A few years later, the teenage runaway would become a commonplace figure in American society, what with the Haight-Ashbury and all, but Jack at least took it calmly. “I’ve trusted my own life to that kid,” he said, “out in the woods or up in the mountains or underwater amongst the killer whales. He’ll be okay.” The mothers, though, were frantic, Josey less so than Ellie, I must admit, and they finally talked me into flying a search for them. I suspect Jack knew all along what creek they were on, he knew every slough and trickle in the Dead Mountie range, and surely the old Indian, Charlie Blue, who lived nearly full time at the lodge now as a tracker, wrangler and general factotum, knew where they were, but the two of them played dumb.
I flew the country on and off for the better part of two weeks, with one or the other of the ladies serving as extra eyes, but we couldn’t find a trace of them—not a tendril of camp smoke, not a streak of discolored water in the creeks from their dredge. Now and then we would see figures in the streams and I would swoop down in the Bonanza with Ellie or Josey white-knuckled beside me, but inevitably it would turn out bears or moose. There were a lot of bears that summer but I was less concerned with them than I was with Dude’s pecker.
“He’s balling that girl,” I told Ellie more than once. “That little diddler, when they come back I’ll kick his ass good. If he’s got her pregnant . . .”
“Don’t worry about it,” my good wife said. “She’s a decent girl and she wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“Why not? You sure as hell did.”
We never got on too well, Ellie and I. She was a bulb-nosed, lank-haired, big-hipped ballbuster and she knew I’d married her for her father’s money. How the girl ever came out looking so good I’ll never know. She was leggy and blonde, with fine features and nice, warm brownish-green eyes wide apart, and even when she was little, she had a kind of husky voice, lazy and sensual. I was embarrassed to bounce her on my knee.
“Sure I did,” Ellie would say, bitter-like. “Because you begged me to. You said you couldn’t live if I didn’t. You told me I was beautiful and I believed you, even though the mirror and everybody else showed me otherwise.” She had a washed-out voice, that woman. Maybe if she’d had some pep, it would have been different. I’ve screwed ugly women galore in my time and when they had some pep they could be beautiful, in an odd way, even through their ugliness. But when a woman is a whiner and doesn’t have any get-up-and-go, then even the ones with classic kissers are dogs. Suzy, though, she had pep, and so did that bitch Josey. When she was out on the search with me, and it got to midday when the sun cast glaring reflections on the streams and lakes so that you couldn’t have seen an elephant drinking down there, she’d make me land on some river or flowage she knew and while I ate my lunch, she’d break out a fishing rod and catch trout until the light got better. Either that or take her Mannlicher and prowl around back in the bush for an hour or so. Now and then I’d hear her shoot, always just the one shot, and soon she’d be back dragging some poor furry critter she’d blasted. Christ, how that woman loved to shoot! And she was good. I never saw her miss, though Jack says that when they first got together she missed a few. Damned if I believe it though. Once—this was not while we were looking for the kids—I was up with her at a camp they had in the Mounties, up in the sheep country, and she and I were sitting outside one afternoon and she says, “Look at that ram.”
She’s staring out across a deep drop to a cliff half a mile away.
“I don’t see anything.”
“There on that ledge about three quarters the way up. He’s lying down, chewing his cud. He’s a full curl if I ever saw one.”
She goes in the cabin and brings out her rifle and a pair of binox for me. After about ten minutes I found him, just like she said.
“That’s a thousand yards if it’s an inch,” I told her.
“Wait here.”
She slides down over the edge and is gone. About half an hour later, I see her coming up the far side—she must have run down the mountain, that scrawny woman—and she starts plugging up the far side, climbing like a goddam goat. She gets parallel with the ram but she’s still a good six, seven hundred yards from him. She’s using the boulders to shield her approach but not paying much attention to the rocks she kicks off. Then she takes her rest and, pop, I see the ram slump where he lies.
Two hours later, she’s back with the head and the loins, hardly puffing a bit with all that climbing.
“How come he didn’t spook when you kicked down all those boulders?” I ask her.
“They’re used to hearing rocks fall,” she says. “Jack taught me that. They hear it all the time, when weather works stones loose, or bears or other goats or sheep kick them down. They can’t smell very keenly either, I guess, because the winds are so variable that it doesn’t make much sense for them to panic at every random smell that comes their way. But what they can do like nothing else is see. You have to keep out of their line of sight. Do that, and you’ve got ’em.”
We had mutton chops for dinner that night and if you haven’t eaten wild sheep, you haven’t eaten. She was a fine cook, that tough broad, and could she shoot. But boy did she hate my guts!
“Why don’t you like me, Josey?” I asked her. “Dude likes me fine, and Jack and I have always been close.”
“Because you’re greedy, Sam,” she says. “You see this country as a great big grabbag and all you want to do is take.”
“That’s the American way,” I hold her. “And anyway, what about you and Jack? You’re as greedy as I am, in a different way. You want to hold onto your hunk of it and keep it just the way it is. What about all those people Outside who’d give their life saveings to spend a summer fishing and hunting or gold-panning up here? I don’t see you swinging wide your doors to welcome them. Alaska has riches that the Outside can use, but Alaskans like you and Jack don’t want to share. Isn’t that greedy?”
It took her aback, I must say. She waffled around for a bit, the color coming up in her cheeks, and then she squares away at me.
“Jack and I believe in taking care of first things first,” she says with a huff. “What’s most important to us is us, then our friends, and only then the rest of the world. Maybe that’s greedy but it’s the only priority we can establish.”
“Well, then don’t call me greedy.”
“Don’t you go posing as some kind of a goddam altruist, Samuel,” she continues, really raging now. “You make it sound like you and Jep Morgan had nothing but the good of the needy Outside at heart. Like hell you do. You want the profits that come from development, and to hell with what’s left when you’re done. I’ve seen the cannery towns you’ve developed, and the mining and oil camps, and the clear cuts where you’ve logged. It’s all of it ugly, uglier than sin. Not a wild animal left in the country. Slag piles and slashings and stinking water, the stink of oil hanging over everything so that the dew falls with a greasy sheen to it. What kind of a world is that?”
“A world with jobs in it for people who want to work, for starters,” I say. “Morgan Petro now employs nearly eight thousand people, more than a third of them natives. You and Jack, by the way, have only one native on your staff—Old Charlie. And you’re sure as hell the one to sound off like a flower-sniffer. The way you delight in blasting animals and ripping out their guts, you ought to be running a slaughterhouse. I don’t think that qualifies you for membership in the Sierra Club or the Friends of Animals.”
“Those jerks,” she says, flustered and stuttering now. “They’ve got their heads up—you know where.”
I sat back and grinned at her.
“You tell ’em, Josey,” I said, “the whole world’s wrong.”
She literally growled at me then and I was damned glad she’d left her rifle in the plane.
“Aw, come down off your high horse, lady,” I said. “I’ve got you and you know it. We’re all rapists up here, only we use our dicks in different ways. And anyway it’s all about finished for all
of us. Any year now the Feds will wise up to what they’ve got here and then they’ll grab it away from us to fill their own pork barrel. We might as well get in our licks while we can.”
“That’s what I despise about you most, Sam,” she says after a bit. “You’re such a cynic.”
Well, we left it at that. We couldn’t find the kids that summer so we just waited for them to come out. As they did, toward the end of August. They were brown and bug-bit and calloused and dirty but they’d made it all right. Their summer of dredging and crevassing the creek had produced a little more than four ounces of gold, most of it dust but a few nuggets the size of pinheads and one as big as a pencil eraser. They both looked bigger and certainly wiser. I’m sure they were screwing. Dude wore that silly-ass look of a man who’s gotten away with it, and Suzy had that smug quiet air about her that women get when they’ve learned the score. But she wasn’t pregnant anyway.
When Dude pulled the canoe up on the gravel bar and stood there waiting for us, Jack walked up to him, white-faced, and slugged him in the chops. The kid staggered back but didn’t go down. He just stood there grinning. Then the mothers were upon them both, hugging and chirping and kissing the way they will do. And shaking their fists at poor Jack, who’d only done a father’s duty.
My punishment of Susan wasn’t physical. I merely sent her away to a Catholic girls’ boarding school in California for the next two years, and after that to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, for an education among the bull dykes.
Two years later, Dude ran away again. He headed Outside, lied about his age, and joined the army to fight in Vietnam. He became a Ranger and he won a lot of medals but he came home with a head wound. Thereafter, he wore thick glasses. But he was as jolly and headstrong as ever. I always did love that kid.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE HUNTER’S name was Malec Mummad-Afi but we called him the Big Man from Eye-Ran. He’d been a wheel in the Shah’s government (one of the top men in Savak, the Iranian intelligence outfit, according to Jep) and when that regime got the boot from the imams, he made a beeline for the States, where he had plenty of wealthy pals who owed him favors. Not that he needed dough. Like most of them, he’d salted away a few million petrobucks in a Swiss account, and he got out early enough to take most of his nonliquid loot with him: Persian rugs, ancient crockery, finely wrought bronzes, rare rich furs, all of his hunting trophies and his armory. The Big Man was quite a hunter, we were told. He had run four Grand Slams on sheep with the standard calibers—.270, .30/06, .300 H. & H. Magnum, and .308 Winchester—and he was one ram shy of the world’s first Grand Slam in .17 Magnum. That’s the tiniest bullet built.
Sheep hunters are a fanatical lot. Once a man’s got ram fever, nothing else can give him a kick. Not lions or leopards, not Cape buffalo or griz. Not even elephants in heavy cover. They fall in love with the anguish of altitude: long, ankle-busting stalks over bare rock with the wind like a skinning knife down your neck and the air so thin that you inhale it by the molecule. It’s not unusual for a sheep addict to walk, run, scramble on hands and knees, or skin along by his fingertips on ledges an inch wide, for a distance of ten or twelve circuitous miles, in order to get a shot at a ram he initially spotted not half a mile from him. And then pass up the shot because the horns weren’t right. The Big Man from Eye-Ran was one of these.
Mummad-Afi and his entourage arrived at the lodge by Jet Ranger helicopter from Anchorage on a crisp October afternoon. He was a scimitar-slim, dagger-beaked man in his early sixties with a narrow, steel-blue jaw and hard brown hawk’s eyes that rarely blinked, and then only in a slow, camera’s shutter manner as if he were taking a time exposure. His entourage consisted of a valet cum bodyguard, his personal shikari, and two high-priced houris, a dark and slinky Latina named Victoria de los Pueblos and a blonde, rather plump Mittel European who went by the nom de boudoir of Svetlana Liberté. The ladies shivered delicately in the icy breeze from the glacier and sniffed with evident disgust as they picked their dainty way along the duckboards that led from the helipad across mudflats to the lodge’s walkway. They paid no attention to the mountains soaring around them, gone pale blue at this season with the first frosting of snow.
The valet, a hardbitten limey named Gates, hauled what looked like a ton of luggage to the main guest cabin, while the shikari took charge of the gun cases—fully half a dozen of them, all gold-monogrammed calfskin. The shikari was a leathery old Pathan tribesman from Afghanistan and he immediately fell into the waiting clutches of Charlie Blue. They must have found some Ur language in common, for soon the two were inseparable, chumming together and talking away a mile a minute about God only knows what—killing, no doubt.
“Ah, quite elegant in a homely manner,” said Mummad-Afi as he warmed his backside before the huge stone fireplace and sipped a cup of tea. His eyes studied the heads on the wall—the giant palmate horns of moose white in the gloom, the gaping jaws of bears, the silver-ruffed, chocolate-and-ivory spread of caribou, and three splendid Dall sheep, each a full curl and a half of yellow-horned beauty, their snow-white necks arched as if in wariness. “Tell me, Mister Slade, did you shoot them all yourself?”
“No sir,” gruffed Jack. “My wife killed the most of them, and a few were left us by grateful clients. I haven’t killed an animal except in self-defense in ten years or more.”
“Your wife must be quite a sportswoman.”
“One of the best shots I’ve ever been privileged to watch,” said Jack.
“And you no longer shoot,” continued the Big Man. “A pity. What is it? You have lost your taste for the blood? I am told that many hunters undergo that change later in their careers, though it has not yet overtaken me.”
“Not so much that,” said Jack, “but more that I know precisely how many animals we can afford to take out of this country every year without depleting the stock or degrading it. And I reserve the harvestable animals for my clients. Oh, we take some culls for meat—a couple of moose a year, a black bear if it’s proving troublesome and trying to break in the larder, maybe a caribou or a few blacktail deer, and of course ptarmigan, grouse, ducks and geese in season—but my wife does most of that shooting. I’m too busy around the place, either guiding or doing repairs, to spare the time. My son does some shooting, too.”
“Yes, the young war hero. Mister Morgan speaks highly of him. Where is he at the moment?”
“I sent him up to the first spike camp with the packhorses. We’ll head up there tomorrow. By the time we get in, Dude should have scouted out the country pretty thoroughly, so we’ll know what’s at home and where it’s hanging out. It’s Dall you’re after, I take it.”
“Yes. I need a ram with at least forty inches of curl to the side to complete my Slam in .17 caliber.” He studied the heads on the wall again. “Those all would seem to fill the order. I hope you have more of the same on the premises.”
Slade laughed. “The premises? This is big country, Mister Mummad-Afi. It’s no supermarket. I know we have at least a dozen forty-inch rams in my territory, but just where they are and how we’re going to collect one is something unpredictable as I’m sure you, as an old sheep hunter, are well aware.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean to sound condescending.”
“Frankly, Mister Mummad-Afi
“Call me Mike, Mister Slade. All my American friends do.”
“Right. What I was about to say, Mike, is I’m a bit leery of this .17-caliber business. You’re only throwing a 40-grain bullet and a Dall sheep is a tough customer. A ram of the size we’re talking about will weigh two hundred pounds dressed, a good two fifty on the hoof. I’m even uneasy going as light as .270 on them, for fear that you’ll hit them clean enough but they’ll stagger off and fall over a cliff before you can collect them. Then it’s goodbye horns.”
“True. But already I have killed Pamir markhor, Tibetan argali, Marco Polo sheep, a hefty Rocky Mountain bighorn and a fair-sized Stone sheep with the small bullet. Not to me
ntion aoudad, bharal and a 175-pound Turkestani urial. None of them exactly sissies. And all of them dead to a single bullet, as I intend to take this final Dall ram.”
“Well, there’s nothing I hate worse than losing a good animal to inadequate firepower. It’s a waste and, in my eyes, a sin against the gods of these mountains.”
“Agreed. But the challenge of this Slam is to take all of the major sheep species with one shot from the smallest available caliber, and I am but a single short step from success. If I round out my sheep Slam, I intend to continue by taking one of each member of the subfamily Caprinae, which as you doubtless know includes all the wild sheep and goats on the planet. To that end I would also like to pursue the local representative, Oreamnos americanus, or what you call the Rocky Mountain goat, though it is actually, according to some taxonomists, closer to the Antilopinae than the Caprinae, nestce pas?”
“If you say so,” said Jack. “Anyway, we’ve got some good billies in these parts, but again I’m damn nervous about going .17 on them. They’re a hell of a lot bigger and tougher than these Dalls, and though their horns are short and brittle they’ve been known to kill grizzlies and cougars with them. Mean customers. And the country they inhabit is even meaner. A lot of sheep hunters I know would rather go for brown bear or griz than mess with billies, mainly because it’s too damn easy to fall off a mountain during the stalk. I’ve seen the bastards walk straight up a vertical cliff like you or I would mount a curb on a city street.”
“I can climb,” Mummad-Afi said stiffly. Clearly, he was getting miffed at Jack’s putdown of his popgun approach to big-game hunting. I figured I’d better cool them both down.
“Of course you can, Mike,” I said, “and Jack knows it. Don’t you, Jack-O? Sure. And you can shoot, too, otherwise you wouldn’t have taken all those markdowns and argyles and urinals you were mentioning just before, would he Jack, old Buddy? All Jack means is he hopes you realize this won’t be any walk-up-to-’em-and-take-your-picnic, right? Right. And you know that anyway, don’t you, Mike, old boy? Now listen, you’re not so strict a Believer that you wouldn’t be able to handle a little Glenlivet, would you, Mike?”
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