The plane climbed free of the valley under heavy skies. As it banked once to the east and then again around to the southwest, Dude and Suzy saw him waving to them, small and squat under the heavy pack, the rifle tiny in his hand.
“He is a proper asshole,” said Dude. His hands were tight on the stick.
“Easy,” she said. “Where does he have to go from here?”
“Where do we have to go?”
“Anywhere,” said Suzy. “As long as it’s us who make the journey.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
NOW HE was out in it: the vastness empty of life and heat, only the hard low light on snow and wind-bare rock as he moved through it, the only sound the fall of his snowshoes as he plugged forward. Even the wind was silent. There were no trees for it to strum. This is how he had hoped it all would be, just moving through the high, empty country with no memory of where he had come from and no need to arrive anywhere at the end. Not even the dogs to whip in line, no traces to untangle, no fights to break up, no worry about how to feed them when the day’s fun was ended.
He ran each day along the ridges until he was leg-weary, then descended into a valley to find shelter among the spruces. He melted snow and ice over a small fire, drank bitter tea, ate a handful of boiled rice and a piece of moose jerky, then zipped himself deep into the mummy bag and slept until his dream awakened him.
In the dream, Josey emerged from a ball of flame, smiling and offering her hand. The fire had burned away the years and she was young as she had been that first fine summer 192 they were together, alone in the country under the icefall. She stood naked with the fire boiling behind her, smiling and silent, only her beckoning arm inviting him forward. But his feet were rooted; he could not move to follow her. He tried to call out for her help but his voice stuck in his throat and all the sound that could emerge was that of the wind moving through branches, carrying with it the hard cold caress of snow. Then, still smiling, she faded back into the fire and was gone.
He had to run for an hour before the pain would subside, and even then it lingered on deep in his belly, a low ache that pulsed with his footfalls: gone, gone, she’s gone, gone. . . .
On the day he ran out of food, he stopped on a high ridge and scanned the country below him. A deep cirque fell off a thousand feet to his left—the southwest—and in its basin lay a small lake, frozen at this season, but surrounded by spruce and balsam trees. The basin seemed big enough to hold wintering game. He pulled his 8x30 Zeiss sheep glasses from the pack and studied the snow for tracks. There were game trails stamped in the snow all around the edge of the basin and cutting into it to disappear into heavy cover. He worked his way down the side of cirque, snowshoes slung on his back and cutting his steps in the crusted snow with his knife as he went. He stopped frequently on the way down to glass the basin. Finally he saw movement: a caribou cow and two nearly full-grown calves pawing the snow at the edge of the trees. He unslung the .22-250 and used its butt as a staff as he continued the descent, keeping to the cover of boulders so as not to alarm the game.
When he had come to within three hundred yards of the caribou, he began his final stalk. He slid out of the pack and circled on his hands and knees through the snow until he was above and behind the browsing animals. The snow here had been melted away by the focusing effect of sun on the concave rock wall and he found the rubble loose under his boots. A large square-topped boulder masked him from the caribou and he would have to work around the far end to get a shot. The light was fading now but still he moved with the utmost caution, painstakingly rearranging the loose rocks by hand over the last twenty feet to the edge of the boulder. When he peered around the corner the caribou were still there. He eased the rifle forward, took a sight on the cow’s chest just back of the crook of her foreleg, and squeezed off. She jumped once at the hit, bawled and leaped forward, and collapsed. The calves spun around and stared in all directions. They walked over to her and nudged her with their noses, then stared around some more. They came toward him a few steps as he emerged from the cover of the rock, then turned and fled into the timber. They were big enough to survive on their own but still he felt the old pang at having killed a female of the species. But her meat would be tender and fatter than a bull’s and he needed meat.
A flock of Canada jays surrounded him, bouncing on the spruce boughs and hopping down to the far end of the carcass as he butchered the cow. Whisky-jacks. Camp robbers. But he enjoyed their company. They reminded him of fat, sassy, oversized chickadees and he threw them tidbits of meat as he worked. He hung the butchered meat on a high limb to freeze in the shade, reserving the liver and heart for his supper, then set to scraping the hide. He built a big fire, heedless of the smoke that billowed up through the cirque, and stretched the hide near it to dry.
Then he sliced up part of the liver and the heart and one of his few remaining onions and fried them. He lay back against a fire-warmed boulder and filled his belly, watching the sparks spiral up into the rising, whirling air column and disappear into the light of the aurora which arched across the dark circle of rock high overhead.
The next day he lashed together a drying rack and festooned it with strips of thinly sliced caribou meat which he had rubbed with the last of his salt and pepper. He spent the rest of the day feeding and watching the fire, and moving the meat around as it dried into jerky. The whisky-jacks were back and he encouraged them with slivers of meat so that soon they were alighting on his wrist to take the offering from between his fingers. They cocked their heads and winked at him with big black eyes. Two ravens arrived in the late afternoon but he could not coax them out of the trees. He threw meat into the woods for them, which they cautiously accepted, then croaking their thanks they disappeared to the southwest.
On the third day, with the caribou hide dry, he moved his 194 camp to the mouth of the cirque. The encircling rock walls ended just a few hundred feet apart and a small, steep creek flowed out of the lake and splashed, unfrozen, down into a broad forested intervale. The boulders on the sides of the creek were frozen and gleamed like glass, and each rill and waterfall wore a beard of ice. He used the caribou hide to build a rude sauna, heating the smaller rocks in a hot fire and then throwing them under a platform of green balsam boughs he had placed inside the caribou hide tent, using gloves made of caribou ruff scraped clean and soaked in the creek to handle the hot stones.
He stripped naked and crouched in the tent, splashing creek water from a birchbark ewer over the rocks and soaking in the balsam-sweetened steam. The whisky-jacks bounced at the peak of the tent and chattered down at him through the steam. When he could no longer stand the heat, he ran out and leaped into a pool below the tallest waterfall. Then he stood in the snow, facing the sunset in the deep far valley, bathed in red light, naked except for the bearclaws.
Nothing.
Only silence, and the crackle of his fire behind him.
That night in his dream, he took one step toward Josey before she disappeared into the fireball.
The next day, with the cruising ax, he built a small threesided shelter of balsam logs, roofing it with interwoven boughs and matting more of them on the fire-bared rock floor for a mattress. Hunting around the edge of the cirque for more boughs, he found the tracks of a wolverine. He followed them up along the wall of the cirque and over into another valley. The animal was not far ahead of him. It was hunting out marmot dens and digging into them to give a rude awakening to the slumbering inmates.
Late in the day he saw a black figure moving on the rocks to his right. He stopped and watched. It was the carcajou. It climbed a small cliff and halted, looking back at him. He could see its eyes gleaming in the late light. They stared at one another for a long time. Then darkness began to intervene and he made his way back to the camp. He fired up the sauna and bathed again in the sweet steam. Still there was nothing in the valley.
“Come with me,” she said that night.
“Not yet,” he told her. “There is something I h
ave to do.”
“Do it,” she smiled. “And come with me. I need you.”
“I need you,” he told her, “and I am coming soon.”
He woke up weeping.
That night, after he had finished in the sauna and stood naked in the cold, he saw them approaching. Six figures, furclad, moving toward his fire across the snowfield from the forested valley. Only when they were close and he could see the full-stocked, long-barreled rifles was he sure. Then he saw their faces in the firelight. Old, scarred faces like his own, but beardless, with dark hooded eyes and skin the color of ancient ivory. One of them carried no rifle, only a long-bladed shallow-curved sword. The katana of a samurai. They stood in a semicircle around him, their eyes on the bearclaw necklace.
Then a seventh figure came up between them from the darkness behind. It was Charlie Blue.
“You need help,” said Charlie.
“One last battle,” Slade answered.
They look like insects, Gates thought. Giant praying mantids nicking and nodding to a god we cannot see. Forged of steel, tireless in their devotions, every obeisance rewarded with another stingy gush of crude. Mantis religiosa mazola.
He turned away from the oil pumps, their grunt and clack in the lamplit dark, and walked back toward the lodge. Searchlights played on the face of the glacier, the beams flickering highlights of blue and green, purple and red, from the ridged crenelations that soared into the darkness. Back in the gloom stood the trucks and cranes and D-9 cats that had built the oil camp. As soon as the earth was dry after last spring’s breakup, the new equipment had arrived by freighter at Gurry Bay. The heavy machines grumbled up the road to the old truck park where Slade had destroyed their predecessors, and began cutting toward the glacier. Gates watched with grim amusement as the big blades slashed through the forest, toppling trees that had taken nearly a century to grow to their puny size in this hard climate, watched the river go brown with mud.
Dynamite blasts shook the valley as the Morgan Petro crews planted drainage culverts and chewed away at cliffs to straighten the route of the haul road. Mile on mile of heavy steel pipe stretched back from the glacier toward Gurry Bay, where a new dock facility was being built to accommodate the tankers that would soon carry away the riches that lay under the ice. For a while the work crews had enjoyed good, though illegal, hunting during their off hours. They gunned down moose and bear, ducks and geese and ptarmigan, even killed a few caribou up Carcajou Creek, the last of the woodland caribou left in these parts. Danforth, the Park Service boss, looked the other way. He too enjoyed fresh meat. But now all the game was gone. They had seen not a single glacier bear up on the ice. Gates had to laugh. A National Monument to a vanished species.
Tomorrow was the big day. The official opening of the new pipeline. The oil had come in even earlier than predicted, only a month and a half after the first drill bit spudded in. Healey and Mummad-Afi were delighted, congratulating each other ceaselessly on their perspicacity and good fortune. Only Jep Morgan seemed subdued. An old man, he did not like the changes that had taken place at his favorite retreat. Still, it was big money and that was the best consolation. Gates himself rather enjoyed the despoliation. He had seen so many beautiful places ruined in his lifetime—the England of his boyhood gone now to sniveling high-rise senility, the endless golden-green gamelands of Africa burned out by civil wars and denuded of wildlife by poachers. Now it was Alaska’s turn.
At first this destruction of the old and the beautiful had enraged him. He had fought on the side of those who had kept Africa underpopulated, a game park for wealthy Westerners. But even now they appeared to prefer profit to permanence. The Arabs were even worse. They seemed happiest driving through deserts in air-conditioned Rolls-Royces, from one pleasure dome to another. So he had joined them, he and his guns, though the only pleasure he could now find in life was the sour one of seeing it die all around him.
The one thing that worried him about tomorrow, and at the same time kept him hopeful for excitement, was Slade’s disappearance. Since his raid on the truck park and his shooting down of the helicopter, he had vanished from the country.
That business with the woman, though. It still made him sick to think of it. Not her death, no, nothing wrong with that. But all that effort gone to waste. He had warned Mummad against it from the start, but Mummad had insisted. Not content with having stripped Slade of the country he held so dear, he had to kill him to boot. Gates had come upriver in a jetboat from Gurry Bay under cover of darkness. He had planted the bomb in the engine of the Super Cub with the utmost of stealth. Not even a snarl from the goddamned dogs. Slade was scheduled to fly into Gurry Bay the next day to pick up a planeload of fishing clients. The king salmon run was on. Who would have thought the woman would pick that day to go shopping?
He had waited below the big rapids they called the skookumchuck with the jetboat hidden back in a tangle of sweepers and heard the plane warm up, heard it taxi out into the stream, then the engine up to full revs as it took off. Almost directly over his head the bomb had gone. A perfect blast. A fireball that filled half the sky, with wings and struts and wheels and the engine itself squirreling off in every direction, and the pilot’s body—afire and dismembered—spinning out and down to splash hissing into the current.
But it was the woman. And now Slade would not quit until he had killed Mummad and Healey and Gates. Well, Gates welcomed the challenge. He smiled in anticipation of the final showdown. He knew he had the hot hand.
Search planes had been unable to find Slade, although Gates suspected that they had not looked too assiduously, the Dead Mounties being very tough to fly. Though Healey and Mummad believed that Slade had given up his fight, gone off into Canada or perhaps even out of the hemisphere—to Australia or New Guinea, perhaps—Gates hoped he would return. He hadn’t killed anyone since Strang, the wayward cowpoke. Victoria, of course, had charged rape. Mummad gave the order. Gates took Strang back into the woods and strung him up with barbed wire, then carved on him with a pocketknife for two hours until the man had simply died of the pain. It had not been very satisfactory. A good firelight was what Gates needed.
He paused as he neared the lodge. From within came the sound of clinking ice and drunken laughter. Healey and Mummad were in there with the town leaders from Gurry Bay—the prissy mayor, Norman Ormandy, and the entourage of pansies whom he had brought in from the Outside to take over all the new, burgeoning service businesses—the Blue Bear Boutique, the IceCreme Salon de Chic, the brothel and the new cinema and the supermarket and the big motel where the cannery had once stood. Gates did not want to join them. He decided to take a last look at the glacier before turning in. If Slade were back and had something planned, the glacier would provide him with the best ambush site. Its caves and turrets and boulder-strewn moraine were excellent locations for gun sites.
Gates let himself through the padlocked cyclone fence and walked toward the ice. There was a cave he had found in his earlier explorations, though he had not ventured far within. It probably dead-ended up in the ice a short distance from the front, but he checked it every day for footprints, just in case it was the entrance to a deeper tunnel or series of caves.
The searchlight beams dazzled him as he moved near the ice, dancing over the seracs and slashing back at his eyes. He put on his sunglasses to cut the glare and drew his pistol as he approached the cave mouth. He stopped short of it, staring down at the gray mud. Tracks. Mukluk prints in the mud, leading into the ice. He stepped forward, his trigger finger tensed on the guard and his senses alert to the smallest sound or movement.
The light danced across the furrowed ice; from behind him, in the lodge, came the pulsing beat of music and the shrill laughter of Victoria and Svetlana. He stepped into the cave.
A blurred streak of silver light slashed out of the darkness, at eye level. A dark figure moved behind it.
Gates never felt the sword that removed his head.
It thudded to the mud at his feet.
His body, spouting blood from the neck stump, weaved and then collapsed sideways against the stained ice wall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SLADE LAY at the very lip of the glacier, on a flat moss-grown slab of iceborne rock. With the glasses he scanned the camp far below him. Workers and Park Service rangers scurried, back and forth from trailers to trucks to valves and pipelines, while others formed an armed cordon around the huge silver holding tank from which the crude oil would shortly flow. They know about Gates, Slade thought. They know I’m here, but they don’t know where or what I plan. Let them worry a while.
Behind him he heard a crunch of ice and, turning, saw Charlie Blue crawling toward him. He unrolled a coil of insulated wire as he came.
“It is all in place,” he said. “Just where you wanted it.” He handed the wire to Slade.
“Where are the Japanese?”
“Those who planted the explosives are on their way out through the rear tunnel. Two are covering the guards, from the rocks on either side, with the grenade launcher and a rifle. When you start, they will fire and then retreat out of the way.”
“You’d better get going yourself,” Slade said.
“No,” said the Tlingit. “I’m staying with you.”
“It’s a one-way ride, Charlie.”
“I know it,” he answered, grinning through his wrinkles. “I am an old man and my country is finished. And besides, it is only fitting that the last shaman should be part of the end of it all.”
Slade nodded and began securing the wires to the terminals of the exploder. Nearly a hundred pounds of C-4 explosive was connected to the end of the wire, the packets distributed across the entire front of the glacier, buried deep in crevasses and caves and linked together by lengths of detonator cord.
“Here they come,” said Charlie Blue. “See how the Persian struts. Like a grouse to his drumming log. And Healey. He is fat now, and worried. He gapes around him like a thief worried about pursuit. But the old man, Morgan, he is sad.”
Slade's Glacier Page 18
