Though Not Dead (54 page)

Kate nodded. She remembered the collection of black-and-white photos in Old Sam’s cabin, now residing in a box in her garage.

“Kate, come on,” Pete said. “Did you find it?”

“Did I find the icon, you mean?” Kate shook her head. “Not yet, but I will today.”

“What’s an icon?” Sabine said again.

Pete kicked her with his bound feet, not gently. “Shut up.”

Kate pretended not to notice. She wondered a lot, though.

After breakfast, she suited up.

“How do you expect to get all of us back to town?” Pete said.

“Shut up,” Ben said. In spite of his alleged limitations as a journalist, he had written the story about Kate’s bringing the Johanson brothers to justice for the front page of the
Ahtna Adit.
He thought he knew how she intended to get them back to town.

“She’s going to have to turn us loose,” Sabine said.

“Shut up,” Ben said. “Really.”

Kate opened the door. Mutt got to her feet. “Stay,” Kate said. “Guard.”

Nobody looked happy about that, especially Mutt, whose narrowed yellow eyes were the last thing Kate saw before the door closed.

The round plastic thermometer attached to the zipper tab of her parka read twenty-two degrees. She cast an anxious glance up at the sky, which was going a pale powder blue. The air on her cheek still felt dry. Reassured, she put on her snowshoes, shouldered the coil of rope and the crowbar, and followed her own trail back up the canyon behind the cabin.

The farther back it went, the higher and narrower it got, with unexpected twists behind outcroppings of bare, jagged rocks that felt like gauntlets thrown down by the Quilaks themselves. Birdsong and the rustling of hare and grouse through the undergrowth ended when the trail ascended above the tree line, and she was surrounded by walls of rock splotched with kinnikinnick. She felt alone, but not lonely.

A movement caught the corner of her eye and she looked around quickly to see a Dall sheep ewe bound over the top of the northern ridge, her white fleece thick as steel wool and her mammoth buttocks jiggling with all the fat she’d stored through the summer.

No, not lonely, and not that alone, either.

The map was not as specific about the location of the last mine as it had been about the first eight. Kate wondered if this was by accident or design. She decided it was probably design. “Just Old Sam’s little joke,” she said out loud, trying not to sound too bitter. Or maybe Mac McCullough’s—no way to know now. The snow was deeper here, and it was early season snow, newly fallen, not as well packed down as it would be a month or even a week later. Her snowshoes sank down a foot with each step. It made for very slow going. “Should have started at the top and worked my way back,” she said out loud.

Kate stood still and took several deep, steadying breaths, and the uncomfortable thumping of her heart eased. She was beginning to wish she had an altimeter along with the thermometer on her zipper tab. The trail had turned steep, but it was still passable. How high up could she be? She was so hemmed in by the encroaching cliffs that she had no idea.

The trail back would be a lot easier. She cast another glance at the sky, still a deceptively innocent blue, the sun not yet high enough in the sky to shine down into the canyon. So long as the snow held off.

She plodded around yet another mini-saddle and stopped, astonished.

It was a level area almost like a mini-plateau. On the north was a sheared slab of solid granite whose weathered surface looked like it hadn’t lost a single flake of quartz since before the first coming. On the south … she walked a few steps and peered over an edge that fell into an abyss so deep it would have given Wile E. Coyote pause. “Man,” she said, and took a prudent step back. “Where the hell am I?” Now she needed a GPS.

The peaks and glaciers of the southern half of the Quilak Mountains stretched out in front of her, a jumbled mass of rock and ice capped with a discreet line of termination dust that had now reached below the tree line. Somewhere out there, much farther than she could see, the mountains slowly decreased in height to melt reluctantly into rounded foothills. Those foothills subsided into the coastal plain formed by glacial silt and tidal action, occasionally broken here by a glacial erratic and there by a slip-faulted butte.

She turned and looked north, and laughed, more in disbelief than because she found the view funny. Around the corner of the cliff she could just make out the outline of Angqaq, Big Bump, the highest mountain of the Quilaks, slightly west and about twenty-five miles north of where she stood. If she wasn’t quite at Big Bump’s elevation, she was high enough to where the mountain did not overawe her with its usual arrogant,
noli me tangere
hauteur. “Besides, I’ve summitted you, and don’t you forget it,” she said.

She wondered if perhaps she was suffering just a little from high-altitude euphoria.

She continued east until the trail began, unbelievably, to descend. She didn’t want to hike back up it, so she returned to the top to try to trace its path with her eyes as far down as she could.

“You’re looking into Canada,” she said out loud. “You know that, don’t you.”

It was as if this were some kind of unknown pass through the Quilaks, which simply wasn’t possible. A passable trail would have been known to the people who lived in the area, known to her tribe. It would have been a part of song and story. It would have been a route for trade goods, perhaps even for war. One of the reasons Niniltna had been built where it was today was because the site had its back to a literally, impenetrable wall of rock. The old folks had known what they were doing. There was the river for water, salmon, and transportation, and the mountains for defense.

And if it had been known, if it had been used, it would inevitably have been learned by the earliest white explorers, because there just wasn’t anywhere those long-nosed roundeyes didn’t go. Some U.S. Navy lieutenant with a pack train of mules would have found it and plotted it on a map. Hell, FDR would have sent a CCC team up here to improve it and mark it. By now, it would have been on Dan O’Brian’s map, and extreme hikers would have it on their bucket list of trails.

She consulted Old Sam’s map, which gave her no clue. The trail simply ended at the ninth cave. “God damn you, old man,” she said, exasperated.

Had he even known this trail, if that was what it was?

She dismissed that thought immediately. Old Sam would have known. There wasn’t one square foot of the Park he didn’t know.

Was this the real reason his mother had told him to homestead here? Had she, a chief’s daughter, known of this pass? Had she foreseen that it might be valuable one day?

Kate looked at the precipitous terrain that rose and fell on all sides, bisected only by this slender thread of a route that at its widest could not have accommodated Kate’s pickup. Still, it was wide enough for a man with a pack. Or a mule. Maybe Old Sam was smuggling scotch into Alaska from Canada during prohibition. Although he’d only have been about twelve when the Noble Experiment had been repealed, Kate still wouldn’t have put it past him.

She took a last look around before beginning her descent back toward the hot springs. There was no cave here. Maybe there was no ninth cave. Maybe it was only Old Sam’s way of showing her the pass, of carrying the knowledge forward in the family. “Crazy old bastard.”

She followed the trail she had broken down its switchbackian route, dodging around rocky outcroppings. She was almost to the tree line, about where she had seen the ewe, when a tumble of rock caught her eye. Even beneath its layer of snow it looked just a little too artful, a little too much like the concealing slabs in front of the first eight mine entrances.

It was above a ledge about twelve feet up the north face of the canyon, in a place where the wall below was especially smooth and free of outcroppings for hands and feet. She used her snowshoes to pack down the snow below it, and then sat down and pulled out an extra biscuit, held together with a thick layer of honey butter, and the small thermos of coffee. She forced herself to eat and drink slowly, leaning back against the rock wall.

She felt a lot better when she got back to her feet, and gave the wall beneath the tumble of rock a closer examination. She wasn’t a technical climber by any means, but she had the line and a handful of eyebolts she’d found in her garage, and she could tie a slipknot with the best of them. And if she fell it wasn’t that far, and there was enough snow to cushion a fall.

Best not to fall, though.

She used the flat end of the crowbar to hammer in the eyebolts one above the other, using each as a staging area to hammer in the next, and so made her way up the surface of the wall to the ledge. She got a knee up over it, saw that it was narrow but not too narrow, and used her arms to pull herself up the rest of the way.

By then she was so annoyed with Old Sam that she wasn’t careful how she used the crowbar, jamming in the flat end and levering the slabs of rock away from what, yes, proved to be another entrance, letting them tumble over the side, where they raised smoke signals of snow when they hit.

This adit was smaller than the others, a short, narrow arch, the marks of the cold chisel and the pickaxe easily identifiable, not yet sanded to smoothness by decades of wind and rain and ice. The hood of her parka brushed the top of the arch. Old Sam would have had to stoop.

She pulled out her flashlight.

It wasn’t much bigger inside than out. She could stand in the middle of the tunnel and flatten both hands on both sides. About a dozen steps in, though, it opened up into a larger space. Kate played the flashlight around and saw that it was a natural cave, from the lines of the strata probably formed when some softer layer of rock had fractured and fallen between two harder layers. She heard the drip of water, felt the moisture in the air on her cheek. Probably find a spring if she looked for it. She couldn’t believe it wasn’t frozen solid. She was.

There was nothing more corrosive than water. If Old Sam had left the icon in this cave for her to find, he had better by god have left it in something waterproof.

She spent half an hour covering every square inch of that damn cave, and came up empty.

She didn’t believe it.

She couldn’t believe it.

She wouldn’t believe it.

She went over the cave again, more slowly this time, her face inches from the rock face, quartering the dome of the ceiling with the flashlight, too.

There was nothing there, not one damn thing, other than a few piles of rock left over from when the cave collapsed.

“I will dance on your grave, you old son of a bitch,” Kate said, and she would have, too, if the beam from the flashlight hadn’t come to rest on one of the piles of talus, hadn’t lingered on one rock in particular. It was the same color as the others, an indeterminate gray, at least in this light, but it was larger, about the size of a small cantaloupe, and it had smoother edges than the rocks surrounding it. She crossed the cave floor, keeping the light on it, and bent to pick it up.

It was unexpectedly heavy.

She put the end of the flashlight in her mouth and used both hands. She needed to. It must have weighed twenty pounds.

She stood there, speechless, knowing instantly what it had to be. Mac McCullough’s story, laid out in exquisite detail in even more exquisite prose on those frail, onionskin pages. The nuggets on Pete Wheeler’s desk.
“What’s an icon?”

“Son of a bitch,” she said. “Wheeler, you’re nothing but another fucking gold bug.”

She was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear the scrabbling at the entrance of the cave until it was too late. She turned, and the beam from her flashlight caught Bruce Abbott’s face, framed by the thrown-back hood of his parka. “Give it to me,” he said. He was holding a pistol, and it was pointed right at her.

“I really have had it with all the guns people have been pointing at me lately,” she said.

He waved the pistol at her. “Give it to me,” he said again.

She was holding the rock at her side. He couldn’t see it clearly. He couldn’t see exactly what she held in her hands. She stuck her foot behind her and let the rock roll down her leg and turned as soon as it hit the ground, scuffing her feet in hopes of muffling the very loud thud it gave when it hit the ground. “Give what to you, Bruce?” she said, holding out empty hands.

“The icon,” he said. “You found the map. It has to be here.”

“I’m impressed,” she said. “I thought you were a city guy. And yet you made it all the way out here, twice. Not bad.”

“Give me the icon,” he said.

“How did you know about the map?”

“I didn’t,” he said.

“Ah,” Kate said. “Then it was Erland.”

She couldn’t see his face against the light coming from the cave entrance, but there was a distinct tremor in his voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I wonder how he knew about it,” Kate said. “His father, perhaps?”

He waved the pistol at her again. “Get back. You dropped something. I want to see what it is.”

“Okay.” She moved to the other side of the cave.

He edged around the perimeter of the cave toward the rockfall, pistol held on her at all times.

Amused, she said, “I’m not armed, Bruce.”

He reached the pile of rock and kicked it apart with his boot. The smaller rocks scattered. The rock she had been holding stayed put. He didn’t notice. “Where is it?” he said.

“The icon?” she said. “I don’t know, Bruce. It isn’t here, that’s for damn sure.”

The flat veracity of her answer stumped him. “It has to be here,” he said at last. “Why else would you come back up here?”

“I think Old Sam was playing a little joke on all of us, Bruce,” she said. “He left me a map. Here, look for yourself.” She unzipped her parka and reached inside.

“Stop! Don’t move!” He took a hasty step forward, raising the pistol.

She held up both hands, palms out. “I’m just reaching for the map, Bruce, that’s all. I was telling you the truth. I’m not armed.”

She could hear him breathing fast in the silence of the little cave. “Slowly,” he said, “very, very slowly.”