Four Quarters of Light (14 page)

I had unearthed much of this material when my love of Jack London's books had made me look for an imaginary prototype for the wolf-dog–man nexus, something that was clearly derivative from the native peoples' belief system. Jack London's stories were fables, and in their own modern way were themselves ‘Distant Time' stories with their own expostulatory critique.

But all this thinking had not cleared my focus but rather brought me to a crossroads. Yes, it had helped clear away the panic and fear that accompany being alone in a desolate place. I was comforted by this belief in the empathy between man and beast and the spirit world; I was intrigued by the notion of transmutation between man and creature. The whole fabric of traditional belief was about honour, respect and shared understanding. It was also about harmony, balance and order, and how things only become calamitous when the relationship between all these things is somehow broken. To the traditional mind, the body of a creature in death should be as revered as at any
human passing. Those sightless eyes still see, lifeless ears still hear!

If the wolves were not savage beasts but rather my brothers, then this ‘living' wilderness was here to receive me. If my sense of dislocation and fear was the problem, not the place I was in, then the wolf pack's ‘aberrant' behaviour was not ‘aberrant' but rather a reaction to some fault or flaw in the system. The wolves had attacked no-one; they need not have ransacked campsites. Indeed, they could have stayed in the wilderness where no human entry was permitted. Wolves have their territory and remain in it for life. A few isolated campers could not force a whole pack to break with long-established instincts. It was whelping season – could that have contributed to their behaviour? I remembered the serious urgency of the ranger's face when he explained the complications of the pack's behaviour. Whatever the cause, it was an irrational act. The wolf pack had come to tell us something, something important, and it was communicating its urgency to us. The wolf's power was not only in its physical presence; it was spirit power of the first order. We need only listen to it to understand. I was new here, even if I felt I had been somehow brought here. I asked the wilderness to forgive me and to be my guide.

It was time to return. There were the remnants of a trail running at right angles to the river. It would take me deeper into the bush, but should, I thought, bring me out somewhere near the road which would lead back to the camp. I felt easier with the land now, not feeling the need to cling to known features such as the river course. The night light was softer, but with that wonderful brightness that comes from nowhere specific but seems to radiate out from the land itself. The clarity of the light and the silence lent a sense of austerity to the world I was walking in. The landscape features on my horizon stood out in high relief. In this light I could scan distances that at other times would have been impossible. The vista across the tundra was giving way to the burgeoning summer. The tussocks of sedge and cotton grass were shedding their russet and ochre hues; the dry yellow of
winter grass against the dark beech green of alder, dwarf birch and willow blended into brown and black. To my imagination the whole colour scheme was like a wolf skin. They were the passing colours of winter.

The reds, oranges, bright greens and early blues of mountain aven, fireweed, moss campion and various species of saxifrage were breaking out. The tundra birds were settling into their ground nests, full of eggs. My approach neither stirred nor fussed them. If I came near they merely eyed me with curious intent. I returned their stare, wondering what communication might be passing between us. It reminded me of the way people look at one another at funerals, half recognizing a face you look at directly in the eye, the solemnity of the moment excusing the intrusion. In that exchange you ask questions, seek recognition and share something that you both know might never be spoken. I passed them by and they acknowledged me as if I were just another lone caribou.

Around me, as I neared the end of my walk, my eyes discovered more remnants of the changing season – pieces of bone and animal fur, fluffy fledgling feathers and the light flight feathers of more mature birds. Everywhere, it seemed, spiders' webs were shining like crystals against the refracted light. It felt as if the whole landscape was opening itself up to me. Maybe it was the silence, maybe it was the acknowledging stare of the birds, maybe it was the glow of the evening, but the bright night seemed filled with beneficence and the final passing of winter.

Without understanding where it came from I began to sense another passing. What if one of the wolf pack had died at this time of change? The corpse of such a creature would embody great spiritual danger and should not be tampered with but left within the omniscient domain of nature. Only then could such a powerful spirit be appeased. Maybe that was it; maybe the pack was preparing their own funeral rites. Perhaps they were ritually cleansing the hunting grounds in proper observance, and those raided campsites were part of this, and also partly a way of communicating this powerful occurrence. I walked on
with silent reverence, not wanting to offend. Maybe I had instinctively stumbled upon what it was that had thrown the whole functioning of this wilderness park into disarray and had so utterly perplexed the rangers.

Perhaps it was the prohibition the wolves had indirectly placed upon us or maybe it was the incessant yapping of the miniature dogs that spurred my desire to move on. Certainly the prospect of a long drive to a destination called Wonder Lake deep in the Denali parkland hastened our decision to up anchor. But the ‘Wonder Lake' experience was anything but wondrous, and only whetted my appetite to experience something less controlled and organized.

The bus trip took us some ninety miles deeper into Denali's parkland. We were advised to bring food to sustain us and enough wet gear to protect us, though there were only two stopping places where we could disembark and make short sorties into the landscape. We decided it was better than nothing. If we were going to have any chance of escaping from our camp compound then this was the only option. We were also assured that it was the best way of viewing the park and its wildlife.

Our bus might have come from the same conveyor belt as the original model T Ford, with its wooden-slat seats, aluminium sliding windows and plasticized, lino-like floor. Overhead storage, which comprised a two-foot-wide section of cord netting,
stretched the length of the bus. The vehicle was green with a brown and dull grey interior. Maybe the landscape we passed through was meant to be the inspiring thing and our means of transport was designed not to detract from that. But, by God, it was bloody uncomfortable for five hours on a mountain road that had seen little more than essential safety maintenance.

Yet, as our ranger driver had promised us, it did afford us a fairly in-depth, if brief, experience of Denali. I guess our score sheet for the day's outing was pretty good. We spotted porcupine, red and grey squirrel, a red fox vixen and her cubs, and beavers repairing last season's dams at the Wonder Lake. The twenty minutes or so that we stayed there did not reveal to me why anyone would have given it the name it possessed. The only sense of wonder or relief I experienced was when I heard it had toilet facilities. After a long journey in a bumping bus with two small children, that's wonder and relief indeed.

The trip back was a monotonous repeat of the outward journey, the tiresomeness of it eased only by two incidents. We did encounter bears. The grizzlys out foraging for berries and roots were making their way from the riverbed to higher ground and had to cross our path en route. It was as if we were not present. They paid little heed to us staring at them wide-eyed. It was our first sighting, but like the lake it was uninspiring. My son must have thought so too. Recalling the bedtime story I had read him many times he said that he didn't think the bear would come home with us as he already had a friend with him. The larger of the bears ambled past our bus and climbed onto a rock some twenty-five feet from us. He collapsed onto his vantage point with slothful grace. I watched him from the rear of the bus while the others concentrated on the smaller bear, which was approaching the bus. He surveyed us with an air of ponderous disdain. Nothing about our presence moved him; our excitement had obviously not radiated itself out of the bus. His demeanour declared nothing more than that he had seen it all before. I could imagine him thinking, ‘Here they are, back again, those strange creatures that stare out of their metal box like the arctic grayling
fish that stare out of the Toklat River. Like the fish and the berries and the caribou, these creatures will come and go again, but only I remain.'

‘He's very grumpy looking!' I heard Audrey say behind me.

‘Yes,' I answered, still lost in my own thoughts.

‘I think he's still not woken from hibernation yet. Look at his big, sad, sleepy face!'

I looked at him again. Maybe Audrey was right. Maybe bears aren't cursed with the need to think or philosophize too much about the meaning of life.

‘Anyway,' I said, ‘let's leave him to whatever his thoughts are. I'm not so sure he would take too kindly to our idle speculation.'

Audrey began settling the boys as the other passengers reclaimed their seats and we set off again. I tried to imagine how our tiny little green safari bus must have looked passing through the bush. The immensity of the empty landmass roaring at us through the bus window was astonishing. There are places out there, I thought, thousands of valleys and creeks and high plateau lakes, that no human being has ever set foot in. Only bears and wolves and dall sheep with their bleached white coats and their magnificent upturned horns have ever been to those empty places. From the map on my knee, I counted eighteen glaciers flowing out of the immense Alaska Range of mountains that I could see through my bus window. I could take in the huge sweep of their fearsome summits. I looked again from the window to the outspread map and back to the window, unable to resolve the stupefying calculations my brain was struggling with.

I thought back again to the big brown bear sitting aloof and uncaring on his stony throne. He was part of it all and didn't have to rationalize it. Whereas I could only look from my map to the window and gape uncomprehendingly, he sat and shrugged indolently at it all. ‘Do you know,' I said to Audrey as our tiny green slug of a bus crawled its way along, ‘I don't think you should be so pass remarkable about the old bear!'

She looked at me with an expression that said, just what is he
going to say next, and is it really worth my while listening to him. Her look was a challenge.

‘The proper attitude to adopt is one of awe, especially if you are a woman.' Audrey's countenance immediately changed. ‘Only men can hunt them and eat them. In fact it is a great offence for men to speak of the bear in front of women. It's even forbidden for a woman to touch the hide of a long-dead animal!'

‘Is that why you didn't want to humour me when I came over to talk to you about the bear?'

Now I looked at her with the same kind of puzzlement that she had earlier fixed on me. I had not thought of the bear as an avuncular old man who had just woken up. As I considered it now I said, ‘Maybe I was just picking up something from the bear's spirit.'

‘You're not the only one who has been reading about bears,' Audrey said, opening up the park brochure about these creatures. ‘It says here that hikers should have great respect for the unpredictability, aggressiveness, tenacity and power of the brown bear. No wonder you're picking up things from that old bear, you and him have a lot in common!'

I looked at her, asking if I should regard that as a compliment.

‘Maybe,' she answered inscrutably.

The bus drove on back to our camp. My thoughts were less and less directed out of the window. Audrey's tongue-in-cheek remarks had thrown another gloss on my thinking and I wasn't too sure where it was taking me. At that point the bus stopped and the driver pointed out some dall sheep. He informed us we were exceptionally lucky as it was most unusual to get so close. I looked and saw we weren't that close. One of the passengers heard me remark how I admired their mantle of horns and lent me his binoculars. I focused on one animal standing proudly with its head and chest facing the wind. For a moment it seemed to be looking directly down the tube of the field glasses. It stared fixedly at me and then abruptly jerked its head back and just as abruptly fixed its stare on me again. I set the glasses down for a moment and thought. Was that sudden tossing of the head a kind of
acknowledgement of my presence, a gesture of welcome? But the figure that the upturned horn made as his head flicked back could also have been the animal equivalent of a two-fingered gesture that simply means ‘up yours, pal!' I had a feeling that the sheep and Audrey were inscrutable companions.