Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “At least he’s dead,” Kate said.

  Bernie met her eyes, his own empty of expression. “That he is.”

  God, it was cold. The frigid air bit through the windshield of the snow machine and all five layers of his clothing with the ferocity of a wolverine biting into flesh, and it felt just that hungry, that angry, and that voracious. He wore a balaclava and a knit cap inside his hood, and his face was still cold. Beneath his down parka with the wolf-trimmed hood and a down bib overall guaranteed to twenty below, he wore a Gore-Tex Pro Shell and a pair of ski pants, and beneath them Patagonia Capilene, the ne plus ultra in long underwear. His boots were Sorel Caribous rated to forty below, and inside his winter mitts he wore heated gloves powered by a D battery guaranteed to keep his hands warm for five hours, minimum.

  Nevertheless, the only truly warm part of his body was in fact his back, and that was because Van was snuggled against it, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist. “You okay?” he yelled over the noise of the engine.

  “Great!” she yelled back. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

  She could talk, she was all warm and comfy back there with him as her wind foil, but she did have a point.

  The white swath of snow-covered ice wound through a landscape of low banks and rounded foothills. Thick stands of willow flashed by, leaving Johnny with retinal after-impressions of enormous brown lumps, moose in groups of four and five, curled up in the snow, conserving energy, waiting out the cold snap before they got up to feed again. High overhead, a bald eagle soared, looking for the unwary rabbit or that foolish pika who had been improvident in preparing for winter and whom hunger had forced out to feed. Eagles mostly ate fish, Johnny knew, but with the Kanuyaq frozen solid and the salmon out to sea anyway the eagles made do with what was on the ground. Or in the garbage dump. Maybe Benjamin Franklin was right, maybe the turkey should have been the national bird.

  It was a clear, cold, calm day, the sky a pale, sere blue. The sun was up after ten and in bed before four, and in the few brief hours that it traveled above the horizon its reflection off the snow felt sharp enough to draw blood. They all wore goggles with polarized lenses to guard against snow blindness.

  Ahead of them Ruthe goosed her Arctic Cat with the verve and enthusiasm of a woman half her age, following truck trails when there were any, breaking new trail where the wind had blown the snow into sculptured drifts that were so beautiful and otherworldly that it seemed a shame to Johnny to destroy them. Ruthe skimmed their tops or plowed through their bases without a backward glance, resulting in explosions of snow that momentarily obliterated the trail. When now and then he managed to pull even with her he could see the grin beneath her goggles. “She’s loving this,” Van shouted.

  He felt an answering grin spread over his face. “Yes, she is!”

  There was traffic on the river that day, other snow machines as well as pickups and four-wheelers and one guy on cross-country skis towing a sled. When asked, he said he was from Anchorage, just out for a weekend wilderness experience. He seemed rational, which was unexpected, and shared with them some homemade fudge that even frozen solid melted in the mouth like chocolate silk. It could have been a highway anywhere north of the fifty-three, if there wasn’t the occasional guy fishing through a hole he’d chopped in the ice, hoping for a mess of whitefish for dinner.

  The others were inhabitants of the villages they passed, isolated clusters of log cabins and small prefabricated buildings brought up- or downriver at great expense, for most of whom their airstrip doubled as main street. Usually downtown consisted of a tiny store with inflated prices and an even tinier post office in someone’s front room. Most had a government building that might also house the rare village public safety officer and whatever air taxi flew there. They all had schools, in spite of steadily dwindling school populations as more and more people moved to where the jobs were. Johnny had heard that topic discussed by the four aunties more than once. He wondered if the mine would help, if it would stop the drift of Alaskans from the rural to the urban world. He knew Kate didn’t think so. “How do you keep them down on the farm,” she had said once in his hearing, “after they’ve seen what’s out there on satellite television?”

  They didn’t stop to talk, though, so he couldn’t ask the people who lived there how they felt about it. One group of three, all wearing helmets, circled around and came back by them, and then circled again and roared by a third time. A pickup came into view, and the three jumped a low section of riverbank and disappeared into a stand of spindly spruce trees.

  “Who was that?” Van said.

  “Dunno,” Johnny said, “but they sure know how to drive snowgos.” He was nagged by the feeling that there was something he should have made notice of. He faced forward to see Ruthe going up the bank on the opposite side of the river. “Hold on, Van!”

  He followed Ruthe’s tracks off the river and over the bank and found her waiting at the top. “Still good?” she said.

  “Still good,” he said. He might be cold but he wasn’t frozen, and he was enjoying the feel of Van’s arms around him. He could keep going all day.

  “Okay,” Ruthe said, and off she hared again, he and Van faint but pursuing. They climbed for almost a mile, Ruthe perforce slowing down for safe passage through giant and mostly dying spruce trees crowded by thickly growing birches, all on the south-facing slope of what resolved into a high valley. Once in it, mountains rose up on either side to give it a wide, exaggerated U shape edged with sharp peaks, notched peaks, double peaks four and five and six thousand feet high. They were in the foothills of the Quilaks.

  Ruthe halted and Johnny pulled up beside her. Ruthe killed her engine and Johnny did likewise, and everyone pulled their hoods back and pushed their goggles up, eyes narrowed against the brilliant sunlight. The sudden and immediate silence fell like a blow. The scene before them was like a painting, richly textured in the subtle hues of an Arctic winter day, hushed, serene, and achingly beautiful.

  “Wow,” Van said, and dismounted.

  “Don’t!” Ruthe and Johnny said simultaneously, but before they could stop her, Van had stepped off the machine and almost immediately sank into the snow up to her waist. She blinked up at them, astonished.

  Ruthe threw back her head and laughed, the explosive cackle frightening a ptarmigan from beneath a bush, wings as white as the snow, a blur of motion. After a moment’s inner struggle, Johnny started to laugh, too.

  Van couldn’t help it, she joined in, followed by a quick yelp of distress. “Oh no, I can’t laugh, it makes me go in deeper!”

  At that Ruthe lay back on the seat of her snow machine and simply dissolved. Johnny pulled himself together and by dint of superior upper body strength, which he did not neglect to point out to both of them, managed to lever Vanessa up on her belly, like a seal, across the seat in back of him. She banged her boots together to get the snow out of her laces, and pulled herself up and back in the saddle. “That’s me, ladies and gentlemen, the light relief for the day. Well, how was I to know? I’ve never ridden out in the backcountry before, just on roads and trails.”

  Ruthe grinned at her, deep laugh lines creasing her lean cheeks. “What’s called throwing you in at the deep end.”

  Johnny and Van were accompanying Ruthe Bauman, the Park’s self-styled naturalist, on an expedition to check on the Gruening River caribou herd. It wasn’t much of a herd, less than two thousand strong, but it was part of the Park ecosystem, and Ruthe was the self-appointed patron saint of all Park wildlife, flora and fauna. She tolerated the presence of Dan O’Brien’s Park rangers, even if they did tend to get in the way when they were least wanted. They meant well, and she was even on occasion pleased to approve of this or that action taken, but she’d watched almost forty seasons come and go from her front porch, and the rhythm of the life of the Park was as natural to her as her own. It was a byword in the Park that Ruthe could step outside the door of the cabin perched on the hillside with the southern view, look at the s
ky, take a sniff or two of the wind, and give anyone who asked a forecast that would be more timely and more accurate than any National Weather Service weather report. When Ruthe said to put the snow tires on the truck, Park rats put them on their trucks. When she said it was safe to take them off, they took them off. She was a handy neighbor.

  Lean as a tough steak, brown eyes still clear beneath a mop of soft white gold curls, Ruthe Bauman was an ex-WASP who had towed targets for WWII fighter pilots doing target practice over the Atlantic. After the war she’d come north hoping for a job in aviation in Alaska when they weren’t on offer to women Outside. She and her friend, Dina Willner, dead three years now, had joined forces with an enterprising travel agent out of Fairbanks that specialized in big game hunts. They bought him out in 1949, acquiring two de Havilland Beavers in the deal, and added air taxi services to remote sites to their business model. In the 50s they bought a cabin and eighty acres twenty-five miles south of Niniltna, added another ten cabins, and took out an ad in Alaska magazine. In that hour one of the world’s first eco-resorts, Camp Teddy, was born. So was the Park’s conservation movement, which came as something of a shock to the Park rats.

  Ruthe and Dina had been close friends of Ekaterina Shugak and were mentors, teachers, and friends to her granddaughter. When Kate acquired Johnny, Ruthe naturally extended that relationship to include him, and he spent a great deal of time literally as well as metaphorically sitting at her feet, learning everything she cared to teach him about the Park and every creature in it.

  This winter, Ruthe had been doing some public worrying over the notion that the Gruening River caribou herd might have suffered some serious depredations due to the increase in population of the resident wolf pack. Dan had organized a couple of overflights on Chugach Air, but the budget didn’t really allow for an on-the-ground look, too. Ruthe volunteered. “She didn’t actually volunteer,” Dan told Kate, “she just told me she was going.” Ruthe had asked Johnny if he wanted to go. He had in turn invited Van along.

  “Sorry you came?” Johnny said, knowing the answer.

  Van just laughed.

  But Ruthe’s attention had shifted, one hand shading her eyes as she looked up the valley. “There it is,” she said, and pointed.

  The sun was behind the mountains now, and the reflected light less brilliant and hurtful to the eyes. Johnny squinted and could just make out a lone trailer a long way up the valley. It was white, so it was hard to distinguish it from the surrounding countryside, but it had a gold stripe around the top, which was what he found first. “Yeah,” he said, “I see it. So that’s where they’ll dig the Suulutaq Mine.”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Can you imagine a pit three miles wide, five miles long, and two thousand feet deep, right there?”

  “How tall is two thousand feet?” Van said.

  “Two hundred stories,” Johnny said.

  “Yeah, but what’s that mean? Compare it to something.”

  “I don’t know.” Johnny thought. “You could put four Washington Monuments in it, one on top of the other.”

  Van had only ever seen the Washington Monument in pictures. “Oh.”

  Inspired, Johnny said, “Those mountains, right here at the opening of the valley? I looked on the map before we came, and those first ones are about two thousand feet high. Which means you could put them down in the mine and you wouldn’t even see the tops of them.”

  Van digested this, looking from the mountains to the valley and back again. “Wow,” she said, impressed. “That’s pretty deep.”

  Ruthe, unheeding, pointed. “See there? All the way up the end of the valley, on the right, that edge of that mountain?”

  They sort of did. “Yeah?”

  “The source of the Gruening River is right there, in those hills, and there’s a pass just the other side of that edge that the river follows.”

  “Where does it go?”

  “Right into the Kanuyaq, boy. Right into the Kanuyaq.”

  Johnny had read the flyers that came in the mail, and the handouts that Talia Macleod had given out at the school the month before, too. So had Van. “You’re thinking about the salmon runs, right?” Van said. “I thought they were going to build a lake to contain the effluent, and two dams, not just one, to hold it all in.”

  “Who says the dams will hold?”

  “They’re going to be pretty big dams, Ruthe,” Van said.

  “Maybe,” Ruthe said. “And maybe there aren’t going to be any dams. Come on, let’s go say howdy.”

  Johnny leaned over and grabbed Ruthe’s hand before it could push the start button. “I thought we were supposed to go looking for the Gruening River caribou herd.”

  She smiled at him kindly, or that’s what he thought she meant to do. On the receiving end she looked more like a feral fox, all sharp teeth and attitude. “We’ll get to them, don’t worry. But we’re so close, it’d be impolite not to drop in and say hello. I’m sure whoever’s stuck all the way out here alone in that little trailer would be glad of some company.”

  The loud roar of her snow machine’s engine split the sky and she was off, going fast enough to send up a faint rooster tail of snow in her wake. Johnny regarded Ruthe’s profession of altruism with extreme skepticism, but he hit the start button. “Hang on, Van!” They set off in pursuit, him pushing his snowgo as hard as he dared.

  It was futile and he knew it. Ruthe’s Arctic Cat was brand new that winter, a green Jaguar Z1, with an 1100 4-stroke engine, the ACT Diamond Direct Drive, twin spar chassis, and slide-action rear suspension. She could hit a hundred miles an hour without breaking a sweat. It had cost a cool ten large, and the first time he’d seen it Johnny had been struck dumb with envy, completely forgetting that he was the proud owner of his very own pickup truck. Trucks didn’t count in the winter, not out in the Bush.

  He, too, was driving an Arctic Cat, Kate’s spare, but it was practically an antique, being all of seven, almost eight years old. It wheezed long before it got to a hundred, and even though the speedometer was broken Johnny knew because he’d tried to keep up with Ruthe before and failed just as abjectly. It was a lot farther to the isolated little trailer than it had looked from the top of the pass, which gave him a perspective on how big the valley was. Now that they were down in the middle of it, he could see it was more of a high plateau, mostly flat, or so it seemed, filled up with snow. “What do you think?” he yelled at Van. “Five miles wide?”

  “More!” she yelled back. “And at least twelve miles long!”

  “Probably more like fifteen!”

  With the sun behind the mountains not only was the light fading but the temperature was dropping, too. He hunched down behind the windshield and was grateful for Van’s warm weight at his back.

  Ruthe had stopped on a little rise a hundred yards short of the cabin, and was waiting for them when they pulled up. “Took your time,” she said smugly.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Johnny said.

  Her grin flashed. She stood up on her machine, leaning a knee on the seat, and yelled, “Hello, the trailer!”

  They waited. There was no response.

  It was a peaceful enough scene, smoke wisping up through the chimney, a path shoveled to a woodpile, a rusty oil tank on a cross-bar stand at one end of the trailer, a large metal put-together shed big enough to house a snow machine and a standing toolbox. There was an orange wind sock on a pole stuck in the snow some distance away. It hung limp in the still air, and blowing snow had long since filled in the tracks of any skis an airplane might have left behind.

  It seemed somehow forlorn to Johnny, as if the trailer and its accessories had been plunked down here and forgotten. “I thought there’d be a drill rig,” he said.

  Ruthe shook her head. “They moved it into storage for the winter.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Van said, “but it sure would get lonely if you were out here for very long.”

  Ruthe tried again. “Hello, the trailer! Don’t shoot, we’re friendl
ies, and we’re coming down to say hi! Put the coffee on!”

  When there was no answer to her second hail, Ruthe led the way to the little group of buildings, still perched with one knee on the seat, one foot on a running board, nose up, almost sniffing the air.

  They pulled up in front of the door of the trailer. Ruthe shut off her engine and tried again. “Hello, the trailer! Wake up in there, you got company!”

  Still, nothing. “I don’t like this,” Van said, her voice very soft.

  “Probably out walking a trapline,” Ruthe said, dismounting. She saw Van looking at her and laughed. “It’s packed down here, girl, you can get off and walk around safely.”

  Van put out one foot gingerly to feel the snow, and then got off with more confidence. Johnny followed, standing uncertainly for a moment, and then he went to the door and knocked. “Hello? Is anybody in there?”

  No answer. Ruthe clicked her tongue against her teeth and brushed by him to grab the knob and pull the door open.

  The smell hit them first. It was strong enough to stop Johnny in his tracks, and behind him Van actually backed up a step. Ruthe froze in place for one long second, and then with a set face climbed the two steps into the room.

  There was a brief pause, and then they heard her say, “For crissake! What the hell were you doing out here?”

  Johnny steeled himself and followed her inside, Van at his shoulder.

  The door opened into the office area of the trailer. There was a desk, a four-drawer filing cabinet, a whiteboard, and a map of the Park on a scale so large it covered one wall floor to ceiling and corner to corner, including the two windows in that wall that showed up as light rectangles through the map. Flyers, brochures, and statistical handouts, all sporting the GHRI cheery sunrise logo, were piled all over the room.

  The desk was large and metal and gray. Across it lay the body of Mac Devlin, his chest a torn mass of flesh and blood and bone, his square, red face gaping at the ceiling in astonishment. He was starting to bloat.

  Behind Johnny, Van made a sound and the warm of her at his shoulder vanished, followed by quick footsteps going down the stairs and the crunch of her knees on the snow. He heard her retch. He wasn’t far off it himself.