Alaska (176 page)

But Poley also saw a sudden and persistent suction of water from the bay, and he knew instinctively that something ominous and terrible was happening.

'Jeb! Jeb!' he began to scream, but in Jeb's eagerness to get to his goat he had hurried ahead out of earshot. Nevertheless, the older man continued screaming, for now he saw the water sweeping back into the bay, inexorably piling up as if pushed from behind by some malevolent titan.

'Jeb! Come back!'

And now it became obvious that the dark waves, never very high but with tremendous pressure behind them, were not going to stop before they had filled the valley and flooded

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upward to some incredible spot seven or eight hundred feet above ordinary sea level, and when Jeb finally became aware of his peril, the water was so high, and piling up so rapidly, that he was incapable of doing anything to save himself. He saw the churning water snatch the goat and toss it about, submerging it in foam, and then the relentless waves were upon him, throwing him sideways and engulfing him as they climbed the sides of the valley faster than the goats had done. His last sight was not of his final trophy, which was mangled in the deep, but of Poley Markham scrambling desperately upward to gain the really high ground which even the Lapak Island tsunami could not reach.

As he was about to perish, Jeb saw that Poley was probably going to make it, and he cried: 'Go it, Poley. You win!'

FOR NOW, IT SEEMED THAT ALASKA WOULD BE GOING THE

way Poley Markham wanted it, not as Jeb Keeler and Vladimir Afanasi and Kendra Scott in their various ways had visualized it.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JAMES A. MICHENER was born in 1907 and raised by a Quaker woman in Pennsylvania.

During World War II he served with the U.S. Navy and traveled across the Pacific.

His TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

He lives with his wife in Coral Gables, Florida and is a professor at the University of Miami.