“Twelve fifty,” said Norman Ormandy, sucking the end of a pencil. “For the lot.”
“Twelve fifty? Last summer we were talking two, three grand.”
“Don’t blame me,” he chirped, shooting his eyebrows. “I don’t decide the fashions. What they want down there is ranch mink, chinchilla, Persian lamb and silver fox. Wolf is out. Lynx is out. You couldn’t sell a full-blanket beaver for a doormat. I can’t help it what they wear Outside.”
“Give me another slug of rum,” I told him.
We were sitting at the bar in the Blue Bear, Norman and Josey and I plus four hefty bales of worthless fur. It was raining along the coast and I was worried that breakup might come sooner than we’d figured. Already there was just snow enough left on the airstrip to land safely with skis. Now this with the furs.
Josey was reading a letter that had arrived for her over the winter from Outside. She hadn’t paid much attention to what we were saying.
“What if I were to take them up to Anchorage?”
“I’m giving you Anchorage prices, Jack,” Norman said. “If you were some Indian or Eskimo, I’d give you a grand, tops. Believe.”
I had to believe him. Norman knew that if I found out he’d japped me on the furs, I’d be back in no time to ream him a new asshole. The one he had suited him just fine.
“That’ll barely pay my supplies for next year,” I said.
“Things are tough all over,” Norman answered. “It’s the Cold War. The only real market we had for a lot of these furs was Eastern Europe, and now they passed a law we can’t trade with them anymore. In Europe, all the ladies are wearing leopard. You see any leopards up there last winter?”
“Don’t get cute.”
Josey folded her letter and slid it back into the envelope. She looked pale.
“I’ve got to go over to the Western Union,” she said, sliding down from the stool.
“What’s up?”
“I’ll tell you later.” She walked out of the Blue Bear, stiff and proper, a town girl once again.
“Listen, Norman. You remember you were telling me once about that guy up in Anchorage who sold stuff to the Chinese? Antlers and stuff?”
“Yeah. Mister Fong. He does a good business. Why? You got some horn?”
“Maybe,” I said. “What does he pay?”
“Good money. Eight or ten bucks a pound if it’s in full velvet. He pays a good buck for walrus ivory too, but he doesn’t see that much of it anymore. The herd is down to only about fifty thousand and most of the Eskimos are working in the canneries or on construction nowadays. But you got no walruses up on the glacier—and I’m not being cute.”
“Where does he hang out, this Fong?”
“He’s got a warehouse down on the docks by the Inlet,” Norman said. “He’s in the phone book. You want another?”
He poured me another rum and popped a beer for me. “On the house,” he said. I must have looked pretty mean, coming in there after a winter in the bush, my beard full and bristly now and my face brown and seamed from windburn and snowglare.
“You hear anything about Healey?” I asked him.
“Someone said he was down in Juneau a while back. I hear he’s got some biggies working to get the charge dropped.”
“What happened to Marie?”
“She hung around here a while getting sloshed until her money was gone. I paid her fare up to Anchorge to get some new teeth. She never came back.”
“Probably peddling her hips up in the Big Town.”
“Something like that.”
We sat there for a bit, me drinking and Norman polishing glasses, and then Josey came back in. She stood inside the door and I went over to her.
“My mother’s very sick,” she said. Her voice was tight and she was holding herself together. “I’ve got to fly down to San Francisco.”
“Hell,” I said. What do you say?
“I’m sorry, Jack, really, but I’ve got to go down there. I don’t think she’ll last long. That letter was from my sister. She’s practically nuts, taking care of her, and . . .”
“What?”
“They need money.” She nearly choked on that, and looked down at the floor. I put my arm around her.
“Take the fur money.”
“No. I couldn’t do that. There’s some money left from last summer, a thousand or so. That should help them some.”
“You’ll take the fur money.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THOUGH MISTER Fong was very old—he told me he had come to Alaska as a young man to work on the old White Pass & Yukon Railroad back in ’98—he seemed no more than middle-aged. His thick hair was dyed a gaudy purplish black that caught the glint of the kerosene lamps lighting his godown on the wharves of Cook Inlet. His face was seamless and his tiny black eyes gleamed bright as a muskrat’s. Ancient bronze bowls crisscrossed with fine engraving adorned his desk and a jade horse the size of a small terrier stood on the mantle over a glowing coal fire. He poured me a glass of wine from a tall slim bottle.
“Snake wine,” he said. “A sure cure for dandruff and falling hair, but delicious in its own right.” Sure enough, there were small snakes coiled and pickled in the bottom of the bottle. The rice wine had a musky, mildewed taste to it like very old champagne that’s lost its sizzle, but it went down smoothly and it certainly set the scalp atingle. If Healey were still around, I’d have offered to buy a couple of bottles. He loved anything Chinese. “Now about that ivory, Mister . . .”
“Johnson,” I said. “Sam Johnson.” If the deal went through, I didn’t want him tracking me down through the homestead records. “I was hunting sheep up in the Wrangells last fall and I found this chunk of ivory in the rubble of a recent avalanche.” I took the fragmented tusk tip from my pocket and placed it on the mahogany desk. “I dug deeper into the rock and found the rest of the tusk and what looked to be the tip of another, but night was coming on and I didn’t have time to dig them out. People down the coast told me that you knew something about the worth of ivory.”
He picked up the shard and turned it against the light.
“How big was the tusk this came from and how was it shaped?”
“I could see about four, maybe five foot of it, and it was deeply curved, kind of kinked inward toward the tip.”
Mister Fong shouted something in Chinese and I heard scurrying back in the godown. In a few moments, the door opened and a young woman in silk robes scuttled into the office, bowing and scraping, and placed a larger piece of ivory in Mister Fong’s long-nailed hand. He compared the two. Through the door, I could see a tangle of antlers back in the gloom, tines and beams of caribou and moose and Sitka deer, furry against the yellow light. He dismissed the young woman and sat for a long moment, fingers steepled like stacked spears, his mouth pursed and eyes lidded.
“This is very old ivory, Mister Johnson,” he said at last. “Older even than I”—he tittered and nodded—”as you have no doubt guessed. It is the ivory of the woolly mammoth, long extinct, and by rights you should report your find to the territorial government. The tusks would prove invaluable to science. You might even receive a reward.” He paused and smiled at me with teeth far whiter than the ivory.
“You seem to have kept a piece,” I said.
“Yes. A poor Eskimo hunter found it north of the Circle while extending his trapline. Up in the Brooks range, I believe. It found its way to me through the intercession of a minister of the Gospel, serving the heathen in those dreary climes. Men of the cloth are so naive. He never thought to report it to the government.”
“How much did you pay him?”
“Fifty dollars.”
“How much does that work out per pound?”
“Twenty-five.”
At two hundred pounds a tusk, that was ten grand a pair. A start, anyway.
“Men of the cloth, as you say, are not of this world,” I said. “Perhaps the good padre’s needs were fewer than mine. I would expect fifty a pound for
the risk of climbing that treacherous scree slope again and removing rocks, any one of which might prove the keystone to another avalanche.”
“Far too rich for my old blood, Mister Johnson. In my humble estate, a poor coolie who toiled until his bones were bent on the White Pass & Yukon, who froze with the men on the Chilkoot, who spent all his meager savings over a long lifetime of toil, et cetera, to purchase this miserable, draughty godown, I could afford no more than thirty-five.” He poured me another glass of snake wine, smiling brightly, his blood up now with the bargaining. Clearly he loved it, even more than his bronzes and jade and juicy young women.
“That’s mean country up there in the Wrangells, Mister Fong. Bears and wolves, winds so cold and fierce they can peel the meat from a man’s face, a country that eats airplanes the way you would a bowl of fried noodles. I could not risk the recovery of this ivory for you at any price below forty dollars a pound.”
“Thirty-seven fifty and you can take the young lady, my able assistant, with you. Keep her for a couple of weeks, a month even.”
“I have a young lady of my own,” I said. “Forty or no deal.”
He smiled and sighed, the lights mellowing now in his beady eyes like those of a man fading into postcoital languor. “Done.” He rose and extended his hand. It felt the way I imagined the hand of Doctor Moran might feel. “Contact me by telephone when you have recovered the goods and we will arrange a suitable rendezvous to complete our transaction.” He opened a drawer in the desk and removed a pile of bills, peeled a few off and handed them to me. “Two hundred dollars as a down payment and an earnest of my good faith,” he said. “It was a pleasure doing business with you, Mister Johnson. So few young people seem to enjoy such transactions these days.”
When I’d put her on the Northwest Orient Stratocruiser at Merrill Field, southbound from Anchorage to Seattle and points Outside, Josey had promised she’d cable the Blue Bear in a couple of weeks with her return date. I had serious doubts that she would ever come back. Once you get Outside, Alaska begins to fade toward unreality. You tell people what you did up there and they stare at you as if you were speaking in Martian. Eventually, their inability to comprehend induces a kind of amnesia in the uprooted Alaskan, so that he himself begins to doubt his experiences. Whirl and bustle confuse him, comforts pound him into a walking cube steak, he buys a car and a television set, gets a job, a home. Alaska becomes a tale of youthful adventure. Only on cold, frosty nights, alone with the memory of ice and emptiness, does it come alive again, and then only for a single shivering moment.
Fresh snow had fallen when I returned to the cabin on Carcajou Creek. I’d left plenty of meat for the chained dogs, but they cowered at my approach, whining and flinching, avoiding my eyes. Much of their food remained uneaten. I found bear tracks around the cache, and claw marks high on the tin-sheathed poles that supported it. A big bear. It had spooked the dogs out of their appetites, so it must have been a damn big bear. But the snow had obscured most of its sign. I kept a rifle handy just in case it was still around.
The cabin was cold and dreary without Josey. I fired up the stoves, but even at full blaze it still felt chilly. After unloading the supplies I’d picked up in Anchorage with Mister Fong’s two hundred, I unchained the dogs and wrestled them into their harnesses, then took them on a long, leg-stretching run down the Alugiak for an hour, letting them work the stagnation and fear out of their systems. And my own. I didn’t like this business with the tusks, but it was the only thing I could do if we were to build the lodge and make our way in the hunting business. Anchorage had left me with a sour belly. I could feel those snakes squirming in there, and that night I slept poorly despite the run. I dreamed of Doctor Moran, 100 his bony hand on Josey’s breast. Vassily Volkov and Mister Fong were playing Chinese checkers on top of the glacier. Charlie Blue came lumbering toward them dressed all in hides, growling hideously through yellow teeth. Josey screamed but it was only the dogs howling. Howling down the moon.
In the morning I slept late, then dawdled over breakfast. I spent more time meticulously watering Josey’s houseplants and herbs, though they looked healthy and pert despite my absence. I gathered together the bone saw, a heavy-spined fleshing knife and a pry bar. Then I took down Josey’s Mann-licher carbine and loaded it with five rounds of 220-grain soft points, brazen fingers of death, each of which delivered nearly a ton and a half of knockdown energy at pointblank range. If the visitor were still around and proved to be a brown bear, weighing in at fifteen hundred pounds, rather than a grizzly half that heft, I should be armed powerfully enough to stop him. I doubted, though, that a brown would stray this far from the coast.
Yet why should the dogs be so craven? Normally, they put on a bold front when we came upon grizzly sign, growling and raising their ruffs, sniffing the big tracks or the steaming mounds of dung as if to say “Lemme at him, Boss!” Even Ulf, the big, black, somber-eyed leader, normally the most confident of dogs, seemed to prefer the protection of the cabin crawl space to a walk in the woods with Daddy. I unsnapped him anyway and took him with me. He would spot the bear before I could, and even if he bolted back toward the cabin, I would have time to get the rifle up.
The trail to the glacier wound through heavy willow brake along the Alugiak, an old game run, but the new-fallen snow obscured any footprints more than a day old. I brushed a few drifts clear, down to the old snow, but could see no sign. The bear probably gave up when he couldn’t climb the slippery poles to the cache and headed off looking for an old wolf kill to ease the hunger of his long sleep. Ulf still seemed wary, though, hanging back and marking every tree trunk with a cocked leg, or else studying the branches overhead as if he expected a red squirrel to drop out into his jaws. Then, as I was stooping my way under an arch of snow-freighted willow suckers, Ulf gave me the slip. I thought I could hear him crashing off to my left and figured he had probably jumped a snowshoe hare. At least he hadn’t spooked back to the cabin.
Once out of the willows, I breathed easier, feeling silly for having worried so much over old bear sign. Out on the scree slope, I could see in all directions. And if the bear appeared, he would spot me at a long enough range for him to alter his vague options. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred—maybe more—a bear will give wide berth to a man. It is only when you surprise him up close, along a brush-choked game trail or a narrow mountainside path, that he finds himself with no choice but to attack. A sow with cubs is another matter, but I had seen only the pawprints of a lone adult at the cache.
When I reached the mouth of the ice passage, I leaned the rifle against a boulder. . . .
It would be ready to hand when I came out. . . .
If the bear was waiting. . . .
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AS HE was, in the ice chamber, eating Doctor Moran.
At first, I mistook the crackling sound for the rasp of my boots on the slick sides of the tunnel. But when I reached the smooth, sturdy tusks and no longer had to skid myself upward, all elbows and knees, I thought perhaps it was my breathing that caused the harsh, echoing râle, or maybe the edge of the bone saw sliding across the ice. I suppose the sound of his own teeth working frozen flesh masked the noise of my approach. At any event, we surprised one another.
I was climbing toward two tusks that protruded near the top of the tunnel. Their absence, when I’d sawed them free, wouldn’t prevent us from climbing up there later. They were fully exposed, with only the hairy gums of the mammoth who owned them locked back in thin ice. I planned to chisel with the pry bar until I could cut into the animal’s jawbone and remove as much tusk as possible; at forty bucks a pound, the effort would be worthwhile.
My mind, I must shamefully admit, was on how I would delude Josey, if she indeed returned. I would head for Anchorage with my ivory, make the swap with Mister Fong (taking due precaution that he not outnumber me and acquire the ivory at pistol point, sans greenbacks—Healey had told me too many tales of oriental mischief to leave me vulnerable on that scor
e). Then I would fly up to Taklavik where the Dewline boys played poker. I’d blow a bit of the money on a couple of nights’ worth of cards, then up the ante until I’d won a decent-sized pot. Maybe two or three grand. The way the popsicle grapevine worked, that sum would treble by the time the word reached Anchorage, quintuple at Gurry Bay.
Not only would I be lucky at cards, I’d beat the odds and luck out at love as well.
I slid over the lip of the cavern’s mouth and the pry bar clanked on the ice. Something went whuff. A cloud sloped away from the sun and the light came in strong, easing the darkness from squid-ink blue to a hollow, cathedral mauve. He was standing, hunched, with a clot of black spaghetti dangling from his jaws—Doctor Moran’s frozen guts, the liver pendant—all eight foot of him, silver-blue in the passing light, puzzled at the intrusion. A glacier bear. The biggest I’d ever seen.
Something strange happens when you’re in that close to a creature more alien than death. His stink—moldy cave, frozen thighs, fear and rage—smells sensible, predictable; it matches your own. I could almost see his balls shrink back into his belly as I felt my own shrivel. He rattled his teeth in synchrony with mine and I could feel waves of rage and fear pour off of him, hot and fetid, flight and fight, as if we had grown the same glands and the same speedy legs and the same claws and teeth (if it came to that). We were fuck fighting scared.
With no way out.
I think we realized it, each in his own way, at the same moment. If I dived down the chute, he’d be right after me. If he dived down the chute, he’d carry me with him, squalling like a newborn lamb.
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