The Great Alone (97 page)

“Yeah, they do.” Erik piped in his agreement.

“He’s probably here spying on us so he can go back to his tribe an’ tell his chief how many of us there are so they’ll have enough braves to kill us all when they attack.” Rudy smiled at his brother’s frightened look.

“I don’t wanta be killed.” There was a slight pout to his lower lip.

“Don’t listen to Rudy. He’s just being a smart aleck.” She noticed the boy glance in their direction, and decided to put an end to Rudy’s scare tactics once and for all before he gave Erik nightmares. She took Erik by the hand. “Come on. I’ll prove it to you.” When Erik realized she was taking him over to the “Indian,” he tried to twist free but not too wildly for fear of attracting attention. “Excuse me,” she said to the older boy, indifferent to her brother’s struggles. “But my brothers think you’re an Indian.” For a moment, his stony stare unnerved her a little, then he smiled. It was a nice smile.

“My grandmother’s great-grandfather was five-eighths Indian, but I don’t know if that counts. She says I look like him, though.”

“See. I told you,” Rudy declared triumphantly.

Lisa wasn’t sure whether the answer meant he was part Indian or not. It sounded like it. “Do you live here?”

“Yeah. My dad’s a bush pilot.”

“What’s that?”

“He flies planes, hauling people and supplies to remote villages, wherever they want to go.”

“Oh. That kind of pilot.” There weren’t many planes in northern Minnesota, but she’d seen pictures and newsreels of them.

“Can you fly a plane?” Rudy wanted to know.

“Yeah. My dad taught me.”

“Wow! That’s super!” Rudy was roundly impressed. “How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Wow, I’m going to learn to fly when I’m fourteen, too. Maybe even sooner,” he declared.

“And just where do you think you’re going to get a plane to fly?” But Lisa thought better of getting into an argument with her brother, and quickly changed the subject. “I’m sorry. My name’s Lisa Blomquist and these are my brothers, Rudy and Erik. We just arrived from Minnesota.”

“I guessed that. I’m Wylie Cole.” But it was more than good manners that prompted Wylie to tell her his name. Usually he didn’t like girls; the ones he knew were always giggling and acting silly. But this Lisa seemed different. He had to admit she was kinda cute with those big blue eyes and hair the color of wild honey, plaited into long braids that hung well below her shoulders.

“Yeah, we’re from Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes,” Erik inserted importantly.

“We don’t have ten thousand lakes in Alaska,” Wylie replied. “It’s more like a couple million. And some of the best hunting and fishing you’ll ever find anywhere. There’s moose and salmon—and bighorn sheep in the mountains.”

“Are there bears here?” Erik remembered the stories Rudy had told him.

“Yeah, will we see any of those big white polar bears?”

“No, they don’t come this far south. Around here, it’s mostly grizzlies. I shot my first one last spring.” Wylie saw the way her eyes widened and knew he’d impressed her. “I go hunting and fishing a lot. This next winter, my dad says I can run a trap line. I figure I’ll get enough money from the furs to buy me a new rifle.”

“I got a rifle,” Rudy said, but Lisa noticed he didn’t brag about how many squirrels and rabbits he’d shot with it. They hardly compared to a bear.

“Lisa. Rudy. Come here this minute.” At the impatient summons, Lisa turned guiltily. As Wylie followed the direction of her glance, he noticed the woman walking stiffly toward them. A cloche hat hid all but the curly ends of her blond hair and framed her stern expression.

Lisa turned back to him. “It’s my mother,” she explained hastily. “We have to go now. Good-bye.” But she glanced over her shoulder at him one last time as she started shepherding her brothers toward the woman. “It was nice meeting you.”

“Same here. Maybe we’ll see each other again,” he offered hopefully and received a quick, wistful smile in response.

When Lisa and her brothers rejoined their mother, Wylie overheard the tongue-lashing she gave them. “How could you be so rude?” she scolded. “Now you will go back and you will sit in your chairs until I say you may move.”

“Mama—” Rudy started to protest.

“You will do as I say or I will have your father take you outside and lay a switch to you.” The threat ended any further argument.

Wylie sighed in disappointment. He hadn’t wanted to come to this dinner for the colonists in the first place. He never felt comfortable among a lot of people, never knew what to talk about. But it had been easy to talk to Lisa Blomquist. He wished her mother hadn’t made her go back to their table. It would have been nice if he could have talked to her a little longer.

Alaska probably seemed strange to her. He hoped he hadn’t frightened her when he referred to the grizzlies in the area. But somehow she didn’t strike him as being the type who was a scaredy-cat. In a way, she reminded him of his mother and Grandma Glory. Which was kinda silly, because she was just a girl.

He wondered whether she’d like it here. A lot of newcomers to Alaska didn’t; they felt too isolated from the rest of the world and endlessly complained about the cold and the mosquitoes. He wished he’d had the time to tell her all the good things about Alaska and convince her that it really was a great place to live.

In hopes that he might have the chance to talk to her again, Wylie moved to the other side of the room, where he could keep an eye on her table. A couple of times during the remainder of the evening, the milling crowd parted long enough for her to notice him standing by the wall. Each time she smiled at him a little hesitantly, and Wylie smiled back. He didn’t want her to feel all alone without a single friend in Alaska. But she never ventured from her mother’s side and he didn’t get another chance to talk to her.

Later, as he followed his family out of the community hall, Wylie reached up and unbuttoned his collar. His mother observed his action with a smile. “I wondered how long it would take you to do that. I’m surprised you didn’t pull the button off.”

“I would have, but I figured you’d make me sew it back on. Then I’d have to wash the shirt ’cause I got blood on it from sticking my finger with the needle so many times. And I’m not very good at that woman stuff.” He shrugged.

“I realized long ago that you were never going to be any help to me around the house, Wylie. I sometimes think if you had the choice you would live outdoors. Most women get married so they won’t have to live alone. But here I am with your father flying off for days to parts unknown and you traipsing off to hunt or fish in some forgotten neck of the woods.”

Ace put his arm around her shoulders. “Just think how fast you’d get tired of us if we were around all the time.”

“The shock would probably kill her.” Glory paused beside the rear passenger door of the closed sedan and waited for them to catch up with her. “That was quite a dinner. What did you think of these cheechakos, Trudy?”

“I have the feeling that, regardless of what they might have been told to the contrary, they expected to find a land covered with ice and snow. That was my image of it when I was a newcomer, a cheechako. I’m certain they never expected it to be so green or the weather so mild and warm.”

“They probably didn’t.” Glory opened the rear door and slid onto the seat. Trudy climbed into the back seat, too, letting Ace and Wylie sit in front. “I must say they didn’t fit my image of farmers. Some of them looked poor enough to qualify for this program, but one of the men I talked to said he’d worked in a sawmill most of his life and farmed a few acres on the side. He said he raised enough to feed his family and keep a cow and some pigs. I wouldn’t think that makes him a farmer, any more than playing poker makes a person a gambler. And he thought the stumps on his farm were a problem. Wait until he sees the stands of timber in Matanuska Valley. Turning that land into farms isn’t going to be as easy as he thinks.”

“Others have done it,” Ace reminded her as he started the car’s engine. “Some families have homesteaded land in the valley. You ate some of their food for dinner.”

“But look at the number of people who gave up after a couple years,” Glory replied. “You’ve flown over that valley many times, Ace. You know how many homesteads have been abandoned as well as I do.”

Wylie remembered seeing them, too, and hoped that Lisa’s parents didn’t become discouraged and quit. He hated to think that he might never see her again. His father’s response offered him some reassurance.

“But the government is behind this project. There’s already four hundred transients from the CCC camps along the Pacific Coast there at Palmer, setting up the main camp and tents for the colonists to live in until houses can be built. The transients are going to help them clear the land, build the houses and barns, make the roads, and build the bridges. These colonists aren’t going to be doing the work all by themselves the way the homesteaders before them had to.” Ace rolled up his window to keep the dust from blowing inside the car as they picked up speed on the open street.

“Some of the local people aren’t too happy about the transients that have been brought in,” Trudy said. “A lot of people here depend on the summer jobs they get on the railroad or the road commission crews. They’re concerned this cheap labor from outside will take their jobs.”

“It seems to me if the people of Alaska are going to be concerned about something it ought to be Japan,” Ace stated grimly. “I flew a couple of cannery boys to Nushgak on Bristol Bay this past week. While I was there, I talked to one of the hands on a fishing boat. He said they’d spotted a Japanese ship in the Aleutians. He swore they were taking soundings, and he said it wasn’t the first Japanese they’d seen in Aleutian waters.”

“I think everyone in Alaska has been worried about Japan since it marched its armies into Manchuria four years ago,” Glory replied.

“Why shouldn’t we be? The western Aleutian Islands are only six hundred and fifty miles away from the Japanese military bases at Paramushiro. When that Naval Disarmament Treaty expires next year, the U.S. better start building some bases in those islands. You mark my words, we’ll be going to war with Japan. I just hope before that happens the Congress starts listening to people like General Mitchell or we’ll be utterly defenseless in an attack. Right now, all we have is four hundred soldiers sitting in the Chilkoot Barracks. There’s no airstrip, no road to it. You can get to them only by tugboat.”

Glory remembered the warning General Billy Mitchell had given when he’d spoken to the House Military Affairs Committee this past February. He had referred to Alaska as “the key point of the whole Pacific.” “He who holds Alaska holds the world,” he’d told them. “Alaska is the most strategic place in the world. It is the jumping-off place to smash Japan. If we wait to fight her in the Philippines, it will take us five years to defeat Japan.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Wylie spoke up. “If the Japanese attack Alaska, I’ll take you and Grandma Cole to a safe place in the mountains and teach you how to cook over a campfire.”

It was a comment made half in jest, yet Glory suspected that such a prospect was the sort that appealed to a fourteen-year-old’s imagination. She wouldn’t be surprised if Wylie could live off the land. More than once Ace had commented after returning from a hunting or fishing trip with Wylie that his son seemed more at home in the woods and the mountains than he did in his own house.

For his age, Wylie was extremely resourceful, and his mind was like a sponge when it came to picking up native survival lore, from making his own snowshoes and snare traps to building a snow cave or stalking game. He’d had Matty teach him how to make his own mukluks and parkas, and Billy Ray had shown him how to utilize bones to make weapons.

Just this past winter, Wylie had gone with Ace on a flight, but a bad storm forced them to land on a frozen lake. Strong winds had threatened to flip the aircraft on its back and Ace hadn’t been able to find any way to tie it down. At that point, Wylie had chopped a hole in the ice, stuck the tie-down rope in it, then urinated in the hole. In that sub-zero cold, it had frozen within minutes, securely anchoring the plane.

Ace was disappointed, although he hid it well, that Wylie didn’t share his love of flying. To Wylie, flying was merely a means to get to some remote region.

Wylie showed all the signs of becoming a loner. In that, he reminded Glory of Deacon. Wylie, too, wasn’t the kind to indulge in idle conversation. Trudy said that sometimes hours went by without him uttering a word. And he had Deacon’s poker face, seldom letting his feelings show.

Even though he wasn’t an unruly boy, he had discipline problems in school. If a teacher told him to do something that didn’t make sense to him, he wouldn’t do it. His resistance grew in proportion to the pressure applied. Glory sometimes wondered if Wylie had inherited that trait from her—and his love of hunting from the blood of the Indians and the Russian promyshleniki. Maybe Wylie was the sum total of all his ancestors mixed together.

“Say, Wylie, who was that pretty girl I saw you talking to tonight?” Ace teased. “Don’t tell me you’ve got yourself a girlfriend?”

“Dad,” Wylie protested, reddening slightly.

“Would you look at that, Trudy. Your son’s blushing.”

“I am not.” But his face felt hot, and growing hotter. He scrunched a little lower in the front seat, hoping his mother and grandmother wouldn’t notice his embarrassment. “She was just some girl from one of those colonist families. She was just asking me a bunch of questions about Indians and polar bears.”