by Aaron Elkins
John led the way into the white-painted kitchen, where they found Axel and his wife Malani at a scarred table in somber consultation over a dog-eared account book. Two half-filled mugs of coffee were beside them, the cream congealing at the surface. A difference of opinion hung in the air: Malani was in the process of shaking her head “no,” while Axel, with his finger on one of the columns, was making an earnest point, but when they came in he jumped up.
“The romance of modern ranching,” he said with an embarrassed grin. “Now you know the truth. It’s all about number-crunching. I haven’t been out on the range lassoing cattle for almost two hours now.”
Indeed, for a cattleman, Axel Torkelsson looked as if he didn’t get out much. He was somewhat puffily built to begin with, and a bookish stoop, a concave chest, and a pair of mild, watery, pale eyes behind black-rimmed, 1970s-style glasses did away with any intimation of the open range. Add to that a worried, slightly dazed expression that suggested he was always trying to remind himself not to forget something, and he seemed as if he would have been more at home with a green eyeshade and arm-garters than in a ten-gallon hat.
John made the introductions. Gideon was warmly received and told that he and Julie were to consider the house, and indeed, the ranch, as their own. When Gideon had thanked them and expressed some interest in, and even some knowledge of, the history of cattle-ranching in Hawaii, Axel’s wrinkled brow smoothed. His pinched face seemed to fill out.
“Actually, ranching is a totally different affair from what it was ten or twenty years ago—back when John was our number-one hand.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” John said.
Axel clapped John shyly on the shoulder and went on speaking to Gideon. “Of course, the paniolos—that’s what we call the cowboys here; it comes from the word español, because the first ones came from Mexico, but you probably already knew that—anyway, they still use lassoes, and they brand and castrate and all the rest, but nowadays it’s really about devising and maintaining a viable system of intensive range management because, if you think about it, a cattle ranch is first and foremost a grass farm. Today’s cattle-rancher has to understand that if he’s going to survive.”
“I never thought about it before,” Gideon said, “but I can see how that would be.”
Encouraged, Axel plowed ahead, his weak eyes blinking enthusiastically away. “See, you can’t just depend on the natural range grasses if you want to compete. You have to sow. But what do you sow? That’s the big question. Right now, I have experimental plots going of Natal red top, brome, cocksfoot… well, you name it. And then besides that, intensive range management means a whole lot of things they never heard of in the old days: symbiotic seeding, selective brush control, and, above all, above everything else, a strategy of long-range water-resource development and conservation. And today’s—”
John was laughing. “I knew you guys would get along. You both talk in lectures.”
“I most certainly do not,” said Axel.
“You most certainly do,” Malani said, “but it’s hard to tell with Gideon. You haven’t given him the chance.”
“Come on, honey, he said he was interested—”
“I am interested—”
“May I make a suggestion?” she said. “It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t you show our guest his room and let him freshen up, and then get some horses and take him out and show him around the ranch. Take Johnny, too. Wouldn’t you like that, Gideon?”
Malani, a porcelain-doll-faced Hawaiian woman a few years older than her husband, had taught at the Kamehameha School on Oahu before she married Axel, and she still had something of the resolutely patient schoolmarm in her speech: a natural bossiness moderated by a precise, sugary, sing-song trill, as if she were explaining things to a not-particularly-swift class of fourth-graders, or maybe to a hard-of-hearing, not-quite-with-it group of oldsters. Heard occasionally, it was no doubt pleasant rather than otherwise, but Gideon wouldn’t have wanted to live with it day in and day out.
“I’d love it, Malani,” he said dutifully.
“So would I,” Axel said, “but I’m due at Inge’s at four-thirty. See,” he said to Gideon, “they just found my uncle’s bones in—”
“I told him all about it, Axel.”
“Oh, fine. Anyway, the thing is, there isn’t time to saddle up the horses and—”
“Then don’t take the horses,” Malani said. “At least you can walk up along the side of Pu’u Nui. You can see half the ranch from there. A beautiful view.”
“But what about the accounts?” Axel asked her, looking longingly at the columns of figures.
“I can take care of the accounts, sweetie. Go. You can use some fresh air.”
“Well, but—”
“Go,” she said, hustling him away from the table with a fluttering of hands, as if she were scattering a flock of pigeons. “Go-go-go-go-go.”
FOUR
A pu’u, Gideon learned, was a volcanic cinder cone, a common, relatively minor vent in the long, sweeping sides of Mauna Kea, the colossal volcano that had created the northern half of the Big Island. Most dated back to the 1500s and before, so that by now they were grassy, treeless hillocks, smooth and symmetrical, anywhere from a hundred to five hundred feet high. It was these old pu’us that gave the Kohala uplands their characteristic hummocky, green-carpeted appearance.
While they trudged single-file up a narrow horse trail that wound around the hill, Axel, in the lead, prattled happily on about ranch operations without requiring much—without requiring any—feedback. The Little Hoaloha was a “cow/calf” operation, meaning that they raised calves but didn’t “finish” or butcher them. At six hundred pounds they were shipped by container ship to Vancouver, Canada, where they grazed on local grain until they reached nine hundred pounds, whereupon they were trucked to feed lots in Calgary, fattened for a hundred days until they reached twelve hundred pounds, and then slaughtered.
Now, Axel proudly pointed out, if John and Gideon looked around, they would see not a sign of over-grazing, even though they ran eight thousand head of cattle on their eleven thousand acres; a heavy load on the land—had Gideon known it took almost seven pounds of grasses to put one pound of meat on a cow? The lushness of the landscape was the result of a fenced paddock arrangement that Axel himself had devised, in which the cattle were rotated to a new grazing section every three days . . .
John, who had heard all this before, was mostly looking out at the view, humming a little to himself. But Gideon, who hadn’t, was also drawn to the constantly changing scene as they rounded the hill. They were at an elevation of four thousand feet. Around them were clumps of scrub oak, prickly pear, a few small trees, and some rocky outcrop-pings, but the overwhelming impression was of a wonderfully green, rolling grassland, dotted with groups of grazing cattle, that fell gradually but spectacularly away to the ocean in one direction, and flowed equally gradually and spectacularly up toward the distant, two-mile-high summit of Mauna Kea in the other. That, he realized, was why this stupendous landscape could be so peaceful, so calming. There were no vertical surfaces, no threatening precipices or jagged mountain walls. Just these welcoming, gently upsloping fields of green and brown, so gentle that it looked as if one could begin at the coast and easily, even pleasantly, stroll right to the top of the immense volcano, given the time.
From here he could see all the way to the gorgeous, gleaming hotel- and resort-lined Kohala Coast, thirty miles away, three-quarters of a mile below, and seemingly existing in some future century. Farther off and looking like Bali H’ai itself, was the island of Maui, from this distance a huge, mysterious, fog-wreathed mountain growing straight out of the ocean.
“. . . is piped by gravity-feed to on-ranch reservoirs,” Axel was saying, “from where it goes via one-inch plastic pipe to troughs that have been placed through mathematically computed—oh, gosh, where did the time go? We better go back. Gideon, I know you must have some questions.” He waited inquiring
ly.
Gideon searched his mind. The last thing he’d really heard was that the cattle were trucked to Calgary, but that had been a while back. He looked desperately around for inspiration. A quarter of a mile away, on a nearby hillside, were a dozen or so peacefully grazing cows. They were brown. They did not have white faces.
“I see,” he said with more confidence than he felt, “that you raise Jerseys here. Do you have Herefords as well?”
“That’s a really good question,” Axel said as they turned around and headed back down, with Gideon now in the lead. “We used to have Herefords on the old ranch—you remember, Johnny.”
“Sure do,” John said.
“But in the last few years we’ve phased them out. White-faced cattle don’t bring as much on the market. Isn’t that interesting? Nobody knows why. You know what I think? I think it’s because they make people think of milk cows, not beef cows.”
“Yeah,” John said. “I guess nobody wants to eat Elsie.”
At the bottom of the hill they separated, with Axel going to the back of the house to bring around a truck for the short drive to Inge’s. John looked at Gideon and made an odd face.
“What?” Gideon said.
John screwed his mouth up into a little knot and put on what he must have thought was a professorial tone of voice, throwing in a prissy English accent for good measure and tipping his head back as if he were looking through a monocle. “I see thet yaw raise Jehseys heah. Do yaw heve Heffahds as well?” he said.
And then dissolved in laughter. “I love it.”
Gideon laughed, too. “I think I got away with it.”
“THIS place, Maravovo Atoll, where they found the plane,” Inge began when she’d finally got everyone settled, “is part of something called the Republic of Kiribati—”
“Actually, it’s pronounced kiribass,” Axel said. “Not kiribati. It used to be the Gilberts, you see, but when they changed the name, they had no way to spell—”
Felix exploded with a shout. “Axel, for God’s sake! I mean, Jesus Christ!”
“Sorry,” Axel said, blinking, clearly wondering what Felix was so upset about.
Inge covered her mouth. It was hard not to laugh. It was so like Axel, so like Felix. What a pair.
“This island, or atoll, or whatever it is,” she continued, “is totally uninhabited. No one ever went there until two months ago, when Odysseus Cruise Lines started offering a ten-day Hawaiian Islands cruise out of Honolulu and included a two-day round trip to the place for a beach picnic. See, they have to do that because Odysseus is Greek-owned, and non-American ships aren’t allowed to travel between American ports without including at least one foreign call on their itinerary, and Maravovo Atoll was the closest—”
“For God’s sake, Inge,” Auntie Dagmar snapped, “we don’t need a lecture on United States maritime law. You’re getting as bad as Axel. Get to the point.”
“What did I do now?” Axel bleated.
“Dammit, Auntie,” Inge said, “all I’m trying to do . . . all right, okay, yes, sorry.” When Dagmar was in one of her cranky moods there wasn’t much point in trying to reason with her. Besides, it was natural enough for everybody to be a little edgy.
A week ago, she explained, a group of snorkelers from the cruise ship had paddled in an inflatable boat to a relatively distant part of the atoll’s lagoon, where they had seen the old Grumman sunk in five or six feet of water, its tail protruding. They had dived down to it, looked through a missing window, and seen some bones inside. The doors had been jammed or rusted shut, and since they didn’t have underwater flashlights or breathing equipment, and everything was a jumble inside, they hadn’t been able to see much else.
“Jesus,” Hedwig breathed. “As if we needed this.”
The snorkelers, Inge went on, had gotten the plane’s registration number from the fuselage and reported it to the ship’s captain, and eventually the number was traced back to the plane’s Hoaloha Ranch ownership. The Waimea police department was notified, and they were the ones who had called Inge with the news.
“N7943U,” Axel said from memory.
Inge checked her notes. “That’s it.”
“What do they want us to do?” Dagmar asked.
“The police?” said Inge. “They don’t want us to do anything. They just called to tell us. But the Kiribati—pardon me, Axel, Kiribass—officials want to know if we want the remains back. Personally, I think the best thing to do would be to just leave them where they are. The less attention we stir up, the better. And it’s not as if it’s him out there, it’s just a few bones that don’t really mean anything any more.”
“I agree,” Axel promptly put in.
“Amen,” said Hedwig. “Don’t meddle with Fortune’s wheel. The plane went down there for a reason, whether we understand it or not. Let it be.”
“Fortune’s wheel!” Dagmar was shocked. “And what do you mean, ‘a few bones that don’t mean anything any more’? Sometimes I don’t know what’s the matter with you people. To leave him out there like that, on that little . . . no, no, I want him back here on his own land.” She stared imperiously around her, challenging them to disagree, and muttering: “‘A few bones that don’t mean anything.’”
Inge hesitated. “What do you think?” she asked Felix, who was silently swirling the ice in his glass.
Felix took a moment before answering. “In my opinion, we should have him brought home,” he bellowed—his normal speaking voice ranged anywhere from bellow to roar. “Not only because of what Dagmar says, but because it would look strange—suspicious, even—if we don’t.”
“But who’s going to know either way?” Axel asked.
“The police, bird-brain,” Inge said fondly. “I’m supposed to call them back, remember? Felix is right.”
“Oh, yeah,” Axel said, then nodded. “Okay, I’m with Felix, then. We better bring him back and bury him here, what’s left of him. A quiet, private, family burial.”
Dagmar nodded regally to signify approval, although she’d glowered at the “what’s left of him.”
“So how do we go about getting the remains back?” Hedwig asked. “Does anybody know?”
“I wouldn’t think there’s much to it,” Felix said. “We’ll probably have to get some kind of formal approval from the Kiribati government, wherever it is—”
“The capital is Tarawa,” said Axel.
“—but any reputable ocean salvage firm will know the ropes. When I get back to Honolulu I’ll check around for one. We can split the cost between us.”
“I’ll pay,” Dagmar said. When the others opened their mouths to protest, they were silenced with a fierce tilt of her chin.
“She who must be obeyed,” said Felix, salaaming in her direction.
“Idiot.”
“Okay, that’s the way it’ll be, then,” Inge said. She glanced at the antique Swedish clock over the mantel. “Now. John and Gideon will be here at six. That gives us almost an hour to make sure we’re all reading from the same script, in case the papers get hold of this, or if the police have more questions.”
“Speaking of John and his friend,” Hedwig said, “I don’t see any reason for them to know anything about this.”
“Too late,” Axel said. “I already told John and he told Gideon.”
Hedwig looked disbelievingly at him. “That was dumb.”
“Well, I figured it was bound to come out anyway, and if I didn’t mention it, it would look as if we were hiding something.”
“We are hiding something.”
“Yes, but we don’t want to look as if we are,” Axel pointed out.
“Point taken,” Hedwig said, submitting gracefully to this superior logic. “Okay, let it all hang out.”
“Not all,” amended Felix.
FIVE
THE wood-branch lettering above the entrance in the split-rail fence said “Kohala Trails Adventure Ranch,” and just inside, where a couple of dirt roads intersected, there was a
post with two handpainted signs: a “Stop” sign—or rather, a “Whoa” sign—and one below it that said “Howdy, Podnuh. Horseback Riding Adventure, Thisaway. Ranch House, Thataway.”
They turned Thataway, toward a white frame house that looked like a bigger, better-kept version of Axel’s and Malani’s. “John,” Gideon said, “when we were driving up from the airport, you said that ‘naturally’ nobody wanted to have the dinners at Hedwig’s. Why is that? Why ‘naturally’?”
“Well, for one thing, the Wellness Center menu is strictly vegetarian, and just a little weird besides. But mainly because it wouldn’t be the same if Auntie Dagmar wasn’t there, and Auntie Dagmar won’t go to Hedwig’s.”
“Uh . . . Auntie Dagmar?” He had been drifting a little during the short drive from Axel’s place, lulled by the gentle rises and falls of the road, the fragrant air, and the long, long views down to the slowly darkening sea.
“Dagmar,” John said. “Torkel’s and Magnus’s sister. Remember? She’s eighty-something now.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Pay attention, now.”
“Sorry, I’m doing my best. So, is there a family feud? Between Auntie Dagmar and Hedwig?”
