Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  The peaks and glaciers of the southern half of the Quilak Mountains stretched out in front of her, a jumbled mass of rock and ice capped with a discreet line of termination dust that had now reached below the tree line. Somewhere out there, much farther than she could see, the mountains slowly decreased in height to melt reluctantly into rounded foothills. Those foothills subsided into the coastal plain formed by glacial silt and tidal action, occasionally broken here by a glacial erratic and there by a slip-faulted butte.

  She turned and looked north, and laughed, more in disbelief than because she found the view funny. Around the corner of the cliff she could just make out the outline of Angqaq, Big Bump, the highest mountain of the Quilaks, slightly west and about twenty-five miles north of where she stood. If she wasn’t quite at Big Bump’s elevation, she was high enough to where the mountain did not overawe her with its usual arrogant, noli me tangere hauteur. “Besides, I’ve summitted you, and don’t you forget it,” she said.

  She wondered if perhaps she was suffering just a little from high-altitude euphoria.

  She continued east until the trail began, unbelievably, to descend. She didn’t want to hike back up it, so she returned to the top to try to trace its path with her eyes as far down as she could.

  “You’re looking into Canada,” she said out loud. “You know that, don’t you.”

  It was as if this were some kind of unknown pass through the Quilaks, which simply wasn’t possible. A passable trail would have been known to the people who lived in the area, known to her tribe. It would have been a part of song and story. It would have been a route for trade goods, perhaps even for war. One of the reasons Niniltna had been built where it was today was because the site had its back to a literally, impenetrable wall of rock. The old folks had known what they were doing. There was the river for water, salmon, and transportation, and the mountains for defense.

  And if it had been known, if it had been used, it would inevitably have been learned by the earliest white explorers, because there just wasn’t anywhere those long-nosed roundeyes didn’t go. Some U.S. Navy lieutenant with a pack train of mules would have found it and plotted it on a map. Hell, FDR would have sent a CCC team up here to improve it and mark it. By now, it would have been on Dan O’Brian’s map, and extreme hikers would have it on their bucket list of trails.

  She consulted Old Sam’s map, which gave her no clue. The trail simply ended at the ninth cave. “God damn you, old man,” she said, exasperated.

  Had he even known this trail, if that was what it was?

  She dismissed that thought immediately. Old Sam would have known. There wasn’t one square foot of the Park he didn’t know.

  Was this the real reason his mother had told him to homestead here? Had she, a chief’s daughter, known of this pass? Had she foreseen that it might be valuable one day?

  Kate looked at the precipitous terrain that rose and fell on all sides, bisected only by this slender thread of a route that at its widest could not have accommodated Kate’s pickup. Still, it was wide enough for a man with a pack. Or a mule. Maybe Old Sam was smuggling scotch into Alaska from Canada during prohibition. Although he’d only have been about twelve when the Noble Experiment had been repealed, Kate still wouldn’t have put it past him.

  She took a last look around before beginning her descent back toward the hot springs. There was no cave here. Maybe there was no ninth cave. Maybe it was only Old Sam’s way of showing her the pass, of carrying the knowledge forward in the family. “Crazy old bastard.”

  She followed the trail she had broken down its switchbackian route, dodging around rocky outcroppings. She was almost to the tree line, about where she had seen the ewe, when a tumble of rock caught her eye. Even beneath its layer of snow it looked just a little too artful, a little too much like the concealing slabs in front of the first eight mine entrances.

  It was above a ledge about twelve feet up the north face of the canyon, in a place where the wall below was especially smooth and free of outcroppings for hands and feet. She used her snowshoes to pack down the snow below it, and then sat down and pulled out an extra biscuit, held together with a thick layer of honey butter, and the small thermos of coffee. She forced herself to eat and drink slowly, leaning back against the rock wall.

  She felt a lot better when she got back to her feet, and gave the wall beneath the tumble of rock a closer examination. She wasn’t a technical climber by any means, but she had the line and a handful of eyebolts she’d found in her garage, and she could tie a slipknot with the best of them. And if she fell it wasn’t that far, and there was enough snow to cushion a fall.

  Best not to fall, though.

  She used the flat end of the crowbar to hammer in the eyebolts one above the other, using each as a staging area to hammer in the next, and so made her way up the surface of the wall to the ledge. She got a knee up over it, saw that it was narrow but not too narrow, and used her arms to pull herself up the rest of the way.

  By then she was so annoyed with Old Sam that she wasn’t careful how she used the crowbar, jamming in the flat end and levering the slabs of rock away from what, yes, proved to be another entrance, letting them tumble over the side, where they raised smoke signals of snow when they hit.

  This adit was smaller than the others, a short, narrow arch, the marks of the cold chisel and the pickaxe easily identifiable, not yet sanded to smoothness by decades of wind and rain and ice. The hood of her parka brushed the top of the arch. Old Sam would have had to stoop.

  She pulled out her flashlight.

  It wasn’t much bigger inside than out. She could stand in the middle of the tunnel and flatten both hands on both sides. About a dozen steps in, though, it opened up into a larger space. Kate played the flashlight around and saw that it was a natural cave, from the lines of the strata probably formed when some softer layer of rock had fractured and fallen between two harder layers. She heard the drip of water, felt the moisture in the air on her cheek. Probably find a spring if she looked for it. She couldn’t believe it wasn’t frozen solid. She was.

  There was nothing more corrosive than water. If Old Sam had left the icon in this cave for her to find, he had better by god have left it in something waterproof.

  She spent half an hour covering every square inch of that damn cave, and came up empty.

  She didn’t believe it.

  She couldn’t believe it.

  She wouldn’t believe it.

  She went over the cave again, more slowly this time, her face inches from the rock face, quartering the dome of the ceiling with the flashlight, too.

  There was nothing there, not one damn thing, other than a few piles of rock left over from when the cave collapsed.

  “I will dance on your grave, you old son of a bitch,” Kate said, and she would have, too, if the beam from the flashlight hadn’t come to rest on one of the piles of talus, hadn’t lingered on one rock in particular. It was the same color as the others, an indeterminate gray, at least in this light, but it was larger, about the size of a small cantaloupe, and it had smoother edges than the rocks surrounding it. She crossed the cave floor, keeping the light on it, and bent to pick it up.

  It was unexpectedly heavy.

  She put the end of the flashlight in her mouth and used both hands. She needed to. It must have weighed twenty pounds.

  She stood there, speechless, knowing instantly what it had to be. Mac McCullough’s story, laid out in exquisite detail in even more exquisite prose on those frail, onionskin pages. The nuggets on Pete Wheeler’s desk. “What’s an icon?”

  “Son of a bitch,” she said. “Wheeler, you’re nothing but another fucking gold bug.”

  She was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear the scrabbling at the entrance of the cave until it was too late. She turned, and the beam from her flashlight caught Bruce Abbott’s face, framed by the thrown-back hood of his parka. “Give it to me,” he said. He was holding a pistol, and it was pointed right at her.

&
nbsp; “I really have had it with all the guns people have been pointing at me lately,” she said.

  He waved the pistol at her. “Give it to me,” he said again.

  She was holding the rock at her side. He couldn’t see it clearly. He couldn’t see exactly what she held in her hands. She stuck her foot behind her and let the rock roll down her leg and turned as soon as it hit the ground, scuffing her feet in hopes of muffling the very loud thud it gave when it hit the ground. “Give what to you, Bruce?” she said, holding out empty hands.

  “The icon,” he said. “You found the map. It has to be here.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said. “I thought you were a city guy. And yet you made it all the way out here, twice. Not bad.”

  “Give me the icon,” he said.

  “How did you know about the map?”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  “Ah,” Kate said. “Then it was Erland.”

  She couldn’t see his face against the light coming from the cave entrance, but there was a distinct tremor in his voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I wonder how he knew about it,” Kate said. “His father, perhaps?”

  He waved the pistol at her again. “Get back. You dropped something. I want to see what it is.”

  “Okay.” She moved to the other side of the cave.

  He edged around the perimeter of the cave toward the rockfall, pistol held on her at all times.

  Amused, she said, “I’m not armed, Bruce.”

  He reached the pile of rock and kicked it apart with his boot. The smaller rocks scattered. The rock she had been holding stayed put. He didn’t notice. “Where is it?” he said.

  “The icon?” she said. “I don’t know, Bruce. It isn’t here, that’s for damn sure.”

  The flat veracity of her answer stumped him. “It has to be here,” he said at last. “Why else would you come back up here?”

  “I think Old Sam was playing a little joke on all of us, Bruce,” she said. “He left me a map. Here, look for yourself.” She unzipped her parka and reached inside.

  “Stop! Don’t move!” He took a hasty step forward, raising the pistol.

  She held up both hands, palms out. “I’m just reaching for the map, Bruce, that’s all. I was telling you the truth. I’m not armed.”

  She could hear him breathing fast in the silence of the little cave. “Slowly,” he said, “very, very slowly.”

  And so she very, very slowly extracted the map from the inside pocket of her parka. She held it out to him.

  He stepped forward, reaching for it with his free hand. She watched the barrel of the pistol. His hand closed around the map and the barrel dropped, and in that same moment she took a step forward and grabbed the wrist of his gun hand in both of hers. She took another step, turning her back to him, and bent over, bending her legs, pulling him with her.

  He was taken by surprise and lost his balance. He started to fall on her. As he did, she straightened her legs with a snap, still holding on to his wrist. His arm acted as a fulcrum and he made an almost perfect somersault, landing on his back with a thud that shook the cave.

  Through all this he managed to hang onto the pistol. It went off, a big boom in a small room, followed by the sound of ricochets, two, three, it might have been four. Kate stood there, petrified, afraid that her impromptu plan was going to lead to an impromptu death.

  Which it almost did, because the bullet’s multiple impact caused mini-landslides all over the interior surface of the cave. Rock fell behind her, to her left, pieces fell from the side of the tunnel where it led into the cave. More rock fell from the roof, filling the air with dust and their hoods and hair with grit and sand and pebbles. This was more than Erland was paying Bruce for and he let out a sound somewhere between a yelp and a squeal and was up and hobbling for the entrance.

  Kate paused long enough to scoop up the heavy rock and stuff it in the pocket of her parka, where it knocked heavily against her knee as she ran down the tunnel. The rumbling falls of rock grew in size and strength and intensity behind her until it sounded as if the entire side of the mountain was caving in. Just short of the tunnel’s mouth she was enveloped in a cloud of dust that stung her eyes and obscured her vision. She threw out her arms so that her fingers grazed the tunnel’s walls and flung herself forward with such impetus she almost walked off the edge of the cliff face.

  She stood there, coughing and blinking. When her vision cleared she saw that Bruce had regained the foot of the wall and was scrambling into snowshoes.

  “Dumb fuck,” she said. “Who shoots off a gun in a cave? You could have gotten us both killed.”

  He heard her voice and cast up one haunted glance before heading down the canyon at a spanking pace. Kate paused for a moment to admire his form. If Bruce Abbott could run on snowshoes, he was a lot more competent in the backwoods than she had previously supposed.

  Kate removed the rock from her pocket, set it just inside the adit, and kicked some rockfall over it. Bruce had been in such a hurry he hadn’t bothered to pull the eyebolts or untie the line. She took her time coming down. There was only one way out of the canyon, and if it came to that she could find him in Anchorage. She knew who he was working for, and what he wanted. Even if he went to ground, Max had baited him into a trap for her once, and she had no doubt that he could do it again. She strapped on her own snowshoes and followed at a more leisurely pace.

  She made the cabin in good time and found Mutt in a considerable state of excitement but still on guard. “Good girl,” Kate said. “Must have been torture for you when you heard him go by.”

  Mutt gave a half shake that was the equivalent of a shrug. It’s what we professionals do. Kate surveyed her three prisoners. “What the hell am I going to do with the three of you while I go catch me another bad guy?”

  They offered her no suggestions. In the end, she tossed everything that might be conceivably used for a sharp edge into a garbage bag and nailed the door of the cabin shut behind her. “Oh, stop whining,” she said. “Ben’s got one hand free, there’s enough wood to see you through the night, and I left you the fire extinguisher in case you somehow set yourselves on fire. I’ll try to be back to get you before then.”

  She dumped the garbage bag into the trailer, which she did not hitch to her snowgo. She’d topped off the fuel in the Arctic Cat when she arrived, and this time no one had put a bullet hole into the tank. More fool them. The engine started at a touch and Kate grinned at Mutt, who was quivering with eagerness to see some action. “Let’s blow this pop stand, girlfriend!”

  Mutt leaped up behind her and Kate hit the gas.

  She took the first dogleg with caution, making sure Bruce wasn’t waiting for her with a baseball bat, and found instead his tracks, and another snowgo, this one the Ski-Doo Rev XP Herbie had told her about, which undoubtedly belonged to one of the parties presently incarcerated in the Canyon Hot Springs Correctional. At a guess she’d say Pete. A lawyer could conceivably afford this sled, a journalist never. She almost missed the snowgo belonging to the second party, another Ski-Doo, although this one was so old it was nearly an antique. Had to be Ben’s. It had been pushed into a clump of thick brush. If it had snowed a little between the time he had parked it and the time she had seen it, it would have been invisible.

  She continued. Bruce was in headlong flight. There were some corners where he only left the track of one ski in the snow. “Moving at a pretty good clip,” Kate said over her shoulder to Mutt. “I wonder if he knows how he’s going to get out of the Park?”

  She laughed and hit the throttle as they came down into the last straight stretch before the last dogleg and leaned into the turn.

  Not so dumb, after all, Bruce Abbott, because that’s where he was waiting for her, not with a baseball bat in hand but a solid piece of deadfall about an inch in diameter. He timed it pretty well, too, so that she ran right into the swing he was bringing forward with both hands.

  He was
partially foiled when it caught the top of Kate’s windshield, which deflected his stroke. It wasn’t enough to miss her entirely, but it allowed her to take the brunt of the blow across her top of her head, which was covered with her parka hood, which further cushioned the blow.

  Not, however, enough that she wasn’t flung backward from her snowgo, carrying Mutt with her. She landed on Mutt, hard, the breath knocked out of both of them.

  She lay on her back, still conscious, blinking up at the sky, and then was shoved to one side when Mutt scrabbled out from beneath her. She barked at Kate—Get up! Get on your feet, soldier!—and made an abortive leap toward their attacker. Kate could hear the engine of his machine roar to life and the machine head away at full throttle.

  Mutt leapt back to her side and barked right in her face. Get up! The bad guy’s getting away! I could be tearing him a new asshole and here you are lazing around on your back! Get UP!

  Amazing the articulation and eloquence Mutt could achieve with one sound.

  “You know what?” Kate said to the cold gray sky overhead. “I’m getting too old for this shit.” Her head was starting to hurt. Again.

  Mutt wasn’t having any of it. She sank her teeth into the sleeve of Kate’s parka, set her hindquarters, and began to pull. Kate slid willy-nilly across the snow in brief, powerful tugs.

  “Mutt,” she said.

  Yank.

  “Knock it off.”

  Yank.

  “Just give me a minute. I’ll be okay.”

  Yank.

  “Mutt.” She didn’t even have the wherewithal to summon up a good bellow.

  Mutt, with quicker recuperative powers, had no such problem. She dropped her mouthful of parka long enough to bark another command. Shut up and breathe!

  This time she grabbed the leg of Kate’s bibs and hauled.

  This time Kate just went with it, watching the clouds sail by overhead, and the occasional alder limb revolve, bumping over hummocks covered with ice, sliding between overhanging bushes that dropped snow on her face, becoming a little too well-acquainted with the edges of rocks. “Ouch,” she thought she said once.