“Haaaah! Get him offa me! Get off! Eck-eck-eck.
The fire had died down and I could see him flailing around in his sleeping bag, a big black writhing fat worm in the dark there, and I grabbed the Johnson rifle and fired twice into the sky. I hoped the shots would spook the animal away.
“What is it? Bear?”
“No,” Healey called back. “It was your pal from the plane. Goddam him all to hell. Oh, shit!”
He came over and threw some dry spruce on the coals and we had light. His face was ripped up and his right ear dangled black with blood. He was shaking like a whole mountainside of aspen there in the fall when the wind is working the pale leaves. I handed him the brandy bottle. He took a long gulping swig.
“Pour some of that over your ear and I’ll sew it back on for you.”
“Like hell,” he said. “Not till I stop shaking.”
We stayed up the rest of the night in front of the fire, listening to the carcajou as he went his destructive rounds. For a while he was in the cockpit, ripping up the seats and smashing the instrument panel. Then he was back out on the wing chewing on the props. Then back into the cargo deck slinging cans and tools around like a machinists’ convention. He never got tired. Just wreck-wreck-wreck. Now and then, we could hear him emptying his bowels on whatever he had just smashed. Healey sat hunkered with his elbows on his knees, his face dead sober, his head bandaged over the torn ear that I’d sewn back on to the accompaniment of his constant whining and bitching. It must have hurt plenty, though, I’ll give him that.
“Why doesn’t he go away?” Sam Healey asked. “He’s got to have wrecked everything three times over already.”
“He’s onto a good thing. You know old Emile Picot down there in Cordova? He can tell you about wolverines. He had a trapline up in the Wrangells one winter and a carcajou sniffed it out. Followed him around all winter and whenever he took an animal in the set, the carcajou would rip it up and eat half of it and piss on the rest. Finally, the carcajou tried to get into Emile’s line cabin. But he had it boarded up tight. The carcajou came down the chimney when Emile was away and destroyed everything in the cabin—food, books, ammo, hides, table and chairs. He ripped Emile’s only sleeping bag into a blizzard. No way Emile could get him, either with the rifle or in a trap. Finally, he gave up and cleared out. He went back two seasons later and the carcajou was waiting for him, ready to start all over again. So Emile went down to Ketchikan and signed on a halibut schooner and never did go trapping again.”
“Carcajou,” Sam said.
“It’s an Algonkian Indian word, means ‘devil,’ hence the nickname ‘Injun Devil.’ Latin name Gulo luscus, the Glutton, the Gulper. Circumpolar distribution in mountains and northern tundra. May be same species as Old World glutton. Rare. Fortunately.”
“Eats airplanes, the larger the better.”
“And ears of their pilots.”
“Well, one thing’s for danged sure,” Sam said, touching the bandaged ear, “I’m not spending another night in the same country as that guy. We’re going to have to pack out of here. Siwash it.”
CHAPTER FIVE
DAWN BROKE: a still and cloudless day. The Dakota lay half buried in new snow and the glacier rolled away in easy undulations, shadowed in its swales a pale bruise blue. We walked out toward the lip of the glacier, feeling our way cautiously with spruce poles so that we didn’t inadvertently step onto a fragile snow bridge masking a crevasse. My knee was stiff at first, but it loosened with the walking. Still, I didn’t know how much strain it could take over the long haul. At the lip of the glacier, the ice began to crackle and the crevasses grew too wide for leaping. We went back up the shoulder of the mountain that flanked the glacier. The country on the far side was all tumbledown cliffs and sharp unitaks. From the shoulder, we could look out over the country we’d have to traverse if we were to get out of that place.
I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but I was taking my first look at the country where I would make my life. It was a place where I would be happier than anywhere else in the world, and sadder. And, finally, angrier—country that would pit Healey against me in a bitter bloody duel from which only one of us could possibly emerge alive. Even with that final battle imminent, with thirty years behind us and our friendship gone rancid with his greed, I cannot truly hate him. But I must. . . .
The snout of the glacier, blue and pocked and studded with boulders, fell off nearly sheer for five hundred feet to the widening valley below. The country down there looked rusty green, smooth as a meadow, spotted here and there with glacier-scoured rock outcroppings splashed bright with lichen and moss. Two rivers snaked through the valley: one, milky white with glacial melt, feeding out of the ice itself, the other cutting down from the ridges to the north, clear and frothing only over its rapids. Black and yellow trees lined the rivers and their feeder streams, and big stands of spruce dotted the valley. Small lakes and potholes flashed like mirrors in the early light. Away off to the west, beyond a black line of coastal rain forest, you could see the hard blue-black line of the Gulf of Alaska.
“It looks like a golf course,” Sam said happily. “A million-hole golf course.”
“I make it about forty or fifty miles to the coast,” I said. “That’s a long hike. And you know damned well that what looks like a golf course from up here will turn out to be muskeg down there.”
Still, it was magnificent country and, despite my knee, I wanted to walk it. We went back to the plane and got our gear together, packing what we could fit into two musette bags. First aid kit, lighter fluid and smokes, Geodetic Survey charts of the region, a Boy Scout compass, some Gillette Blue Blades, six Hershey bars with almonds, the rest of our brandy and all the canned goods we could cram in. The tarp would be too heavy for one man to carry alone, so we haggled it apart with a pocket knife and each took half. I planned to carry the Johnson and gave Sam the .45.
“We could use some rope going down that cliff,” he said.
“There’s a coil of manila just back of the cockpit door in the hold,” I told him. “Why don’t you go in there and get it? Maybe you can pay back our furry friend for the ear.”
“Like hell.” Then he thought for a bit, looking warily at the plane. We hadn’t heard the carcajou since first light. “Maybe he’s gone. Maybe he heard his mother calling.” He steeled himself and went over to the plane, waited a long minute, then began climbing the spruce snag ladder into the cockpit. I watched him lean in cautiously, turn his head from side to side, then slide in farther as he reached for the coil of rope. I had the Johnson up and ready in case the wolverine showed, either in the cockpit or at the cargo door.
“Cripes!”
He exploded out the window like a champagne cork, the coil of rope snaking in his left hand. The spruce tree leaned out and away from its rest against the nose of the Dakota and for a long, teetering moment Healey balanced up there, a frozen pole vaulter, swaying back and forth. Then the tree fell backward to the ground. I could see the carcajou stick his flat ugly head out the window, eyes flashing evil, but before I could lay the rifle sights on him, he was gone.
“Did he get you?”
“No, thank God. But I think the only reason he missed was that he was back in there packing.” Sam brushed the snow from his sleeves and gestured with the rope coil. “Got the manila, though. That’s something. Why didn’t you shoot when he stuck his head out?”
“I’m getting to kind of like him. He’s a laugh a minute. You up there on that pole—it was better than a circus.”
It took the rest of that day just to get down the side of the mountain. Some of the time, we waded armpit deep in soft melting snow. At other times, we had to line our way down steep faces rather than go the long, slow way around. My knee was beginning to throb and I wrapped it tight in a hunk of canvas from the tarp, but then it was too stiff to flex properly so I took the canvas off. The flesh around the fang holes was red and puffy, with crusts of pale green pus showing. I scraped
the pus away and sprinkled on more sulfa. But puncture wounds don’t hold sulfa like a good clean slash. It ached deep down in there.
We drank glacial melt from the cans we had opened for our dinner, cold and gritty from the ice-ground rock the glacier had been polishing for the last ten thousand years. We watched our backtrail closely, but saw no sign of the carcajou. Maybe he decided to stay with the plane. It seemed a perfect playground for a lad of his bent. I was beginning to like that animal. What an appetite! God he was tough. In those early years I had not yet met up face to face with an angry grizzly, only a few rather phlegmatic black bears, and the carcajou was the first animal I had encountered (other than man) that ran both ways—toward you more often than not. There was something very deep and basic in the tingle you felt when you saw an animal coming your way with malice on its breath. Not a pleasant feeling, to be sure, but certainly a stirring one. I’m half convinced that he could dodge bullets. I’ve seen ducks, particularly green-wing teal, roll away from a pattern of chilled birdshot, eyes on mine as they pass, then folding one wing and executing a perfect barrel roll as they drop under the shot. The carcajou seemed able, even in the dark, to watch the bullet emerge from the gunbarrel and simply to step aside, letting it pass as a matador would a charging bull.
The sun was sinking fast toward the Gulf when we finally reached bottom. It was warmer in the valley than up on the ice, but not by much. My knee was about finished so we decided to make camp beside the clear river that flowed in from the northern scarp. Where the two streams met the milky glacial runoff and the clear water surged and swirled together, the clear current pulling clouds and tendrils of murk into itself, gray-green puffs of spinning smoke. Long dark shadows moved in and out of the murk and I caught a flash of red as one of the fish rolled—a big cutthroat trout, feeding along the edge between dark and light. Skulls and vertebrae of last summer’s salmon run littered the bank, and where it dipped to a natural ford we saw fresh moose sign, the big pad marks of a brown bear and the pockings of many caribou. Up on the ridge flanking the glacier we had seen sheep droppings. This was a rich country.
Healey came out of a spruce thicket dragging two blowdowns for the fire. “There’s a bog back in there that smells of oil,” he said. He scraped black muck off his boots and sniffed it. “Take a whiff.”
“Probably oozing out from under the glacier,” I said. “There’s a big seepage like that under the Valdez glacier but the oil companies aren’t interested. Too difficult to extract, they say. There’s probably oil all through this country, but it’s too damn tough to get it out. Gold is easier. Gold and fur and timber. The big treasure in this valley is the game. You could build a lodge right here where the two rivers meet and have top flyfishing within walking distance. If you worked the country carefully and weren’t too greedy, you’d never shoot all the game out. The caribou come through, like it or not. Keep the wolves in check and the moose would prosper. You might want to thin out the bears some. No sense having your clients chewed up.”
“Yeah, and that carcajou.”
“You could put in a string of spike camps up in the mountains and go after the Dall sheep in season. You could range out all through these mountains and set up a circuit of semipermanent camps, rotating them over the years so that you’d never put too much pressure on any one hunk of country. You could do it forever.”
Lying in our bags around the fire that night, sipping Labrador tea spiked with brandy, we talked about our hunting lodge. In those days you could still homestead in that section of Alaska. All you had to do was improve the property by five hundred dollars over a three-year period. We could do that just by putting up a small cabin. A small cabin to start, but then expanding it, doing it right: a big, high-ceilinged main room with a stand-up English-style stone fireplace and a lot of heads on the walls; rocking chairs built of caribou racks with lacquered snowshoe webbing; bearskin rugs and bearskins on the beds in the guest rooms; a separate room for a library like we’d seen in the big old houses in India from the days of the Raj. One thing we’d learned in Alaska, felt it ourselves, was a hunger for books. The farther north you go in this world, and the deeper you penetrate the wild places, the more literate the people who live there. Apart from the radio—which was used as much for gossip as it was for legitimate emergencies—there was no other way to stay in touch with the rest of the world. Not that Alaskans would like to be living in the Outside, but rather that learning of the Outside’s latest acts of arrant idiocy gave them a sense of superiority. Another odd thing: living lives of high adventure, they craved more than ever the spurious adventures of others, as filtered through the written word. A woman alone in a log cabin on a remote mountain hours from any other human being might take out the compost pail one morning and find a brown bear standing in her vegetable garden. She would go back into the house, take the Remington .338 Magnum off the wall, step outside, kill the bear with a brain shot, and then pour a cup of coffee and return to The Sweet Cheat Gone.
But the situation was ideal for a hunting lodge. It was far enough inland to be spared the incessant drenching rains of the coast. There was enough spruce and willow to heat with wood year around, plenty of water. Not so boggy that mosquitoes would drive you out, though they are a perennial pest everywhere in the summertime north—mosquitoes and black flies and no-see-ums so thick in all these parts that I’ve seen caribou dead with their nostrils plugged with matted black insect bodies, seen moose go crazy and crash off cliffs from the fly bites. But by the time the hunting season rolled around late in August, the flying insects had usually vanished, frozen out by early frosts. It would be perfect.
“Let’s file on it,” Healey said. “A damn good investment. If the game ever ran out, we could always tap the oil.”
We both laughed at that. In those days, oil was the cheapest commodity in the world. Or so it seemed.
CHAPTER SIX
AND SO we left the country that the carcajou had showed us—”The Valley of the Devil,” as Healey called it. We built a raft of dried spruce logs, burning them to size in the campfire and lashing them together with the manila line. According to our charts, we were on the headwaters of the Alugiak River. Before we broke camp, we placed cairns at the corners of the section we planned to homestead, estimating the acreage as best we could from our detail chart and leaving our names and the date, written on pages torn from the flight log, buried in taped tin cans under the stones. Later, we could run a more precise survey.
The weather held fair and we made good time, drifting silently on the strong green current with the sky a high hard blue overhead filled with the piercing dog yap of migrating geese. Around nearly every bend, we flushed rafts of ducks and geese off the slow water of the back eddies. I killed one with a lucky head shot from the Johnson, a young snow goose just at the start of its takeoff. We surprised a family of black bears, a sow and two cubs, stuffing themselves on skunk cabbage in the mucky shallows of a slough. They stood hock deep in the ooze staring vacantly at us with shredded vegetation dripping from their jaws, as if they had never seen men before. Innocents in an Arctic Eden.
We made camp that night—our last on the river, we hoped—on a broad gravel bar in an oxbow bend where the breeze would keep the mosquitoes down. As the weather warmed, they had appeared in clouds, forcing us to midstream to avoid them. But as the sun sloped lower and the shadows lengthened along the banks, a chill knifed into the air and the mosquitoes began to disappear. Even in midsummer, with the sun shining nearly twenty-four hours, ice is never far beneath the surface. It is always cold in the shadows.
We roasted the goose over a slow fire, catching the fat drippings in the concave surface of a flat, ice-hollowed stone. After two days of canned goods and a lot of labor, we were ravenous. I found a stand of Indian rice—a chocolate-flowered iris-like plant with small edible bulbs—growing in a meadow back of the gravel bar and we roasted the bulbs on another rock at the side of the fire, seasoning them with wild chives. The aroma of our cooking
was almost unbearable as we waited for the goose to be done. I wondered if I looked as beat out as Healey. He lay propped on one elbow beside the fire, his face and hands lumpy with bug bites, the bandage over his torn ear spotted yellow-brown where it had leaked. My own injured knee was swollen to twice its normal size. Lining the raft down the last set of rapids, I had slipped and smashed it against a sharp boulder. Despite the fire, my bones still ached from immersion in the cold ice-fed water.
Yet for all our aches and bruises, for all that our sole means of livelihood lay smashed on top of the glacier far behind us, for all that we did not know what the night, much less tomorrow, would bring us in the way of trial and fresh peril, we were happier, there in front of that sputtering fire on that chilly windswept gravel bar, than we had ever been before. We were young then, and strong, and certainly naive. But this was what had brought us to Alaska: the challenge of strong country, the chance to pit our strength and skill against something stronger, pitiless but not impersonal, a land as young and raw as we were, yet infinitely tougher. I guess we could be called masochists, for suffering in that country was a kind of privilege. Scars were our wound stripes. Walk down any muddy street in any scruffy Alaskan town and count the fingers on the men you pass. Even if they all have both their arms, you’ll be lucky to count ninety on the first ten you see. Empty eye sockets, peg legs, burn scars and axe scars: Badges of Honor.
Something splashed in the darkness of the river. Healey glanced over at the holstered .45 and unsnapped the safety flap. The glint of firelight on wood.
“Hello the camp! May I come ashore?”
The man who dragged the heavily laden freight canoe up onto the shingle was short and square-shouldered in a faded red wool shirt and stagged corduroy pants tucked into the top of high lace-up mukluks. His long white hair was held back from his forehead by a wide rawhide sweatband. Bright black eyes, wide cheekbones, a short hooked nose, heavy jaw, wide mouth. An Indian.
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