Slade's Glacier

by Robert F. Jones

  “How do you mean?”

  “Pregnant.” And she laughs.

  I knew I had him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SO SLADE had his way. How many men can look back over a quarter of a century and say they led precisely the life they wished? He certainly could, though now the goddam ingrate is out there somewhere plotting our destruction. Still, can I blame him? After all, I did betray him, though I’m sure he knew I was planning it all along.

  Look at all we gave him. Even while he was recovering from the mauling by the bear, work gangs from Morgan Petro’s MorgArctic Construction subsidiary were hard at work expanding his dinky cabin into a fine, sprawling lodge, built of well-cured prefab cedar from Wisconsin. They installed generators and electricity, lights and freezers and refrigerators. They dug septic tanks and lay hundreds of feet of pipe. They drove a well more than two hundred feet down into that permafrost and brought in sparkling clear water with no glacial sediment in it to grind down your teeth and clog your bowels. They fenced in a huge corral and threw up a horse barn to house the two dozen pack and riding horses provided, free of charge, by Jep Morgan, along with a gang of crack Texas and Montana wranglers to handle the herd.

  While all this was going on, Jep sent Jack and Josey off to Hawaii for a free honeymoon vacation at the Kailua-Kona Inn on the big island. Jack went out deep-sea fishing every day and caught a 680-pound blue marlin. Jep paid to have it mounted, and the fish hangs to this day over the mantle in the main lodge’s rec room, along with dozens of other tro-phies—moose, caribou, sheep, mountain goat—taken by Jack and his hunting clients over the years. Not a penny did he have to pay for the mounting of those heads.

  Of course, while the Slades were off honeymooning, we flew in a gang of doodlebugs to run a seismic survey of the area. For the better part of a month, the jug hustlers laid out their geophones in a cross-hatched series of survey lines, drilling crews bored holes for the charges, and the woods echoed to the pow of the shooter’s blasts. The head geophysicist plotted the echoes and confirmed, as we’d all expected, that there was indeed an anticline under the glacier—a dome of unruptured rock beneath which lay a reservoir of oil and natural gas. The presence of the oil seeps—we found three others, in addition to the one that had first tipped me to the possibility—made it seem likely that the reservoir was a big one. The trick would be to tap it without disturbing the glacier.

  “That’s a tetchy sumbitch,” Jep said, staring up at the ice one afternoon. “We’ll have to drill in directionally, down at an angle from this side of the ice. The geo guys say it’s not more’n five thousand feet to the anticline, then maybe another thousand to get through it. Burn up a few bits when we get down there, I reckon.”

  “You’re not going in right away?” I asked him.

  “Naw,” he said. “Like we planned, we’ll hold this un in reserve. Right now, with the cost of cutting a road in here from the coast to lug out the crude, plus the cost of bringing in the rig and all, it wouldn’t be worth it. But mark my words, Sammy boy, there’ll come a time when all of that will pay. Right now it seems we got the Ay-rabs eating out of our hands. But you look at that long-snouted cunnel in Egypt, Camel Nasser or whatever they call him, he’s up to no good as far as we and the limeys are concerned. And there’ll be more like him ere long.”

  So the plan remained as we’d first discussed it—without Jack’s knowledge, of course. We’d build up the game lodge, use it to entertain Jep’s many business contacts, make what money we could from it by letting only the wealthiest of American and European hunters—serious hunters, sheep men and bear men—hunt with Jack when we weren’t using the place. And then, when the price was right, we’d break the news to Jack-O. We needed his signature to secure the mineral rights in their entirety.

  Still, he must have known it was coming, sooner or later.

  Jack and Jep hit it off quite well together. Out back of his office in Juneau, Jep had built an obstacle course complete with rope swings, high board walls, stake-lined ditches, and a big traverse of monkey bars socked together out of peeled logs. It was his custom to run every new employee over the course to see if he was fit to be hired. Jep had a pair of English pit bulls—Rip and Rumble, he called them—and he would give the new would-be Morganite a thirty-second start over the dogs (who actually were too clumsy to catch any man in reasonable condition). When Jack was healthy again after the bear, he came down to Juneau on some business and Jep asked him to try the course.

  “You gonna sic them dogs on me?” Jack asked him.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “How highly you value them?”

  “Cost me two hundred apiece,” says Jep.

  “Take it out of my this year’s pay.”

  Jack lopes out onto the course and vaults the first fence, then saunters toward the trench filled with sharpened bamboo stakes. This you were supposed to cross on a rope swing. He waits until the dogs have scrabbled over the fence and are huffing toward him, their piggy red little eyes gleaming and their long crocodile snouts snapping in anticipation of a hunk of human haunch. Then he swings out over the spikes, only about three quarters of the way, swings back in and kicks Rip in the nose. The dog leaps at Jack’s feet as he swings back over the pit. Rip plunges out of sight—yipe!

  Rumble is smarter, though. Even from where we stood we could see the light flick on in his eyes. He circles the stake pit and waits for Jack on the far side. Jack hand-for-hands up the rope to the beam that supports it, then tightwires his way so that he’s standing over the dog. He’s wearing heavy logger’s boots.

  “Bombs away!” he yells.

  Splat. Right on old Rumble’s guts. Rumble uttered a final fart, then was no more.

  Jack jogs the rest of the way through the course in the slowest time any employee ever recorded.

  “Am I hired?”

  “Hell, boy,” says Jep between wheezy guffaws, “you always was hired. This was just fer fun.”

  Both of them were crack shots with both rifle and shotgun. Jep built a skeet range behind the lodge and the two of them shot there every time Jep came up. After a while that got boring, so Jep started shooting the clays with a .22 rifle. Jack one-upped him with a pistol. Then Jep appeared with a pair of crossbows. On doubles he’d take one with his right hand, the next with his left. Jack thought of moving down to a slingshot, but said to hell with it.

  One spring, after the runoff had abated to fast water and only a few small ice floes, Jep showed up with a couple of wetsuits and a hankering for a swim. “Race ya to the jam,” he tells Jack.

  About two miles downstream from the lodge, there was a colossal tangle of piled up ice and uprooted trees blocking the river just above the Mad Wolf Rapids, a stretch of skookumchuck (strong water, in Indian talk) that at this season was a sheer half mile of boiling death. The ice jam had it half tamed right now, but the minute it went out all hell would break loose. Jack looks at the river and then up at the sky for a minute—it was one of those spring days so hot it could frizzle a side of salmon in the sun, but with ice lying back in heaps under the trees.

  “Can’t accommodate you this morning, Boss,” Jack croaks in that sarcastic way of his. “Got some chores that won’t wait. But how’s about this afternoon, on about happy hour?”

  I saw him ride out of camp a little while later on one of the cayuses, with a packed saddlebag and a coil of wire. I figured he was going up to one of the nearby spike camps to refence the corral.

  He was back in time for the big swim meet, though. The two of them wriggled into their black rubber suits—Jep’s had a yellow hood on it so I could tell them apart as I followed them in the outboard—and waded out into the shallows. The water was mucky brown with slivers of ice spinning in the eddies but neither of them yelped or shivered. I gave them their start, with a .44 revolver.

  They lunged out into the current and I scrambled into the outboard to follow. The motor wouldn’t start until the third yank on the cord, so by the time I
caught up with them, they were already a quarter mile downstream, with Jep in the lead, turning on his back now and then to whoop back at Jack and flag him on. They swept through the bends like seals after salmon, shouldering the ice floes aside and staying to the main current. The speed was incredible, even when viewed from the outboard, and the trees along the bank spun by like bike spokes, lit by that low white-hot sun. Eagles spooked off the snags and magpies squalled.

  Then they came around the final bend above the jam. The ice and mangled sweepers stood like a blue-black wall against the horizon, jumbled and packed every which way, groaning at the weight of dirty brown water pressed against it, popping occasionally as a tree or a floe cracked to the river’s push. Beyond it you could hear the low grumble of the skookumchuck. The jam had formed a huge turbid lake of slow water this side of it, and ice rafts circled in the swirl of the water. They entered this temporary lake nearly together, with Jep holding onto a body-length lead and stroking loose and easy in a heads-up crawl.

  Then I saw Jack cut toward the bank, sprinting. What the hell was this? Old Jack-Off quitting? But I saw he was headed for a big sweeper that stuck out from the bank, a great old spruce that had been undercut by the runoff and now lay angled into the stream with its black-clad limbs flopping in the water like some giant squid covered with short hair. Jep had turned and spotted what Jack was up to. He treaded water and watched.

  Jack scrambled up onto the sweeper and picked something out of a crotch in the branches. It was an exploder box. The water dripped off the wire that led into the river angling down in the direction of the ice jam.

  “Hey, Jep,” he shouts. “Let’s finish with a real kick!” He pulls up the handle of the plunger, then socks it home.

  Wham! The whole middle of the ice jam rose up into the air like a cat hunching its back. Brown water and a sky full of spinning, splintering sticks, whole slabs of ice whirling off like the chunks of a shattered clay pigeon. The water went out into the skookumchuck with a sucking, rattling rush, and the spruce Jack was standing on wrenched free of the bank and spun out into the main current. Jack reached out as it passed Jep and yanked him up onto the trunk. The tree and its riders swirled down into the rapids, and as it disappeared into the dirty spray, I could hear the two of them yelling, Jack in his crazy raven’s croak and Jep like a goddam bronco buster.

  I roared back up to the lodge at full speed, feeling a bit shaky and with that hollow feeling in the gut when you know something awful is happening and you can’t stop it. Josey was waiting on the dock as I pulled up.

  “What happened?”

  I pushed past her and ran to where the Supercub was moored to the bar, cast off and slid in behind the stick. She started on the first turn of the prop and I didn’t even bother to check the instruments or the wind, just jammed full throttle into her and skipped over the ice and the water, popped a float clear, then the other and banked downstream at treetop level.

  From the air, the skookumchuck looked uglier than it had sounded on the water. Whitehorses of tan and gray and pinto black spewing and puking down through the big black rocks that stuck like broken teeth out of the foam. No way they could have lived through that rush. I climbed to three hundred feet and sinuated downstream, looking for signs of their broken bodies. The black of the wetsuits, and particularly Jep’s yellow hood, ought to stick out in the gray-brown suds that lined the shore.

  About five miles downstream, I found them.

  Sitting on the end of a little island, whooping and waving up at me.

  Jep had a silver flask of Wild Turkey in his paw, that he’d carried in the wetsuit to celebrate the end of the race. By the time I’d landed and taxied up to them, they were shitfaced, the both of them, with only a little blood oozing out of cuts on their faces and out of the tattered, floppy black shreds that had been their wetsuits.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE BEAR must have done a job on Jack’s balls, gave him a crude vasectomy or something, because they only had the one kid. It was a boy, John Strong Slade, Junior, but when he got older everyone called him Dude. Like his dad, he was short but wiry tough and he had a way with animals, wild and tame, like no one I’ve ever known. Particularly horses. He could hardly walk yet when Jack had him up on the back of one of the remuda, and he was throwing a rope like a veteran by the time he was five. The wranglers loved him and taught him all their tricks and he got so that he could bust a hardnosed new bronc in a dozen jumps, and not with a lot of heavy stuff, quirt and spurs and Spanish bits, but just by letting the pony know he would not come off. The wranglers fitted him out with tiny chaps and hand-tooled boots and a Stetson you could of boiled muskrat in, and that’s how he got the name Dude.

  He knew where every moose and bear and caribou in the country hung out and he got so he could take you to them, pussyfooting along on horseback so that you were on them before they knew it. He claimed he could talk to bears and always felt bad when someone plugged one, but that didn’t keep him from wolfing down the meat when it came suppertime. He always had a pet raven riding on his shoulder or the pommel of his saddle, and for a long while, he had a pet golden eagle named Skraw who ate raw meat from his hand and killed ground squirrels for Dude to feed to his other pets of the moment—weasels, skunks, lynxes and coyotes. Down at the mouth of the river, in wetsuit, fins and goggles, he swam with the sea otters and the hair seals, watching them fish and winning their confidence so that some days you could see him up on the rocks with them, sunning together, Dude as black and shiny in his wetsuit as any seal.

  Jack and I dove with him a few times. It was eerie down there in the dark blue cold, weaving your way through the thick yellow rubbery stalks of kelp, with the sunlight slanting in low through the clouds of microlife that thicken the waters of the Gulf to a copepod soup, and when Dude’s favorite seal slipped up behind me and suddenly popped its head over my shoulder, its whiskers beaded with little air bubbles and its eyes bulging into my face plate, I like to croaked right there. Another time we swam with the sea lions. The big bulls would come charging straight at you, their foreheads domed like the heads of earless Labrador retrievers, and then whip into a ponderous barrel roll that would take them past so fast and big you could feel the pulse of the water they displaced pushing you sideways.

  “When they come at you like that,” Dude said, “don’t for the life of you try to duck aside. You might duck into their path. Then it’s splat, so long.”

  Dude found a cave back in along the cliffs. You had to dive down about twenty feet and then snake your way in through a winding passageway another forty feet or so, and then you came up into a dimly lit cavern behind the rock wall. Up at the top the light came in faintly and the air column in the cave rose and fell, hooting as it was expelled through the chimney. The first we learned of it was one day when Dude was about twelve or thirteen and we were all down at the river mouth for a picnic. Jack and Josey and my old lady and I were in the Zodiac raft while Dude and my daughter, Susan, dived for abalone and crab. The two kids got on great together, practically grew up summers in the same skin, and Suzy was nearly as good in the water as Dude, though she couldn’t stay down as long. They had been diving along the cliff wall when suddenly Josey says, “My God, where are they?”

  The two women are up on their feet, bouncing the raft around like it would tip, and then panicking one another, unable to spot the kids’ heads through the low chop that had sprung up. They were deathly afraid of killer whales, though Dude said he often swam with them in clear water and they paid no attention to him. Jack and I are trying to calm the ladies down and sneaking looks at one another and working hard to keep ourselves from screaming when we hear this weird, hollow howl—like a giant wolfpack singing the moon. The howl has two notes to it, low and grainy, high and screechy—and they weave back and forth together into the most doleful, cold, heartsick sound you ever heard.

  “What is it, what is it?” squeals Ellie, my old lady.

  “I’m going in there,” croak
s Jack, stripping off his shirt and pants and grabbing up a spare face mask.

  Then we hear the howl turn to laughter. It’s the kids, back in the cave, as they told us later. Of course there’s nothing for it but Jack must go in there himself and see the sights, and I with him so as not to look chicken in front of my family, but I never liked it back in that cave, never for a second, not the going in or the howling or the coming out with the rocks scraping on belly and butt and the air tight in your lungs and not knowing what or who will be waiting with its mouth open on the far end.

  Like most kids who grow up in Alaska, Dude was a demon with machinery. He could tear down and put together any motor ever made, or build one out of spare parts with only a minimum of tools. He knew how to fly the Cessna before he could spell the word, and he drove a log skidder like a grownup before he was twelve. He was always good with big gear—graders, Cats, shovels, dump trucks—better by far than Jack or any of us, and he never could swallow the irony of child labor laws that prevented him from going out to work his skills when men older but dead stupid when it came to machinery could kill themselves and others on any job in the state. “It’s not fair,” he would holler. “I’m better than those jerks and I need money too!” He wanted to buy a thirty-foot double-ender ketch he’d seen in Valdez and sail out to the Tuamotus in the South Pacific. He’d been reading Jack London. He had just turned fourteen.

  That was the summer he and Suzy ran away. I was Outside on business for Morgan when it happened but Ellie was up at the lodge with Jack and Josey. The way Jack told it, he woke up one morning and they were gone, with just the canoe and a couple of rifles and some camp gear, plus a submersible gas-powered dredge and a small sluice box Dude had welded out of old scrap. “Since I can’t get a job in town,” he wrote in the note he’d left on the kitchen wall, “I’m taking Suzy with me and we’re going for gold. It’s a stream I found long ago that has good color in it and you won’t be able to find it so don’t come looking for us. I know what I’m doing and can take care of us okay and I want that boat! Your loving son, Johnnie.” He never called himself Dude in those days, would punch you in the Adam’s apple if you said it to his face. Very feisty.