If we could get Mummad’s money, we could develop the glacier oil, and we’d be set for keeps then. We’d find Jack a new place, better than this one: maybe down in New Zealand, or Hawaii, New Guinea might suit him better. Up in the Owen-Stanleys, there were still practicing headhunters.
And if Gates should kill Jack over some slight to his boss . . . That man was primed for it all right, ready to go . . . But no, not Jack. Not all those years—India, China, the Dakota.
Why not?
He’s not your brother, is he?
Ellie says family first, pals last. Fuck it. If Gates . . .
Then I heard the moan, and the old in-out in the snow. I moved around the edge of the cabin to the corral and they were at it in the lee corner, Strang and the Victory of the People, over a hay bale Dude had hurled up, with the horses uneasy around them—charged up, do you reckon?—and Strang’s jeans down over his scrawny ass and her one naked leg up and kicking as if to bruise the snow: it was Strang groaning as he plugged her with her chittering away chipmunk-like in Spanish and wriggling under him: damn, I’m sorry I lost that piss hard-on, but wait, what’s this coming on? Something Ellie never gave me.
“What do you suggest, Mister Healey?”
The voice over my shoulder limped me out for keeps that night. Gates, of course. And he had the pistol in his hand.
“Uh.”
“By rights I should shoot the both of them,” he whispered, “but it would only ruin the hunting trip, wouldn’t it? And my employer values his sport in many ways indecipherable to us plebeians. He prefers the ram to the ewe. Anyway he’s got another one warm in the sack with him right now. No harm done.”
He took me by the arm and led me back into the cabin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ALL THE next day it snowed, a gray veil that obscured the far peaks and cut visibility to a quarter of a mile. They went out anyway. Jack, Gates and Mummad hunted up toward the north. Dude and Strang went west. Charlie and Sayed checked the col where Dude had glassed the four rams earlier, found nothing, and then headed east into a broken country of ridges and rotten lava. I stayed in camp with the houris but they responded indifferently to my suggestion that we while away the hours by playing “Doctor” so I ended up splitting firewood, brewing coffee and organizing a suppertime stew of caribou bits, carrots and onions. Svetlana knitted; Victoria played double solitaire.
“Nothing,” said Jack when they came in, sodden with wet snow, on toward dark.
“Snowflakes, slippery rock and a covey of ptarmigan,” reported Dude.
“A bear dug out two marmots and ate them but missed a third; the mate of that dead raven hunched in a snag near open water; and this,” said Charlie Blue. He tossed an empty 150 cartridge case on the table. Jack picked it up and read the base.
“Seven point seven millimeter,” he said. “Probably from a type 99 rifle. The Japs used them in the Aleutians during the war.”
“I told you they were still around,” said Charlie.
“Unlikely,” says Jack. “I’ve seen plenty of Indians and Aleuts carrying old Japanese rifles, and anyway that brass is pretty well corroded. It could have been lying around since the days of the Mounties. But we’ll keep watch tonight and tomorrow we’ll pull out and head on down to the lodge. Fm sorry, Mister Mummad, but it looks like a washout.”
“Nonsense,” Mike answers. “I’m not concerned with Japanese stragglers. We are heavily armed, better armed than they, and they must be old men by now.”
“The weather is not going to get any better,” says Jack, “and those sheep have cleared out of here. To move up to the higher camps with this snow would take more feed for the horses than we have with us, and the only meat we could kill for ourselves is down in the valleys by now. We’d have supply problems.”
“Call in some supplies,” Mummad says. “Send your son or Strang or both of them down to the lodge tomorrow. They can fly food in for us. I want my ram, and that is that.”
“Don’t worry about watches,” said Gates. “I’ll stay up all night. I’m used to it.”
Dude broke out his fiddle and, grinning, began to saw away:
Oh I been sheep hunting all my life
And all I got is my Barlow knife.
Barlow handle and Barlow blade,
Best damn knife that ever was made.
The next day we moved up to the second camp, hunted the snow for two days more, found nothing, no sign even, and then moved up into the really rough country to the northeast where steep valleys could provide browse and pasturage for wild goats and sheep. There were moose in the brakes along the valley creeks, cows and yearling calves, one of which we killed for meat, and signs of bear moving nervously, feeding themselves up for the long winter sleep. But no sheep.
And no Japanese.
Charlie and the Pathan scouted for human sign every day, leaving the sheep tracking to Jack and Dude. They found nothing.
On the fifth day, with the ladies nervous and bushwhacky with the cold and the lack of action, and with Gates surly at the lack of human targets, they found rams. Three good rams and one for the record books.
Mummad stalked and shot it on a high cliff face with the sun hot on the gray rock and rivulets of snow melt staining the cliff black in long broken tracks, and the sheep staggered to the hit, then pulled itself together and bounded over the spine of the ridge. They followed and we watched them, Gates through binoculars and I with the 20x spotting scope, half a mile away on another ridge.
The sheep wandered weakly out onto a long point of rock that fell away to either side a thousand feet into whitewater gulches. Then it lay down, boxing its legs catlike under itself. Its big yellow-horned head swayed like a wooly pendulum to the sickness of its wound. We could see Jack and Mummad talking where they lay against boulders at the beginning of the point. Finally, Jack got up and walked out toward the sheep.
When he got to it, the ram rose—suddenly, powerfully, as if it had merely been taking a nap—and, trapped, it slammed forward into Slade’s belly, bending and then bucking him out and over the edge of the point. He managed to snag the lip of the rock with his fingertips.
The sheep began to dance around his hands, as if it were purposely trying to stomp his fingers.
All this while, Mummad stood watching, his rifle slung over his right shoulder. We could hear Jack shouting to him but he seemed not to hear. He wanted this to be a one-shot kill, and he was waiting for the ram to die.
Then Dude appeared behind the Persian, took in the scene in one glance, cuffed Mummad on the ear and ran out onto the point with a revolver in his hand. The sheep spun away from Jack’s clutching hands and started toward Dude. Dude raised the revolver and we saw it kick and then heard the report as the sheep sprawled face-first down onto the edge of the point, then skidded slowly over the edge. Only as it fell did Mummad seem to recover his senses. He raised both arms pleadingly and lurched forward as if to stop the sheep in its accelerating skid. But then the ram was gone.
We saw it slide loose of the adhesion of the rock, then tumble backward into open air, turning and spinning as it fell, its yellow horns winking alternately in shade and sunlight until it crashed finally on the dark boulders far below. Its horns were shattered to raw red stubs.
We saw Jack walk stiffly up to where Mummad stood, shoulders slumped as he stared down into the abyss. Jack grabbled the rifle from Mummad’s hands and smashed the stock against a boulder, smashed it to splinters of walnut and glass and just the scarred barrel left in his hands. Then he grabbed Mummad by the front of his jacket and went to work on his patrician Persian pan.
“Bloody ’ell!” hollered Gates. “I’ve got to get over there!”
“Take it easy, pal,” I told him. “He won’t kill your boss. He’s just teaching him a lesson in priorities.”
Where his face wasn’t blue-green with bruises, Mummad was white with fury. He stormed into Jep’s office in Juneau three days later with me trailing behind and trying to cool him do
wn.
“I want Slade ruined,” he yipped at Jep. “Dead, if possible. You say there is oil on his land. I want it. And you will arrange it. And Slade and his son and his wife will leave that country, forever, and without a penny.”
“Now wait a minute, Mike . . .”
“No minutes, no seconds, nothing. It will be done. If it is not, there are things your attorney general has an interest in. You know as well as I to which matters I refer.”
Gates stood behind him, arms folded across his chest, one hand dangling not far from the butt of the pistol where it snugged against his cushioned belly.
Things moved swiftly. Jep called in his lawyers and before the year was out the President of the United States had pleased the environmentalists once more by declaring yet another hefty chunk of Alaska a National Monument—this one the Blue Bear National Monument, sole remaining stomping grounds of that shy and reclusive creature already on the Endangered Species List. Compared with vast and far more spectacular acreage he had thus removed from the clutches of hunters, anglers and loggers back in 1978, this was a small bite and little outcry arose from the gun fraternity or the exploiters. The national need for oil, however, allowed him to exempt petroleum developers from access to the Monument. Since Morgan Petro was most familiar with drilling procedures in that latitude, the lease went to Jep’s boys, with development funding courtesy of M-A Mineralogy Ltd. of Geneva and Palm Beach, Malec Mummad-Afi, president and chairman of the board.
“Why couldn’t you stop them?”
“Look,” I told him, “I only work there. Anyway, it was the Feds who made the decision, not Jep or the rest of them.”
“Bullshit! Don’t give me that crapola. You know as well as I do that it was the Big Man from Eye-Ran who called the shot. And Jep went along with him.”
“You know that Jep loves you like a goddam brother, why get on him?”
“When Jep sees big bucks, he goes for them, the way Mummad goes for big rams only with a larger caliber load. How the hell did you know there was developable oil on the property?”
“A lucky guess.”
He stared at me out of that warped, scarred face, his eyes at angles to each other.
“You lying cocksucker,” he said, way deep and grating like he did. “I saw the holes where your doodlebugs were shooting. Dude found them four years ago. I figured you’d struck out and that’s why you weren’t in here already, drilling. But just to prevent you, I changed the registration on the homestead. You don’t have your half say anymore, Sam. But a hell of a lot of good that does me, with the Feds in on it now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Anyway the government wants oil for the folks, and they want the glacier for the posey-fuckers, and that’s that. It’s done, Jack-O. Over. Finished for keeps. You’re out.”
“Unless the appeals work.”
“I don’t have to tell you.”
He got up and walked over to the gun cabinet. Then he looked around the big room of the lodge, at all the heads and hides, the books and paintings, and at the furniture he’d built over the years. There was a big fire roaring in the stand-up fireplace, and outside the wind was howling down from the Circle with a snow-filled vengeance.
“You’re pounding sand down a legal rathole,” I told him. “Give it up. Jep will set you up in another place, wherever you want, here in Alaska or over in the Yukon—you always loved that country in the Ogilvies, where the new highway is open now, the Dempster—or even overseas if you want. There’s still good country in the Owen-Stanley Range, in New Guinea there.”
He took down a rifle—that .22-250 of his that he was so proud of—clean kills at seven hundred yards, even in a cross-wind—he was no better than Mummad in that respect. He worked the bolt and then pulled it, checked the lands for fouling, took down a cleaning rod and ran a dry patch through it. He loved those pieces, always played around with them, the way a man whittled in the old days.
“No,” he said at last. “This country is my whole life, the only part of it that counts. I’m sixty years old and I’m not going to learn a new country even if I wanted to try it. I’m not going.”
“What can you do?” I asked him.
“Let them try to come in here,” he said. “Josey and Dude and I, we’ll make it a tough road in.” He reassembled the action on the rifle and socked the bolt home. “And if that doesn’t work, I can teach them a little lesson my father once taught me.”
The light was going fast now and I had to fly back down to Gurry Bay and then catch the Alaska Airlines jet from there down to Ske-daddle. More stuff with the lawyers.
“You don’t hold anything against me, do you pally?” I said.
“You’ll be the last one to die,” he said.
And he wasn’t kidding.
PART THREE
THE GLACIER
1981
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SOMETHING IS moving out there, something so furtive that even the dogs cannot hear it. Stealthier than the cold wind falling from the glacier down through the tops of the pines. Quieter than the slow swirl of ice water over the rocks of the eddies. No wolf ever prowled so carefully, nor any weasel. Maybe it’s all in my mind, she thought. But I’d better.
Josey Slade slipped out of bed as quietly as possible to avoid waking her husband and pulled on her sealskin mukluks. The room was cold. Her breath puffed pale in the half-dark before dawn and she dressed quickly, catching a glimpse of herself in the dressing table mirror as she writhed into her longjohns. Funny, she thought, the face and hands of an old woman on the body of a girl. We age from the extremities inward. And it’s only the outer parts the rest of the world sees. More than half a century old and I still don’t need a bra. I guess that’s something.
She took the pistol from the night table and went into the main hall. From the dark walls, fierce or benign according to species, stared the bright eyes of animals: moose, caribou, Dall or Stone sheep; bears black and brown and blue and grizzled, some of them peering sideways around shelves freighted with books. Lynxes, their ears bristling, snarled in silence at a Gauguin nude across the hall, or glowered with yellow glass eyes down a Provençal road by Cézanne. The dead eyes of the trophies had a deep detachment, the seeming wisdom of gurus, she thought. She had mentioned it once to her son Dude when he was home from the war, recovering from his wound, and he had laughed. “Everything dead looks wiser than life,” he said. “Don’t let them kid you.”
A coal snapped in the huge stone fireplace behind her but she did not flinch. The sound she was seeking had come from the outside. She opened the front door and slid out into the shadows under the weather-bleached moose rack overhead. On either side of the door, pegs had been set in the spruce logs for the convenient hanging of flyrods, waders, hip boots, fire-arms, saws, axes—the daily tools of their trade—and from the porch a path led down to the river, ending at a pier where the boats and the plane were moored. She heard the rhythmic rocking of the plane’s floats on the river. The light was dark blue out there and snakes of fog curled on the current. She walked quietly down the path, between stands of shoulder-high Arctic cotton that gleamed pearlwhite in the gloom. The pistol was ready in her hand. But there was nothing. No one. She checked the mud carefully for fresh sign, but in that light she could not be sure. She tested the lines on the boats and the plane and they were secure. Far out in the dark a spawning salmon rolled, a heavy shivering sound. Just my imagination, she thought. Just a bad dream. And she went back to the lodge.
So many bad dreams lately, she thought as she brewed a pot of tea in her kitchen.
And why not? The Outside is coming closer every day. We’ve lost the place but Jack won’t admit it. He wants to fight. And we can’t win, and he knows it. She looked around the kitchen at her handiwork—the time-darkened breadbaskets she had woven over the years from river reeds, her pots and pans fire-scarred from thousands of meals cooked over the ancient wood stove, utensils hanging from the heavy ceiling
beams, all catching the light in familiar winking patterns. She could 160 move in the kitchen in the dark, cook a six-course meal in it blindfolded. That had to count for something. Now they say, Get. Do it all over again, someplace else. Of course she had nightmares.
But where else is there for people our age? Africa is finished for the white man. My Spanish is too rusty for repair and my Portuguese nonexistent, so that leaves South America out. Europe maybe—Spain or Ireland, good bird shooting, salmon beats—but Jack has no use for that continent: worse than the Lower Forty-eight, he says. Pussies. New Guinea? Fruit bats and tamed-down headhunters. No chance. Besides, too hot.
The Rocky Mountains—Alberta or Montana perhaps. But Canada is too tame. Even in places like Dawson City and Whitehorse you feel you’re among steers rather than bulls. And Montana is filling up with Californians, or else with writers and movie actors who play at being tough. What is it Dude says? They mainline TV. The only thing on television is sassy Negroes and cutesy he-shes and assholes so stupid they think they are Real People. And soaps. Those women on the bus that time in Seattle. For five stop-and-go miles they had swapped the most horrific gossip. Marlene had to have an abortion because Aggie’s husband Storm had raped her and Mark’s father had run the business into the ground so he and Jennifer had to sell the house to pay for Duane’s sex-change operation. It wasn’t till the end, when one of the women mentioned in a bored voice that her own son had the measles, and I knew they were discussing a television program. It was more real to them than their own lives. The worst thing about the Outside was that everything happened Inside.
And if we stay in Alaska, what then, and where? Anchorage has become a northern suburb of Seattle and Fairbanks is little better. Since the Native Claims Settlement Act there is no open land to speak of left for white Alaskans—here, in a state as big as an entire third of the Lower Forty-eight. Land-poor in the vastness. But I suppose we’ll have to put up with it. Jack is fighting mad now, but he’ll learn to live with it when the fight is over. We have the best things anyway: us. That they can’t rip off.
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