“And they’re here now?”
“According to your mother.”
“All of them?”
“Looks that way. Listen, we’ll deal with them later. Right now I —”
Rory was already on his feet.
“Hang on there, champ. Where do you think you’re going?”
“Home.”
“Are all those sleds uncrated?”
“But, Dad.”
“Don’t but dad me. She’ll still be there when we get home.”
“Sir?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, son. You know who I’m referring to. You think I don’t notice things?”
LL8 1.0
DEUT AND CORA carried the sleeping little ones into the living room where they laid them in a row on the carpet. Cindy Lawther hauled out spare pillows and blankets. The Lawther dog, a toy breed of some sort, sniffed them cautiously as they slept.
Out in the bus, Proverbs and Adam were setting up the bunks and curtains for the older sibs and lighting a propane heater. They discovered the cat snoozing under a sleeping bag. Calgary had somehow managed to stow away, first on the sled ride to the parking lot, and then in the bus.
“She probably had a few accomplices,” Adam said.
The Dodge pulled in behind the bus in the driveway, and Hosea and Poppy got out. Proverbs said, “Let’s keep the cat to ourselves for now, okay?”
“Sure thing,” Adam said.
Inside the house, Cindy said, “Anything else you need? How about food? Have you girls eaten?”
“We have, thanks,” Deut said. “We had a picnic on the bus.”
“Why don’t you sleep in the house tonight too? We have plenty more blankets.”
“Thank you, but we’re used to the bus.”
“What about the kids if they wake up and don’t know where they are?”
“They’ll figure it out. Just please keep a light on and the bathroom door open.”
“Yes, of course.”
There was nothing left to do, but the girls lingered in the foyer. Finally, Deut said, “What about your daughter, Ginger? Isn’t she at home?”
“Not right now, dear,” Cindy said. “She’s at a basketball game with some of her friends. But she’s got a 10:30 curfew, so she’ll be back soon. You can wait up for her if you want.”
Neither girl could reply, so astonishing were Mrs. Lawther’s words. Apparently, her daughter was allowed to go to a sporting event where boys were probably present, and she didn’t have to be back till late at night.
“Yes, ma’am,” Deut said finally. “We’d like that.”
Cindy led them to the kitchen. “Is it my imagination, or are there a few of you missing? I seem to recall a couple of toddlers.”
“Yes, ma’am. That’s Elzie and Nummy. We left them at home to be with Mama.”
“Then your mother is recovered?”
Deut wasn’t sure how to answer. “Mama isn’t sick, but she’s still in Heaven visiting with Elder Brother Jesus.”
“So your father never took her to a doctor to examine her?”
“No, ma’am. There’s nothing wrong with her for a doctor to fix.”
“You mean she’s up and about and able to function normally?”
The kitchen was a large, bright, gleaming space. Deut struggled not to succumb to covetousness and envy. “No, ma’am,” she said, “but we left my sister Sarai to take care of her and the babies.”
Behind them in the doorway, Poppy startled everyone by saying, “Don’t concern yourself about Mama.” He removed his hat and parka. He’d entered the house without knocking and heard them talking in the kitchen. Even the little dog was taken by surprise. It began to growl, but Cindy picked it up and hushed it.
“Elder Brother Jesus will send her back to us soon enough,” Poppy went on. “Now, if you girls have everything squared away here, it’s time to head out to the bus.”
“Yes, lord,” the girls said. They thanked Mrs. Lawther and went out together.
“About that bed you offered,” Poppy said to Mrs. Lawther, “I’m ready for it.”
“Yes, of course,” Cindy said. “The guest room is this way. Or would you care for something to eat or drink first? Rex said he’d be home soon, in case you wanted to see him.”
“Bed.”
Cat and Woodpecker
CW1 1.0
WITH WINTER SOLSTICE two weeks away, there were only about four good hours of possible daylight each day, and Jace was determined to use them searching for whatever it was he’d seen falling out of the sky. The GPS readings he’d gathered told him that the cone’s imprint in the snow was about six miles wide (10 km), and he’d pinpointed its center and probable landing zone, a windswept tract of frozen bog on the river flats.
At first light on Wednesday, Jace parked the Tundra at ground zero, mapped out a search grid, and spent the afternoon walking in straight lines. He walked rather than rode because he didn’t know what he was looking for and didn’t want to miss anything. The object had fallen too slowly to leave a smoking crater, but there still might be scorch marks or a frozen-over melt pond.
After a cold, fruitless, five-hour slog, Jace rode home wondering if he should cover the same ground the next day, or maybe extend the grid, or move the search area to somewhere else entirely. After all, his supposition that the object fell in the center of the circle was based on appearances. The object appeared to fall in the center, but that may have been due to his perspective at the time of the sighting. If he had been watching from the western edge, for instance, instead of from the south, he might have seen that it fell closer to one edge or the other.
Jace spent Wednesday night surfing internet sites that offered “satellite images of your roof.” You enter an address or GPS coordinates, and it returns a hybrid map/photo of your neighborhood from space. Neat, except that when he tried it using the coordinates he’d taken from the flats, the image he received was missing any indented circle in the snow. Since the circle was six miles in diameter, and the depression in the snow was eighteen inches (46 cm) deep in places, and the winter sun cast long shadows, he had expected it to have shown up. He tried again on Google Earth and got similar results.
Moving the image a little north, Jace was able to find his own roof on Lucky Strike Lane. In the front yard the old shed was still standing, the one that had been a heap of rotten wood when Beehymer showed him the property in 2010. That meant that Google Earth and the other sites he’d tried were displaying old images.
When Jace searched for real-time or near-real-time satellite images, he found a variety of sources, including the USGS Earth Now!, Landsat Image Viewer, GloVis, and EarthExplorer. These either didn’t work on his iPad or had no results for his desired time and place. The closest he came was with NASA’s EOSDIS Worldview. He found daytime images from Tuesday, Mail Day, hours before the event, and he went to bed confident that by morning the updated Worldview site would display Wednesday’s image and that there, plain as day, would be a bullseye in the snow at 61.386472, –142.944489. Especially satisfying was the fact that he’d be able to contact NASA about his snowy crop circle using their own satellite imagery.
No such luck. On Thursday morning, though the site had been updated, a light haze obscured his whole corner of Alaska, enough to blur the image and eliminate any possible shadows.
Riding to work in Caldecott, it occurred to Jace that short of a satellite photo, an aerial photo could serve as evidence. He had decided that before he told anyone about what he had witnessed, it would be a good idea to have some kind of evidence to back up his story.
When he reached the ranger office, his senior colleague, LE Ranger Masterson, was already at his desk, pecking away at his computer keyboard. They exchanged greetings, and Jace placed a call to Nellis Air Service in Gulkana. Mrs. Nellis answered.
“I want to charter a flight-seeing ride in the park ASAP,” he told her.
“You want us to pick you up in McHardy?” she replied.
&nb
sp; “Yes.”
“We’d have to charge you for Ned’s flight time to and from, plus the flight-seeing itself.”
“Yes, yes. When can you come?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “Things are slow right now, so we’d be able to get you in next Thursday, a week from today.”
“Nothing sooner?”
“I suppose, if you was willing, Ned could take you on Tuesday when he delivers the mail. That’d be cheaper for you too. Are we talking about an hour or two of flying?”
“An hour would do, but it’s got to be even sooner.”
“Wait. Ned wants to talk to you.”
The phone changed hands, and Ned Nellis said, “This Ranger Kuliak?”
“Yes. Hi, Ned.”
“So, what about that trapper cabin? Was I right?”
“Yes, you were.” Jace glanced at Ranger Masterson, not ten feet away. “But why don’t we talk about it when I see you.”
Ned said that was fine with him and that he would be in the McHardy area the following day and could maybe spare him an hour. They made pick-up arrangements, and Jace hung up.
Masterson said, “Was that official business?”
“Personal.”
“One of those Asian ladies catch your eye?”
How much easier it would be if he could just level with Masterson, tell him about the falling light and snow circle. Hell, show him the circle. Ranger Masterson was an opinionated SOB, but even he would have to believe his own eyes. After that, the circle’s existence would become a park service matter, and with NPS resources they could get to the bottom of it. [see the sidebar, A Herd of Picnic Tables]
Should he tell him or not? How would he react? Masterson was waiting for an answer to his stupid question.
“You’re right. One of the Asian ladies.”
Or, to be specific, one of the Japanese ladies. Ordinarily, the entire Caldecott mill town would be shuttered at this time of year. Jace’s employee contract never ran beyond September or October. But this year, the park service, the state’s Department of Commerce, TravelAlaska.com, and the Caldecott Glacier View Lodge concessionaire were conducting a feasibility study/pilot project for boosting Alaska’s wintertime tourism. For some reason, Alaska was not a popular tourism destination during the months of December through March. Except for one demographic: young Japanese couples. Folklore in Japan promised good fortune to couples who consummated their marriage under the dancing lights of the aurora borealis. Conceiving a child under the influence of the lights was considered even more propitious. And since the Northern Lights rarely appeared over Japan, Alaska had the rare opportunity to offer “Aurora Tours” in romantic locations, such as the lodge in Caldecott. Currently there were about sixty Japanese couples booked at the “Aurororium.”
JACE OPENED THE backcountry gear room to get the camera. It was a sweet, pricey Canon, with a geo-tagging feature and a variety of lenses. If he was going to go through the cost and effort of flying over the area, he needed something with more chops than the pinhole camera on his iPhone. While in the room, he noticed the metal detector and decided to borrow it too. Whatever the space artifact was, it was bound to be made of metal.
Not only that, but the park service kept a Geiger counter in its disaster kit. He found it and did a systems check. It was small enough that he could keep it in an inner pocket with his water bottle where its battery could stay warm.
AFTER DETERMINING THAT the search area was not radioactive, Jace decided to retrace his steps from the day before, this time with the metal detector. It was tedious, exhausting work. The river flats were not flat, not even under layers of snow, but bumpy, like a bunched up old carpet. And it was a lot of ground to sweep with a nine-inch (23 cm) search coil. Summer or winter, the wind always blew on the river, and he had to protect every inch of his flesh or risk frostbite.
At the end of the day, he had nothing to show for his work but tracks in the snow. On the plus side, he was getting pretty darn good at walking in straight lines over hummocky terrain while sweeping, sweeping, sweeping.
THURSDAY NIGHT MRS. Nellis called to say that a storm front was moving in that night, and that it might put the kibosh on his flight-seeing trip and, if so, did he want to reschedule? He told her no, he didn’t. With the snow circle obliterated by fresh powder, what would be the point?
Sure enough, Jace awoke Friday morning to white-out conditions. Nellis called again to cancel the flight. Jace, in turn, called the ranger station and left a message saying he was maybe coming down with something and was taking a sick day. He still had the park service Tundra at home, and he raced out to the flats in the pre-dawn darkness to get in as much time as possible. He modified his search area to include a north-south band from one end of the cone base to the other. At no time did he contemplate giving up. He knew he saw something that night. He might have been high at the time, but he wasn’t that high.
ON FRIDAY NIGHT Jace’s thoroughly sensible sister Kate called from Littleton, Colorado, where she lived with her husband Darshan and son Luke. She was surprised and upset to hear that he hadn’t purchased his airplane tickets yet.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“I forgot. I’ve been busy.”
“You forgot? You’re kidding.”
The plan had been to spend Christmas in Littleton, and there was still time to book a flight, but he said, “You know what, Kate? I think I’ll stay here this year. The house needs work.” Better to blame home improvement than a close encounter of the third kind.
“You’re kidding,” she repeated. “What’ll I tell Luke? You promised to take him skiing.”
“Tell him I’ll come down in February. You still have snow down there in February, don’t you?”
There was silence on the other end, and then, “This doesn’t have anything to do with that girl, does it? The one with the big family? What’s her name? Leviticus?”
“Very funny. It’s Deuteronomy, and, no, this has nothing to do with her.”
“You know, little brother, you can’t change a person’s core beliefs. I mean, you can try, but one way or the other they’ll resent you for it.”
“I’m not trying to change a person’s core beliefs.”
“Oh, no? Then have your own beliefs changed?”
“No, but so what? I’m not intolerant, you know. I could accept a partner with a different faith, if things ever came to that.”
His sister snorted.
“What are you saying, Kate? That I’m a bigot?”
“No, but when it comes to religion, your mind is already made up.”
“Then it may come as a shock to you that I’m a flexible person. My attitudes are adaptable. I can tolerate diversity.”
“Good to hear. But tell me this, Mr. Flexible, if it’s not too personal a question, have you two lovebirds actually met each other yet? Have you ever traded two words of conversation?”
CW2 1.0
WHY, YES, THEY had met. And they had traded two words of conversation, sorta. It was during the shit-storm over the airstrip.
Back in 2010, when the quarrelsome family pulled up stakes and vanished from the lot next to his house in McHardy, Jace had optimistically imagined that he was rid of them for good. But they had only moved deeper into the park, to Orion Beehymer’s old mine site to act as caretakers, and soon they were making trouble again. Only this time they were the park service’s headache and not Jace’s. Yet he still managed to get sucked into it.
A few months after granting the Prophecys the run of his old mine, Beehymer got it into his head that now was a good time to sell off the property. So he went to the saloon of the McHardy Hotel one evening in August and bought a round for the house. Then he announced that his patented mining claim on the side of Stubborn Mountain was on the market for an asking price of one million dollars US.
Word spread, and the park superintendent in Copper Center heard about the proposed sale. Now here was a significant opportunity for the NPS. Here was a page torn fro
m its own strategic plan. This was no mere townsite lot on offer. The Stubborn Mountain Mine property encompassed 340 acres (138 ha) was the largest parcel of private land that still remained within park boundaries (aside from Native corporation land). It was incumbent on the park service to repatriate the land and extinguish all mining rights attached to it. And there was actually a budget for doing so.
Throughout the summer and early fall, the NPS was the only potential purchaser to make a serious offer, and it looked as though Beehymer would soon accept it. But on Halloween, word came that Beehymer had just sold the mine to his on-site caretakers for his full asking price.
Needless to say, the parkies were confounded by this development. How had that hippie-dippy caretaker family with all the kids come up with that kind of dough? [see Tour of the Mine] But however the Prophecys had managed it, the land was off the market.
Then, in November, Ned Nellis of Nellis Air sent Superintendent Rodgers a thumbdrive of Mail Day photos he’d taken from the cockpit of his Cessna. It appeared that the Prophecys had gotten the mine’s ancient Caterpillar D6 bulldozer running, and that they were felling trees and dragging them to a little sawmill they’d set up. Maybe it was because Nellis was a bush pilot who was ever watchful for safe places to land in an emergency, but he said it looked to him like the Prophecys were clearing land for a private airstrip. And that the land they were clearing belonged to the park.
If true, this was a serious encroachment upon public land that had to be investigated as soon as possible. But even under the best of circumstances, survey lines on steep, forested land were hard to spot from the air. And in this case, there hadn’t been a survey done or lines cleared since the original platting in 1909. So the superintendent ordered a new boundary survey to be conducted in the early spring. In the meantime, the park service went to court and served the Prophecys with a cease and desist order. Naturally, the family ignored the order and, in fact, sped up the pace of its land clearing. The park service retaliated by impounding their bulldozer in place, a heavy-handed act that infuriated them. And in April, with snow still covering the ground, Superintendent Rodgers hired a four-man, civilian survey party to locate and mark the property corners and to brush out the entire three-mile-long (5-km) property line.
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