Trey has gotten over his disappointment with losing the big char. He cracks jokes, volunteers to gather firewood and to fetch wash water for our mess gear. The good Trey again. Of course, that could change at any moment. His sharp, unpredictable swings from cheerful to sullen, civil to rude, are what make him so problematic. They keep me off-balance. He would be easier to deal with if he were a jerk all the time instead of half the time. He reminds me a little of Cheryl’s youngest brother, Todd, also a moody character, affable one minute, offensive the next. What’s more, like most self-centered people, Todd lacks self-awareness, doesn’t realize when he’s being obnoxious, and is shocked and perplexed when anyone—me, for instance—tells him so. He’d been a commercial real estate developer, a chiseler, a cheat, a crook who’d bought a sixteen-room house in Bloomfield Hills at thirty-two and at forty was sentenced to three years in federal prison for bank fraud. What upsets me most about Trey’s abortive venture into crime, and his absence of remorse, is the possibility that he’s inherited an outlaw gene from his uncle.
We break down the two smaller tents, stuff them into backpacks with our sleeping bags (in case we have to spike out), and start for a drainage where Rick had spotted sheep last week, on an aerial reconnaissance. From a distance, we must look like some sort of guerrilla band in our hunter’s camouflage. Walking on tundra is like walking on a waterbed stuffed with bowling balls, the squishy tussocks rolling under your feet. Half an hour of it, carrying a pack with a rifle strapped to it, wears me out. I’m grateful when Rick, in the lead, finds a game trail that winds through the trees galleried along the river. Trampled by parades of moose and caribou, it feels solid as a sidewalk.
I’m bringing up the rear. Trey is in front of me, head and torso canted slightly forward, probably to ease the weight of his pack but possibly to give himself an uninterrupted view of Elise’s ass, whose contours her baggy pants cannot completely hide. I’m not so old that I’ve lost all memory of what it’s like to be his age—the perpetual roil of male hormones. I’m not totally past that even now, though it isn’t Elise’s backside that captures my attention but her copper-colored hair, flowing out from the back of her wool watch cap to flounce and bounce on her shoulders.
I don’t know much about her. What I do know she revealed at an awkward moment at the hotel in Fairbanks, the day before we were to board the floatplane. I’d complained of a sore neck from the long, tedious flights from Detroit. Twelve or thirteen hours. She claimed to be a qualified masseuse and invited me to her and Rick’s room for a rubdown. But Rick wasn’t there; he was out running last-minute errands. She told me to take off my shirt and lie facedown on the bed. I did; then, straddling me, her knees pinning my ribs, she proceeded to dig her strong hands into the back of my neck, into my shoulders. I wondered, Is this a tease? Is she up to something? She must have known that her ministrations could be arousing—which they were—but she could not have been so reckless as to think of stealing a quickie with a married man whose son was in the room down the hall, not to mention the chance that her boyfriend might walk in at any minute. I squashed my own erotic thoughts by asking her about herself, as if I were a human-resources director interviewing an applicant.
She lived in Anchorage, where she met Rick. She’d been a student in the photography class he teaches at the local community college. In the past, she’d managed an inn, owned by her ex-husband, in a remote town named Eagle. The End of the Road Roadhouse. After the marriage broke up, she guided eco-tourists on hikes and rafting trips, then spent four years as an instructor at the Wilderness Leadership School.
“Alaska’s the right place for me,” she said in a chatty voice, as if we weren’t alone on a bed in a hotel room, me bare to the waist. “That’s because the twenty-first century is the wrong century for me. I’ve got skills that are of zero value in the modern world.”
She enumerated them while I, with a rapid heartbeat, waited for Rick to suddenly return and make a scene. “I can gut and skin a caribou, smoke salmon strips, paddle a rubber raft through class-three rapids, find my way by the sun and stars, tie a diamond hitch to a packhorse. I shot a bear once, back when I was managing the roadhouse. I’d gone out for firewood and it came at me. A .300 Winchester Mag. Right here.” She paused her massage to reach over my head and press a finger between my eyes. Plus, I’m a published author.”
“What did you write?”
“Kind of a self-help book. How to Wipe Your Ass Without Toilet Paper: Survival Tips for Cheechakos. That’s the title.”
“Uh, kind of wordy, don’t you think?”
She pounded my back, bottom to top, with the heels of her hands.
“But catchy, don’t you think?”
“What’s a cheechako?”
“You are. A tenderfoot.”
“And you’re what? An apprentice photographer?”
“You could say that. Okay, all done. How’s the neck?”
“Loose,” I answered as she dismounted and I stood to put my shirt back on. There was a mischievous twinkle in her greenish eyes. Easy to understand why Rick had fallen for her. My protective instincts rising to the surface, I hoped she wouldn’t dump him after he’d taught her the tricks of his trade.
* * *
We come to a steep ridge. I’m slipping and sliding in the shale—imagine climbing the roof of a ski chalet that’s five or six hundred feet high and covered with loose shingles. Rick’s smoking habit—he quit only a couple of years ago—appears not to have affected his wind. With a camera and binoculars harnessed to his chest and twenty or thirty pounds on his back, he strides up as if the slope is as gentle as a pitcher’s mound. Elise keeps pace with him, and Trey’s young legs seem to devour the 60 percent grade. The others reach the crest when I’m barely halfway to it.
Ten minutes more and I’m there. Gasping. Below is a wide valley split by a nameless, almost waterless creek hemmed by stunted spruce that draw a winding dark-green line across the paler green of the tundra grasses. Lying flat behind a spotting scope, Rick glasses the ridge on the opposite side, twice as high as the one we’ve just climbed, topped by sheer limestone crags resembling ruined temples. Low shrubs speckle its slopes; otherwise, it’s as rocky and gray and barren as a ridge on the moon. Right below the crags are what look like whitewashed rocks—Dall sheep. All ewes and lambs, Rick declares, except for one ram.
“Not shootable,” he adds, then motions to Trey and me to have a look. “He’s way off to the left and way down from the rest.”
The 60-power scope brings the ram startlingly close. I can see his black snout and his eyes, and they seem to be staring right at me as he turns his head, crowned by brownish horns curved like fingernail moons.
“He’s eating rocks,” Trey says after I turn the scope over to him. “What’s he eating rocks for?”
The question elicits Rick’s pedantry. The valley was a seabed sixty million years ago, he begins. Fossilized corals and marine organisms are embedded in the shale, and the phosphorus and nitrates in those ancient skeletons leach out. The ram has left the safety of the high elevations because he needs those minerals in his diet. He isn’t eating rocks; he’s licking them.
“It’s wonderful. Those rocks are graveyards for things that died when dinosaurs were roaming around,” Rick goes on, rapturous. “And now they feed animals living today. It really is wonderful when you think about it.”
“I suppose,” Trey replies. “So why can’t we shoot him?”
“What did I tell you the other day? The horns have to have a three-fourths to a full curl. That makes it legal. This ram isn’t much more than a spikehorn.”
Trey, shading his eyes with a palm, looks this way and that—a parody of a scout spying out the countryside. “Don’t see any game wardens,” he says, drawing a scowl from Rick. “Hey, kidding. I’m just kidding.”
I’m not sure he is. Maybe the outlaw gene is speaking to him: If you think you can get away with it, do it.
Just then, Elise hisses for our attention
. She’s pointing at three caribou that have appeared in the valley, seemingly out of nowhere, a kind of caribou nuclear family—cow, calf, a splendid bull with antlers like branched lightning and a cape that falls like a silver apron over his forequarters. They are ambling over the open tundra, grazing on the move. The bull is without question a legitimate animal, and Trey quietly chambers a round and looks to Rick for permission to shoot. That pleases me—the restraint shows respect—but Rick shakes his head, whispering, “That’s a five, six hundred shot and all downhill”—which pleases me further. The chances that Trey would wound the animal at such long range are great; so are the chances that he would miss entirely and hit the cow or calf.
Rick notices something. He grabs the spotting scope, squints through it for a few seconds, then signals Elise, who pulls from her backpack a lens that looks as long as a rocket launcher. Rick locks it into his Nikon—such is the stillness that the click sounds alarmingly loud—and rests it on a flat boulder.
“What is it?” I ask, in an undertone.
“Those willow bushes on the right…”
Raising my binoculars, I scan the willows clumped at the creekside but don’t see anything at first; a moment later, I glimpse movement. It’s faint—shadows drifting through the thicket.
“We’re about to watch a nature documentary, and it won’t be heartwarming,” Rick murmurs.
A hunting pair emerges from the willows, crouched low in the tundra grass. Their cautious stalk, their absolute, unshakable concentration, remind me of my bird dogs approaching a covey of grouse or quail. The caribou are upwind and facing away, and that favors the wolves. They have moved only a few yards before they halt to study their prey. The tension in their long gray bodies is palpable, even at a distance. The arrest between equal and opposite urges—spring or hold. They hold for now, probably waiting for more space to open up between the calf and the adults. The calf is what they’re after. A pack could easily bring down the cow or bull, but these two don’t have any help. The bull would be especially dangerous; he’s twice their size put together; his antlers, larger than the female’s, are bone-tined pitchforks; a kick from him could cripple or kill.
Suddenly, all three caribou raise their heads. An eddy of wind carrying wolf-scent must have alerted them. They look toward the thicket, as if to verify the wind’s warning, but before they can bolt, the wolves explode, legs stretched out to run them down. I sweep the binoculars to follow them and see the bull whirl and charge into the wolves’ charge, hooking with his horns. He grazes the larger of the pair—an alpha male, I assume—knocking it flat. Its mate rushes the caribou from behind, and he spins to confront her as the male rolls to his feet and stands motionless for a few seconds, like a dazed boxer taking a standing eight count.
Now begins a spectacle Trey and I have never seen before, a lethal ballet strangely beautiful even as it’s horrible. The she-wolf charges the bull, he lunges at her, antlers throwing lefts and rights, but she nimbly dodges one side to the other. Instantly, the male sprints at the caribou’s haunches, forcing him to face the new threat. This goes on for ten or fifteen minutes, the wolves taking turns, one attacking from behind, the other from the front, the bull pirouetting round and round. Rick records the dance of death, his camera’s burst shots making a rapid chirp. The wolves’ intelligence and agile teamwork are awesome to behold. They harry the caribou like matadors in a bull ring until he’s exhausted. His silvery breast heaves, his head droops, its swings grow feeble. He stands on splayed legs, nose halfway to the ground while the she-wolf paces back and forth in front of him. She darts in, twirls away, darts in again.
A diversion.
The male, stationed some twenty yards behind the bull, decides the time has come to end the choreography. He covers those twenty yards so fast I almost don’t see him streak between the widespread hind legs and bite into the belly, ripping it open. Entrails, a slick mass, spill out like groceries from a bag. Incredibly, the caribou is still upright, staggering, stumbling, intestines trailing. Both wolves snap at them, eating him alive.
“Jesus! Jesus Christ!” Trey cries, shouldering his .270.
Elise pushes the barrel aside. “There’s no saving him now,” she says, adding, “Nothing up here dies easy,” with a calm that comes off as indifference.
The bull at last topples over—dead, I hope. The male wolf leaps onto him, bites a chunk out of his hindquarters, and illustrates what it means to “wolf it down.”
“I feel like shooting them myself,” I say.
Rick shifts his look from the camera to me. “They don’t do it for fun, y’know.”
He points with two quick fingers. Far below, the she-wolf has fetched her brood from the thicket, four of them. Even through my 10-by-50s they look like mere blackish puffs, trotting behind her in a row. They tuck into the feast, gobbling up guts and organs, devouring the bull from the inside out while their parents, savaging the haunches, go at him from the outside in.
“It’s like he sacrificed himself for the cow and calf,” I say, finding it impossible not to anthropomorphize.
“That’s a nice thought,” Rick replies.
* * *
It’s ten-thirty and only now grown dark. The wind has picked up; cold, sharp gusts slap the tent. Snugged down into my sleeping bag, I hope I won’t have to get up in the middle of the night to piss. Probably I will. Roughing it isn’t for middle-age men with prostatitis.
“That was a hell of a thing we had to watch today,” Trey says, his voice muffled; he’s buried his head in his sleeping bag to keep the chill off his face. “The way they tore him open. I was imagining what that felt like. Your guts spilled and you’re alive to see a wolf chomping them.”
This tenderness, this empathy for a fellow mammal, isn’t like him.
“Why are you feeling sorry for the bull now? A few minutes before the wolves got him, you were all set to shoot him.”
“Right. Shoot him. He would’ve been dead before he knew what hit him. I wouldn’t have sliced him open with a knife and gutted him alive.”
“If the wolves could shoot a rifle, they wouldn’t have, either.”
“Ha ha.”
“Would you rather see the wolf pups starve? Killing and eating—that’s the background music up here. Elise had it right, nothing dies easy.”
“Her Hard-Bitten Bitch of the Far North act gets real old real quick. A bullet through the heart would have been a lot easier than getting eaten alive. Anyway, I thought we were on a hunting trip.”
“We are.”
Lying on my back, I can see my breath plume and condensation spreading a sheen over the tent’s ceiling. It is a hunting trip, and to make it, I’d had to pull more strings than a puppeteer to exempt him from two N.A. meetings and allow him to leave the state. Besides his father, I am, in effect, his parole officer. He’s been living at home since his expulsion, working days for a landscaper I know, playing video games at night in his room. Dinners with him are studies in family non-communication. Yes, it’s a hunting trip, but its purpose is not, for me, to shoot anything. A quest, rather, to discover what’s going on in Trey’s heart, his mind, his soul. I want to know my son, hard as it is to know anyone, even ourselves.
“All we did today was hang with Rick while he took pictures,” Trey grumbles. “Him and the hard-bitten bitch.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“It is down. They won’t hear us anyhow. They’re probably fucking in there.”
“Trey! Dammit…” A picture of a naked Elise embracing me in a sleeping bag has composed itself in my brain. “Rick’s on an assignment. This is a job for him. He invited me to come along, and I invited you. An experience like this—your old frat brothers would give up their iPhones for it. So quit complaining.”
“They don’t hunt. Most guys my age don’t. I’m like that Indian in The Last of the Mohicans. That Indian with the weird name, Changachuk or whatever.”
“Chingachgook. Uncas was the last of the Mohicans. Chingach
gook was his father, kind of the second-to-last of the Mohicans.”
“Hey! Homeschooling.”
“Good night, Trey.”
* * *
We scour that hard country for a Dall ram, hiking into drainages as innocent of human footprints as Mars. There is enough water in them to overtop our boots, and willow and aspen stick fires do not burn with sufficient heat to dry our socks. The temperature falls a little each day, and each day loses seven or eight minutes of light. We are being stalked by an ever-advancing night. On the third day of this, we trek more than five miles from base camp and are too tired to return to it (five miles in Alaska is equal to twenty anywhere else). Also, it has begun to snow, lightly, but snow all the same.
We spike out on a saddle in the mountains, from which we can see the base camp’s supply tent, bright green and blue dots on the tundra fell below, and the pewter-colored river flowing past it, and the lake where the plane is to pick us up in another three days, unless weather prevents it from flying.
Glassing the landscape, I watch a bear digging in an alpine meadow. It rises onto its hind legs, then crashes back down to all fours, long-clawed forepaws furiously flinging dirt. It’s the same blondish sow Trey and I had encountered on the river; her cubs gambol nearby. “She’s excavating the meadow for parky squirrels,” Rick lectures. “Parkys—so-called because Inuit line their parkas with the squirrels’ fur—live in underground burrows, like prairie dogs.” He tells us that they weigh about two pounds each, a pretty meager reward for the effort she’s putting into its acquisition.
“Calories in don’t come close to calories out,” I remark.
“They’re called barren-ground grizzlies for a reason,” Rick answers. “Out here, you grab what you can when you can. She’s got to feed her kids something.”
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