Flight To Pandemonium

by Murray, Edward

  “Maybe… maybe not, but we must come up with a better plan. It was a bad storm, but an early one. Perhaps things will settle down and maybe even stabilize a little before the next one. In the meantime, we have a fair stock of supplies. They just made a container delivery here. That can of stew came from one of the new pallets… Oh, and if you know anything about generators, having electricity again would be nice. But don’t go inside any building!”

  “Christie, I am determined to move on somehow. I’m still trying to get a grip on my worst fear… just how far has this bug gone anyway.”

  “Laz, you yourself said that your family all got sick and likely died. Seattle is over four thousand kilometers away! So far you’ve managed just two hundred in two days and ended up stranded here half naked freezing in a snow storm!

  “To hell with the bat plague, Laz!” said Christie forcefully. “You definitely do need to get a grip, but on life instead!”

  “Christie, I just can’t sit here doing nothing all winter… I’ve always been impulsive and this thing is driving me hard.”

  “Dear Laz, nothing is keeping you here except wet clothes. But maybe your impulsiveness is what got you into trouble. You certainly can’t help your family this far away...even if they are still alive.”

  “Maybe so,” he replied grimly.

  “I don’t know you at all, but it sounds like I need to tell you another thing that should be perfectly obvious. Take a deep breath. If you want my help, we can make a plan together. But I won’t die foolishly trying to go over that pass just now. You’ll be on your own if you decide to do that… and we should let that influenza cool off a bit.”

  Lazlo attempted to stand again, but winced in pain. “I suppose you’re right again. I can’t even walk on my own two feet.”

  “Ready for that massage? Then, I’ll make a grand dinner that will take us away from our worries for a while. For a start, there’s a great bottle of merlot there on the counter.”

  21

  Green Gulch, October 2nd. Pug spent the day closing down the powerhouse for winter. Late that afternoon, he ventured outside to check the weather. He saw the gulch still obscured by wind driven snow and the vertical columns of the portico heavily coated with ice. The dreary blast forced him inside where he smelled ozone or something overheated that he hadn’t noticed earlier.

  Remembering his communication gear, Pug rushed to his tiny quarters and its radio nook. When he turned on the full array, he was relieved to see all internal displays illuminated normally. Although the receiver was tuned to a powerful commercial station, he heard nothing from the set even when he turned up the volume. Had another station failed because of the pandemic, he wondered? He spun a dial… to silence. One by one, he tried his receiver, transmitter, scanner and radio telephone. All were silent and smelled charred.

  Lightening must have struck the antenna array high above on Wolverine Peak. The cable conducted the strike down to the vulnerable electronics. Each year before leaving for the season, Pug removed the connection to safeguard his radio gear. This early in the season, he hadn’t thought to do so yet.

  His precious radio station was finished and so was his link with the outside world. He could no longer call for help.

  Undeniably on his own, Pug realized he must store a winter stash of food or be forced to leave his sanctuary. In twenty-five years of service, he had never seen the first storm of the season drop a foot of snow. Late summer became deep winter overnight.

  Pug fondly gazed across crystal peaks watching trailing veils of windblown powder. But ice and snow also covered his pond. The fish would soon grow lethargic, settling near the bottom.

  The tail of the storm continued for two days, then trailed off to showers of dry powder. At his first opportunity, Pug returned to the glades to gather low bush cranberries, now buried under drifted snow. During an entire day’s effort, he was rewarded with less than a bucket-full of wrinkle-frosted berries. He tried gleaning again the next day, spreading his search wider, but gathering less. Stepping blindly through the drifts, he crushed as many cranberries as he gathered. Blackberries were withered and squashy. By late afternoon, his back could suffer no more.

  Returning to the tailrace pond, he discovered that overnight freezing had progressively thickened the surface. Pug could break ice only by leaning far over the reeds and pounding with a hammer. Many days had passed since the fish were presented easy food from either the hydro portals or from the snowbound shoreline. He needed attractive bait but he could no longer find succulent insects in the snow covered meadow.

  Pug tried a concoction of fish chum. The watery chum slowly descended, but got little response within his window of broken ice. Disappointed, he poured a full cup into the pond precariously leaning over the icy reeds. Fish responded instantaneously, ate voraciously, but vanished when Pug reached for his net. He tried again lowering the net in one hand and pouring with the other. Many fish rose, roiling the surface. Pug swept under their midst and netted six vigorously shaking trout. The bait was proving irresistible despite his awkward technique. Finally, three sweeps in succession came up empty.

  Pug decided he needed to change tactics. These weren’t thinking fish, but just wary survivors rising for food and quickly vanishing. The elusive fish near the far range of his reach required faster reflexes. Leaning far over the icy reeds, Pug plunged his net too deeply. The momentum of his downward thrust propelled him into the pond.

  22

  Rainbow Lake, October 3rd. Morning light revealed the snow line hovering near the surface of the lake above a vast pool of warmer water. Low hanging clouds drifted toward the cabin. Tony knelt on the deck, inspecting fresh tracks preserved in the slush.

  “What do you make of ‘em?” Max asked.

  “Wolf chasing two snowshoe rabbits under the deck,” said Tony whispering. “Deck is too low for the wolf and then we scared him off. I’m hoping we can still beat him to them. Fresh rabbit’s a treat. Let’s wait here quietly a few minutes.”

  Lowering his voice while looking at the lake, Mac observed, “Must have rained buckets last night. Muddy water won’t help fishing. Got any ideas?”

  “Bad weather fishing takes real patience,” whispered Tony. “Find a spot free of plants and reeds, like where a moose browsed on the bottom and stripped the plants. Set up your net so that you can drive the fish into it like you were doing in the creek. The big fish usually run for cover in deeper water, not into the shallows. You’ll need to get wet to do it, and I’ll help if you like. Leave it for a while, and then come back. They’ll flee right over your net.”

  “Sounds easy enough…”

  “Nothin’ to it, really…”

  “That’s what William said.” Mac immediately realized it was a boorish attempt at humor and regretted it.

  “A decent man and a sad shame.”

  “Sorry I brought it up, but tell me while we’re talking… what was that shouting about back and forth between you and Jack?”

  “You mean, ‘right’… ‘left’… all that?”

  “Yea, that.”

  “Oh… that goes way back to when we were much younger,” explained Tony. “Hot-shot sluicers we were, anywhere we could stick a dredge in a stream. Caused lots of upset and some people wanted to brawl even though we had every right. So we stuck together and found a way to defend ourselves against odds. Bullies always brought on spectators.

  “It’s to tell each other exactly what we’re gonna do next. We’d call out who we’re gonna fight… always picked out the biggest brute. Beat on him and everyone else backs off. It takes the hot prickle off the collar when their favorite bully gets whooped.”

  “But against a man pointing a gun?”

  “What choice did we have? They were about to take everything we’d brought and leave us with crackers!”

  “Sure glad you two
saw trouble coming.”

  “Maybe things are lookin’ up.”

  They’d forgotten to whisper and the panicked rabbits did not appear. Darker clouds rolled lower across the lake.

  “Guess I spoke too soon.” The pair moved inside away from wet snow.

  Judy insisted she needed no help fixing breakfast…berry cobbler topped with reconstituted scrambled eggs mixed with powdered sour cream. It was hot and sweet but no one asked for seconds. After their experimental breakfast, Judy declared that cabin stores should be stretched as long as possible. Fresh food would last only two or three days so she requested filling the larder any way they could.

  The weather didn’t cooperate. Spitting snow swirled around the lake. The hunters kept an eye on their lake valley for moose and caribou which sometimes ignored marginal weather. Nothing moved.

  Mac used the day to enlarge his nets and make several more. He was especially pleased to find a small fiberglass fishing boat in the shed which would help him deploy his nets without wading in the icy lake.

  The miners and pilots made spears to improve their chances of taking a caribou. Crafting the first using William’s hardened walking stick with its burl topper made the perfect handle for a large serrated kitchen knife, resulting in a balanced thrusting spear.

  Making a longer throwing spear proved more difficult. A small hunting knife provided a fine head, but they found nothing suitable for the long shaft except an old tent pole. Tony suspected the flimsy pole wouldn’t last long but shaped it anyway. Without deadfall, he vowed to search the woods for something better.

  The snow turned to unabated rain. By afternoon, the ribbon of silt-laden shallows around the lake obscured all of the plant bearing shoreline. Mac resolved to fish in the morning regardless.

  That day, the cabin revealed more of its secrets…a pair of binoculars stored together with a portable multi-band short-wave receiver powered by dry cell batteries. Housed in a lacquered wood case, the radio was an ancient analogue antique requiring old-fashioned tuning skills.

  While waiting for dinner, the Captain explored the bands, but heard only waves of static and a weak transmission in Morse code. He concluded that they were poorly situated surrounded by mountains without a proper antenna and gave up.

  The best surprise was buried treasure beneath the cabin floor. Tony removed a rug just inside the door intending to shake out its accumulation of mud. He discovered the rug covered a trap door to a root cellar. Inside, a layer of straw mixed with cedar shavings covered a bounty of fresh vegetables stored from a recent garden, and an abundance of Gravenstein apples.

  Pondering the hoard, Mac said, “Finding all this begs a question. Hasn’t someone been here recently… maybe the owner’s guests? This stash is fresh, especially the apples. I wonder why they left, considering…”

  “More likely, they were planning to come back…” said Judy.

  “If they were planning to come back, they might’ve run into trouble,” said the Captain. “Remember that radio broadcast from Talkeetna? Everyone there was sick.”

  “The owners didn’t live in Talkeetna; they lived in the Matanuska Valley near Palmer,” replied Pappy. “They’re friends were prosperous farmers. That would explain the veggies.”

  “Just think this is odd…” Mac said, “All these cabins with no one around. This place should be a pretty fair refuge, I would think. Might find more food in the others.”

  “Way I see it, there’s two answers,” said Jack. “One is, they didn’t make it back this far…the other is they did.”

  “Huum... I suppose we should stay outta those other cabins,” replied Pappy. “We were lucky walking right in this one.”

  “Yea? Well, there ain’t no rescue squad for the unlucky anymore,” replied Jack. “Keep that in mind.”

  Over baked apples, the companions began a candlelight conversation during the long twilight. Mac enjoyed companions who were comfortable expressing their thoughts. But Judy, unwilling to discuss recent bitterness, sought social introductions all around.

  Thrown together by traumatic events, Judy knew little about her companions. So far, Tony had volunteered nothing about himself, probably by habit. So she prodded Tony first, hoping that if he would give an account of himself, everyone would follow.

  Judy explained her motive was to encourage fellowship among companions. Accordingly, she asked everyone to offer a candid assessment of himself.

  “Aw, I’ve never done nothin’ in my life worth the tellin’,” Tony protested.

  “Sure you have,” replied Judy. “You were miners in faraway Nome of all places. Just tell us about yourself and what you still believe after all that’s happened.”

  “Well… I ‘spose, if that’s all you want…but it’ll make no matter…

  “I was a gold miner even as a kid workin’ alongside my ol’ man… until he was killed. This’s been the longest stretch of my life that I haven’t worked some claim or other… and I ‘spect this might finally be the end of mining. Gold won’t be worth much, anymore, I ‘spect. God only knows what He’ll have me doin’ next.”

  But Tony confidently believed that God would look favorably upon any man who kept the faith, demonstrated loyalty and dependability among friends, worked diligently, and always helped others do the same. A verbal expression of his faith was not nearly as important as action… attention to duty and completing anything once begun. From childhood, he was taught that these would be the measures of a worthy man. One should never look back with regret upon anything properly done in accordance with the custom of the time.

  With such self-assurance, he also possessed a measure of patience for other people and their opinions. But such tolerance did not extend to those who confronted his fundamental faith or shirked the responsibilities required of a man. More than once on social occasions, Tony embarrassed his previous wife by vigorously defending his principles against any antagonist who scorned his fundamental view of decency.

  Tony hadn’t always been so self-assured. Failing early in school, he was disappointed with his own performance. He resolved to strike out independently and prove that he measured up to the dictates of his upbringing. Instead of formal employment, he joined with partners in one unfortunate mining enterprise after another up and down the Mother Lode in California. During that decade, they all failed.

  His luck changed when he joined Jack and formed a reliable partnership in mining ventures. They shared the burden of the hands-on labor made necessary for any mining enterprise. The key to their success was hard work and the ingenuity they brought to their operations.

  The most recent investment of the partners was their most unusual. The miners marveled at how the beach goldfields in Nome continued to be productive year after year. For eons, storms had replenished the beach sand each spring in a vast stretch of shoreline along the Seward Peninsula. More than a hundred years earlier, three “Lucky Swede” gold panners discovered an astonishing quantity of placer gold washed up on the beaches.

  Each year since the original discovery, the beach claims yielded enough gold for their owners to earn a modest livelihood. The reality of the goldfield was that every fall, the Bering Sea solidly froze up onto the beach, rendering the workings inaccessible. Churning winter storms stripped the beaches of sand while gentler spring waves usually recharged the beaches with precious flakes from deep offshore surges of Bearing Sea sand. Come spring, each miner renewed his frantic physical work for another season.

  The requirement of each claim was that the owner was obliged to work the claim himself. The success of any claim depended on each owner sifting as much sand as was physically possible each season. That included as much of the sea bottom within its boundaries as could be dredged up onto the beach and sluiced as well. Off season, the black concentrate was refined and processed.

  Seven years earlier, the par
tners had purchased two 60 foot adjacent Bearing Sea black sand gold claims and began working on borrowed money. As with so many gold offerings, the reward proved less bountiful than the ardent testimony of the previous owner. The physical labor required taxed the abilities of even the most dedicated, work-hardened lifers. That was until Tony came upon an entirely new technique for sluicing sand and adapted the practice to their beach.

  At a winter trade exhibition, Tony observed the operation of a new device designed to separate particles of gravel or sand by size or specific gravity in a different manner than traditional shaking equipment. This new apparatus was intended especially for the separation of loose alluvium. Tony recognized its similarity to hand sluicing beach sand into concentrate.

  The new machine used powerful waves of varying sound frequencies to vibrate the material while gently rocking stacked trays of alluvium, thus separating and gradating the particles of its composition. Tony was convinced the machine would separate out his beach gold and after trial experimenting refined the technique. With the designated rocking tray filled with rich black concentrate containing the gold, the machine separated more of the useless iron oxides from the last tray than an ordinary sluice.

  But the device frequently broke down, requiring endless repair. Even when the device functioned properly, the machine couldn’t process the needed quantity of beach alluvium. Finally, Jack persuaded Tony to return to traditional methods for the remainder of the season. Tony, however, was undaunted by the setback.

  Tony insisted the solution was a matter of durability, not of principle. The electronic components didn’t cause the problem; the electromechanical devices quickly corroded in salt water and failed. That winter, Tony redesigned the machine tailored to the demands of beach sluicing. Instead of the rocking trays, he employed a traditional Long Tom sluice using beach water. He attached the wave generator to a flexible steel bar underneath, protecting the frequency generators from salt water. Once wetted within the sluice, the particles could be effectively separated as they cascaded down the sloped pockets propelled in water by the varying sound vibrations.