Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  From where Kate sat, rocky spurs rose high on one side and higher on the other, with the intimidating bulk of the Quilaks taking up most of the eastern sky. They were not shrinking violets, the Quilaks, not some soft, rounded little knolls short enough to spit over masquerading in a mountain costume for Halloween. The year Kate had spent at Quantico, she’d made several weekend expeditions with classmates into what passed for wilderness east of the Mississippi, and the first time someone had pointed and said, “Look, there’s Mount Jefferson,” Kate had said in genuine confusion, “Where?” It had taken her a while to get used to the idea that you could call something a mountain that was only eight hundred feet tall.

  The Quilaks were individually anywhere between five and sixteen thousand feet high, with Angqaq Peak at nineteen thousand and change the highest of them all.

  The mountain, Angqaq was a brutal wedge sharp enough to tear open the sky. Its nearly vertical peak dared climbers from all over the world to a duel that ended either in death or in the knocking back of a Middle Finger at Bernie’s Roadhouse. There were previously triumphant climbers who post–Middle Finger might have wished to have left their carcasses in a crevasse on Big Bump instead. The next mountain over, similar in shape, stood ready to take on whatever climbing fool might imagine two thousand feet less in height would be easier to summit. Climbers nicknamed it and Angqaq “Mother and Child,” not infrequently shortening that to “Mother,” and occasionally with feeling lengthening it again to “you mother.”

  Big Bump dominated the skyline with a swagger and a sneer, but its cohorts were nothing to sneeze at, either, and taken together the Quilaks did not give way easily to the incursions of man. They were easier to drive around. On a clear day you could admire them at a safe distance from the Beaver Creek border crossing, which was as close as most people ever got. The range formed a very effective border, as the stampeders on the Klondike trail had learned in the winter of 1898–1899.

  It wasn’t the great statue laying broken in the desert that inspired awe and despair, Kate thought, it was this eternal, unchanging bulwark thrown up by four billion years of tectonic shifts that squelched any sense of self-importance.

  “You don’t scare me,” she said out loud.

  Mutt, trotting up that instant with a ptarmigan feather caught in her teeth, gave her an odd look, and she laughed.

  Whistling past the graveyard.

  She packed up and they moved on.

  The last time she’d traveled to the hot springs, a little over a year ago, she had lost the way three times before finding the correct dogleg that hid the entrance to the narrow little canyon. This time, she took it more slowly, paying attention. It looked like they were the first to visit this year. The only tracks she saw were the tiny prints of shrews and voles, the larger, leaping prints of the arctic hare, and the occasional disappearance of said tracks with the imprint of wing tips on either side as an explanation.

  They came to a small saddle of rock. If you had never been there before, unless you looked closely you would never see that the saddle stopped short of the opposite wall, leaving a passage open to the narrow canyon on the other side. She slowed down even more, and Mutt hopped off and trotted ahead. Kate followed, with care.

  They emerged from the passageway into a tapered vee of irregular stone walls, which met almost perpendicularly in an inclined floor that rose gradually from the saddle to what appeared to be a dead end. Next stop, sky.

  The hot springs seeped out of the floor of the canyon, a series of seven interconnected pools that steamed gently in the cold air. The sides of the canyon were carpeted with spruce trees, a dark healthy green. The heat from the springs had created a microclimate for this lush little oasis, and the dogleg entrance and the steep walls had thus far protected the trees from the voracious appetite of the spruce bark beetles that had decimated the forests across the North American continent.

  The tumbledown log cabin at the top of the springs still had a roof and walls—just. She pulled up in front of the door and killed the engine. Mutt came loping around the corner of the cabin, her tongue hanging out of the side of her mouth, and followed Kate through the door that hung cattywampus from its hinges.

  Inside was a mess, courtesy of the cabin’s last occupants, not to mention decades of Park rats packing in and not packing out again like they were supposed to. Someone had replaced the original cast-iron woodstove with a crude but functional stove made from an oil drum, and Kate had seen a stack of firewood outside the door.

  She cleaned the cabin by the simple expedient of propping open the door and pitching all the trash outside, building a burn pile a safe distance away from the cabin. Place could use a burn barrel. She made a broom out of a couple of spruce boughs bound together and swept the floor, which proved to be made of wood planks that creaked protestingly beneath her feet, but held. A screwdriver and some new screws from the tool kit on her snowgo lessened the draft between the door and the jamb.

  The outhouse in back had fallen over the last time Kate had been there, not entirely at her instigation. It was still lying on its side. Kate held her breath and used the number two shovel she’d brought to knock down the pile of shit that had accumulated in the hole over the past sixty years. A bucket of lime had been inside the outhouse when it went over and there was enough left for a thick layer. A makeshift rope and pulley rigged to the nearest tree got the outhouse back on its feet, and she shifted it one corner at a time until it was recentered over the hole. Snow piled up around the sides would give it some insulation and help keep it steady, at least for a while. A roll of toilet paper placed in a coffee can with a plastic lid, and it was back in business. No flies this time of year, either.

  She unpacked the rest of the supplies from the trailer and carried everything inside. She went back out to tarp snowgo and trailer both against the possibility of more snow, although if she stood still and looked straight up at what little sky the sides of the canyon allowed she could see a few faint stars beginning to appear. The mouth of the canyon faced south, so it wasn’t completely devoid of sunlight, but during the winter the high rock walls ensured that the day would be brief indeed.

  She went back into the cabin, lit the Coleman lantern she had brought with her, and surveyed the scene. Someone had done a good job on the drum stove because the room was palpably warmer. The ventilated walls were a vivid memory of her last trip out to the hot springs, and she had brought more tarps because of it. She shed her parka and got to work with a hammer and tacks, covering most of three walls with two bright blue tarps and one dark green tarp. It made for a colorful interior and reduced the drafts to where the stove could go to work in earnest.

  There was a whine and a scratch at the door. Kate opened the door and Mutt padded inside. “I’m guessing you’ve already had your supper,” Kate said, and indeed there was a trace of blood and fur on the iron gray muzzle. “I don’t suppose you’d care to share?”

  Mutt looked shifty.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so, greedy guts.”

  Kate got out a small cast-iron Dutch oven and lid and put it on top of the drum stove. A little oil, some sliced garlic quick fried and removed before it burned, and she added slices of a small caribou roast, the last of last year’s harvest. She might have to combine a neighborly visit to the Suulutaq Mine with a hunting trip up the Gruening River, which supported a healthy little herd of caribou. Or it had before Howie Katelnikof had orchestrated his hunt of wholesale proportions the previous winter. Kate would check with Ruthe before the season opened.

  The meat had a nice crisp crust and a pink interior when she took it out of the pan, into which she now put a sliced onion and waited for it to turn translucent before draining a can of green beans. Stirred together, the leftover oil, the browned onion, and the green beans made Kate’s favorite vegetable dish, and it was even almost healthy, too.

  Well. It was green.

  She ate with a hearty appetite—there was nothing like working outside in the win
ter to make you hungry—and washed up with snowmelt. She melted more snow for cocoa and sat on the snowgo seat she had removed from the chassis and brought inside. She leaned against the dark green tarp tacked to the back wall, and looked around the cabin.

  It was old enough to have been built by a young Samuel Leviticus Dementieff, and now that she was looking for them she could see the bones of the original floor plan, which was very like that of Old Sam’s cabin and Auntie Joy’s cabin. And the cabin Kate’s father had brought her mother home to, where Kate had been born and in which she had lived most of her life, until some asshole under the mistaken impression that Kate was inside had burned it down.

  It was roughly the same size as the others. She remembered the description on Old Sam’s document of proof. Part log, part frame, two doors, two windows, shingle roof. The walls were log, still neatly fitting together although virtually every log had bowed after years of drying and there wasn’t the vestige of a chink left to fill any of the resulting gaps. The roof was intact, Kate suspected in part because it was sod over planks, like the one on Old Sam’s cabin in Niniltna. The two windows, one on either side of the door, faced the hot springs and the mouth of the canyon, although both had been broken out long since and subsequently boarded up. The second door, leading out back to the outhouse, had also been boarded up long ago, and was now covered by one of the tarps.

  She got to her feet and picked up the lantern, casting the light up. Yes, there were the posts halfway up the wall that would have supported the sleeping loft across the back half of the cabin. Very likely the loft had been taken down and used for firewood by those too lazy to go chop their own. Upon closer examination, the floorboards looked hand planed. As old and infirm as they were, they reminded her of the floorboards of Old Sam’s cabin in Niniltna.

  She thought of all the tools he had in his shop, including the old plane with the sharp blade set into the wooden body. As a little girl she had watched, fascinated, as Old Sam’s large-knuckled hands had run the plane back and forth and the wood came up in long, almost translucent curls.

  All the varnish had been worn off the plane by the time she had seen Old Sam using it. She wondered if he had bought it new or if it was one of the tools he had inherited from Quinto Dementieff. If Quinto had had tools, and if he had left them to Old Sam.

  Old Sam had never talked much about his father, and now Kate knew why.

  It had been a long day, and a longer week. Her body ached suddenly with all the remembered bumps and bruises she had sustained during the past seven days, from the bang on the head to the rollover to the not inconsiderable succession of mental and emotional shocks she had sustained with each new revelation of Old Sam’s life. She had barely enough energy to pull her sleeping bag from its stuff sack and unroll it next to Mutt, sprawled in post-hunt splendor in front of the stove. She put some more wood on the fire, extinguished the lamp, and shucked out of her clothes. The flannel lining of the bag was warm by the time she slid inside. She snuggled down and was asleep in seconds.

  * * *

  The howls woke her hours later. Next to her Mutt was on her feet. Kate sat up, feeling unusually thickheaded. “What is it, girl?”

  Then she heard the howls again. She tugged on jeans and boots, grabbed parka and rifle, and opened the door.

  The full moon had risen, flooding the canyon with light, the new snow reflecting it back double strength. In a small notch halfway up the canyon wall, figures outlined in the moonlight as if someone was training a spotlight on them, stood three wolves.

  As if they had only been waiting for the door to open, the middle one paced forward, put his muzzle up to the sky, and let loose with a long, ululating howl that frightened the living hell out of everything on two and four feet within earshot.

  Just outside the door of the cabin Mutt sat down, wrapped her tail around her feet, and waited in composed silence, head cocked a little to one side. When the big wolf was done, he dropped his head and trotted back to his pack mates.

  Mutt rose to her feet and sashayed—it was the only word descriptive enough for her gait—sashayed forward. She pointed her muzzle at the moon, opened her mouth, and let loose with a howl that would have shamed James Brown. Earthy, plaintive, wild, it called to more than the hunter, it called to the lover, too.

  The three wolves stood there immobile until the last peal was rung. Mutt shook herself and returned to Kate’s side with an unmistakably smug look on her face.

  The visitors, released from the spell, gave a few more yips and yowls, but clearly their hearts weren’t in it. They put their muzzles together for a few moments, and then the big one came forward again and let loose with another call, shorter this time, one that seemed to end with a question mark.

  Mutt looked up at Kate with imploring eyes.

  “You aren’t in heat, are you?” Kate said.

  Mutt looked back at the wolves.

  “Oh, go ahead,” Kate said, and even before the words were all the way out of her mouth Mutt had exploded from her side, heading up the side of the canyon at the speed of light. The big wolf had enough time to take a half step back before Mutt cannoned into him. The two of them went into his pack mates with no perceptible diminution of speed and the resulting ball of fur and teeth resolved into a yipping, nipping mass that rollicked over the edge and spilled down the side of the canyon and nearly precipitated itself into the top pool of the hot springs.

  Mutt executed a grand jeté that culminated in a neat and graceful four-point landing that Mikhail Baryshnikov would have wept to have seen. The big wolf screeched into a hairpin turn, while the smaller of his pack mates, a white female, couldn’t stop herself and skidded over the side and into the water with a yip and a splash. There was a split second when Kate could have sworn that the other three stood there, laughing at her. She wasn’t in the water for long and then the chase was on again, up and down the little canyon, over and around the seven pools, once in a circle around the cabin, through a clump of trees in which a great snowy owl was peacefully slumbering. He woke with an indignant squawk and launched himself into the air, his four-foot wingspan a vast and outraged sail against the half moon visible between the high walls of the canyon.

  Kate, enchanted, sat down with her back to the door and lost all track of time, watching as the four of them hurtled in and out of the moonlight, playing tag and tug-of-war and capture the flag like a bunch of kids on a playground. An arctic hare whose black-lined ears had tips bent back by the velocity of his flight burst out of the undergrowth to take the first pond in a single panicked leap and vanished into a heap of snow-covered rocks, losing only a bit of his tail. A pure white ptarmigan exploded out of the other side of that same pile of rocks and beat frantically at the air to gain some desperately needed elevation, sharp teeth nipping at her all the way. She, too, escaped death by inches. But then Mutt and her new friends weren’t trying that hard.

  Kate herself was ignored as if she wasn’t there. At some point she became aware of wetness on her cheek. Sitting on this ground, her back against this door, watching this scene play out over the homestead he had staked for whatever reason when he was younger than she was now, she felt more connected to Old Sam than she ever had before. The realization that she would never see him again, never talk to him again, never be yelled at by him again, never be tossed into Alaganik Bay by him again, never benefit from his wisdom and his counsel again, struck like a knife. Old Sam had been an irascible, mocking, unsympathetic son of a bitch as a general rule, but he’d been a giant of her childhood. The shadow he had cast was long, and its absence would be acutely felt for the rest of her life.

  She bent her head and let the tears slide down her face and into the snow in his honor.

  When she looked up again the moon and the moonlight had vanished, along with the wolves. Mutt was gone, too, but Kate wasn’t alarmed. Mutt would escort them on their way to some boundary predetermined in her lupine brain and return.

  Kate went back inside, added wood
to the drum strove, and climbed back into her sleeping bag. She fell asleep as though felled by an ax.

  Nineteen

  She came awake the second time that morning as she usually did, fully conscious and aware.

  And knew that she wasn’t alone.

  She didn’t move, but whoever it was must have sensed that she was no longer asleep. “Get up,” they said.

  She thought about it, considering and dismissing options.

  There was an ungentle nudge in her back. “Get up,” the same voice said. It was a male voice, not one she recognized, although the man would have to say more before she was sure.

  She threw back the sleeping bag and rolled to her feet in one swift motion, balanced and ready. The man swore and jumped back.

  He stood in the doorway clad in parka, bibs, and boots. He wore a dark blue balaclava pulled down over his face, and he had a bolt-action rifle in his hands, a Savage Model 110, easily recognizable even by non-gun nuts like Kate by its homeliness and by the barrel locknut. Hunters were willing to put up with its lack of aesthetics for its accuracy. A lot of Demetri’s clients carried them, or the serious ones did.

  The safety was off. She looked up. “What do you want?”

  “Same thing you do. Where is it?”

  She cocked her head, trying to memorize the tone and timbre of the voice so she would know it again. He kept himself very still, no betraying mannerisms or tics. His gear wasn’t new. Neither was the rifle.

  A lot of people made the mistake of thinking that a firearm was a great leveler. A lot of people were wrong. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kate said. “You’re trespassing, you know.”

  “I want the map,” he said.

  “What map?” she said.

  “Don’t play cute with me. You’ve been following the same trail I have, a step behind all the way.”

  Arrogant. Kate noted it for future reference. “So you’re the one who coldcocked me.”