Due North

by Jackson, Melanie

  Due North

  by

  Melanie Jackson

  Version 1.4 – August, 2011

  Published by Brian Jackson at KDP

  Copyright © 2011 by Melanie Jackson

  Discover other titles by Melanie Jackson at: www.melaniejackson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Chapter 1: The Crash

  Usually, when a plane falls out of the sky, it draws an immediate crowd. But not in McIntyre’s Gulch, especially not in winter when it snows more than not. The last storm had lasted three days and screamed like the damned the entire time. A plane crashing would just be one more noise amongst a thousand others. Breaking plane, breaking trees, breaking thunder—unless it had landed on someone’s roof, no one would notice anything until the spring thaw. Because no one in their right mind would be out walking where I was until at least May.

  After a decade of finding odd things while hiking, especially with Max, this discovery didn’t surprise me. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t dismayed to find an out-of-place something blocking my way through the high meadow. It is one of the few level places where one can look up at the sky, unimpeded by branches or rocks. It feels a bit like a cathedral, a sacred and secret place.

  “Uh-oh,” I said to Max, who cocked his pointy ears my way. “This isn’t good. Someone has dumped their junker out here. Who would be such a pig?”

  Max didn’t agree that finding junk was bad. His eyes glittered with joy and he panted out doublewide breaths of steam. He was full of energy after his game of canine hockey. Max loves going out on the frozen pond and having me shove him over the ice. Kind of like crack the whip, but I let go and he goes skating. Unfortunately for him, I tire of the game long before he does. Max still had plenty of energy to spare for exploration, and I felt guilty enough after my human hibernation to be lured deeper into the forest.

  I looked at the giant white hump of misplaced something. Thick snow gives the scenery a certain sameness, hiding both landmarks and dangers, making it easy to get lost or fall into trouble. I had learned to trust Max to be my auxiliary eyes and nose. He always knew his way home. At least by dinnertime.

  Still, we had ventured out farther than I had planned and were in an area I rarely visited after September, a passing glacier had left deep, uneven furrows that one could fall into if the ice wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight. I was rather wishing that I had stuck to my pattern and not found this eyesore, because now that it was discovered I would have to look into it. After all, though it probably was someone’s abandoned piece of junk, it might be something—someone—else.

  I began to circle the blob. In the right light, ice is more beautiful than diamonds. Certainly there is more of it, and with the sun shining on the crystals, weakening their bonds, snow can mumble and moan in ways that diamonds never would. Unfortunately, what was glinting at me was neither ice nor diamonds. It was glass. And from the general outline of things, I knew it was a sheet of glass, like from a vehicle.

  A new fear presented itself. What if this wasn’t an abandoned truck but one that had had an accident? What if someone had gotten stranded out here and then caught in the storm? I hadn’t heard that anyone was missing in town, but maybe someone had come up from Little Fork.

  “Damn.” After three days of near-whiteout conditions and below-zero temperatures with a broken window, chances were anyone inside would be dead.

  Max, inclined to rush in where angels and humans fear to tread, dashed up the mound and began digging at what might be a door. I hoped it wasn’t because he smelled carrion. I love him, but he has some disgusting eating habits.

  “Max, stop. You’ll cut your paws. Now,” I said and meant it. Unless I am very clear about what I want, Max is inclined to do as he pleases.

  Max backed off reluctantly, shaking snow from his fur and growling at the mound that had clearly offended me. Three days spent indoors because of a late storm had left him seething with pent-up energy, and he was ready to tear that blob of snow into sno-cones if that was what I wanted.

  After the last three days I was too tired and cold to seethe. When the wind howls, Max howls, lamenting the time indoors when he might be out chasing snowflakes and wind and maybe voles. I let him out for short runs, but he is a social beast and prefers to be in my company—even if I am weak in body and prefer the indoors and baking bread to standing out in a blizzard like a proper wolf.

  His choice would be flattering to me, but I suspect it is often about food and he doesn’t stop complaining until I feed him. Day, night, he sighs and moans and whines. Sleeping is difficult with a dog that seems to sigh on both the inhale and the exhale.

  “Stay back, Max. Stay.” I scrambled up the slope and began digging carefully. The snow slipped away in soft crunches until I reached the inner layer of rime. The snow had melted on the hot body of the vehicle and frozen into a solid ice sheath. It took a few kicks to crack the icy cocoon and free the door of what proved to be a single-engine airplane.

  “Double damn.” I don’t know a lot about planes, but no one flies anything less than a twin-engine up here in the winter, not unless they have a death wish. This had to be someone from down south who didn’t know about winter in Manitoba.

  Max, the big mouth, cheered me on.

  As I feared, there was someone inside the plane. Only one someone that I could see, but he was past all efforts of first aid. I noticed longish dark hair, a crushed skull, a neck tattoo, and hoarfrost all over the slender body. But above all else, I found my eyes focused on the large duffel bag full of money in the passenger’s seat, and another one on the floor with a broken zipper that seemed to contain jewelry and some kind of bonds and stock certificates.

  “Uh-oh, damn and damn,” I said again. I peered around the body and looked in the backseat. There was yet another large duffel, though this one was closed. Maybe it had clothes, but since it looked like the other two and had what I thought was a gun barrel poking out of the tiny zipper opening, I kind of suspected that it wouldn’t be filled with sandals and suntan oil.

  “Max, shut up please. I need to think.”

  Max turned it down a notch, but he was still quivering with the need to get into the plane and explore things for himself.

  I will admit to being a little paranoid and try to take precautions against it. Conspiracy theories thrive around here. Mostly because the majority of us have participated in at least one conspiracy, and sometimes more, though not always voluntarily. Paranoia is the cultural norm in McIntyre’s Gulch.

  Leaving aside the wildest hypotheticals about the plane and its occupant, even innocent bodies meant police involvement if they were reported to the authorities. Bodies with money, guns, and jewels guaranteed prolonged police interest and might also mean other criminals looking for misplaced items. I wanted nothing to do with either.

  Nobody else in town would want to talk to strangers either. I should just shut the door and walk away. Someone else could deal with it in the spring.

  It was a lot of money though. A lot. And how would I explain that find without mentioning the plane? There was no way. In a town this small, one didn’t have monetary secrets. And once the story was known, someone might blab.

  Maybe I was being too bleak in my thoughts. After all, the plane had been out here for days with no one coming to look for her. There hadn’t even been any reports of a plane going missing in the area, no requests for help at search and rescue. So maybe there wouldn’t be any trouble even if
everyone knew about it.

  And it was a lot of money.

  “What do you think, Max? Should we go get help? Go tell someone what’s happened?”

  Max gave a low howl at my euphemism.

  “Good point. We shouldn’t leave all that money lying around where a bear might eat it. I better make a sledge though. It’s too heavy to carry. You can help me pull it, right?”

  Max danced excitedly.

  Building a travois is an easy enough task if you have tree limbs, a blanket or tarp, and some string and a pocket knife. The string and knife were in my pocket, the tree branches were all around. The only trouble was finding a tarp, but there was a canvas plane cover in the back, stuffed carelessly behind the seat. The pilot was dead and neither he nor the plane would be needing it again, so I cannibalized it.

  Leaving fingerprints at the scene wasn’t a problem as I wasn’t about to take my gloves off and risk frostbite, but I made every effort not to touch the corpse anyway. The man, even dead—maybe because he was dead—was repellant. Something about that tattoo caused a bad vibe. And I watch CSI when we get tapes at the pub. I know about DNA evidence. You can’t be too careful. I did look in the other bag though, and it had a machine pistol along with more money. The machine pistol wasn’t something we would use for hunting or killing anything around here. Except man.

  Like I said, I’m a little paranoid.

  “Okay, Max. Let’s go to town—and no stopping for foxes or rabbits. I mean it.”

  Max raced away, leaving me to play oxen.

  I didn’t run. The sledge was heavy, and the trouble with working hard in the cold is that it is too easy to overheat. That doesn’t become a problem until you need to take a rest, which in my case was somewhere around Potter’s Ridge when I was breathing hard enough to make a fog around my head. If you wait too long, the sweat cools against the skin and begins to freeze. Hypothermia can set in very quickly. So, though I would have liked a longer rest and maybe some coffee and an apple fritter with butter, I allowed myself only a two-minute breather before continuing down the hill.

  Max would run ahead and then double back to check on me. After the ridge, the way became easier and mostly downward sloping, though there was less protection from the wind.

  On a good day, I think of McIntyre’s Gulch as being protectively cradled in the crescent of a majestic mountain range. That afternoon, from where I labored up on the ridge, I was thinking that the town looked more like it had been shoved down into a sinkhole and left where it landed. Certainly, it wasn’t the kind of place a city planner would be proud of. Building sites were chosen because of flat surfaces that didn’t need dynamiting, and not design esthetics. There weren’t many of those sites either, and buildings crowded onto them.

  I began following a deer track, figuring that it was a proven passage with no holes or fissures hidden by snow for me to drop into. I also trusted Max to warn me if there were any other creatures stirring in the forest. He is pretty good at frightening animals away, even bears and mountain lions. I had a gun of course. You don’t go out of town without a gun. But usually Max was enough of a deterrent. I hate shooting things.

  “Brrrr.”

  The winds had died back some as we reached the zenith of our short day, but they were picking back up again. The occasional northern gust was violent, reminding me that we were on the tail end of the dark season, the one that tries earnestly to kill you when you get careless or disrespectful of its power.

  A flock of white-cheeked geese came honking overhead, silhouettes in a darkening sky. I figured that it must really be spring if they were coming back to the lake to scout out nesting spots and tried to take heart. Sometimes it felt like winter would never end.

  Max barked and spun in the air, as if he really thought he could catch the geese.

  “Silly dog,” I said fondly.

  Chapter 2: The Town

  Town is small. Like blink and you’ll miss it small. We have only four public buildings and a few private houses that line the one paved street. That’s good because by the time I had reached our one and only flat street, I was grunting with every footstep and sweat was running down my face.

  I was glad that it wasn’t Sunday. The first building one encounters coming in from the south is a sort of church/town hall. It has a bimonthly schedule for the itinerant preachers who look after our spiritual needs, weather permitting. The Presbyterian minister, John McNab, has the first Sunday and the Episcopal priest, Father White, comes on the third.

  Most of us aren’t terribly religious, but Sundays are boring in winter and we prefer not to be labeled as godless heathens by the outside world. It’s a short step in most people’s minds from godless to lawless. We keep up appearances to avoid talk. In aid of that we have bingo night every third Saturday when Father White flies in early for chicken dinner and legal gambling. Half the money goes to the Episcopal Church and half stays in town to buy things for “the public weal.” Our last purchase was a new radio that replaced the World War Two surplus model we used for decades. That one had been moved to the grocery store. The radio is necessary because we have no cell phone coverage and the only landline that reaches out of the Gulch is at the pub. Instead we are part of the General Radio Service. That’s just like citizens band radio in the United States. For in-town communication we have crank phones, relics from the ’40s and slightly better at carrying sound than soup cans and string. Unless the lines have frozen.

  Some might chafe at the lack of this modern convenience, but it has done a lot to keep the town off of anyone’s radar.

  You see, what nonresidents don’t know—and never suspect because we all have red hair and closed mouths—is that while the carrot-topped McIntyres are actually related by blood, most of the Joneses aren’t. We, the self-selected Joneses of McIntyre’s Gulch, are transplants from the outside: refugees, outcasts, and sometimes actual outlaws. The red hair, in my case, is natural. Some of the other residents owe a debt to L’Oreal and Clairol.

  We may have started as different people from different places, but through the decades we have become family in every way except the legal one, and we look out for each other accordingly. Sometimes grudgingly. But in the eyes of the law, DNA trumps emotional ties. We therefore tend to stay away from formal law enforcement, hospitals, and any other institutions that might want to collect genetic data and use it to control us. Whenever possible, and it almost always is, we solve our problems, legal and medical, in-house.

  Yes, we were nearly as invisible as that enchanted town of Brigadoon, but that might change if we reported the downed plane. It would certainly change if the authorities found out about the money the plane had been carrying, though I should be grateful it wasn’t drugs.

  According to national statistics, McIntyre’s Gulch has the lowest crime rate in Canada. We are also not much of a burden on the national health system.

  Doc Jones (the Bones) is retired—or maybe stricken-off, if that is what they do to doctors who drink too much on the job—and takes care of most of our medical needs, including tooth extractions. I do his taxes for him since he is one of the few who actually still pays them. Fortunately for us, his common-law wife is a medicine woman. Linda Skywater only lets him see patients when he’s sober, and she is a wonderful practical nurse and healer in her own right.

  In fact, our last outside medical case was an emergency appendectomy in ’02. If the Bones had been sober, we wouldn’t have farmed that out either, but he had gone up to his fishing cabin on a three-day bender and the Wings had to fly Madge Brightwater into Winnipeg. Linda and I had looked after her dogs while she was gone.

  We have one other part-time resident who is not a McIntyre or Jones. Wendell Thunder is of the Brokenhead tribe near Lake Winnipeg. I’m not sure what brought him our way, but he has a sod-roof cabin just outside of town where he breeds wolf hybrids. That’s where Max came from. Wendell and I have a bit of romantic history that I do my best to forget.

  A quick glance in
the window at Doc’s showed me that the Bones wasn’t in. That wasn’t surprising. He spent a lot of time at the Lonesome Moose. If our town has an emotional center, it is the pub.

  The first sign that anyone was still alive was at the market. Amy (the Braids—formerly a Jones but now a McIntyre) is married to Davey McIntyre and they run the grocery/post office/DVD rental store, which they had inherited when Big Davey passed on two years ago. They also have a gas pump out behind the shop that is our sole source of gasoline and diesel.

  I do their books too. Pretty much, if you have electricity then you pay taxes. If you pay taxes, I do them for you.

  Amy was waiting on customers, and they turned to stare at me as I struggled by with my burden.

  One of her patrons was Surfer Jones. He was probably no more a Jones than a surfer in his former life, but no one knows for sure. He wears beachwear whenever the weather permits and talks like a surfer dude. He is also one of the few men who are clean-shaven. The rest grow beards in winter. I wish I could grow a beard in winter…. All I know for sure is that Surfer is a refugee from California and that he never actually lived near the ocean, growing up in a commune in Bakersfield. Surfer came north when things were heating up during the Vietnam War. He grows marijuana, eats mostly vegan, and uses his smokable to barter for the things he needs. He does not pay taxes and he has let his hair go gray.

  I mouthed a “slan leat” at them and Surfer mouthed “dude” back. Slan leat is a Gaelic blessing, part of the founders’ language which has lingered. It means “health upon you” and takes the place of hello in many conversations.

  Danny waved. Danny (the Wings, who I mentioned before) is a Jones-McIntyre and our pilot. He makes a monthly run for supplies that can’t be trucked in from Little Fork and handles our rare medical emergencies that need the hospital at Winnipeg. There is an airfield about two miles out of the Gulch on the top of a flat mountain that can be used in summer when the lake has thawed, but Danny prefers to land on the lake or in town when he has supplies, and the road is just wide enough to accommodate him. If there’s no wind or cars.