She poured another cup of tea and, on a whim, spiked it with two glugs from a bottle of Courvoisier, then went out on the dock. The morning was coming on and she watched the big black shapes of the king salmon moving up through the current. Just downstream from the dock a hen was digging her redd, scooping the boulders with her dark tail and flipping them clear of the long, tear-shaped oval of gravel in which she would deposit her eggs. Two males circled in the sand-fogged current, watching her. From time to time the larger male drove toward the smaller, his deeply hooked jaw slashing to force the smaller competitor away. Then as the redd neared completion he moved in on the female, darting around her and rolling in the water so his silver belly flashed like a stained mirror. She took position at the upstream end of the redd and lay above the gravel, watching his flashing dance, quivering as her time neared. Then with a climactic shudder she spurted a gout of orange roe into the water and on the instant the male convulsed, a cloudy gusher of semen rushing out and down to follow the eggs to the river bed. It was as if the male’s seed were sentient—tendrils of sperm dove after individual egg clusters, encircling them and coating them as they fell whirling in the current to lodge on the gravel. The fertilized eggs would sink deep into the gravel bed and ripen there, emerging next spring as tiny alevins with bits of yolk still attached. That would be a time of slaughter. All the trout in the river would be on hand to feast on the salmon fry. Even now they were here, waiting to slash in and gobble eggs as they fell toward the redd. It was just as well, she thought. With the oil operation due for completion next summer, these waters would no longer provide a breeding ground for salmon, or a feeding ground for trout.
The spawned-out hen hovered over her redd, exhausted and slowly dying before Josey’s eyes. Instant senescence. From the moment the salmon entered the fresh water to spawn, they began to die. Their hard silver bodies softened and darkened, their jaws warped into hooked stubs, tatters of skin trailed from their bellies and sides. After those final reproductive convulsions—I wonder how it feels? Is it a real orgasm? I hope so—the salmon, male and female alike, weakened rapidly and wandered at the will of the current, rolling back down through rapids they had leaped on their way upriver, preyed upon by wolves and bears, eagles and ravens. This hen, the one she was watching, was already badly tattered, her sides and tail frayed with age and dying. Down in Florida, the drugstores display only the boxes that contain bottles of Oil of Olay. Too many old ladies on social security shoplift the magical fluid of youthful skin care. Bring the empty box to the counter and pay for it and you get the bottle. How sad.
She looked again at her own hands. Tough, brown, calloused, starred and crosshatched with the scars of slippery knives and unseen briars. The stump of her right-hand little finger glossy in the morning light. She had “been splitting wood one winter morning fifteen years ago and thanks to the cold was not aware she had chopped it off until she saw the dog, Ulf, lapping blood from the snow. She found the finger beside the chopping block and rushed inside with it. Jack was upcountry with a hunting party. She stitched the finger back onto the stub with heavy sewing thread, trying to attach the blood vessels but certain she was doing it improperly. For a while the finger pinked up, but three weeks later it went green and then black. She cut the threads and pulled it off, then threw it into the stove. Oh well, they’re good strong hands anyway and they do the work they’re meant to do. All the Oil of Olay in the world couldn’t help them now, so at least I have that to be thankful for: I’ll never be tempted to shoplift for vanity’s sake.
Jack came out of the door, buck naked except for moccasins and a towel over his shoulder. His body, too, was still young but surrounded by the badges of age: that scarred face, those crooked hands and big feet splayed and toughened by thousands of miles crossing rough country. Look how his cock flops from side to side when he walks, she thought. Pretty well hung for a mean old fart. She grabbed for his groin as he went by but he spun away with a whoop, snapped at her with the towel, then kicked off his moccasins and dove into the river, taking care to splash her thoroughly with the dive.
“Come on, you dirty old lady,” he yelled. “Try that in here where I can fight back.”
She stripped and followed him into the icy water, and again they made love as they had the first time, so long ago, among the dying salmon.
“I’ve got to go down to Gurry Bay this afternoon,” he said later as they lay on the dock in the sun. “That fishing party from Portland is due in about three.”
“I’ll go,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of shopping to do, and you always get so pissed off when you go into town.”
“I can’t stand to see what they’re doing to it. They’ve got that frigging motel going up for the oil execs and Norman Ormandy is turning the Blue Bear into a goddam pansy garden.”
“We’re going to have to learn to live with stuff like that,” she said.
“I’m damned if I ever will.”
“You will.”
He ran his fingers over her belly, touching the faded stretch marks from when she had carried Dude. Then he took her maimed hand and held it, rubbing his thumb over the smooth end of the axe-amputated finger stub.
“We’ve been through a lot of shit together,” he said. “We can read it all over each other, like on a goddam map.”
After lunch she gassed up the plane, rechecked her shopping list and climbed into the cockpit. Jack held the mooring lines while she ran her takeoff checklist. Then he cast her off and she drifted out into the current, letting the float rudders take her out into the middle. She started the engine and warmed up, then turned downstream to the west into the slight breeze of early afternoon. The sun glared bright on the rolling water and she remembered she’d forgotten her sunglasses. Well, it would only be for a little while, during takeoff. She gunned the motor and raced with the current. The glare flashed in sudden sparkles on her squinting eyes. She felt herself reach takeoff speed, checked the gauge, popped a float clear and pulled back on the stick.
Below her the forest flashed past, dark green and dimming as she climbed, and the glare from the river receded. The engine roared louder for a moment and then there came a sudden blaze of light, brighter than the sun, blinding her. . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ANY TIME now, he thought. Outside the snow was still falling, fat flakes, slow and thick, and the thermometer beyond the windowpane read an even zero. Warm weather for the run. The blue Arctic light was fading fast and he had expected them before dark, but the sound of their snowmobiles would alert him anyway. They had to come today: it was the deadline.
Snowshoes, pack and weaponry stood ready at the back door of the lodge, where the tunnel he had dug through the snowdrifts led out to the cover of spruces on the low ridge to the north. If it got any warmer the tunnel could conceivably collapse, particularly if there were explosions. The snowshoes were short, heavy-framed bearpaws and he knew that their design would cost him speed in the open, but he planned to make his run through rough country—most of it, at least. The pack weighed nearly a hundred pounds, yet he had carried that much or more at a run over this same country often enough to be sure of himself. Most of the weight was high explosives: one-pound bricks of C-4 plastique, off-white in color and as malleable as Silly Putty. Atop the bricks he had packed a hundred yards of det cord, innocuous looking fuzzy stuff that resembled loose-braided clothesline. In a side pocket of the pack nestled a box of blasting caps, each the size of a cigarette and covered with aluminum foil. The exploder he carried in his parka pocket, along with the coil of insulated wire.
Boxes of ammo filled most of the top of the pack, shotgun shells and rifle shells and canisters for the stubby M-79 grenade launcher his son had brought back from Southeast Asia. The M-79 was accurate to one hundred fifty yards for precision work, up to three hundred for area fire. Its 40-mm. cartridges were loaded with coils of springy wire, notched every quarter inch so that when the charge detonated they flew into thousands of tiny whirring sawb
lades. In addition to the grenade launcher, he would carry his Ruger .22-250 rifle mounted with a three-to-nine-power Tasco scope, and loaded with the 55-grain hollow point bullets. The bullets were of the Federal brand, which he thought appropriate. With these, he could hit accurately out to five hundred yards, farther in good light and wind conditions. For close work, he had set aside a 12-gauge Remington pump gun along with boxes of both bird-and buckshot. He had spent a long afternoon cutting the pump gun’s stock down to the pistol grip and shortening its barrel to a finely filed twenty inches.
The rest of the pack was stuffed with necessities for living on the run: moose jerky, tea, knives, a cup, a match safe, extra sulfur-tip matches, lengths of babiche and a sewing kit to mend his snowshoes if need be, codeine pills, a hand mirror, a light short-handled Hudson Bay cruising ax, a meat saw, a can of WD-40, a can of 3-in-One Oil, an oil rag, a pocket compass (Girl Scout—ironically the most reliable), a surgeon’s scalpel and retractor, a packet of number three surgeon’s curved silk needles, a bottle of iodine, a box of sterile gauze and another of surgical tape, a needle-nose pliers, a small claw hammer in whose metal handle was nestled a series of ever tinier screwdrivers, and a box of dried apricots (for dessert).
A hell of a load in more ways than one, but he might need every item in it before this business was done.
He went over to pitch a few chunks into the barrel stove and on the way caught a glimpse of himself in the fluted, gold-framed mirror that Josey had found in a Seattle antique 166 shop. The glimpse made him start. Christ, he thought, I scared myself. The face that looked back at him in the deepening dark was lined and deeply scarred, one eye drooping at the outside corner under a flap of shiny scar tissue, the beard bushy and shot through with streaks of white and carcajou yellow but still, at the age of sixty-one, basically black. He was a short, thick-set man with heavy shoulders and a flat belly who moved more like some wild predator than a human being.
I wonder how she loved me after that?
Ugly son of a bitch, you.
He saw again the burst of orange flame above the river, streaked with oily black as it ballooned, and the wing fluttering up and then downward, above the spruces, awkward, clumsy, to splash in the Alugiak. Meant for me, he said to himself for the millionth time.
And she took it.
The radio crackled with static but no voice came through. It had been silent since the previous afternoon when Dude radioed from Juneau that the last appeal had failed. The Feds and Healey had won, as he knew they would. “Get out now, Dad,” the boy had said—boy, hell, he was thirty now, wasn’t he? “You can’t beat ’em. There’s other places we can go.”
“But not my country,” he said. “You do as we arranged before you left, kid. You know where.”
A long crackling silence, then the key triggered again.
“If you get there.” Cut, click.
“I’ll be there. Out.”
Let the eavesdroppers figure it. The rendezvous could be anywhere back in the Dead Mounties. Sure, they’d have air up watching for him on the passes, but with this late winter weather, the chinook beginning to blow, they would have a hard time following him. He doubted they’d use gunships.
He sat at the smooth-worn table he’d carved himself so many years ago and spread the geo map under the lamp. From the darkness the glass eyes of animals stared down on him off the walls, horns and teeth gleaming cool and ectoplasmic from the gloom. They’d expect him to stay to the passes, making through the range toward the Canadian line—how far? maybe two hundred miles. He would lead them that way, then take to the peaks when they were convinced and double back to the rendezvous.
The construction road, which he had marked in red pencil on the chart, stopped ten miles short of the lodge. He had scouted it all that fall and into the winter. Most of the heavy equipment was parked on a plateau just above the rapids, sumps and tanks drained for the freezeup. He had cached plenty of diesel, though, along with some gasoline.
Better eat now, he told himself. It may be some time before your next hot meal.
He was dozing in the dark by the window when he heard the first snarl of snow machines, and he woke with a snap. Goddammit, old man, what’s the matter with you? Snoozing at a time like this. You ought to be in a rest home. How long have they been coming? He listened hard, cracking the window to hear better. The snow was still falling in the pitch dark. It was nearly six p.m. No wind. The whine and growl of the sleds strengthened, then faded as they wound along the frozen coils of the Alugiak, blocked at times by the forested banks, clear at others when they ran in the open. Still five miles away, he thought. They should be at the sign pretty soon.
POSTED. NO FEDS, NO OILIES.
SURVIVORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
J. SLADE.
He looked down to where the detonator wire came in through the hole he’d drilled beside the door. Better hook up now. He took the exploder from his parka pocket and hunkered down beside the wire, bending the contacts to the terminals but leaving the handle locked. The exploder was small, handsized, and with a squeeze on the handle the rotors inside it would generate enough spark to fire the blasting cap at the business end. The snow had covered the det cord and plastique he’d run days earlier for his surprise.
He brought the M-79 and the Ruger over to the window and loaded them, laying an open box of shells and half a dozen grenade cartridges within easy reach. The switch that would throw on the spotlights was right over his head. Do you have everything you’ll need? You’d better, you old fart. Too late now to go scrambling. He wondered how they would be armed. He hoped Healey would be with them.
“Mister Slade.” The voice boomed through a bullhorn out of the dark. “My name is Danforth and I represent the United States Department of the Interior. I have an order signed by Circuit Judge Albin Dean in Juneau requiring that you quit these premises. These lands are now Federal property. You have been properly recompensed for them. You must leave this wilderness forthwith or I will be forced to evict you physically.” The bullhorn squealed like an electronic moose as the speaker finished.
Slade lay quiet.
At least six of them up on the bank, he thought. Maybe seven. I didn’t make it more than half a dozen sleds, though. Let’s hope they haven’t left anyone down on the ice where they’re parked. Two hundred yards to where they’re standing. He glanced down at the sight of the M-79 and adjusted it to 100 yards. Enough to get their heads down.
He could see them better now that he knew where they were. They were huddled together, talking, trying to decide if he was home or not. They’d see the smoke from the chimney, but that didn’t mean for sure that he was there. He might be out in the dark, waiting, or he might have left the country six hours ago for all they knew.
“Mister Slade, if you’re in there, please come out and show yourself. You have five minutes.”
The voice was metallic, emotionless, through the loudhailer, and Slade knew that it would sound much the same even without amplification. A cop’s voice. Police. Noncommittal. Ready to blast his guts out if he didn’t obey. Who’d have thought these fuckers would team up with Healey and the oil company? The glacier was now a National Monument, by proclamation of the President himself. All the oil under it belonged to Healey and Morgan and Mummad.
Slade, get fucked, they had said. You’re a beat-out old widower of a mountain man, sorry about that, and your string is run in this country. All of this now belongs to Uncle Sugar and his good buddy Uncle Sam Healey. The nation needs oil and recreation. Get lost.
He reached up and flicked the light switch. The twin beams caught the men where they stood near the riverbank, black in their government-issue parkas, rifles on two shoulders at least, their faces bone white in the glare. Slade opened the door wide enough to sneak the muzzle of the M-79 out. With the barrel elevated to a low angle, he sighted quickly, making sure his trigger-hand thumb was laid down clear of the breaking lever, and squeezed the trigger. The butt kicked hard against his crook
ed arm with the recoil and the grenade exploded on contact—a snow-muffled whump. He rolled back into the protection of the logs as two rifle bullets slammed against the logs. The triple explosion set the glacier above them to creaking. A quick look out the window—they were flat in the snow, aiming—six pieces all told. Let them come a bit closer. He saw one man jump and run in a crouch to his right, circling to cover the back of the lodge.
He broke and reloaded the M-79 and chunked another round out ahead of them. Then he rolled over to the exploder, picked it up in his right hand and squeezed the handle. Whirr. Like a kid’s toy that makes fire engine noises.
The whole riverbank rose in a flash of hard white, a muffled spanking roar of snow and frozen earth. Within the flash, he saw the yellower burst of exploding gas tanks as the snowmobiles flared. Again, he hoped no one was down there. Then he skidded across the floor with his weapons toward the back door. Rifle bullets smashed the windows and door as he lashed the snowshoes and slid into the heavy pack. He fired one more grenade round straight through the front window to keep them down, then ducked out into the snow tunnel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ACTUALLY JORDAN Danforth of the DOI had a rather mellifluous voice, and he was exercising it now in a chain of well-turned epithets as he lay belly down in the riverbank snow. “McGregor goddammit hump your fat ass over there to the right and get a line on that window. Blackie you check on the sleds. I think the fuckers blew.” He scanned the front of the lodge with his scope and saw no movement but socked a round of solid into the door anyway, keep his nose clean. Who’d of figured the son of a bitch had a grenade launcher? Those sleds better be all right, he thought, all the tear gas is on them and the radio and the snowshoes. He heard Blackie bellying up behind him.
“They’re wrecked,” he whispered, “all the ones that’s left, that is.”
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