Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  If Joan the Maid had been nothing but a mad peasant girl who heard voices, she might have passed unremarked into the mists. It was the way of her dying that secured her a bright spark in the memory of man, for we remember fire. We may not instantly recall the names of our high school teachers, the current crop of politicians, or what we last watched on television, but we know the significance of Nero’s fiddle, the MGM Grand, and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

  As necessary as it is to our daily well-being, fire is never to be trusted, for it lives. It moves, speaks, breathes, consumes, stalks, and inspires in us a plea to drown, freeze, or even bleed.

  Anything but burn.

  1

  ON AN EARLY EVENING IN MID-MARCH, JESSIE ARNOLD was sitting on the floor by her huge sofa, surrounded by a gang of half-grown pups from two different litters that she had brought into the house so they could become accustomed to handling and interaction with a human, as well as to the other dogs. The seven pups tumbled happily on and around her, staging mock battles, chewing each other’s tails and ears, crawling onto her lap for rations of the affection she was happy to give them. They were still cute and babyish at this age, falling over the big feet they were quickly growing into, curious about everything, full of life, and beginning to display individual characteristics that she was assessing closely, looking for traits that would make them good working sled dogs later on.

  Her racing lead dog, Tank, the long-suffering father of four of them, had been trying to take a nap near the wood-burning stove, but he found it impossible, as some of the pups that couldn’t crowd onto Jessie’s lap turned their focus on him. Jeep and his smaller sister, Daisy, were being especially attentive to their dad. When they had run around and over him several times, faking attacks to encourage him to join their exuberant games, he finally grew tired of their nonsense and growled a warning in Jeep’s direction. Jeep stopped in his tracks and growled back, which amused and interested Jessie. The young dog was showing independence and assertiveness, qualities that could indicate a possible leader in the making for a future racing team.

  Socialization with humans early in the life of sled dogs was important. It established relationships while the pups were still imprintable and became a positive, normal part of their lives, making training easier and helping them develop skills for working with people and other dogs. She sincerely hoped Jeep had inherited the attitudes and abilities that made Tank the best leader she had ever had.

  Jessie had been trying to read an article she had found in the latest Mushing Magazine on summer training for sled dogs. She tossed it onto the sofa when the adolescent gang of pups made it impossible to concentrate. Now, over their yips and immature growls, she glanced at the magazine longingly, then suddenly hesitated, looked toward the window across the room, and held her breath for a few seconds to listen intently. It had grown very quiet outside. The faint repetitious murmur of rain that had been a background for the last two days had stopped.

  Shoving two pups from her lap in order to get up, she walked across to the window that overlooked her dog yard.

  Snow. It was finally snowing again. Big white feathery flakes were falling thickly through the air, melting as they hit the wet ground. But here and there they were beginning to stick. The roof and hood of Jessie’s pickup truck were already turning white. It would be wet, heavy snow, but at least it was not the unseasonable rain that had been turning the trails she used for training to slush.

  Glancing at the large thermometer mounted outside facing the window, she saw the temperature had dropped from well above freezing to twenty-eight degrees. As she watched, it moved to twenty-seven. Still falling. No wonder the rain had turned to snow, and how welcome. Since it had started this late in the day, she thought it would probably continue into the night, replacing some of the old snow the rain had melted and, possibly, allowing her to take out a team or two tomorrow.

  Finished with the Yukon Quest, the last race she would run this season, she and Billy Steward, the young musher who helped her at the kennel, had been working hard with mixed teams, one-and two-year-old dogs harnessed together with experienced ones. The days of rain had put a halt to that. Jessie, pleased with the progress they were making, was frustrated at being housebound. Running sled dogs in the rain was a miserable business that she and other mushers avoided when they could. It took all her attention to train inexperienced dogs without adding bad weather to the equation. Untangling the snarls they managed to get themselves into several times a day was work enough. It was fun to play inside with the pups who were not yet close to real training age, but it was more challenging to be out on the trails.

  Two of the pups had quietly followed her to the window, and she almost tripped over them as she turned back into the room but managed to step wide, missing both. Crossing to the phone on her desk, she dialed Billy’s number. The pups trotted along behind her, not giving up their attempt to reclaim her attention, but they were quickly sidetracked by a patchwork pillow that had fallen from the sofa. With a long reach she snatched it away, knowing how soon its feathers would be floating around the room like the snowflakes outside if she left it to their sharp teeth.

  “Have you looked out?” she asked Billy. “The snow’s coming down like crazy. If it keeps up we can run tomorrow. Right—about seven. Yes. Okay.”

  Dropping the phone back in its cradle, she returned to the window to watch the falling flakes with satisfaction, unwilling to sit back down. She wished she could go out now but knew there wouldn’t be enough new snow until morning, and the plastic runners on her sled would grind themselves to tatters on the rocks and bare ground the rain had uncovered.

  Flopping down on the sofa, she ignored the pups for a minute and picked up the magazine again. When she realized she had reread a page for the third time and had no idea what it contained, she tossed it to the opposite end of the large sofa and stood up again.

  “That’s it,” she declared. “Time for all you guys to go back to the puppy pens with your moms.”

  Tank raised his head, ears pricked, alert to the possibility of activity in the offing. The pups, as usual, ignored her. Jeep and Daisy had settled into a semisnooze, curled up next to Tank near the warm stove, but they scrambled up as he moved.

  “Enough sloth. I’m going to Oscar’s for a beer and a game of pool.”

  Tank was on his feet in a bound, tail wagging enthusiastically, recognizing the words going and Oscar’s.

  “Okay,” Jessie told him, giving in with a grin. “You can come.”

  A significant number of other mushers, who had also been unable to take their dog teams out, would probably drop into their favorite pub this evening to commiserate with each other at the rain-enforced intermission in their training runs. Some human company will do me good, she thought, gathering up the puppies, which she transported back to their pens in squirming, protesting armfuls.

  Before leaving, she added a log to the stove and turned off all the lights but one in the kitchen. Standing for a moment in the driveway, she raised her face to let the snowflakes fall on it, stuck out her tongue, and tasted one. Delightful.

  With Tank sitting beside her in the truck, she negotiated the potholes of the long drive to the highway and headed for Oscar’s, her mood lifting with the thought of going somewhere.

  A little over five miles down the road she swung the pickup into the wide parking lot in front of Oscar’s Other Place, which she was pleased to find was full of vehicles as she had anticipated.

  When he had built the semi-isolated rural pub a few years earlier, Oscar Lee had called it the Double Dozen, for it was twelve miles from the main highway and just over twelve from where he lived, farther along Knik Road. The name, however, had never worked for the simple reason that most of his customers were already familiar with Oscar’s first bar in the nearby community of Wasilla. With the possessiveness of regulars, they had referred to the new pub as Oscar’s Other Place, ignoring anything to do with double pubs or dozens of miles. So it wasn’
t long until he bowed to the inevitable, replaced the sign out front, and made it official. “Oscar’s Other Place” it became and remained.

  From the day it opened, located in the middle of an area popular with racing aficionados where there were more sled dogs per square mile than people, Oscar’s had quickly become a haunt for local mushers, handlers, and their followers. So many of them stopped by to warm up during training runs that Oscar kept a perpetual kettle of chili or stew steaming fragrantly in a huge slow cooker, and provided straw for their dogs to curl up on in back of the pub.

  Year-round, something was always happening at the bar. Dart and pool tournaments were popular. Three or four tables of bridge players usually collected on Sunday afternoons. A large television set above the bar featured regular sports in their seasons, accompanied by potluck dinners and many friendly wagers. A pig roast became traditional on Super Bowl Sunday. Every summer the Other Place sponsored a softball team that carefully kept its error count just high enough to remain solidly in the B league, where the game was less intense and more fun.

  The battered jukebox was packed with an astonishing collection of much loved easy listening and country-western oldies. When an unwitting serviceman delivered a new machine full of current hits—and the result was a unanimous insurrection of patrons who threatened to toss it and him into the nearby creek—the antique player and its old tunes were quickly restored.

  The walls had gradually been covered with an enviable collection of mushing photographs and memorabilia donated by mushers and their followers—a fascinating history of the wide variety of modern races across the state, mixed with reprints of early twentieth century heroes of the sport.

  Coming through the second door of the pub’s Arctic entry, and shaking the snow from the blond curls above her gray eyes, Jessie was brought face-to-face with an image of herself on the opposite wall. It portrayed her now-legendary run down Front Street in Nome the year that she had finished the Iditarod in second place. Tall and slim, she smiled for the camera, her lead dog, Tank, beside her. Though the photo had always pleased her it now precipitated a slight frown at a figure on a snowmachine in the background.

  Alex Jensen was the Alaska state trooper she had met during that race and with whom she’d shared a relationship until a month ago. The disappointment they had both experienced at the separation was a still-tender emotional bruise she consciously refrained from fingering.

  She moved on into the warm, crowded interior of the Other Place, Tank walking politely beside her. The large room smelled of rain-damp parkas, wool hats, and mittens; and it was noisily cheerful with conversation, laughter, the crack of pool balls sent flying around on two tables, and the thump of darts hitting a board in an out-of-the-way corner in the back.

  The interior was decidedly informal, with little of what could actually be termed decor. The walls were concrete blocks painted a bright terra-cotta, the floor a worn gray-green commercial vinyl tile. About a dozen square pedestal tables sat among a functional assortment of plain metal chairs with padded plastic seats. The bar stools were of two different types, with and without backs.

  Like many rural Alaskan pubs and roadhouses, the appeal of the Other Place had little to do with interior decor. It was a casual place where mushers could drop by in their working clothes—often grubby but warm parkas repaired with duct tape to retain their down—track snow or mud onto the floor without concern, and not worry about offending anyone with the smell of the dogs they drove and fires they built and hovered over.

  “Hey, Jessie. Wondered if you’d show tonight. Pretty sad out there, isn’t it?” A friend put out a hand.

  “It was sad, Hank—now it’s snowing. We can run tomorrow. Yes! Wanna play some pool?”

  “Sure! Your turn to put up a quarter.”

  Tank sat down beside her and looked around carefully for Oscar as Jessie paused next to the blond, bearded man who had swiveled on his bar stool to greet her, exhibiting the front of a dark blue sweatshirt that bore a Crabb’s Corner logo, one of the stops on the annual Yukon Quest, a race between Whitehorse and Fairbanks. A well-mannered dog was as welcome as its driver in the Other Place, and, though his dignity would never have allowed him to beg, Tank was not unaware that Oscar kept a large jar of homemade moose jerky behind the bar for his four-legged friends.

  “There’s my buddy,” Oscar said, coming around the end of the bar that ran along one side of the big room and leaning down to give Tank a few friendly pats and a sizable chunk of jerky. “Such a gentleman. No sleds today—right, Jessie? How’re you keeping?”

  “Bored stupid, or I’d have been here earlier.” She grinned in response. “You?”

  “Oh, tolerable. What’ll you have?”

  “A Killian’s, thanks, and Tank thanks you, too.”

  His broad answering smile included a glance at the husky, who now lay on the floor, gnawing contentedly on his treat.

  As the bottle of lager was efficiently set in front of her, along with a frosty mug, an arm waving on the other side of the room and a call from a woman seated at one of the small tables attracted Jessie’s attention.

  “Hey, Jessie, you ran the Quest this year. Come settle an argument.”

  “Sure. Let me know when we’re up, Hank.”

  “Yup.”

  Pouring the contents of the bottle into the mug, Jessie sipped it and wiped a bit of foam from her upper lip. She laid a quarter on the edge of the nearest pool table as she carried her mug across the room, then pulled an empty chair to the table where three mushers were closely examining a map. Questions met her before she could sit down.

  “The trail still goes across Lake Laberge before the Chain of Lakes, doesn’t it?”

  “No, they changed it last year. Now you go up the Tahini River, north to Braeburn, then east to the chain. It skips Lake Laberge completely.”

  “After that it’s the same?”

  “Except for the new run into Pelly Crossing.”

  “Trail any good?”

  “Depends. Pelly’s great—best of the race. Between Braeburn and Carmacks it’s a nightmare—real pinball alley of turns and trees. There were a lot of broken sleds this year.”

  “You got through okay.”

  “Yeah, but I had to take it real slow. One rookie got to Carmacks, built a fire with the splinters of his sled, and went home.”

  The four mushers fell quickly into a detailed discussion of the international distance race and its difficulties that lasted until the game at one of the pool tables ended.

  “Hey, Jessie, we’re up.”

  For the next hour she and Hank successfully met all challenges, defended their claim to the table, and won the beer they drank. Finally running out of opponents, they played each other till Jessie won two out of three games and quit, returning the cue she had used to its rack on the wall.

  “Come on, Shark”—Hank tried to coerce her with a wolfish grin. “Let’s make it three out of five.”

  “Push my luck? I don’t think so. Next time you put up the quarter.”

  “Aw…well…But I’ll be practicing.”

  “Like you really need it. Dropping the eight ball was a mistake you never make. I’d be an idiot not to take what I can get.”

  Collecting her raincoat from a hook on the wall by the door, Jessie looked across the room at Tank, who had been resting cozily under a table, muzzle on paws. With a jerk of her head toward the exit, she let him know it was time to leave. He got up, stretched, and wound his way between the tables to her side.

  “Hold up a minute,” Oscar called, wiped his hands free of soapy dishwater, and emerged from behind the bar with another piece of jerky.

  “One for the road, buddy,” he said, giving it to Tank.

  “Thanks, Oscar,” Jessie said, keeping a straight face at the sight of a lock of thinning hair that stood straight out from one side of his head. “This place is a port in a storm.”

  “Sure busy tonight,” he said. “You guys don’t like being cooped u
p by bad weather.”

  She glanced around at the chairs and bar stools that had gradually emptied. It was late and only a few people were left, finishing their drinks and a last round of darts. At a table in one corner near the stove, a man in a blue plaid shirt slept with his head on his arms, face turned away toward the wall.

  “Who’s that? Tom?”

  “Nope. Not a regular—Bob something—friend of Warner’s. Getting over a bad cold, so it probably got to him, because he only had a couple of beers. I’ll let him sleep while I swamp out—wake him up when I’m ready to leave.”

  It was like Oscar to let the guy get his rest, and Jessie smiled to herself. No wonder he was so well liked and his pub so popular. Everyone felt welcome and at home here, because, unless they seriously abused his hospitality, they were like family. Like family, they were also protective of their own and respectful of Oscar’s. Outsiders were carefully evaluated with watchful politeness, obnoxious behavior was never tolerated, car keys were requested and usually cheerfully relinquished by anyone whose alcohol intake was such that they shouldn’t be driving, disputes were swiftly broken up or contained. Only once had Jessie seen a fight threaten to develop, and the half-in-the-bag visitor was immediately and firmly made aware that he should forget the Other Place existed and “don’t let the door hit you on the way out!”

  “See you soon.” Oscar waved at Jessie, as she left, calling good night over her shoulder.

  The drive home was short, but Jessie was yawning by the time she had pulled up in front of her cabin and clipped Tank back onto the line by his box in the yard. The snow was still falling, if anything, more heavily than before. Each box in the dog yard now had an inch-deep layer of white on its roof.

  “Oscar’s pretty good to you,” she told Tank as she rubbed his ears and scratched his back fondly. “Good night, good fella.”