Slade's Glacier

by Robert F. Jones

  “Not for long,” Jack said. I wish we had Sam up here with us, though, he was thinking. I wish he were still on our side. But he never was. He sold me out long ago, the first time we saw this country. Well, he deserves it. But I still hate it to end this way.

  Think of her, he told himself. She was the only one who saw it the way you did. New and fresh, just waiting to be lived in, not eager to give but grudging, yet what a living it provided. Dude grew up in it, he never felt the strangeness or the accommodation. Or the whole reward. He can make his own life, and Susan’s, in this new world we built for them. Each of us has to find his own place and make it all fit together.

  “Josey,” he said aloud.

  “Yes,” the Indian said. “Think of her. I always do.”

  “You still have time to get out.”

  “I am with you.” He rattled the bearclaws around his neck and looked at Slade. “This is how it has to be.”

  Slade lifted a flap of canvas that lay beside him on the rock. Under it was Gates’s head. A few flies had worked their way in despite the cold and the covering. They flushed sluggishly from the corners of the dead man’s eyes and the raw butt of his neck. Slade looked down at the holding tank. The entire party was gathered at the valve platform. He saw Norman Ormandy simpering among the onlookers as Healey mouthed a speech. A few words drifted up to him.

  “. . . new era for Gurry Bay. . . . Wealth undreamed of even in the days of the Argonauts . . . time for a change in Alaska. No longer the land of the bear and the trapper, it must now . . .”

  Slade hurled the head out and upward. It arched high over the towering seracs, turning and tumbling as it cleared the gray rock-studded mud of the moraine. A good shot. It bounced on the platform at Mummad’s feet. Someone screamed—was it one of the houris, or was it Norman?

  Danforth and his men spread out from the crowd gathered at the holding tank, rifles ready and eyes searching upward. A hollow pop echoed out from the rocks and a grenade canister exploded among the Park Service riflemen. Danforth sprawled backward, his face and eyes bristling with bit of wire. Many of his men fell with him and those who remained standing broke and ran for the safety of the lodge. The men and women on the platform stood frozen beneath the lip of the glacier, gazing upward.

  Slade raised himself from the rock where he lay and walked forward into view. He held the exploder in his right hand, and to the Indian watching him it seemed he glowed as if he were on fire.

  “You wanted it,” Slade yelled down to them. He could see them gaping up at him—Mummad pale despite his tan, Healey fat-jowled and red with something that looked like glee, old Jep grim-jawed and tall. He could not tell if they could hear him, but he finished his speech anyway.

  “Then take it.”

  Healey’s head was back and he was laughing openly now. He could see that the wall of ice teetering above them, with Jack its final projection, would be their icy tombstone. Slade laughed with him. They both knew they were dead: all in the glacier’s path were dead.

  Slade squeezed the exploder.

  The glacier shuddered like a great, blue, bullet-hit bear. A muffled roar broke from the ice face. The frontal seracs shivered and snapped like icicles, their tips shattering and spilling out-202 ward and downward. The entire front began to split and tongues of fire erupted from the spreading crevasses. Then the ice under Slade’s feet began to tilt, slowly at first, then faster, then breaking up with a groan and a roar as it slipped down the falling face, down into the valley. He felt Charlie Blue beside him, and turning saw the raven climb up and away into the smoke. . . .

  EPILOGUE

  For weeks the fire burned through the ice, sending billows of dirty smoke into the atmosphere. Flares of natural gas erupted from time to time, lighting the clouds from within so that they glowed red and orange through the darkness. The river itself ran like a rainbow with unburned oil, and for a hundred miles out to sea beyond Gurry Bay the swells shone with its gleam. The thawing bodies of strange animals rolled with the waves down to the Gulf of Alaska.

  King salmon, gathering for their upriver run, could not control their instincts and surged in the Alugiak, dying in oil-choked millions. Gulls and jaegers, fulmars and shearwaters, lurched helpless and gasping in the oil spill’s grasp. Shellfish died less spectacularly. Hundreds of commercial fishermen, finding one of their last good grounds destroyed, sold their boats and went on welfare. The price of seafood escalated rapidly.

  Seals and porpoises, accustomed to fishing for a simpler living in Gurry Bay, fled the spreading slow arms of the oil spill, heading for deep water, clear water. But to no avail.

  Outside, the killer whales waited: the only creatures to profit from Slade’s Glacier.