We floated the planks down a brook to the clear river, and then down to the cabin. I built a door while Josey floored the cabin with the bulk of the planks. We sanded them down with ancient pumice from a long-dormant volcano. Using an empty fifty-five-gallon oil drum for a cistern, we rigged a gravity-feed waterline to the cabin from a spring on the slope behind it, running the water for now through a length of rubber garden hose. Later, I would install galvanized pipe. Another drum, cut in half with a blowtorch, lengthwise, became a sink and a washtub. A third drum evolved, with the addition of a cast-iron door and thimble and a ten-foot length of sheet-metal eight-inch pipe, into a wood stove. It rested on a cradle I’d welded together of scrap iron, over a hearth of river slate. We chinked the walls with gray, slippery glacial mud that dried hard as putty and at night, when the temperature fell, and the chill wind blew down from the glacier, the barrel stove roared and it was warm enough in the low-ceilinged, sixteen-by-twenty-foot cabin to walk around naked in full comfort.
With some more cedar planking, I built a rough table and a bed frame that we strung with dried bear guts, two big comfortable wooden chairs covered with bear hide, and a deep cupboard where we stowed tools, utensils, ammo and our few books. The days were rapidly growing shorter now, and in the high country back of the glacier the aspens had gone yellow. Big storms moved in over the mountains, and when we woke in the mornings we could see the snow line moving down steadily, a few hundred yards a day. We read at night by the weak yellow light of candles made from bear tallow.
“I’m not going back to California.”
“No?”
“I couldn’t take it, not after this. All those people. Cars. Movies. Newspapers and radio programs and noise noise noise.”
“I was figuring on wintering over up here. I reckon on trapping the valley back of the cedars, maybe a hundred traps. I’ll need dogs for that, and a good sled, not to mention the traps and supplies for the winter. I figured on selling the plane and having someone fly me back in with the dogs and gear and then not coming out until breakup or maybe later.”
“You don’t have to sell the plane. I’ve got four thousand that Norman’s holding for me back in town. Would that be enough?”
“Plenty. But it can be very bad up here in the winter. I’ve never wintered in the bush, but it’s got to be worse than Vermont. Back home, people used to scrag themselves right and left during the winter. Women would drink carbolic acid. The old boy would go out to milk the cows and when he didn’t come back after a while, she’d go out there and find him dangling from the rafter, with his tongue stuck out. Sometimes they’d shoot each other. They drank a lot and died from that. Radio helped some, and the telephone, but still it was pretty bad unless you could live inside your head and you had a lot of love for the person you were living with, and for the kids. Up here it’ll be worse.”
“Except we’ve got us.”
“Yes. But we’d better stock up on a lot of new books just to be sure.”
“Come on over here.”
She was hot and smooth under the blanket, slicked up and waiting.
“We’ll make it,” she whispered later. “No doubt about it.”
“How do you know?” I whispered back.
“Because I’ll use my witchly bitchly powers to make you think you have a harem of a thousand women, each one more beautiful and practiced in the arts of love than the last.”
“The arts of love make mighty thin soup.”
“And when you’re out on the trapline, I’ll be running right with you and skinning for you and tanning moose hides and cooking big feasts for you and tending your salmon nets in the summer, splitting the salmon and drying them on the racks the way Indians do, mending your clothes, and you’ll teach me how to fly the plane so that I can fly into town if we need anything like more ammo or books or things for around the house. That sort of thing.”
“Why don’t we get married?”
“Naw,” she said. “I’m not ready for that yet.”
Her fingers toyed with the bearclaw necklace on my chest. Charlie Blue was right. It had taken me where I wanted to go and made everything all right.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IN MID-OCTOBER, the snow began to fly. Anchor ice formed on the river edges and floes thickened in the mainstream. The last geese blew with the last of the aspen leaves, skeining south through iron skies, their distant yap skirling down through snow-thick winds. We had not yet laid in our meat for the winter and took advantage of the snow to drift the river in the nineteen-foot aluminum freight canoe we’d picked up on our shopping spree in Anchorage. We ghosted with the ice floes, Josey hunched in the bow with the new .30/06 full-stocked Mannlicher carbine across her knees while I steered in the stern and fended off the ice as best I could to keep it from clanking on the hull. Dead silence except for the gurgle of black water around roots and rocks; the shorelines dark gray broken-toothed ranks of spruce shifting and fading and then emerging clear through the veils of snow; a raven calling somewhere in the gloom.
The moose, when he finally appeared, stood hock-deep in the water with sedge drooling from his long bulbed nose, and at first he seemed just another uprooted snag along the shore. But a faint glint of warmth from the polished spoons of his antlers gave him away. He popped clear to view, as if some shaman had placed him there, had transformed the snag into nearly a ton of hot meat and heavy hide and bone.
Flame crack from the muzzle: a fiery tiger lily, bloomed and blown on the instant: the swat like a well-hit baseball as the 220-grain hollow point bullet took him on the shoulder and he lurched awkwardly, drunk with death, up the bank, water splashing black from his belly and his haunches bulging in the steely light: then a second shot: thump, into the brisket, and he teetered near the edge of the spruce for a moment, shuddered, sprawled forward on his chest with a crash like a falling tree.
“Let it snow,” said Josey as we stood in the sweet steam that rose from his open chest cavity, his heart huge and bloody in her hands. “We won’t starve now.”
And so, like the bears, we settled into our winter den. The sturdy log cache we’d built well away from the main cabin was full to the rafters with frozen slabs of moose and bear, ptarmigan and trout and grayling; cases of canned vegetables and soup lined one wall of the main cabin itself, serving as insulation additional to the rockwool with which we’d lined the ceiling. With her new Singer, Josey had fashioned heavy, bright-patterned shades for the two cabin windows, which were now double-glazed with proper glass. She had bought some house plants—a wandering jew, a piggyback begonia, a spider plant and a velvet plant with its smooth furry purple leaves, an aloe vera whose slimy sap worked wonders on stove-burned fingers; little pots of herbs dangled on hooks from the rafter near the kitchen window, chive, parsley, tarragon, mint, rosemary, thyme, pineapple sage and burnet, all thriving in various combinations of heat and light and cool shadow.
Three walls of the house, outside, were stacked roof-high with ranks of wind-cured firewood, spruce and popple mainly, wood that my childhood neighbors in Vermont would have sneered at as “junk stuff” fit only to sugar within the springtime. But we had no rock maple, red oak, beech or ash, and I knew if we burned the wood hot enough and kept a close watch on the chimney pipe, cleaning it once a week perhaps, we would avoid the danger of creosote buildup and a chimney fire. A small and niggling point, you may think, but in that country, in the dead of winter with the thermometer bottomed out at seventy below, a fire would be the finish of us, even if we got out alive. Of course, we could make do in the cache, which was one reason we had built it well away from the cabin, but that would be roughing it. As it was, we would winter in luxury.
With rollers and a block and tackle, we had winched the Cessna up a log ramp onto the high ground, and replaced the floats with skis. When the river froze solid, we could fly out again if we had to, but we both agreed we would like to spend the first winter entirely on our own. It would be an adventure of the mind.
We
had looted the bookstores of Anchorage. The complete works of Dickens. The Waverley Novels. Shakespeare in a single volume. As much Faulkner as we could find, but most importantly The Bear. Agatha Christie and Dorothy B. Sayers. Nordhoff and Hall. Thoreau. Benchley. Turgenev and Tolstoi and Gogol’s Lost Souls. Anguish in Swaziland by Hubert Beard-Highwood, along with his sister Lavinia’s surreal companion volume, By Lallygag Through Northumberland. Fix Bayonets! by John W. Thomason, which I mistakenly took for a knife-repair book but enjoyed anyway. Gray’s Anatomy. Blackstone on Law. A delightful account of early travels in the Arctic titled Chiaroscuro Motley by Vassily Sergeevich Volkov, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. Louise Helen Tyor’s best-selling new cookbook The Eclectic Kitchen (the last copy on the shelves in Anchorage, and perhaps all Alaska), into which, we discovered only when we got home, some mischievous printer had bound a totally irrelevant folio of ink sketches portraying the lovely chefette in various stages of deshabille, gaily waving a wooden spoon, clad finally in naught but a garter belt and black mesh stockings, with a white chef’s toque cocked jauntily on her pretty, Joseyesque head. It gave us many a laugh over dinner in the months that followed.
The books and the laughter were very important, for the long winter night of the North Country sends electric ghosts and grim-fisted demons leaping over the synapses of the soul. In the depth of winter, the goneaway sun barely edges over the horizon at eleven in the morning, a worn shaved obol from some distant past, and creaks down again without a wink by three in the afternoon. The air lies heavy and still, filling the universe with a creaking cold that fingers the very bowels and crystallizes them; the chimney smoke rises no more than a dozen feet from the pipe, a still, thick blue column, then collapses within itself. You can hear it fall. And you can hear, through the cabin walls, if you are alone in your soul, mourning the dead world, the passing hiss and crackle of the Aurora, whispers in some cobwebbed corner of your mind, insinuations and sly hints of murder and madness: perhaps in all the universe there is only one mind, and it is insane, and to keep itself from exploding like a tree in the taiga that bursts into a million million toothpicks as it freezes, that mad mind had imagined a world. And this mind is you.
“Don’t tell me things like that.” Josey shivered beside me under the goosedown quilt. The fire snapped in the drum stove and under the cabin the dogs shifted, growled, and nestled back down within the universe of their long silver tails; the spines of our books glowed in the amber umbra of kerosene light; water hissed in the teapot. “Isn’t that what Mark Twain believed toward the end of his life, after his daughter died?”
“Something like that. And he had all of Hartford to keep him company.”
But we had our work. The trapline mainly: some thirty miles of it, extending in two long, flattened loops that formed a wobbly figure-eight straddling the drainage of Carcajou Creek, our name for the clear stream that flowed into the Alugiak from the northeast. Over that distance, we set 120 traps in the most likely spots we could find—hollow logs near creeks for mink, ledge country for foxes, squirrel den territory for both the ground squirrels that were prized as parka material and for the wolves and lynxes that preyed on them. Our traps were mainly single and double springs, ranging in size from ones and one and a halfs (for weasel and mink) to fours and fives (for lynx and wolf). We boiled them three or four times to remove the human-machined odor of oil and steel, the final boil in a stew of pine and spruce needles. Then we dipped the still-hot traps in melted beeswax and, when it was dry, handled them only in smoked leather gloves that never came indoors. Most of our sets were in cubbies—little hidey-holes we built of spruce boughs, with a bait swinging enticingly at the back of the cubby: a ptarmigan wing, a hunk of spoiled fish, the foot of a beaver. A dangling corncob smeared with peanut butter and honey had worked wonderfully on the raccoons I trapped as a kid in Vermont, but there are no raccoons in Alaska and nobody else up here seemed interested. For them, it was meat or nothing.
We ran the line two or three times a week, depending on weather, covering the double loop in a long, ten-hour day. The dogs—five of them—were Husky crosses, silent, fierce-eyed and quarrelsome, with a lot of wolf in the mix. There was no love lost among us. In the first weeks they fought among themselves, tangling the traces and slowing the run, but we learned to get their attention with stout clubs and harsh voices (Josie cussing like a Marine sergeant) and the more they worked, the more they worked together so that by the time the rivers were frozen solid, we could spot a fight brewing before it began and quell it with a yell. Most of the furbearers we took in our sets were frozen by the time we got to them. Those that weren’t, we stunned with a club blow over the bridge of the nose and then finished off by standing on the animal’s chest. Wolves and lynxes, growling and hissing at the end of their trap chains, received a quick .22-caliber bullet behind the ear as surcease.
Returning from the run in the dark late one afternoon, the stars crackling overhead and the frost on our wolf-fur parka ruffs stiff and spiky from the exertion, we found a strange sled parked near the cabin, and strange dogs chained back in the trees. A short, busy figure moved against the yellow light behind the windows. We had a visitor. We shucked our snowshoes and went in.
“So you stayed!” yelled Charlie Blue as we came into the cabin. “Good for you! Good for the bearclaw necklace!” He was clad all in fur, his face a vast brown interlocking wrinkle. In one hand, he held a half-cooked haunch of beaver he’d fried over the new woodburning stove and the fat glistened on his jutting chin. I wondered what was left in the larder. Josey looked at me doubtfully, but I gave her a wink.
“I hope you’ve helped yourself to food and fire,” I said to him.
“Naturally, of course, certainement. Listen, you’re trapping in this country. How are you doing on cross-fox?”
“Not so good.”
“Here, try some of this.” He pulled a bottle from one of his many pockets and unscrewed the cap. An odor so pungent, so rotten, filled the cabin that one might have expected all the dead of all the world, past present and future, animal vegetable and alien, to have putresced in that tiny phial. “Take salmon eggs, duck livers, seal blubber, some herring and some codfish, deer meat and a few shrew mice. Stick ’em in a jar and let ’em rot together for two years in a warmish place. To get the shrew mice, bait a perforated tin can but don’t let ’em get at the bait. They’ll die right quick. Won’t nip your knuckles when you come to take ’em. Makes a nice oily scent for the fox. Here, you try it. How you doing on wolf?”
“Fair.”
“Should be doing better. Too damn many wolf this country. Not enough moose. Wolf eating them all. Here’s what you do.” He reached into another pocket and pulled out a long rib bone, probably from a moose or maybe a caribou. The top third of the bone was sharpened to a knife edge. “Coat the sharp end in tallow—some good rich bear or beaver fat is best. Stick the bone sharp end up in the snow out where the wolves have been running. Wolf comes up, can’t resist licking the fat. Licks down to the sharp part. Slits his tongue. Can’t feel it in the cold. Goes off and bleeds to death. You follow out along his track, look for bloody shit. At the end, you’ll find dead wolf. No bullet holes in the hide. Get you more mazuma that way.”
“What’s to keep the wolf from pulling the bone out of the snow and making off with it?”
“Cut a hole through the river ice and hold the blunt end in the water. It freezes in a minute or two and the wolf can’t pull it out.”
“I hope you’ll stay for dinner with us and spend the night,” Josey said.
“Of course, natürlich. First, I’ll feed my dogs. I’ll feed your dogs too. Where do you keep your fish?”
“In the cache.”
“I looked in there. All your salmon is gone. Everything else is okay, hunky-dory. Some thief must get in while you’re gone, steal your salmon. But I’ve got plenty on my sled. Don’t worry.” He went out into the night.
“What’s going on?” Josey asked.
“Did he steal our fish?”
“Not really,” I said. I told her about my earlier run-in with him down the river. “Whatever he takes, he’ll leave more in return. And better. The necklace brought me you, didn’t it?”
The door slammed open and Charlie stumped in, grinning and swatting his furclad arms against his sides.
“Good. They’re eating. Plenty of fish for all. You got anymore of that good brandy?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHARLIE SPENT the night curled in front of the barrel stove, naked except for his bearclaw necklace—the twin of mine—and his mukluks. He was wrinkled all over, like one of those Chinese fighting dogs you see now and then in the photo magazines, all drooped and folded skin so that when another dog grabs one in a fight, it can’t get hold of anything vital. He snored in a great rolling cacophony of roars, grunts, gurgles and wheezes, sometimes sounding like a ravening wolf, sometimes like a giant raven. Even our dogs, who usually spent the night growling and snapping at one another, fell silent in awe. At first we could not sleep, but then his snoring took on a kind of rhythm, as if one were dozing at the edge of a great waterfall, or high on a beach where a storm was playing itself out among the rocks below.
We awoke to the smell of frying bear bacon and bubbling oatmeal. Charlie stood at the stove, singing at the top of his voice in what I took to be Tlingit.
“Up! Up!” he yelled on seeing us stir. “Daylight in the swamp! Let’s eat and then I take you into the glacier, show you your own forever cache of dog meat.”
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