I’ve understood why a son might be driven to kill a cruel father, but a father murdering his son, no matter how delinquent, has always struck me as an unthinkable crime against nature, right up to the moment when my son made me think it.
I am on bear watch while Trey fishes, standing sideways to the current, his feet spread wide to keep his balance, the gray-green water making a V-shaped riffle as it pushes around his upstream leg. He’s casting into a pocket across the river, just above the place where it necks down and dances over a rock-cobbled shallows before sliding into a long pool, smooth as an ice sheet and darkened by the spruce leaning out from both banks. In the far distance, a snow-cowled mountain shows blue in the long arctic twilight. It’s late in August—the days at these high latitudes shed light quickly, each several minutes shorter than the one before; even so, the hours of full darkness are brief. The blackness that cancels dawn and dusk will not descend for another two months. I’ve experienced that perpetual midnight only once, the year I’d studied in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, and I hated it.
Trey makes a cast. Line and leader shoot ruler-straight behind him, then the forward cast unfurls in a tight loop. He stops the rod at the ten o’clock position, as I’ve taught him, and the leader inscribes a rough S in the air and the streamer flops into the pocket water, under a hanging alder branch. After mending the line to make for a natural drift, he follows the fly with his rod tip as it swings downstream, then strips in and casts again. Nicely done, I think. Sensing that the lift in my heart his finesse produces might presage forgiveness, I check it immediately. It’s always a mistake to conflate the artist with his artistry.
The rod bows on the next drift; the line slashes crosscurrent into the shallow water above the pool.
“Big one!” Trey calls to me as I sit on the gray gravel bar and keep a lookout for bears. We haven’t seen any so far, but they’re around, fishing, too, because salmon and char are spawning now. Their huge tracks, printing the riverside mud, give me the same pause as signs that read: DANGER! NO TRESPASSING.
The tips of the tail and dorsal fins of Trey’s fish show above the surface, and there must be at least a foot between them. I glimpse a flash of reddish belly, dark, speckled flanks: a char, a spawning male that might be six or eight pounds. Mud swirls when its belly scrapes bottom. Realizing it has swum into trouble, the fish turns suddenly into the pool and streaks downstream; all the line and then backing hisses off the reel.
“Jesus! Bigbigbig!”
Trey wasn’t calling to me now; maybe to himself, maybe to the somber spruce immuring the river. Nature in Alaska is nothing like the housebroken nature in lower Michigan, where we’re from. It’s nature off the leash, stupefyingly vast, and its wild soul whispers that you are a triviality, so you announce your presence, you assert yourself with a yelp, a shout, a howl.
The pool is nearly as long as a football field. Tiring, the char stops its run at about the fifty-yard mark. A quivering in the taut line that throws tiny droplets into the air tells me that it’s shaking its head to throw the hook. I picture it down in the emerald depths, the streamer hanging like spittle from a jutting jaw. Trey wades into the thin water to give himself firmer footing.
“Put the screws to him,” I say, standing up. A lesser yellowlegs, alarmed by my movement, swoops toward my head, low enough to make me flinch. “Cup the reel. See if you can turn him.”
“I know what to do.”
“Then do it.”
“I’m afraid I’ll break him off.”
“If you know what you’re doing, you won’t.”
He follows my instructions—a rare thing—and clamps his fingers on the spool to prevent the reel from turning and to apply maximum pressure on the fish. It doesn’t budge. The rod, stiff enough for the grayling Trey caught earlier, is too light for this beast.
It races off again, and Trey sprints with it, hopping along a narrow shelf edging the right-hand bank, where the water is no more than a few inches deep. He’s trying to get below the char, so he won’t have to fight it and the current both. I follow him, stumbling in my waders down the whole length of that pool, Trey reeling up slack as he runs, staying tight to the fish. We round an oxbow bend. The char stops again, and so do we, a good thing; a sow grizzly with two yearling cubs occupy a gravel bar no more than thirty, thirty-five yards downstream.
She is looking into the river, ready to pounce on any decent meal that swims by. Although we’re downwind, she senses our presence, rises on her hind legs and stares right at us, as motionless as a stuffed bear in a museum, except for her cinnamon fur, rippling in the breeze blowing straight up the river from the direction of the mountain whose name I cannot pronounce. Every inch of eight feet, every ounce of five hundred pounds, she stands upright for three or four seconds, assessing if we’re a threat, then drops back to all fours but continues to face us, her snout raised to pick up a scent. Grizzlies have poor eyesight, but she might consider it a challenge if I meet her gaze. Lowering mine, I notice how vibrant are the colors of the rocks paving the river bottom—green, gold, red—and this acuity of vision has something to do with the fact that a five-hundred-pound grizzly is taking a profound interest in my son and me.
Credit Trey with whatever is the opposite of attention deficit disorder. Or maybe it’s the conviction, inherent in all twenty-year-olds, that he’s indestructible. He’s totally focused on his fish, which has lodged itself in a trough beside a boulder roughly halfway between us and the bear. Rick loaned me his .44 Magnum before we left camp. It’s in a shoulder holster strapped outside my chest waders. No creature on earth is more implacable than a female grizzly defending her young. This one, probably, would be on us quicker than I can draw, aim, and fire a killing shot. Not that I want to kill her, but I want even less—much, much less; infinitely less—for her to kill Trey and me.
“Break him off,” I whisper.
“No way. I—”
I snatch the line near the reel, give it a quick wrap around my fingers, and feel the line go slack as the leader parts.
“What the fuck…?” Trey groans, reeling up as he reproaches me with a look.
The char enjoys its liberty for a second or two before the sow lunges into the water and, in a single movement, like a second baseman fielding a slow grounder barehanded and flipping it to first, swats the fish with a forepaw and tosses it onto the gravel bar. The cubs pounce on it.
We start to hike back toward camp, a half mile or so upstream. The river is low and braided, and the walking is easy over the exposed shoals, rocks milled down to pebbles by twelve thousand years of rushing glaciated water.
“That was a helluva good fish. Would’ve been the biggest trout I ever caught,” Trey says, injecting rebuke into “would’ve been.”
“A char isn’t a trout, if that’s any comfort.”
“Well, it isn’t.”
“If that sow got it into her head that we were a danger to her cubs, she would have been on top of us in two seconds flat and in another five seconds turned the both of us into coleslaw.”
Trey responds with what used to be called the silent treatment but is now known as passive aggressiveness. Being a male of the old school, the kind who prefers back slaps to bro hugs, I would welcome a mood of active aggressiveness, an air-clearing, spleen-blowing fight, albeit one that doesn’t turn physical: Trey is one-ninety and is—I mean was—a varsity wrestler at the University of Michigan, while I’m a fifty-six-year-old Russian literature professor who hasn’t been in a scrap since I was his age, and maybe younger.
When we come to the spot where I’d been watching for bears, the yellowlegs flies from out of the woods on another strafing run. She wings so close that she nearly knocks my hat off. Others join her—a squadron buzzing us with shrill cries. The avian attack is like a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds, but it’s as comical as it is menacing. Laughing at ourselves as we duck and bob and weave, like punch-drunk fighters, we break into a jog to escape, staggering over the rocks
. Finally, we’re in the clear, except for a single bird that flies out ahead, one wing flapping erratically.
“What the hell was that all about?” Trey asks with a nervous giggle. Some of the tension between us has relaxed. Some, but not all.
“Must be a rookery nearby,” I answer. “Protecting their chicks.” I point at the lone yellowlegs with the spastic wingbeat. “She’s pretending she’s injured to draw us away from the nests, I guess in case the bombardment didn’t work. Predators always go for the weak one, right?”
Trey shrugs and resumes his silence.
Three bell tents of brightly colored nylon sit like huge termite mounds on the tundra fell that slants upward toward the south face of the Brooks Range. Smoke rises in tendrils near the largest of the three, our mess-cum-supply tent. Rick and Elise are cooking dinner. Rick is a freelance wildlife photographer who is doing a photo-essay for a sporting magazine that appeals to outdoorsmen with seven-figure incomes. Elise is his girlfriend, but he always refers to her as his assistant, to preserve the fiction that their relationship is strictly professional. As for Trey and me, we’re Rick’s subjects—we are to begin hunting Dall sheep when the season opens tomorrow.
We slog across the fell toward camp. It looks cozy and welcoming, so long as we focus on it and avoid taking in the landscape, whose scale and wildness reduce it, and us, to nothing. In the Alaskan bush, you are constantly aware that a small mistake in judgment, or a stroke of bad luck, can have catastrophic results. Most state mottoes and nicknames are exaggerations or outright falsehoods. Michigan claims it’s the Wolverine State, even though a wolverine hasn’t been sighted there in a century. But Alaska really is what it calls itself—the Last Frontier—and given its inhospitable climate and geography, is likely to remain so forever.
“Any luck?” Rick asks, stirring a pan in which the contents of a U.S. Army MRE have been dumped. The olive-green package lies crumpled on the rock fire ring.
“Yeah and no,” Trey replies, managing to sound sulky and sarcastic at the same time.
Rick looks up and squints at me, deep lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes, like rays in a child’s drawing of the sun. I remove the shoulder holster and pistol and hand them to him and explain what happened on the river. He nods to tell me that I did the smart thing, and Elise seconds him.
“Mama bear starts to look at you like that, you relocate. But you don’t turn and run. That would trigger a chase response, and a grizz can outrun a racehorse. You back away from her, cooing like you’re putting a baby to sleep.”
Trey opens his mouth to say something, and fearing that it will be smart-alecky, I’m grateful when Elise checks him with an upraised hand.
“Now, sometimes a grizzly will charge anyway, sow or boar. You’ll know a charge is coming when the bear clacks its jaws. It can be pretty loud, all those sharp teeth, and it’s the most shit-your-skivvies sound you’ll ever hear in the bush. To give yourself a chance that it isn’t the last thing you’ll ever hear, you fall on your belly, cover the back of your neck with your hands, and play dead. If you’re lucky, the bear leaves you alone.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Trey asks.
“You’ll probably die.”
“Why not just shoot the damn thing first?”
“That assumes you have a gun with enough oompf to drop it right away. Take those .270s you and your dad have.…” She twitches her head at the yellow-and-green tent a few yards away, our tent. “They’ll kill a grizz if you can shoot it right through the heart or the brain. Otherwise, you’d best be sure you’ve removed the scope and filed the front sight off.”
Trey skews his face into a puzzled expression. Elise smiles—she has a toothpaste-commercial smile—and I grin, too, knowing what’s coming.
“That way, it won’t hurt so much when the bear grabs the gun and shoves the barrel up your ass.”
Trey’s laughter is welcome. Elise has brought out the good Trey, for the moment anyway. She talks like a Calamity Jane and looks like a supermodel: the dazzling smile, reddish-blond hair that falls in waves a little past her shoulders, hazel-green eyes, and the finely cut features of a WASP princess, though she attests to come from dirt-poor country stock. What she’s doing with Rick is mystifying, a study in the perverseness of human sexual attraction. He’s my age, twenty years older than she, and two inches shorter. Gray spatters his unkempt, dingy brown beard, and the teeth that show through it now and then are crooked and stained from his former habit of smoking a pack of unfiltered Camels a day.
Trey reaches into his canvas creel and, one by one, pulls out four fat grayling.
“I got these at least,” he declares, lays them on the ground in a neat row, and waits to be praised as the camp’s provider.
“We’ll have a two-course meal, then,” says Rick, who fetches a sheathed knife and a small cutting board from a canvas bag. “Fillet ’em, but not here. Nothing like fish guts and slime in camp to draw critters, so do it there.”
He points at the lake a short distance away, where the floatplane delivered us yesterday afternoon. Trey looks at him as if he’s been ordered to scrub a toilet.
“Something the matter?” asks Rick.
“Isn’t that the guide’s job?”
Rick clenches his jaw, then forces his lips to part, his teeth like chunks of almond. “I’m not your guide. This isn’t a guided trip. It’s just the four of us, and we all pitch in, right?”
“Meaning,” I say, shamed by my son’s spoiled-brat attitude, “filleting the fish is your goddamn job.”
He says nothing. Words would be superfluous. Ill adept at disguising his feelings, he seldom needs to express them out loud.
Elise grabs the knife and cutting board. “C’mon, Trey. We’ll get it done in two minutes.”
When they’re out of earshot, Rick says, “It’s none of my business, but—”
“I’ll apologize for him. We taught him manners, Cheryl and I did, but sometimes he’s a thirteen-year-old in a twenty-year-old body. Been a handful since day one. Nothing like his older brother.”
Gloving his hand, Rick removes the pot from the coals and covers it. “I meant there’s something simmering between you two. It’s damn near visible. Even an idiot like me can see it.”
He and I go back a very long way, to high school in Manitou Falls, Michigan, where Rick, a skinny misfit, had been nicknamed “Nature-Nerd” because he spent most of his free time in the woods, collecting plants and bugs and taking pictures with an Instamatic of rabbits, raccoons, birds. I’d gone on a few of his expeditions and had been impressed by his skills and eventually became his friend, shielding him from bullies and taunts. We haven’t seen each other in years, and although he no longer needs me to protect him from anything, our old bonds are like the strings in a fine piano—still in tune, even though it hasn’t been played in decades.
Which is why I have no trouble being candid with him. Last April, near the end of his sophomore year, Trey had been expelled from UM for, as the police report phrased it, possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. Hashish was the controlled substance. His partner, a girlfriend studying abroad for the semester, had mailed him a kilo of the stuff from Amsterdam.
“That proved the both of them flunked Drug Trafficking 101,” I say.
Rick frowns, puzzled, then arches his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah. Dope is legal in Holland, so…”
“So a package mailed from there is likely to get special attention. Okay, the mailman delivered it to Trey’s apartment—he was living off campus with a couple of his frat brothers. The mailman had him sign for it. The cops had set that up with the post office. Trey stashed it in the fridge. Five minutes later, narcs from the sheriff’s department kicked down the door, confiscated the dope, and off Trey went to the county jail in handcuffs.” I pause for a moment, mentally composing an abridgment of the miserable tale. “First I heard about it was when he phoned me, begging me to bail him out. Somebody—a public defender or cop, I don’t know�
��told him that because it was his first offense, the felony would be wiped from his record if he pled guilty and went to Narcotics Anonymous meetings once a week for a year. I sent him to college for a degree; now I had to cough up twenty-five hundred bucks to keep from acquiring a rap sheet. If I’d had Star Trek powers, I would have teleported from Lansing to Ann Arbor and strangled him with the phone cord.”
Rick chuckles.
“I’m serious, Rick. I felt capable of killing him.”
“So what did you do?”
“Waited twenty-four hours before wiring the money. I figured a night behind bars might be a teaching moment. You want a lesson in humility, go to a strip-mall Western Union to wire bail money to your kid.”
“That’s a lesson I’ve never needed. What’s so humbling about it?”
“You stand in line with trailer trash bailing out their relatives.”
“Uh-huh.” His narrow gray eyes fix on me. “So what’s pissed you off is that Paul Egremont, PhD, professor of Russian lit, had to stand in line with the trailer trash.”
He makes no attempt to scrub the bite from this remark. Back in high school, Rick had been the only child of what was called in those times a “broken home.” He lived with his mother, a waitress, in a rented cottage near the ore-freighter docks on Lake Michigan. Two divey bars a block away in one direction, a strip joint in the other.
“The teaching moment—how’s that worked out?” he asks.
“So far, no good. He still claims he’s innocent, had no idea there was hash in the package. I ask him, ‘What did you think was in it? Cookies? Fruitcake? Is that why you put in the fridge?’”
Rick, glancing over my shoulder, signals that the conversation is over. Trey and Elise are on their way back from the lake.
* * *
The air has teeth in the morning, whetted by a north wind. It’s late summer back home, mid-autumn here; the tundra vegetation is changing color, bursts of burgundy and orange amid the green; the yellow leaves on the aspen that share space with spruce flutter like candle flames. We crawl reluctantly out of our sleeping bags, shiver ourselves warm, brew coffee, and cook instant oatmeal over the campfire.
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