Alaska (152 page)

'I can't?'

'Against the law. No sport killing of walruses.'

This so startled Jeb that he ran over to where Poley Markham was dancing a kind of jig with an elderly Eskimo woman and her husband, the three of them waddling about like ducks on land. 'They tell me I can't take the head back to Anchorage.'

'That's the law,' Markham said, leaving his dance.

'Then why did we fly up here? Just so we could say we'd shot a walrus?”

'We don't have to obey the law.'

'I don't want to get into trouble. A lawyer at the beginning of his career.'

'That's when you have to learn how to handle the stupid laws that legislatures keep passing,' Poley said, and when the 929

walrus head mysteriously appeared at Jeb's flat in Anchorage, the young lawyer did not make inquiries as to how it had got there, but hung it in a place of honor.

As Jeb worked with the various village corporations throughout Alaska he observed two facts: wherever financial shenanigans were in progress he discerned the subtle orchestrations of Poley Markham, the Virginia-PhoenixLos Angeles wizard. Suits against one corporation, legal processes in behalf of another, proxy challenges to protect this large corporation, proxy defenses to subvert the hopes of that small corporationin all such legal battles Poley was involved, until it appeared that the man had no moral base whatever. His sole function, it seemed to Jeb, was to generate disputes between the Native corporations, then litigate them, and always at such phenomenal fees that it was rumored he was making about a million dollars a year, even though he was in Alaska only three or four months during that time. He was living proof of the prediction that the Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 'was going to be a bonanza for the legal profession,' especially if, like Poley Markham, the lawyer seemed to have no moral compunctions.

But at the same time, whenever Jeb accepted Poley's help in garnering the next of this Big Eight, he found the man to represent the soul of generosity and sportsmanship.

'Why do you waste your valuable time helping me shoot a mountain goat?' Jeb asked one day as they were climbing the high mountains in back of Matanuska Valley.

'I love the high places,' Poley replied. 'The chase. I got as much fun watching you bag a Dall sheep as I did when I got mine.' He would permit no shortcuts in hunting; when you were out with Poley you didn't hire a helicopter, fly into some high point, duck out, and gun down a goat. Not at all. You followed Poley up steep inclines, puffing while he seemed to be tireless, and you staked out the spot where you thought the elusive creatures might pass. You waited, kept downwind of where the goats might be hiding, and you froze, and when you stumbled back without having even seen a goat, you appreciated the great respect Poley had for animals and the thrill of chasing them.

'Of the entire Big Eight,' he said one night after they had chased goats unproductively, 'I think the greatest excitement came with bagging my mountain goat.'

'Even more than the polar bear?' Jeb asked, for although under Poley's guidance he had bagged a big Kodiak, he had not yet managed a polar bear.

'I think so,' Poley said. 'To get your polar bear you just have to persist. Go out there on the ice floes. And in time you 930

get him. But with a mountain goat you have to climb as high as he does. You have to be as surefooted. And you have to be one degree smarter. That's a tough assignment.'

He considered this for some time, then added: 'I think maybe it's because he's such a handsome animal. Your heart skips a beat when you see a goat in your sights. So beautiful, so small, so high in the mountains.' He slapped his leg, pitched more logs in the fire, and said: 'Apply the attention test. I watched you when you were in my lodge in Phoenix. All the heads of my Big Eight on the walls. And what did your eyes come back to most often? That splendid white mountain goat. As if it represented the real Alaska.'

In three extended expeditions to various mountains in Alaska, Jeb and Poley failed to bring a mountain goat within range, so Keeler's campaign for the Big Eight remained stalled at six: caribou, muskox, Kodiak bear, walrus, Dall sheep and moose, in that order, had been taken, but not the polar bear or the evasive mountain goat. 'We'll get them,' Poley vowed, and his insistence upon helping kept him constantly close to young Jeb. This, in turn, led him to throw more legal business Jeb's way. For example, when the corporation centering on Kodiak Island staggered into horrendous legal battles over who had a right to sit on the board of directors, Poley was too busy with the oil companies developing the huge reserves at Prudhoe Bay to give the various proxy fights his full attention, so he passed the lucrative Kodiak case on to Jeb, who spent the better part of a year and nearly four hundred thousand dollars'

worth of his time unraveling a problem which should never have arisen. At the end of his third

year

advising the Native corporations in their internecine brawBng, he realized that before the age of thirty he was going to be a millionaire.

His real money came when Poley got him involved in the intricate legal battles centering on the great oil field at Prudhoe Bay, for then he flew to that remote location on the northern sea, walked out upon the floes that kept it ice-locked ten months in the year, and watched as men from Oklahoma and Texas kept the drills plunging downward twenty-four hours a day. His first visit to Prudhoe came in January, when there was no daylight and his body gave no advice on when to sleep; it was an eerie experience highlighted by his visit with the team from California which provided the living quarters for the men and the food: 'We've learned that to keep workmen from places like Texas up here, we have to provide three luxuries. Good pay, say about two thousand dollars a week. Movies twenty-four hours a day so that they 931

can entertain themselves no matter when they get off work. And the dessert table.'

'What's that?' Jeb asked, and the concessionaire from California showed him: 'We keep the cafeteria open twenty-four hours, with breakfast constantly and a full dinner served whenever you want. But what makes life tolerable is the dessert table,' and he led Jeb to a large area at the end of the chow line. There, on something that resembled in size a big pool table, rested no fewer than sixteen of the most luscious desserts Jeb had ever seen: pies, pecan tartlets, cakes, blancmanges, fruit salads, 'and over here what they like best of all.' Beside the pool table, in a nest of ice, stood six fifty-quart steel containers, each filled with a different kind of ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, butter pecan, cherry with whole cherries and a marvelous concoction called tutti-frutti. And to make the area truly seductive, on two huge plates beside the ice-cream cans rested piles of chocolate-chip or oatmeal cookies.

'Watch!' the concessionaire from California said with a degree of pride. ”That big fellow over there, he's already eaten enough dinner for three ordinary men, but now he'll hit the dessert table,' and when the Texas oilman did, he took a wedge of pie, a hunk of cake, a huge bowl of tutti-frutti and six chocolate-chip cookies.

'If you keep their bellies satisfied,' the California man explained, 'they're satisfied.

It's the cookies that turned the trick for us. The ice cream they expected. The cookies they appreciated as thoughtful extras.' With professional judgment he added: 'Men with a sweet tooth always take the chocolate-chips. Those attending to their health choose the oatmeal.'

On his second flight in to handle legal problems at Prudhoe Bay, Jeb was accompanied by Poley Markham, and the two lawyers had one of the most terrifying adventures in their lives. It was March, and daylight had returned to the arctic, but as was so often the case with aviation, this proved a hindrance rather than a help, for when the pilot learned from his radio range that he had to be approaching Prudhoe, he began his descent, but the light available was a silvery gray and the wind kicked up enough blowing snow to make the entire visible world one exquisite pastel, with no horizon, no sky, no snow-covered landing field. There was no time, no season, no hour of the day, no discernible anything, just this mysterious, lovely, potentially fatal whiteout.

Unable to detect in what direction up, down or sideways the land lay, the pilot was either unable or unwilling to deduce from his flight instruments where he was or in what

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attitude, so, cutting power drastically, he tried to edge himself down, and he was flying close to the ground when Poley Markham screamed 'Bulldozer!' and at the last moment the pilot pulled up in a grinding surge of power, just missing an enormous black dozer parked a hundred yards from the impoverished airfield.

Sick with fear, pilot and passengers circled in a grayness that had no definition, but gradually the omnipresent and inescapable force of gravity began to assert itself, and with the aid of his instruments, the pilot established his position relative to the snow-covered ground that lay somewhere below. Flying far out over the frozen ocean, he zeroed himself on the radio range and told Markham and Keeler: 'Keep watch.

The signals are strong and good, thank God,' and gingerly the plane felt its way through the deadly grayness, and Jeb thought: I saw a picture like this in a storybook, years ago. The hero was approaching a castle, visor down on his helmet, seeing nothing.

And there was a fog, a beautiful gray fog.

Jesus! The snowy field was fifty feet higher in the air than the pilot had anticipated.

The plane struck while still in a flying attitude, bounced high in the air, came down again thirty feet before it was supposed to, bounced again, then rolled to a trembling stop. When the ground crew came out in a jeep riding on immense snow tires, the driver yelled up to the pilot: 'Land came up at you, eh?' and the pilot said: 'It sure did,' and the man said encouragingly: 'No pain, no strain.'

At lunch that day Jeb had a huge plate of tutti-frutti and four big oatmeal cookies.

JEB EARNED HUGE SUMS FROM HIS LEGAL WORK AT

Prudhoe, and later, whenever he encountered Poley Markham on the latter's infrequent visits to Alaska, he would say: 'We still haven't nailed the mountain goat,' and Poley would remind him: 'It took me three years to get mine. Don't rush it,' and Jeb discovered that he and Poley were quite different in their attitudes. 'You like the chase, don't you?' Jeb said. 'But I want to round out my Big Eight and get it done with.'

Poley said: 'You never get it done with. Last month I took a young fellow hunting on Baranof Island, that's where Sitka is, trying to snag a goat, and it was as much fun as when I first went out on my own.'

'Poley,' Jeb said one day, 'I heard some men . . . that is, some local men from Barrow, -white men, Eskimos, talking about your work over there. What's, up?'

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For the first time in their pleasant and rewarding acquaintanceship Poley became not just evasive, which he always was when he didn't want to answer a direct question, but almost shifty and edgy, as if he were ashamed of what he had been doing: 'Oh, they have some big ideas over there. They need counsel.” He would say no more, but in the months that followed, Jeb saw less and less of his mentor, and new men from the Lower Forty-eight began appearing in Anchorage and occasionally at Prudhoe Bay.

They were a difficult lot to identify or fit into the Alaskan scene. If you saw in the airport at Fairbanks a trio of men who looked like oil-field men from Tulsa in Oklahoma or Odessa in Texas, you could bet that they were either headed for Prudhoe Bay or planning to open a short-order restaurant in Fairbanks for oil-field workers on vacation. But Poley Markham's visitors were a wildly mixed lot: a road builder from Massachusetts, a building contractor from Southern California, an electrical plant manager from St. Louis, and all of them apparently headed north of the Arctic Circle.

Then Markham disappeared for about half a year, and rumors filtered back that he was in Boston arranging bond issues of enormous magnitude: 'I got a letter from a friend associated with a small bank in Boston. He said Markham, and he had the full name, was finagling for a bond issue of three hundred million. My man didn't know what for.'

And that was the second discovery Jeb Keeler made regarding his friend: Poley was engaged in some very fancy footwork in relation to certain officials in Barrow, and the sums involved were staggering. At first Jeb believed that somehow Poley and his cronies had discovered a new oil field, but his contacts at Prudhoe Bay said: 'Impossible.

We'd know about it within six hours.'

'What is he doing?'

'Who knows?' But then the oilman leveled: 'You know, Keeler, this oil field at Prudhoe pumps huge funds into the North Slope. Taxes, salaries. There's a lot of money kicking around up here, and Markham has always been the kind of man who's attracted to money.'

'So am I,”Jeb said defensively. 'So are you, or neither of us would be up here in this godforsaken place.'

'Yes,' the oil-field manager said reflectively, 'but you and I seem to work within defined boundaries. Markham doesn't.'

For almost a year Jeb had no opportunity to question Poley, for the latter spent all that time in Los Angeles and New York arranging financing for the huge operations taking place north of the Arctic Circle, but one day while Jeb 934

was unraveling a legal bind at Prudhoe, he received an urgent letter from Markham: 'Meet me in Anchorage Friday. I think we may have your mountain goat.' Eagerly Jeb flew south on an ARCO plane, to find Poley waiting in a suite at the new Sheraton Hotel: 'Man phoned me that a large herd of goats has been seen hi the Wrangell Mountains.

Let's go.' They motored to Matanuska and then in to Palmer, where they both purchased nonresident hunter's licenses at sixty dollars each, with Jeb acquiring for an extra two hundred and fifty the metal tag which he would have to attach to the body of any goat he killed. Then, in a small plane which Markham had used in bringing down his own goat some years before, they flew in to the low hills at the base of the great sixteen-thousand-foot Wrangell range. The pilot, always looking to make a few extra dollars, suggested that he could land the two men well up into the mountains where the goats were likely to be, but Poley would have none of that: 'Put us where the law says we're supposed to be,' and when they were deposited with their tent and rifles, he led the way up toward the head of the valley where the goats had been reported.