It was still too dark to see the compound or its main house where the girl lived with her felonious father and crazy family. But two of its windows blazed brightly, and this was the sunrise he had come to behold. It was the west, and she was its sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who rules a winter-weary —
Blam! Jace’s dream was shattered by the crack of a rifle. He spilled coffee in his lap. He did a back flip over the snowmobile to take cover behind it, lying in the snow. All his juices ran cold.
But the shot had sounded pretty distant, upon further reflection, and it seemed unlikely that he had been its target. After a little while there was a second shot, likewise distant. It was probably only a case of sociopaths greeting the morning with gunfire. Wasn’t that what sociopaths did?
Jace got up and located the spilled thermos in the snow. He couldn’t find the joint. Which was a drag. Good thing he’d brought a couple of spares.
He started the Tundra and made a U-turn, leaving the headlights off until he reached the safety of the deep woods. Rejoining the Mizina spur trail, he continued on to his second destination of the day. This was Trapper’s Slough, where he needed to check out the report of an illegal cabin. Someone had rebuilt a derelict structure without a permit, without so much as a howdy-do to the NPS, in whose park and preserve it allegedly stood.
MD4 1.0
THE ORIGINAL STRUCTURE had been a trapline cabin built circa 1946, long before the establishment of the park, by a disabled man named Jack (or Jaques) Dupré, who came into the country after fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Despite a knee that did not bend, Dupré established and ran a sixty-mile (97-km) trapline loop from April Creek, along the Mizina, to its confluence with the Chitina. He trapped ermine, marten, lynx, and beaver mostly, sometimes wolves and wolverines. He built the cabin at the far end of the loop, where he and the dogs would rest overnight before running the return line.
In its heyday, Dupré’s cabin had been a windowless shoebox made of unpeeled spruce logs with a dirt floor and a pole roof covered in sod. The ceiling was too low for a man to stand up in, and there was only enough floorspace to fit the little Yukon stove and army cot. But the cabin was snug on the coldest, blowiest nights, and it was all a man needed, be he wounded by war or not.
Jace, of course, had never met Dupré; few current locals had, but legend had it that he stopped overnighting in the cabin sometime in the late 1960s when he replaced his dog team with his first snowmobile, a 1967 “grey line” Ski-Daddler Power Sled. Now he could work the whole trapline in a single day. Nevertheless, he maintained the cabin throughout the 1970s for emergencies and storage. At some unknown date thereafter, Jaques Dupré left the country, traveling south, and vanishing into pre-digital obscurity. Surely by now he was dead.
Left to the elements, Dupré’s little bivouac shelter fell into ruin. In this part of the world, things rotted slowly, and even after decades of exposure, only the bottom rungs of logs had melted into the moss. But the roof was stove in, and jewel-like fungi blossomed everywhere.
Then some not-yet-identified yahoos got it into their sovereign heads to blow off the park system and restore the ruins to their glory days. No, to a level even higher than their glory days. The bandit craftsmen had doubled the floorspace and raised a new, trussed roof with composite shingles in lieu of sod. They added a porch and a window. They expertly peeled, scribed, and notched new logs to replace the rotten ones.
Jace stepped on the porch to look through the window. There was no furniture or much of anything else inside. Instead of dirt, the floor was now made of rough spruce planks. Lengths of stovepipe were stacked against one wall, ready to hook up to a stove that had yet to arrive.
Above the door, the builder had nailed a polished birch plaque where it would be impossible to miss. Branded into the plaque with a soldering iron was a Bible verse. What a surprise. Isaiah 32:2. Jace dug out his iPhone to ask Siri to look it up for him, but he’d traveled too far from town for service. He’d have to look up the verse when he got home. [“Each will be like a refuge from the wind / And shelter from the storm . . . ] In and of itself, the plaque did little to identify the builder, since no single park inholder seemed to have a monopoly on Bible verses. As to the level of craftsmanship, Jace knew a half dozen locals who possessed the skills necessary to pull off this renovation. Most of them decent people.
Jace trudged through deep snow around the structure to document it with his phone. A sound, like the whine of an out-of-season mosquito, that had been on Jace’s verge of perception for many minutes, finally broke through to his awareness. A small airplane was approaching from down the Chitina River. Nellis, no doubt, with a week’s worth of snail mail.
Ned Nellis of Nellis Air was the only reason Jace knew about this rogue construction. Peeled logs looked a lot like neon signs from the air, especially when you’ve flown the same weekly wilderness route year in and year out for half your life, as Nellis had.
There was no question that Jace would report the structure to his supervisor. Rogue construction in the park could not be condoned. The question was when. If he filed a report today, Masterson would be out here tomorrow to burn the place down. Literally, to burn the place down. But Jace rejected the belief that arson was the best solution to unauthorized buildings on federal lands. Especially in Alaska where ANILCA, the federal law governing public lands, made allowances for traditional use. Besides, this park had too few remote cabins for visitor use as it was. The park service should treat it as an anonymous donation from an admiring inholder and manage it, not burn it to the ground.
Screw Masterson.
So Jace would just have to sit on his report and file it next year. The open-fire burn ban would go into effect in April. The cabin would be safe then — from arson at least — until the drenching rains of October. This would give park headquarters, in far-away Copper Center, a chance to weigh in on the matter. Cooler heads usually prevailed at headquarters.
The mosquito whine grew louder, and a few minutes later Jace could see the aircraft low on the horizon. It was a green and white Cessna 206, a single-engine workhorse of the Alaska bush. Its tricycle landing gear was fitted out with skis. On Tuesdays it was the mail plane.
As Nellis flew over, he tipped his wings, and Jace waved back.
Before leaving the cabin and continuing on to the glacier and his main task of the day, Jace pried the birch plaque with its Bible reference from the lintel and tossed it like a frisbee into the frozen slough. It sliced into a snowbank and disappeared from sight. Amen.
MD5 1.0
THE GERMAN SHEPHERD stood conspicuously alone in the middle of the field sniffing at the pile of snow-buried offal. Blood was soaking through the layers of snow and turning it pink, especially around the base. The airplane was almost on top of them. Adam and Proverbs called the dog, but she wouldn’t come. They yelled and whistled, but she didn’t even bother to look at them. The children had cooled off after their exertion, and the smaller ones were beginning to shiver.
“She’s your dog,” Poppy said to one of the middle boys. “Call her off that pile.”
“Yes, lord,” Uzziel replied, even though it wasn’t so. She wasn’t only his dog. She was the family’s dog, and she loved all of them, except for Poppy. The boy went to the edge of the forest and called, “Crissie! Crissie Lou! You come here, dog.”
The dog’s ears perked up — it was a voice she adored — and she trotted across the field to him. But there was something off about the way her gaggle of humans was huddling in the trees. They’d never done this before. So she held back the final few yards, no matter how urgently her favorite summoned her.
She came close enough, though, and in a heartbeat the plane roared overhead. An hour of preparation for such a meager show. But it was the effect that counted, and as the sound of the Cessna steadily diminished, Poppy knew they’d pulled it off. Ned Nellis was a good man, as men went. He professed to be a Christian, but he was not saved. That much was clear.
/>
The older girls started shepherding the younger ones toward the house, but Poppy stopped them.
“I got something to say. Listen up.”
With chattering teeth, they listened up.
“Father God loves his children,” Poppy began. “He don’t want to see them go hungry. That’s why He led the beast to our door. That alone is proof of its divine provenance and a rebuke to the unbelievers.” He looked pointedly at Sarai as he said this. “The only reason we had to hide the Father’s gift from the eyes of men is because your brother was ignorant enough to take it before the mail plane went by. He could have waited till after. Then we wouldn’t’ve had to hide it. Get it?”
He was addressing Sarai, but Proverbs answered. “I was afraid it would get away, lord.”
Poppy turned to his third born. “Did I ask you to speak? Did I say I wanted to hear your lame-ass excuses?”
“No, lord.”
“I didn’t think so.”
With her father’s wrath momentarily diverted by her brother, Sarai studied her twin’s face, trying to piece together what had just happened between them. But Deuteronomy was defiant.
“Your behavior,” Poppy continued, “shows that you do not believe. Because if you believed in the Father’s generosity to His children, you would also believe that He’d keep that moose hanging around long enough till we could harvest it in a normal manner.”
The old man’s tone changed subtly — but they all recognized it — from prosecutor to judge. “For your infidelity,” he intoned, “your reckless infidelity that almost earned us a visit from federal jackals, for your dangerous lack of faith, you will receive six stripes.”
The children cringed.
“I’m sorry, lord,” Proverbs said.
“Sorry don’t cut it, son. And for that backtalk you just earned two more stripes. That makes eight.”
Proverbs groaned.
“Two more for that. Keep it up, boy.”
Proverbs’ eyes flashed, especially the right one, but he kept his peace, and Poppy Prophecy grunted with satisfaction. He turned toward the house before remembering he had another errant child to tune up, his twin of a twin, his eldest (by five minutes) and twice-blessed daughter, Sarai. “You,” he intoned, cutting right to the judgment part, “for sinning with your mouth, shall also receive punishment.”
He left it at that for now.
MD6 1.0
POPPY PROPHECY HITCHED the freight sled to the Polaris Centurion and loaded six small cartons of fulfilled orders into it. The boys had already skinned the moose and hauled the carcass to the bathhouse where they would butcher it. Adam volunteered to go into town for the mail, as he often did, but Poppy shot that idea down pretty quick.
Before he left, Poppy charged Proverbs with the task of transporting the moose head and entrails somewhere far from the house and deep in the woods where ravenous beasts could share the bounty.
Each of Poppy’s three eldest boys had taken a legal bull in Ninthmonth. But two of the moose had been on the small side. The meat locker wasn’t exactly bare — it still contained frozen salmon, whole chickens, rabbits, and black bear roasts — but when you have so many mouths to feed, you’re always on the lookout for your next moose. How fitting, then, that Father God should send them such a large bull. It would yield them five hundred pounds (227 kg) of roasts, steaks, brisket, ribs, and hamburger, as well as tubs of lard.
The first eight miles into town on the Stubborn Mine Trail was rough in spots, but the only stretch that could be called hazardous was a blind curve around a steep bluff that the locals called Curve Canaveral. The old roadbed had collapsed there, leaving a narrow path over a sheer drop where you could launch yourself all the way to the valley floor. Especially if you didn’t know it was there and came upon it too fast. Or at night.
During the day it was a nice spot to idle awhile and gawk at the Father’s outrageously gorgeous handiwork: the bottomlands of the Mizina, the quarter-mile canyon, and in the hazy distance the backbone of the Chugach Mountains.
Sad to say, but even the Father’s best work fades from sight after four score viewings, and Poppy Prophecy barely glanced up from the trail as he eased around the curve.
Halfway to town, Poppy passed the only other still-occupied homestead on the trail, Dell Bunyan’s place. That was where the trail widened out into a single-lane gravel road. The rest of the ride in was fast and smooth. Poppy didn’t even glance to see if woodsmoke was coming out of Bunyan’s stack. Dell Bunyan wasn’t his favorite person.
Poppy drove his tired iron through the deserted streets of McHardy to the public airstrip on the other end. McHardy didn’t amount to much of a town. Only a few of the houses within its bounds were habitable. The rest had either collapsed or burned or were gracefully decomposing in place. McHardy was a town birthed in sin and killed by greed. If it was up to Poppy, he’d scrape the entire townsite clean, backfill fresh soil, and start a new town from scratch. Or better — no town.
Remarkably, it was not up to him. [see the sidebar, Ghost Town with Footbridge.]
By the time Poppy Prophecy arrived at the airstrip, the mail plane was long gone. There was no way to know what, if anything, Nellis had seen from the air.
Poppy idled his sled alongside the Sulzer porch. Ed and Ginny Sulzer lived right next to the airstrip and served as the region’s unofficial postmasters. Judging by the number of sno-gos parked in their yard and the hum of the generator, Mail Day was in full swing.
Each winter, the population of McHardy shrank to its committed core of around sixty souls. If you left out Prophecy and his family, it was closer to forty souls, half of whom were in the Sulzer living room at that moment. Poppy shuddered at the thought of so many sinners gathered in one room eating blueberry pie.
He stacked his outgoing cartons three high and two deep and carried them into the porch breezeway. He had difficulty working the screen door latch, but fortunately Ed was there to give him a hand.
“Last minute orders from Santa?” Ed said merrily. Ed’s glasses were so thick and his brown eyes so big and round that you were forced to watch their every twitch and twinkle in startling close-up. And Ed was clearly baiting him. He well knew Poppy’s opinion about the secular side of the holiday, but he seemed to enjoy poking at people to watch them react. And laughing when they did. Why a man would behave like that was beyond Poppy’s ken, and outside his interest as well. So he dropped the cartons in a pile next to the outgoing mail sack without bothering to reply.
Along one wall of the breezeway stood a long, wooden potting bench where the Sulzers sorted the incoming mail. In the old days, the mail plane pilot would stop only long enough to toss the mail sack out of the airplane and pick up any outgoing ones. Thus, the incoming sack usually ended up on the edge of the runway where locals would paw through it to see if anything was addressed to them.
When the Sulzers arrived in 1972 to operate the remote meteorological reporting station, they took it upon themselves to end that practice. Henceforth, no one touched the mail until Ed and Ginny sorted it. And although their breezeway wasn’t heated, it was dry, and the screen door was open night and day.
No one challenged the Sulzers’ petty despotism, and society was improved by it. The blueberry pies started soon thereafter.
“Anyway,” Ed said, “come in the house before you leave.”
Poppy grunted noncommittally. He had located the Prophecy’s stack of mail and was thumbing through it.
“To hear the news,” Ed added.
Poppy looked up. “What news?”
“The news about the road.”
“What news about the road?”
But Ed winked an enormous eye and slid back into the house. Ed Sulzer was too much an old woman. He and Prophecy were about the same age, middle to late seventies. Hard to say which one of them was the more decrepit, but only one of them was saved.
By bulk, most of the Prophecy mail was made up of fat manilla envelopes from the Alaska Lighthouse
Correspondence School with lesson plans and workbooks for students from kindergarten through middle school. Expensive home heating fuel was what it was.
By density, the prize went to several small but heavy packages from Taiwan. They would contain cheap necklace chains and lapel tacks.
In between were credit card applications, direct mail coupon offers from businesses in Anchorage and Glennallen, an advert from a Fairbanks insurance agency that promised to save him fifteen percent in fifteen minutes, several glossy catalogues and magazines, Living City and Guns & Ammo among them, and a handful of belated political campaign brochures from hopeful candidates. These brochures had arrived too late to save the republic. Obama had won a second term as president. God have mercy on our homeland.
Poppy dumped the electioneering crap and advertising crap and catalogue crap into the trash barrel that Ed had kindly provided at the end of the table. One thing Poppy didn’t find in his stack of mail were bills. He had none. He owed nothing to no one. Praise Elder Brother Jesus. Amen.
Another thing he didn’t find was anything from NJB, his business associate in Palmer. NJB was in charge of supplying them with the fulfillment mailing labels and of forwarding sales contracts and the odd paper check that needed Poppy’s endorsement. But Poppy hadn’t heard from NJB in over three weeks. No emails either. Calls went straight to voice mail. It wasn’t like him. NJB was one of the good guys, one of the few in this sinful world who helped his fellow man. NJB wasn’t saved, however, not by a long shot, though in his case it was a damned shame.
Upon This Rock Page 2