Slade's Glacier Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT F. JONES

  Blood Sport

  The Diamond Bogo

  Blood Tide

  The Man-Eaters of Zamani

  Tie My Bones To Her Back

  Deadville

  The Run to Gitche Gumee

  Copyright © 2014 by Louise Jones

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-62873-783-7

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-155-8

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Printed in the United States of America

  FOR CHARLES F. JONES

  (1905–1980)

  “Up North”

  PROLOGUE

  That country is best approached from the sea, the ship ghosting shoreward through a fogbank, her deck and hull beaded, fresh water dripping from sheets and halyards. Then the gray light breaking toward blue: tatters of fog braid the rigging. Somewhere to starboard sea lions bark—hollow yaps and honks, as if the fog were mourning its own demise. Now the light brightens rapidly and the sun shows like a worn coin through the thinning mist. Finally, to break clear and see the country rising dead ahead, its raw and awful power.

  Not just the size, but the enormity of it: a country that can rape at a glance. That black-green, bristling coast—hemlock, cedar, Sitka spruce—hunkered under the vast glare of mountains, slashed with falling water, punctuated in ice. An offshore wind butts the fogbank seaward; whales blow rainbows against the light. A square mile of ocean erupts, frolics, disappears: porpoises at play. Closer inshore, sea otters dive through swaying yellow forests of kelp, then float on their backs, grinning, as they crack spider crabs and toss aside the sucked husks.

  Sudden bait balls—a million herring compressed by panic, ten-foot globules of instinctive fear, circling and circled, hit and ripped by the sea lions so that the tilting black surface of the sea is spangled in scales. A scraw of seabirds overhead—fulmar and shearwater, gull and tern, jaeger and skua—and now a gam of Orcas, killers in black-and-white dinner dress, coursing in from the fogbank to slam the sea lion herd: tendrils of blood thinning toward yellow. The tall dorsals slash and gleam and zigzag. Hit by a killer whale, a great bull spins skyward, silent, his dog’s eyes going dim as he falls to the waiting maw.

  Alaska.

  Take this for the truth: Any man who says he is not frightened by his first glimpse of it is either a fool or a liar.

  A slow swell rolls shoreward, turning from green and black to murky brown as it surges up the tidal flat, breaking at last on the lustrous mud and leaving behind its loops and coils of foam: sea snakes built of tan bubbles that shiver to the thud of succeeding waves. Above the high-tide mark, the beach is shingle and sea wrack: smooth, skull-sized boulders thatched with scarred logs—escapees from coastal lumber rafts—and tangles of driftwood, all meshed and snarled with tentacles of rotting kelp.

  This coast is rich in life and death. A billion generations of mollusks and arthropods died to build the beach: razor clams and butter clams, king crabs and Dungeness crabs, whelks and snails and abalone and goose barnacles. Beyond the reach of the surf, the ribs of a fin whale, bleached by salt and time to polar whiteness, arch like an untented canopy over a single vertebra, broad as a tea table. There are human bones as well, buried now by the undertaking sea. Haida and Tlingit and Aleut bones; the bones of once-bearded Russians, traders in fur for Aleksandr Baranov’s Russian-America Company, massacred upriver by the Tlingit, their skulls split and guts jellied by fiercer blows than those of their own knouts and nagaikas, those favored instruments of Tsarist commerce. The promyshleniki of the Russian-America Company justified their excesses with an old proverb: “God is on high and the Tsar is far away.” But the Tlingit, unlike the timid Aleuts whom the Russians had enslaved on their way east, were near and fearless.

  Closer to the surface lie the bones of American gold seekers and the rusting absurdity of their machines: buried in sea tangle, nearly invisible now, a great red steam car flakes away in silence. It had been meant to carry men and gear across the mountains to the mother lode; it never cleared the beach.

  Behind the rusting behemoth rises a wall of coastal forest, rooted in ten thousand years of dead and decaying conifers. Trees grow from trees, tiny saplings sprout from the moss that devours their ancestors. Walking the forest floor is impossible unless one follows the pleached and sinuous thoroughfares of the brown bears—one of whom might be ambling bemusedly around the next bend. The only safe way through this tangle of spikes and bears is to follow up the fiord of the Alugiak River as it drains to the sea from ice-capped mountains now invisible through the timber.

  The fiord itself is quiet, windless, its surface broken only occasionally by the roll of a salmon. Hair seals bark and argue on the rocks that line the shore. The Alugiak itself, brawling and bouldered, decants from the forest with a white-water roar. From below, the rapids look impassable: great transverse ribs of granite studded with boulders the size of houses; gushers of beer-brown water crashing and caroming down the chutes; dead trees piled athwart a gap, one spruce snag standing upright, skinned, throbbing and humming to the water’s blows. But salmon climb these falls and so can men. By lining and poling a canoe up the right hand side of the rapids, it is possible to reach the top with only one carry.

  From the head of the rapids, the country opens out into a wide, gently climbing valley that angles inland to the northeast. The protective girdle of blowdowns and devil’s club gives way to park-like grassland studded with islands of spruce, birch and aspen. Along the brush-bearded course of the river grow giant ferns and willow. Pale huckleberries and cloudberries, red and yellow salmonberries, wild apple and dogwoods a hundred feet tall find footing along the edges of valley. Farther upstream, the country grows wetter: a maze of sloughs and pothole ponds, creeks and mucky rivulets, muskeg and true tundra. At every step of elevation lie kettle moraines and mounds of ice-scoured gravel.

  At the far end of the valley, tucked in a crotch of the distant mountains, waits the engineer of this landscape: a cubic mile of blue-green ice. As Alaskan glaciers go, this one is nothing remarkable. It lacks the sprawl and spectacle of the Mendenhall or the Malaspina farther south. You cannot run a steamboat up to its snout, as you can at Glacier Bay, and with a blast on the ship’s whistle send great icebergs calving into the sea. Yet in its day, a hundred centuries ago, this glacier was the dominant force and feature of the country. It filled the valley: a great, broad-shouldered, rumble-gutted river of blue ice more than thirty miles long and five wide, its undulating back, half a mile above bedrock, covered with rock and dirt and stands of living trees, its nose in the sea, its ragged fangs flaking off to generate waves that could swamp a war canoe.

  The Tlingit payed homage whenever they passed, wishing it good health and asking it for favors. Like early Europeans, who saw glaciers as ice dragons, the Tlingit knew the ice to be anim
ate—a giant blue bear that moved slowly but with irresistible power. The Tlingit believed that the universe was made up of a few orderly sequences of cause and effect—shoot enough arrows and the moose dies—plus an enormous amount of something unpredictable that they called yek. Yek was the head of a shark, decapitated hours ago, suddenly snapping off the foot of a man who playfully kicked at it. Yek was the whim of the Thunderbird, causing lightning to flash from his eyes on a clear day. The earth was a plate of water, rock and ice, balanced on a long pole by The Old Woman Underneath. The Old Woman was nervous, and when she twitched, the earth shook, the mountains fell and the sea arose to suck down whole villages. That too was yek.

  As the glacier slowly retreated up the valley from the sea, vast lakes of ice melt accumulated behind its ever thinning walls. When they broke, the water crashed down the valley, tumbling trees and rocks and Tlingit and their community houses along with it. The drowned and shattered bodies of moose and bear and Dall sheep rolled with the flood. Now and then the distorted, bug-eyed faces of uprooted totem poles rose from the whirling scum, stared briefly, then surged headfirst below. That was powerful yek, indeed. The Tlingit left the river.

  Now, in its old age, the glacier was relatively benign. It squatted at the head of the valley, its shoulders wedged between two mountain slopes. Its mile-wide front beetled high over a terminal moraine of boulders, talus, scree and gray glacial mud. A dozen small streams gushed from under its skirt, milky water freighted with grit, and combined to form the Alugiak River. The wall of the glacier was sculpted by weather into a crenellated surface where mutant armies clash on melting legs, their warped swords and hammers frozen in midswing. Misshapen gods weep blue tears that redden at sunset. Smooth-walled caves lead into the ice, turning and twisting as if bored by some giant worm, only to end against blank walls that glow blue and green in the light filtering from above. Now and then frozen carcasses emerge slowly from the glacier’s maw: the bodies of animals fallen into crevasses long ago, before the days of men.

  Other secrets lie hidden beneath the ice, awaiting their moment of revelation in the long thaw. Sometimes the milky water that leaks from beneath the glacier wears a rainbow sheen, and the riverbanks downstream glow iridescent in the low last light. There is oil down there. This, of course, is not unusual in Alaska, difficult as it may be to realize that once, on these sun-lorn lands of rock and ice and stunted trees, great leafy forests grew in the ancient greenhouse of the planet. How much oil, though, is the big question.

  You might stand there, oily muck on your boots, and stare at the ice wall. The real strike—the great pool—is back there: back up the groin of the mountain, buried under a million million tons of ice. You would slap distractedly at a moose fly circling your head, wipe the sweat from your brow (it is hot at the glacier’s front in midsummer: the ice is a warped mirror). You would stare again, up the ice wall to the overhanging lip high above, dripping and translucent against the hot sky. After a while you might laugh. A fine joke, this one. A fortune lying in there, irretrievable: like those medieval tales of dragons sleeping on pots of gold. Tickle this dragon, and he would respond with a thousand tons of crashing ice.

  That night there is a full moon and the glacier rears above the camp, a baleful presence shot through with pale light, the frontal seracs gleaming like fangs in the moonlight. In the silence you can hear the streams of melt gurgling out from under the ice. You rise from the fire and work the bolt of your rifle, sliding a round into the chamber. Just as an experiment, you squeeze the trigger, aiming randomly skyward, watching the glacier.

  The shot roars down the valley.

  The glacier groans, then screams.

  A tower of ice teeters in the moonlight, then falls with a splintering roar to the rocks and mud below. . . .

  The Tlingit would have loved it.

  PART ONE

  JACK SLADE

  1950

  CHAPTER ONE

  “GET A load of this,” said Healey.

  The window looked out on the tarmac where the planes were parked. A man in a full-length bearhide coat walked toward the office dragging something on a leash. It was a squat, wide, thickly furred animal, its jaws lashed tight over a stick secured with rawhide thongs.

  At every other step the animal turned and lunged at the man. The man stopped, cursed mechanically, and kicked the animal in the chops.

  The animal could have been a small bear but it had a flat head and too long a tail and yellowish stripes ran from its forehead down along the sides of its glossy dark brown pelt. Its eyes were pure flashing fire.

  The man came into the office.

  “How much you charge to take this critter to Fairbanks?” He was bearded and weathered and smelled like a salmon cannery. The animal growled and lunged.

  The man kicked it.

  “What the hell is it?” Healey asked.

  “Carcajou,” the man said. “Injun Devil. What you’d call a wolverine. I promised Doc Haggs up in Fairbanks that I’d get one for him. Took me all winter to outsmart this son of a bitch and most of the spring to walk him into town.”

  “Sixty cents a pound for freight,” said Healey. “How much does he weigh?”

  “Be damn if I ever put him on a scale,” the trapper said. “Probably about forty, fifty pound. You want to weigh him, go ahead.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Charge you forty bucks plus another five to crate him. Make it fifty since we’ll have to keep an eye on him in case he gets airsick.”

  “Ain’t got no fifty,” the trapper said. “And he won’t get sick ’cause he ain’t et since last Tuesday when he got holt of my winter mukluks. But I’ll give you eight beaver. Full blanket beaver.”

  “Ten,” Healey said.

  “Eight,” said the trapper, “and I’ll crate him for you.”

  “We’re flying up that way this afternoon,” Healey told him. “There’s lumber and tools in that quonset over by the plane.”

  For the next hour we could hear the man hammering and cursing while the wolverine growled and scrabbled. Then the man came back into the office and flopped a stack of peltry on the table. “That ought to hold him,” he said. “I took a couple extra turns of babiche over his muzzle. You don’t want him getting loose.”

  “We’ve hauled pigs and bears,” Healey said. “Once we took a crate of eagles down to Ketchikan.”

  “A bear’s a sissy compared to a carcajou,” the trapper said. “You keep an eye on him he don’t get loose. He’ll eat up your plane and use the wings for toothpicks,”

  “What’s your name?” I asked him. “I’ll need it for the bill of lading.”

  “The Mad Trapper,” he said. “Tell Doc Haggs the Mad Trapper. He’ll know who I am. Give him a copy of the freight bill and tell him to send the money order to the Blue Bear down in town. I’m going to hang out there for a while, get good and shitfaced, fuck me some of them dollies from the cannery. The Mad Trapper.”

  There were three or four Mad Trappers in that country back then. They all took the name from the original Mad Trapper, a hard case named Albert Johnson who killed a Mountie over the line in the Yukon back in the early thirties and was himself killed on a frozen oxbow of the Eagle River after a long midwinter chase through the Richardsons. The Mounties had to shoot him seven times before he would die, and even at that he wounded three of them. I saw a photograph of him once that they’d taken after they killed him. A snub-nosed, jug-eared little guy, his dead eyes slitted and glaring, pale, his pale hair frozen in wild cowlicks, a scruffy beard bristling around his final, bare-toothed grimace: like an animal clubbed to death in a trap. Like a blond carcajou.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HEALEY AND I came into that country right after the war. We’d flown together in the China-Burma-India theater with the Air Transport Command and the only alternative when the war ended was flying for the airlines. Neither of us could have stuck it. Too much like driving a cab. So we pooled our savings—mainly Healey’s—and bought a war-surp
lus C-47 Dakota and headed up into Alaska to take a crack at the bush pilot business. We’d settled down pretty steady in Gurry Bay, a cannery town on the Gulf of Alaska where the Dead Mountie Range peels off inland from the Chugach. Business was good in those years right after the war and we carried everything from whores to gold dredges all over the place. The government built a slew of airfields and weather stations during the war and you could land almost anywhere. It was good flying, you had to stay on your toes, though, with that weather changing the way it did, but the country was tough and gorgeous and we got in a lot of hunting and fishing. The women weren’t much and most of the locals were tough old bones with livers the size of their boots, but we liked it up there and we thought we knew what we were doing.

  We took off that afternoon when the fog lifted but got right back into it at a hundred feet. Then it broke clear and we could see the country all around. Ice and black rock and cold steel water, big sprawling stretches of black-needled spruce, one little salmon seiner pounding north like a chip of pine up through the channel toward Cordova. Mighty empty. We’d flown the Hump for three years and that was empty country too.

  Healey was a big lop-eared, easygoing guy who kidded around a lot and played a canny game of poker. Women had told him he looked like Clark Gable and he grew a little blond cookie-duster to enhance the likeness. He loved India, the bright hot stench of it, the fiery food, the swarthy squirming monkey-bodied girls with rhinestones in their noses, and the big slow dusty cattle wandering vacant-eyed through the crowded bazaars, and off in the distance the faint wink of ice high in the Himalayas.

  On the other side of the mountains was China. K’un-ming was cold, crowded and poorer even than India. In the morning in front of the hotel where the pilots stayed you would see beggars frozen in the gutter. I kicked one once and he crackled. Sometimes you would see camel caravans in from central Asia, tall knock-kneed mangy animals hung with tiny brass bells and ridden by wiry little men carrying blackpowder rifles. If you knew the right people, you could make a lot of money in K’un-ming. Healey knew them. He sold them nylons, cigarettes, British booze and sometimes opium and by the time the war ended he had fifty grand in his kick. Before the war, he’d knocked around the Middle West selling insurance and tending bar. Now he was rich and he knew how to fly.