly into Gurry Bay for a resupply run and to sell our furs. Norman Ormandy had promised me as good a price as I could hope to get in Anchorage or Sitka or Ketchikan.