The sky steadied and she realized that Mutt had hauled her to where her snow machine had stopped. Amazingly, the engine was still ticking over. With Mutt on his tail, Bruce hadn’t had time to grab the key or disable the engine. Kate even found a moment to be grateful that his pistol had been buried in the cave-in.
Mutt let go of the leg of her bibs and pounced on her head, using her teeth to pull Kate’s hood back, after which she gave Kate’s face a thorough washing, in between minatory yelps and yips. Kate got tired of the yelping and yipping a lot sooner than she tired of the tongue bath, soon enough to discover that her arms still worked. She shoved Mutt off her. “It’s okay, girl. I’ll be okay.”
Mutt wedged her snout under Kate’s shoulder and shoved. She managed to sit upright. The earth took a revolution around the sun at a heretofore unheard-of pace.
Kate closed her eyes, which were starting to feel a little puffy. When she opened them a moment later, the world and she were both a little steadier, enough so that she could rummage in her pack, which was still on her back, for a bottle of water. She emptied it and felt the better for it, enough so that she could hoist a leg up over the seat of the snowgo.
There, she had handlebars to hold her up.
She felt her face. There was a lump coming up on her forehead, right at her hairline. “Goddammit,” she said, and felt a surge of rage, which filled her with a probably illusory energy. “I was just getting over the last set of black eyes.”
Mutt barked.
“All right,” Kate said, “get on.”
This time she kept the throttle all the way down, and if anyone had been inclined to try to follow her tracks they would have seen that on this trip down the mountain her snowgo was more often airborne than it was earthbound. She took the straight path wherever and whatever it offered. If there was a ledge she jumped it, if there was a field of moguls she flew from top to top barely touching their crowns. She barreled through blueberry bushes and willow thickets alike, she frightened the life out of three peacefully browsing moose, and she saved an entire colony of shrews from the excavations of an arctic fox when she scooped him up with her front left ski and bore him a quarter of a mile before he finally regained enough sense to roll off. There must have been times, she thought later, that her speed had achieved something that could have launched her into low earth orbit. Certainly she had set some kind of land speed record that Arctic Cat would forever mourn they had not been present to record. Those parts of her face exposed to the wind felt frozen solid. She could hear nothing but the roar of the engine, and she could feel nothing but the pressure of Mutt against her back, teeth locked in a death grip on a mouthful of parka so she wouldn’t fall off.
The edge of the high had moved far enough north that the setting sun was framed between horizon and the edge of the clouds the high was pushing northwest. Between its blinding rays, the new head wound, and the lingering cave dust, Kate’s vision wasn’t what it should have been, and she didn’t acquire Bruce as a target until he was ten miles out of Niniltna. He had the faster vehicle but she was the better driver, and it took her only five more miles to close to within a hundred feet. He knew they were there and hunched down behind his handlebars, but he was getting all he could get out of his Polaris and he lost even more ground by panicking.
Kate drew up slowly, inexorably, level with his snowgo. “Go!” Kate said, and Mutt sprang, aiming straight for him.
He hauled on his handlebars and veered right. Mutt missed him by inches. She was going so fast her momentum sent her skidding for fifty feet before she managed to scramble up and give chase. In the meantime he’d straightened out and was back on course for Niniltna, the tiny houses of which were just now becoming visible against the snow. Kate didn’t know what he thought he was going to do once he got there.
She pulled out the line she had taken from the cliff face and stuffed in the pocket of her parka. There was one slip knot left in the end of it. She needed her right hand for the throttle. She tugged off her left mitten with her teeth, tossed it over her shoulder, and pulled the slipknot loose and large and let the loop dangle from her left hand.
She was coming up on Bruce’s left now, pushing him off course, into the path of Mutt, who was coming up on his right, a flattened, elongated gray shape skimming over the snow. All his concentration was on Kate so he didn’t see Mutt until the last minute, and when he did he pulled instinctively to his right to avoid crashing into her.
Kate, teeth bared in a grin savage with joy, dropped the loop around his shoulders. She whipped the loose end of the line quick around the handlebars and grabbed the handlebars in both hands and braced herself as her snow machine passed his.
Behind her there was a yell and her whole snowgo seemed to halt in midair, the engine revving to the decibel level of a 737 as the track revolved with nothing to push against. There was a loud thud when Bruce hit the ground, followed by another as the Arctic Cat hit the snow again in something approximating a controlled crash.
Kate ran at full throttle all the way to town and right down the main street, Bruce Abbott yelling and cursing at the end of the rope, dragging him past the Grosdidiers’ clinic, past Auntie Edna’s house, past the Riverside Café, past Bingley Mercantile, around the corner and up the hill past Auntie Joy’s and Emaa’s and Old Sam’s.
All the way to the trooper post, where she slowed down and pulled in and finally, at last, let the Arctic Cat’s engine die.
Mutt came trotting up to take Kate’s temperature with her nose and give her a hearty Well done! lick, before taking up station next to Bruce, who was still cursing.
Kate dismounted and straightened her back, a little surprised that she could. She looked up at the porch, where an astonished Maggie stood staring down at her.
Kate pushed her hood back.
“Jesus,” Maggie said, and actually took a step back.
Kate couldn’t imagine what she looked like, but knew the grin she gave Maggie was lopsided in the extreme.
“I ride an old paint, I lead an old dan,” she said, and laughed.
1965
Amchitka
Sam was in Kodiak for the Good Friday Earthquake, in the middle of delivering a load of king crab to Whitney-Fidalgo. He heard yells on the dock. When he looked out of the wheelhouse to see who’d fallen overboard, he saw instead the massive wooden dock rippling like waves, first in one direction and then in other. It looked like the piano keyboard in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
When he broke free from his stupefaction he slammed out of the wheelhouse and slid down the ladder to the deck. The brailer was just coming out of the hold, the winch on the boom reeling it up to dump the crab into a tote on the dock.
“Attention on deck!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “You, let loose the bow line! You, get on the stern!”
A chorus of voices followed him back to the ladder. “What’s up with the boss?” “What’s going on, Sam?” “Hey, look at the dock!”
He jumped forward and yanked the pucker rope. The crab cascaded back into the hold. “Earthquake, and it’s a bad one! We’re getting away from the dock!” He shoved a deckhand who was staring at the dock, stupefied. “Now, not this time tomorrow! Move your asses before I drop-kick the bunch of you over the side!”
The deck boss materialized next to him. “Sam, I live here. My wife and kids are here. I’ve got to go find them.”
“Go ahead, if you think you can get up that ladder,” Old Sam said.
The deck boss turned in time to see the last bolt pop out of the steel ladder and the ladder drop into the water a hand’s breadth away from the Freya’s hull.
Sam slammed into the wheelhouse, slapped the engine into life, and had the bow pulling away from the piling as the bow line slid free. The deckhand on the stern line wasn’t as quick and the rope burned his hands when Sam went all ahead full.
All around them boats, from thirty-foot seiners to hundred-foot crabbers, were pulling away from floats and docks and moorages and st
eaming north northeast. Sam didn’t breathe again until Woody Island was on their stern. He kept the Freya offshore north of Spruce Island for the next twenty-four hours, the whole crew spending their off-watch hours huddled around the big marine radio bolted to the wall at the foot of the chartroom bunk.
There was no telephone service left in Southcentral Alaska. The Anchorage International Airport tower had fallen over. The Million Dollar Bridge fifty miles north of Cordova had collapsed. Twenty miles of the Seward Highway was below water. Later they would hear that nine people had been killed outright during the earthquake, a hundred and six in the tidal wave that struck nine hundred miles of Alaska coastline afterward. To the Freya and the other boats who had made it out of the Kodiak harbor, the tidal wave had been a long, hard, rolling swell that rocked their hulls and moved on, but some coastal villages and towns like Seward and Valdez were heavily damaged, and some villages, like Chenega in Prince William Sound and Afognak north of Kodiak had been completely destroyed. In some places the land had sunk five and a half feet, causing high tide floods. In others, the land had risen thirty feet, putting docks forever out of reach of high water.
By Sunday morning the deck boss was beside himself with worry over his family and they were getting close to the point of no return on fuel. The Freya headed back to port.
The first indication of what they would see when they got back to town was the house floating out to sea on the ebb tide. Two stories, for the most part intact, the tidal wave had simply lifted it off its foundations and carried it off. It was only the first. Sam, his jaw tight, stayed alert, picking his way through the detritus of totes, lengths of lumber, refrigerators, a red tricycle tangled in a fishing net. It was as if the entire town had been washed away.
Which was pretty much what it looked like when they got up close. The earthquake had reduced the town to a game of pickup sticks, and the tidal wave had washed half of them out to sea. There was no dock left. Sam hailed a drifter he knew to ferry the deck boss to the beach so he could go find his family.
The other three deckhands were from Seldovia, Valdez, and Seattle. The Seattle man opted off in Kodiak, going ashore with the deck boss. Sam got some fuel off a crabber who’d just finished topping off the tank when the quake hit. The Freya headed back out to sea, on a course for Seldovia, where he knew there was a fuel dock. Two days later they steamed into the bay. The town looked pretty much intact, except for the small boat harbor, which was being towed back in one float at a time by the fishing fleet. He refueled, emptied his hold of king crab for pennies on the dollar, dumped his Seldovia hand, and headed for Valdez.
The tidal wave had damaged Valdez so badly that three years later it was moved to a new location. He moored the Freya to an anchor buoy offshore, and allowed his Valdez deckhand to move his family on board since their house had been first destroyed by the earthquake and then washed away by the tsunami.
And then he headed up the Richardson Highway, hitching a series of rides until he got to Ahtna. The Interior town was shaken but mostly intact. He spent the evening with Jane Silver, who fed him a large meal of moose steaks and mashed potatoes, and at first light next morning he was on the road for Niniltna with a pair of snowshoes he borrowed from the local banker and a pillowcase full of smoke fish and fry bread over his shoulder. It was a slushy trip, but he was made welcome at homesteads along the way. Everyone was anxious for news, and the expression on Joyce’s face when she opened the door of her cabin to see him standing there made it the whole odyssey worthwhile. For the first time since before the war, she was moved to a spontaneous show of affection, throwing her arms around him and holding him close. God, it felt good.
He slept next door in Ekaterina’s spare room and spent the next month chopping wood and hunting for Joy and Ekaterina and Edna and Viola and Balasha, although the few moose he found were thin and stringy. “No matter,” Balasha said. “Anything tender you boil it long enough.” By then all five women had lost their husbands through death, divorce, or abandonment. They worried more about the need to send the children away to school, and the subsequent decline of the village’s population. Every other house was empty and beginning to deteriorate both from the depredations of scavengers and lack of care. He’d never seen the town looking so shabby.
Joyce had gone to the same school in Cordova as Sam had, and she spoke English better than he did, but he noticed that the other women’s speech patterns were overtaking her own. She was misplacing modifiers and displacing clauses, and for the first time he heard someone refer to the women collectively as “the aunties.”
It was also the first time he remembered anyone outside of the Cutthroats calling him Old Sam. Well, what the hell, he sure enough felt old enough that April.
Face it. He’d felt old ever since that night in Anchorage.
“You still have the manuscript?” he said one evening.
“Same place like always,” she said.
Neither of them looked at the wooden armoire lurking in the corner, repository of one of the best-kept secrets in Niniltna.
What the hell, he thought again. What was one more?
He left in May to see to his boat, and got a job ferrying supplies for the U.S. Navy, back on the Aleutian Chain again but this time way the hell and gone to Amchitka, which was damn near all the way to Russia. He was there on October 29, 1965, when they detonated Long Shot, the first of three underground nuclear tests. He sat offshore on the Freya, wondering if a giant mushroom-shaped cloud was going to rise up over the island and roll out over the water and kill him dead where he sat. He didn’t much care.
He’d hired his first woman deckhand this trip, a Norwegian Eyak from Cordova with a set net site on Alaganik Bay. Her name was Mary Balashoff. She laughed a lot, and after a while she was laughing in his bed. He told himself he didn’t deserve her, but it didn’t stop him from enjoying her. And slowly, steadily, that night in Anchorage let go of him, so that he didn’t think about it more than once a day, then more than once a week. When a month had passed during which he realized he had not thought of the sight of Emil’s smile, of Erland’s voice yelling, “Dad! Dad!,” he began to feel that life might be worth living after all.
He had found the map in the icon, where Mac had hidden it, probably one step ahead of the Pinkerton agents. Pete Pappardelle had not found it, and either Emil hadn’t found it or, more likely, he had found it and, finding it, had taken a characteristic pleasure in retaining a reminder of the man whose life he had taken without shame or remorse. Old Sam put it back, hid the icon, and got on with it.
Mary was still with him three years later when he loaded most of a drill rig from Nikiski onto the Freya, lashing to the deck what he couldn’t take apart and put into the hold. While he didn’t see anyone he knew, he was relieved when they pulled out, even if the Freya was riding a little too close to her trim line.
They lucked out with the weather. It was almost flat calm all the way down to Unimak Pass, a thing Sam had never seen before in his life, after which they turned right and went past the Pribilofs and Nunivak and St. Matthew and St. Lawrence and Big and Little Diomede, all the way up through the Bering Strait to the Chukchi Sea and the Arctic Ocean, to land their cargo in Prudhoe Bay, on August 16, just a couple of miles from where the discovery well had been brought in the previous March. Sam was curious in spite of himself, and hitched a ride to the BP Base Camp, which high-sounding name resolved into a bunch of ATCO trailers and a couple of drill rigs, peopled with a bunch of men who hadn’t shaved in a long time. He hadn’t known such flat land existed in Alaska. There was only the barest hint of mountains on the southern horizon. He’d never seen so many birds, either, what seemed like seventeen different species of ducks and all the species of geese there were. He thought of the aunties’ freezers, and his hands itched for a shotgun.
“Good fishing in the rivers, too,” the redheaded radioman said, and offered him a beer and a ringside seat for Tony’s Nine O’Clock News at Ten, a radio show comprised of
news snippets read off a wire report, what music was available in the form of records played on a turntable with a scratchy needle, and a lot of bad and mostly unrepeatable jokes. It was an impressive example of what people would sit still for when they were that lonely, that bored, and that far from home.
Upon returning home safely, Old Sam took the Freya into Seward and put her into dry dock for some much-needed repairs. Mary wanted to go to Anchorage. He most emphatically did not, so she took the train up without him. He spent the interim perched on a stool in the Yukon Bar, drinking beer and thinking.
When Mary returned from Anchorage he said, “I’m going home.”
In the last twenty-five years there wasn’t much of Alaska’s coastline he hadn’t cruised, and he’d put away enough money that he wasn’t nervous about his future even after he paid off the Freya’s repairs and maintenance. “Since they outlawed fish traps with the statehood,” he said, “the fish are back in Alaganik Bay, and there’s enough processors in Cordova to keep the price interesting. I’m going to refit the Freya for tendering, and spend the summers picking up fish and delivering them to Cordova, and winters in Niniltna.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Actually, I was going to tell you. I got a letter from my dad. He says none of the other kids want the family set net site on Alaganik Bay. I do.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, I’d be just offshore.”
“Imagine that. You don’t want to get married or anything, do you?”
“Hell, no,” he said. “You?”
“I’d shoot myself first,” she said, and laughed.
He did love that laugh.
So he’d sat out the pipeline years in what now, after ANCSA and the d2 lands bill, was coming to be called the Park. He bought an old cabin on the Kanuyaq River two houses up from Joyce’s and wired it for electricity so he could read the books he was beginning to collect. Summers he spent on the Freya, delivering fish from Alaganik to Cordova for a penny a pound. When he wasn’t hunting or splitting wood or completing honey-do lists for Ekaterina and the aunties, winters he spent exploring the Park that had been created around them, penetrating the fastness of the Quilak Mountains, following the creeks and rivers from their sources to their mouths, tracking the herds of caribou. He regained all the woodcraft he had put on hold when he had left the Park so long ago, and learned more, honing his carpentry and woodworking skills and slowly collecting a set of more and better tools. Long winters were made for that kind of thing.
Though Not Dead Page 44
