Whisper to the Blood (16 page)

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
snow-gos." 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 sky, 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 Zl, 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 friend-lies,
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!"