by Henry, Sue
“What gun?”
“Don’t be stupid,” he told her. “I know you’ve got one somewhere—probably on you. Put it in there.”
Slowly, Jessie reached into her parka pocket, took out the handgun by the barrel, and laid it in the compartment with the package of money. Now her only protection was gone.
If it gets used in Alaska, it won’t be me that uses it, she thought in discouragement.
How could he possibly have known? Delafosse was the only one—No, that was wrong. Several people could have known, and the only way this person could have known for certain was if one of them had told him. Who? She started to make a mental list, but was interrupted.
“Get on.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Get on the snowmachine.”
“I’ve got a team to drive to Eagle. I can’t leave—”
His hand steadied the gun directed at her chest.
“I said—get on.”
Reluctantly, she got on.
“Now you’re going to drive this thing and I’m going to ride behind you. And don’t forget that now I’m the only one with a gun. Right? Move up.”
Although she moved as directed, Jessie again protested.
“What about my dogs? I can’t just abandon them.”
“Somebody’ll find ’em. If they don’t, it’s not important.”
“But why take me? What good will it do? I’m no good to you. Just tell me where to find—”
“This time you won’t be telling anyone anything—about where you handed over the money, or which direction I went when I left, will you? You shouldn’t have gone to that Canadian cop, Jessie. You didn’t follow instructions.”
How did he know about Delafosse? Had there been someone watching her, who saw her slip out of the hotel, even with all the care she had taken? Could the two she had gone out the door with have been only pretending to be drunk? She doubted it—they had smelled intoxicated and being drunk was hard to fake convincingly. Who, then? How the hell did he know, and how much did he know? Had someone seen Fitzgerald bring the firearm to Don Graham? It had been disguised, not out in the open. Could they have guessed? Maybe it was Graham himself? Not Don, she thought. Could Fitzgerald have mentioned it? Surely not—with Delafosse to warn him. Who else knew that she had it? Bishop? Ryan? None of them seemed even remote possibilities. She trusted them. But there must have been a slip somewhere.
She stared at the snowmachiner, knowing he wouldn’t tell her.
So, he wanted to keep her from reporting on the delivery of the ransom? Somehow Jessie didn’t think that was the whole story. Where did he intend to take her? Was she becoming a second hostage? Why would they need a second? Could it be because they no longer had the first? Unanticipated, this turn of events frightened her, but there was nothing she could think of to do about it, or any way to get word back to anyone.
He slid onto the seat behind her and the sudden contact with his body made her cringe away from him. He slid away a little and she felt the hard barrel of the gun pressed into her back.
“You know how to drive this?”
“Yes.”
“Then turn it around and get us going, the way I came.”
Scared because her secrets were known, and worried about leaving her team, Jessie did as she was told, aware of the firearm solidly pressing against her spine. She hated leaving her team unattended and uncared for on this barren, inhospitable plateau. They were important, and such inconsideration for animals that depended on food and care from their drivers filled her with helpless anger. Left by themselves, they would curl up and sleep. He was right that, eventually, some other racer would probably find them there on the trail to Eagle. But it could be long hours before that happened, especially if any closely following mushers turned back with Lynn Ehlers to help take Gail Murray to Forty Mile, as he had assured her they would. She hoped the team would not have moved by then.
Before they were out of sight, she looked back and saw Tank standing in his lead position, staring after her as if trying to figure out what was happening. He would expect her back soon. She seldom left them without a word or some attention, definitely not for long, and not on a noisy snowmachine. She wondered what he was thinking, what he would do.
“Watch where you’re driving and speed it up,” her captor told her abruptly, poking her with the gun barrel. Even through her parka, it seemed cold and intimidating.
She turned back to her reluctant assignment, hoping for…what? This was a turn of events none of them had anticipated or could have planned for. What the hell was going to happen now?
The break in the overcast was as temporary as it had been sudden—a mere pause for the wind to gather its breath. Soon there were no stars to be seen, snow began to fall again, and the wind picked back up to its previous intensity, whipping snow and ice from the ground, obscuring the high plateau of the summit. A few shapes loomed low out of the cloud of blowing white, trees twisted into fantastical shapes from years of trying to survive in the power of the wind. They appeared almost alive and tortured, as if they would move in writhing contortions the minute Jessie wasn’t looking at them directly.
It became more difficult to see and she drove carefully, getting used to the unfamiliar machine. It had been a couple of years since she’d driven a snowmachine and she had never liked them. Compared to the peaceful, quiet running of a sled dog team, they were annoyingly noisy and seemed to whip through the drifts so fast there was little chance to look around at anything but what was coming up next. It took almost all her concentration, as the weather deteriorated, just to keep going back over the suggestion of the track the machine had left in coming to meet her. The rest was concerned with the gun she felt jabbing at her back whenever they hit a bump. She could only hope it would not discharge if the man riding behind her accidentally tightened his finger on the trigger. If it weren’t for that threat, she might have tried to accelerate suddenly, or tip them over in a drift and hope she could get away.
“Get it going,” he told her once. Otherwise, he was silent, though she asked him several questions, trying for some kind of information. Where was Debbie? When and where would she be released? How far were they going? She got no answers.
When she increased their speed a little, he put his left arm around her waist to hold on, as he continued to hold his gun ready in the other hand. She hated the feel of it and his closeness behind her on the machine, felt the muscles in her back tighten as she leaned as far from him as she could. Her shoulders began to ache with the strain.
Eventually, they came to a place where the trail markers indicated that Yukon Quest racers should turn right and follow the Taylor Highway, deeply drifted closed for the winter, as it ran steeply downhill for the last fifty miles into Eagle, another community situated on the banks of the Yukon River.
“Take a left,” her captor instructed her, and she could see the hint of a track that went to the west on the Taylor, on its way to Tetlin Junction far away and below in the Alaskan Interior, on the other side of miles of mountains and mining country.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“You don’t need to know,” he said, and refused to answer any other questions. “Slow down for a minute.”
The hand that held the gun must have been getting too cold to function, for, as soon as she slowed the machine, he removed his arm from her waist and changed hands, putting the heavy glove back on his right hand and removing the other so he could manage the gun. The right arm then slid around her.
“Go,” he demanded, and she obeyed, still detesting his presence behind her and his touch, even through his thick clothing and hers.
There was something about him that seemed familiar—made her uneasy—something about his voice. She wished he would speak again, so she could carefully listen.
“Where are we going?” she asked again, but the only answer was another angry jab from the gun barrel that made her shudder and crank up their speed, though she didn’
t dare go too fast in the storm.
The snowmachine headlight was almost worse than none, reflecting back from the curtain of windblown snow. Going toward Eagle would eventually have brought a lessening of the wind, at least. Now, crossing a ridge, they seemed to be close to disaster as the gale threatened mercilessly to blow them off and down the steep western side.
At last they came to a junction with the Top of the World Highway that ran through to Dawson. Jessie had heard about this road from a friend who had crossed it during summer months and spoke in awe of its incredible vistas. She remembered that the friend also told tales of the notorious western descent of the Taylor Highway that was nothing but a narrow gravel road with switchbacks that clung to the almost vertical hillsides, and knew before her abductor told her that this was where he would want her to go.
Almost immediately they were rounding sharp curves filled with drifts. To the left was nothing but a dizzying cliff that fell away, to be lost below somewhere beyond her sight. The only relief was that, as they went farther down, the wind had lost a little of its force and gave her a better chance to see ahead.
More than an hour later, they finally reached a lower elevation where the road ran down the bottom of a long valley between the tall hills. Once, in the headlight’s beam, Jessie caught a glimpse of some abandoned mining equipment, an antique grader, and a shed or two, covered with snow, tucked away on a piece of land that had once been cleared, but now was full of the small spruce that were reclaiming it, growing up around what had once been someone’s dream of riches. Mining on a small scale still went on in this country, and some were able to find enough gold to exist, if not grow wealthy. No one traveled here during the winter, though.
Somewhere along this road was a small community called Chicken. The story of its name—true, but reminiscent of many northern tall tales—was that the residents had wanted to name it Ptarmigan, for the Alaskan state bird, but could find no one who could spell it, so they settled for Chicken.
She realized that in her fear of the unidentified man behind her on the snowmachine and their unknown destination, along with apprehension about what would happen when they got there—wherever there was—she was mentally escaping by considering the country that they passed. She wondered what was happening to her team back on the summit, and prayed that someone would find them and take them down to Eagle. They would be hungry soon, and she wouldn’t be there to feed them. Tank and the rest would not understand that.
As they rounded a bend in the drifted road, a rolling vista of snow-covered hills spread out before them.
“Stop,” the voice behind her barked suddenly. “Get off and step away from the machine.”
Swinging a leg across the saddle, she did so, her heart in her throat, close to panic. What could he possibly want in this desolate place? Why get off? Would he shoot her now? She stood staring blindly at a dark, snow-covered spruce near the track, feeling totally helpless and stupid with fear, heart pounding, knees weak.
At the sudden sound of the engine revving up, she whirled and saw that the machine was in motion. Already ten feet beyond where she stood in snow to her knees, he was rapidly moving away from her, still heading west. She distinctly heard him laughing gleefully over the increasing roar of the engine.
“Hey. What the hell? You can’t just leave me here.”
God, what a predicament. She wanted to be away from him—but not here—not abandoned…here.
He could, and clearly intended to do just that, for he didn’t even look back at her shout. He wasn’t going to shoot her. There was a much easier and less personal way of killing her, wasn’t there? Just leaving her there, far from anywhere, in dangerous below-zero temperatures, with no food or means to keep warm, other than the clothes she wore, would do the trick nicely.
“You bastard,” Jessie yelled after the dark, sinister figure on the machine that was rapidly disappearing into the wall of blowing white. But he did not so much as glance behind him. Almost as if he had never existed, he was gone, swallowed up by the fog of snow, over the brow of a hill.
For a few minutes she could hear the whine of the snowmachine rise and fall, before that sound also vanished into the night. Left standing, aghast and horrified, in the dark, she was almost overwhelmed by the abruptness of the vast silence of the wilderness that surrounded her. The small sounds of snow carried on the wind rattled faintly against her parka hood and icy crystals blew into her face to mix with tears of frustration and anger at this unbelievable turn of events.
She had not yet begun to feel the anxiety or dread over just how easily this snowbound landscape could be the last place she would ever know.
22
“The snow had covered the trail, and there was no sign that men had ever come or gone that way…Then the woman began to fall.”
—Jack London, “The Sun-Dog Trail”
ALONE IN THE SNOW AND THE DARK, JESSIE HAD FEW OPTIONS. She knew that people in severe cold can quickly surrender their body heat, lose any desire to move, and those who move little or not at all grow sleepy and eventually lie down to die. Without shelter, the only way to keep warm at all was to keep moving.
A body cools first from the extremities in preservation of the most critical parts of the body, those organs most necessary to life. Therefore, the fingers, hands and feet, nose and cheeks, freeze first, while the blood is drawn into the trunk to protect the heart, the lungs, and the other systems essential to circulation, respiration, digestion. To keep the body warm and blood flowing normally requires that the body exert itself.
Jessie was dressed warmly, in preparation for extreme cold. A musher riding the back of a sled does not expend as much energy as one pumping, pushing, or running behind it. Since sled dog drivers ride their sleds much of the time, they have learned what clothing to wear to keep themselves comfortable in extremely low temperatures. She knew that, stranded, without her team and sled, with no prospect of shelter, if she could walk and keep walking, she would not freeze. But motion burns calories, which, in the cold, require almost constant replenishment. Without food, without rest, a person can only go so far. Would Jessie be able to travel far enough?
She was not entirely without resources, for in one large pocket that she had sewn into the inner lining of her parka, she always carried a small amount of emergency supplies zipped into a plastic bag that she never touched. This included fire-making supplies—a handful of matches, some heavy waxed paper that could be torn into strips and a slim bar of petroleum-soaked wood fiber—some painkillers, a small amount of duct tape, an ace bandage, half a dozen Snickers bars, six peppermint tea bags, a plastic bottle that would hold two cups of liquid, several disposable chemical hand warmers, and a coiled wire saw. In another pocket she had a Swiss army knife fat with blades and tools that she used mostly in repairing her sled and harness for the dogs, and an extra pair of wool socks.
Furious at being left to die in the snow, she spent the first few adrenaline-filled minutes coming to terms with the shocking reality of her situation, then, practicality taking over, began to take inventory of her assets and make important decisions.
The plastic bottle she immediately filled with snow and tucked inside her parka, between her wool sweater and the thermal underwear she had on next to her skin. If she was going to stay in motion to avoid freezing, she would soon need water to drink, or risk dehydration in the effort. The snow in the bottle would melt and be reduced to a minimal amount of liquid, but it could be refilled and the process continued as long as her body was warm. Snow would also have melted in her mouth, but she knew that eating snow to satisfy thirst resulted in an unacceptable sacrifice of body heat, cooling her body core from the stomach out.
She had not eaten since just before leaving Lynn Ehlers at the tree line on the other side of American Summit, so she took out one of the Snickers bars and ate it quickly, before it could freeze in the cold. Frozen candy bars were certainly edible, but also stole body heat, and sometimes teeth. She knew a musher w
ho had previously run more than half the Quest with a tooth broken on a frozen power bar, hoping it wouldn’t cause him an agony too great to continue.
As she chewed the sugary combination of caramel, nuts, and chocolate, she determinedly started walking in the direction the snowmachine had gone. It would do no good to leave the track or try to go back over the mountain to find her team. She and her abductor had traveled much too far on the snowmachine to retrace their path on foot, and anyway she would never be able to struggle back to the summit in the storm that was still raging. It was bad enough where she was.
Somewhere, sometime, she would need rest, for not only had she made the exhausting climb to the top of the summit, she had made it twice. The tension and stress of rescuing Murray and of driving the snowmachine with a gun in her back had also taken their toll on her energy, as had the poor sleep at the stop with Ryan on the Yukon. Before long Jessie could feel the leaden-boots syndrome beginning, as she labored through the soft, deep snow.
Periodically she stopped to catch her breath, to drink what had melted in the bottle, and refill it with snow. In a treeless space at the crest of a hill the wind had all but blown away the track of the snowmachine. The farther she went, the more time it had to fill in behind the man who drove much faster than Jessie could walk. She continued in the direction that seemed most obvious, but the trees closed in around her, and soon there was nothing that looked remotely like either a track or a roadbed under the enormous expanse of white. Everything was white—the trees, the sky, the ground, the very air around her.
What the hell did I do to deserve this? she wondered. I must have done something really awful to somebody sometime without knowing it. Again, she thought of her team, stranded back on the summit. She hoped that Ehlers had found help in getting Gail Murray back down to Forty Mile. It wouldn’t be long until they would be arriving there and could summon medical assistance. Jessie wished she were with them and out of this cold hell.
Maybe I could find a spruce with branches that come to the ground, she thought. I could crawl into the space under-it where the snow couldn’t reach and maybe find enough dead wood to build a fire.
