by Henry, Sue
“Don’t ask me to make a decision right now. If you do…I don’t see how I can say yes. Don’t force me.”
“Force you?” Stung, he turned back to her, upset and frustrated.
“Didn’t you hear me? I said I wanted to marry you, share the rest of my life with you. Not drag you off by the hair to someplace you’d hate, like a Viking raider. You’ve never even seen my Idaho. How can it be so easy for you?”
“Easy? Not just going ahead and taking a chance—saying yes—is the hardest thing I can ever remember doing.”
“Maybe that’s what you should do, for once. But it doesn’t seem like it’s hard for you. You seem to just accept it as impossible without fighting.”
She thought about that for a minute, looking out at the solid shapes of the ice blocks on the Yukon.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that women think differently. We’re more practical in the long haul. Maybe we do accept what we perceive as inevitable more easily, but that doesn’t mean we don’t agonize over it—don’t die inside. This is terribly painful for me, Alex. Don’t misunderstand that. But, if it isn’t going to work out for us, I’d rather it were quick and clean, than long, drawn-out, and crippling.”
“You sound as though I’m making some kind of demand that you have to resist. I’m not, you know. I’m trying to share something I love with someone I love.”
“Well, maybe I do feel that, in a way. I don’t take well to demands—but you’re not really the demanding sort, are you? I know you love it there, Alex. But that doesn’t mean I will. Do you see? I love you. You know I do. I’d give almost anything for you—to you. But I won’t give you less than my best, and I don’t know if my best can include Idaho. Can you understand? I don’t know what I would do there—who I would be. I have to know that, before I can promise you without telling us both a lie.”
He was enormously hurt and disappointed. She could see it written in his eyes, in every line of his body. His voice sounded hollow in the cold air.
“So, you’re saying no.”
“I’m not saying that, Alex. I’m saying let me think about it a little longer. I’ve got a race to finish. While I do that, let me consider it—give it some time. Then, when it’s over, let’s go back to Knik, where we live, where things are more normal, and talk about it, okay?”
He shook his head. “I can’t stay that long. I’ve got to fly back in four days.”
She thought about that. “You’ll be coming to Circle and Central. I’ll come in, but don’t expect too much there. I’ll be exhausted by then and trying to get mentally ready for the last big summit that comes just after Central. Will you meet me in Angel Creek? That’s just outside of Fairbanks on the Chena Hot Springs Road. I’ll have an eight-hour layover there before making the last run through North Pole to the finish line. Meet me there and we’ll work out an answer. Keep an open mind, and so will I. That’ll be time at least to have given it some more thought.”
Jessie, Debbie, Ryan, and Lynn left Eagle together the next morning as the sun came up to shine on the ice of the wide Yukon River. They settled easily into the long, steady, 180-mile run to Circle, taking turns in the lead position, stopping for regular rests, passing other mushers, but being passed by none, for they were well behind any of those whose racing ability, quality of dogs, and speed could have bested the four. They knew they would not win the race—would not even place in the top few—but were content that what they had already accomplished was worth more to each of them than prize money.
Most of the time they were on the river, but a few times the trail left it to portage through woods and several icy lakes, and when they stopped to rest they usually pulled off to camp in the woods, or next to a driftwood pile frozen into the edge of the highway of ice.
They ran north through another jumble of ice blocks and cracks where the river had frozen restlessly in the fall, thawing and breaking apart to refreeze again into a paralyzed wasteland of natural ice sculpture. Forty miles out they stopped for a middle-of-the-night rest at a two-story trapper cabin at Trout Creek, and Jessie felt for the first time since early in the race a sense of peace and wonder at the silent display of northern lights that twisted ribbons of color across the sky over her head.
She stood alone on the riverbank and let go of most of the tension she had accumulated for the duration of Debbie’s abduction and their attempts to get her back safely. Part of it, she knew, was almost not making it out of the wilderness herself, coming close to freezing in the snow. It fueled her appreciation of all she observed and experienced, the people she valued, and she thought it probably would for a long time. It made her want to hold fast to what she had, instead of taking it for granted as she had done in the past. Yet even as she admired and treasured what she had, still she turned her attention to whatever was coming next, for it might be lovely, as well.
What was she to do about Alex and his proposal? She was not ready to analyze her feelings just yet, she decided, wouldn’t force it, but would let it float until the answer naturally came to the surface of her mind.
“Nice night.”
She looked over her shoulder to find Lynn Ehlers standing a little behind her, looking at the colors of the night. The three-quarter moon floated in the nets of the aurora like a silver seashell from some cosmic beach.
“Hmmm,” she agreed, and there was comfortable stillness between them for a few long minutes. In the trees behind them, she could hear Debbie crooning to her dogs as she checked them before catching some sleep for herself. Someone opened the cabin door to toss a panful of wash water onto the snow and, in the light that fell through a window, Jessie could see steaming rising from the spot where it had landed and now froze.
“You know, Lynn, I never really said thank you for helping me with Gail Murray on the summit, for taking her to Forty Mile in my place. If you hadn’t…well, you gave up your best chance in the race to do that, and you hardly know any of us—Gail not at all.”
“It wasn’t a big thing, Jess. If you race, you come to expect that bad things can happen and you may need to be part of them sometime or other. Honestly—I was honored that you trusted me. You really don’t know me, either, but you told me what you needed anyway, and why.”
“Well,” she told him with a smile, “there are people I’ve raced with for years that I wouldn’t have told. You get so you can read people pretty well. Anyway, thanks.”
Another silence. This time a listening one.
“Ryan said something earlier today that led me to think that you and that trooper who showed up yesterday are an item. Is that true, Jess?”
She hesitated. “Oh, Lynn. Right now—I just don’t know. We have been. But things are a bit mixed right now. Until we get it sorted out, I’d have to say, yes. We’re trying to be.”
“Okay. That’s fine. I just wondered. But, as a friend, would you mind if I called once in a while after this is all over?”
“Of course not. I hope you will.”
They walked back to the trapper cabin and left the night to its own dark hues.
28
“Silent, inexorable, not to be shaken off, he took [it] as the fate which waited at the last turn…[He] believed in those rare, illuminating moments, when the intelligence flung from it time and space, to rise naked through eternity and read the facts of life from the open book of chance.”
—Jack London, “Which Make Men Remember”
WELL BEFORE DAYLIGHT THE NEXT MORNING, THE FOUR MUSHERS were on their way again, rested and ready for what the day might bring. At this point, at a tall cliff, the Yukon widened where the Nation River came in to join it and help in giving the frozen surface the impression of wide, slow-moving waters. The wind picked up, blowing any residue of snow from the glare ice, on which the toenails of the dogs made scrabbling sounds, but gained little purchase, and the runners scraped as the sleds and mushers swung back and forth at the back end of the gang lines. It slowed the group’s speed slightly, but they were making good ti
me and did not mind. They were not running so much to compete anymore as to finally arrive at the finish line.
They were not tired or ready for a rest, but made a traditional stop at Biederman’s cabin. This was out of respect for Charlie Biederman, who in 1934-35 was the youngest mail sled driver in Alaska. At age fifteen, he had made the Upper Yukon’s last mail run with a team of dogs in 1935, just as the airplane took over. In fact, carrying the “government mail” by dog sled on the river highway between Dawson City and Circle had been a Biederman family tradition from the early days. The sled Charlie used when he started driving had been on display in the National Postal Museum at the Smithsonian since 1995, just before he died in Fairbanks, waiting for the Yukon Quest winner for that year to cross the finish line, which Canadian musher Frank Turner did twenty hours later.
Ryan had suggested that they stop only briefly, but they found that people had come in from trapline cabins all around the area to watch the mushers come through on the Quest. So it was an hour of greetings, congratulations, questions, hot food, and drink, before they could be on their way north to a longer rest at Slavin, where the park rangers provided a spacious shelter in a two-story cabin on the left-hand riverbank.
Through the dark, they ran together after Slavin, trading places in their train of four, stopping frequently to make coffee and warm themselves, snack their dogs. It was one of the most pleasant runs Jessie had ever made in a major race. The pressure of winning had been lifted away and, though they did not run slowly, all being good drivers with top quality teams, they did not push themselves, either. It was, to her, as good as the best of training runs, when she would come home through the wilderness country that she loved, tired and pleased with her efforts and the performance of her dogs, glad to have gone and glad to be back—satisfied in a way that added to her personal account in the accomplishment bank. Running with four other people who felt this was a warm way of realizing what couldn’t be articulated.
She thought of Alex, briefly. If I wasn’t a musher…
There was much laughter and easy conversation, sharing of food and ideas, naps and wake-up calls. Ehlers was made an honorary Alaskan by the acclaim of the other three, which was formalized in scratches with the awl from Jessie’s Swiss army knife onto a scrap of birch bark picked up somewhere by Ryan, and presented with great fanfare and hilarity. He promised to come back, if not the next year, then at least very soon. From the bemused expression she saw several times on his face, she thought he would, for it was clear that he had been infected by the lure of the far north and its people.
It was a long, flat run through the night, and they were all tired and ready for a long rest when they came to the first of a group of small islands and sloughs that told them they were almost to Circle. Before the Klondike gold rush, this settlement had been the largest in the area; it had been named Circle because the early miners thought they were on the Arctic Circle.
Debbie was in the lead when they crossed from the last little island to a big channel, went up the bank, and were suddenly at the checkpoint.
Leland was there with Debbie’s mom, who flew to her daughter, to assure herself that all was well. He just grinned, the same proud expression Jessie remembered seeing at the start in Whitehorse, mixed with a touch of humor, and let them be women together without him. But when his glance met Jessie’s and his lips formed the words thank you, she knew how much he meant it.
The four racers were directed to spaces near a big log cabin with white frame windows, the Alaskan flag pinned to the wall, along with a large WELCOME TO CIRCLE banner. They pulled their dogs in next to each other to begin the checkin process and went about finding straw for the dogs and the supplies they had shipped to this location.
Billy Steward all but flew to reach Jessie first and, losing all his teenage self-consciousness, wound his long arms around her in a huge hug of welcome before he realized what he had done, started to draw back, realized he didn’t care, and hugged her again.
“Hey, Jessie. We’ve been waiting and waiting. How was it? Did you make up any time? Are you very tired? I wish we could help you here, like we did in Dawson.”
Linda Caswell, her eyes dancing in her attempt to keep from laughing and embarrassing him, was next, and her embrace was less exuberant, but no less warm.
“You made it. We’re awfully proud of you. Billy doesn’t know everything about Debbie and all, but Cas told me,” she whispered in Jessie’s ear.
“Here’s your bale of straw,” Don Graham sang out in his bass voice, pulling up with it and her supplies on a sled behind a snowmachine. “They told me it was okay to bring it this far, but you’ll have to take it off to be legal.”
“Thanks, Don,” Jessie told him, conflicted, as she turned next to Alex and Cas, who were smiling from a position next to the dogs. Alex was down on one knee, accepting affectionate greetings from Tank, who, Jessie knew, had felt his long absence. Cas gave her a very straight, serious look and a slight nod, as Bob Spenser, the vet, came with an assistant to test her dogs, and she knew what was about to happen.
Out of the dark came two more troopers, who stood on either side of Spenser.
“Robert Spenser?” Caswell asked.
The vet looked at him, surprised by the official tone. “Yes.” Then, catching sight of the men beside him, his competent expression crumpled and he dropped his clipboard. “Oh, God—no.”
“You are under arrest,” Cas told him. “Anything you say may be used against you…” He continued the Miranda warning, as one of the other troopers handcuffed the broken man. They led him off in the direction of a van that Jessie could see parked next to the checkpoint building.
There was a confused buzz of questions and comments from the people who had gathered to watch the racers come in and found themselves witness to something unexpected. The mushers themselves, and all those gathered around them, were unusually quiet, all except one knowing that it wasn’t finished—that there was one more person to be called to account for Debbie’s abduction, B. J. Lowery’s killing, and the attempted murder of both Debbie and Jessie. In that uncomfortable silence, Jessie noticed that Alex had moved around her sled to stand with the trooper who had not gone with Spenser to the van.
“Don Graham?” Caswell asked quietly.
The big man gave him a startled look. “What?”
“You are under arrest—”
“Oh, shit. What for? I never had anything to do with—”
“Don’t, Don,” Jessie said suddenly, and took a step forward. “Please, don’t. Wilson told us all about it in Eagle.”
He stopped what he had been about to say and looked down at her, his face unreadably sad.
“I never meant to have you involved, or hurt, Jessie. I was only interested in the money.”
“I believe that,” she told him. “That’s why it was so hard to understand and accept.”
“I tried to stop you from running this race.”
She thought about that for a moment.
“You mean the stanchion that broke?”
“Yes, that, your two missing dogs in Knik, and the sick ones in Whitehorse. I’m sorry, Jessie.”
“You messed with my dogs?” She gave him a long, disappointed look and turned away.
Caswell read him the warning while Jensen restrained him.
Large and strong as he was, he could have put up quite a struggle, maybe succeeded in getting away or injuring someone, but he let them do their job without a fight or a further complaint.
“Well,” he said with a hint of bravado when they had both finished, and even managed a rueful grin, “I guess I did it to myself. You never play, you never lose. It started out worth the chance.”
“Franz Hildebrand?”
“Yesterday,” Cas told her. “We spotted him on the river yesterday morning from the plane, and were waiting for him when he got here. He had all the money, just like Wilson said. Leland got him right in one—face of an angel on a stone predator.”
&
nbsp; “No trouble?”
“Well, he did have trouble getting up the riverbank when that piece of cable Alex and I were carrying took him off his snowmachine. Accidentally, of course.”
“Of course. Good grief, you two. I should have known there’d be something.”
“He just got a little banged up and didn’t have a chance to use his gun. We got lucky, I’d say.”
“Somehow his bruises don’t half bother me. I can’t figure out why.”
Alex and Cas grinned at each other like a couple of small schoolboys, instead of the Alaska State Troopers they were.
Jessie ran the rest of the race alone, at her request, knowing she must now try to confront herself with Alex’s proposal.
Ryan insisted on her going out first, behind Debbie and Ehlers by half an hour, but, from times past, she knew he would only follow, unless she wanted company. She hadn’t known that he was aware that something was worrying her, and also had a confession of his own.
“I’ve felt badly ever since I went ahead of you over American Summit, when I knew there was something going on,” he said.
“That wasn’t your fault, Jim. I told you to go—we had to do it that way, no matter what came of it later.”
“That doesn’t make me feel less guilty.”
“Oh, give it a rest, Ryan,” she teased, to dilute the appreciation she knew he recognized. “Let your new wife give you the guilties. I refuse to be responsible.”
“I’ll just stay away from both of you for the moment, thanks. But if you get to longing for a chat—or can’t make it over Eagle Summit with that scrap team you’ve got—”
“Scrap team, my…This team will run the legs off yours.”
“We’ll see. We’ll just see, when we come to where performance really counts.”
And performance soon counted.
They ran to Central, where Crabb’s Corner made them welcome with a break that included some of the best food on the race in a cafe so full of wonderful, enthusiastic people that it felt like the end of the race and was exceptionally hard to leave. Here they were met by a tangle of media that had now heard the basics of the kidnapping and ransom plot and were anxious for any statement they could get from Jessie. They crowded around her with their cameras and questions until she escaped back to her team and the trail.