Never Say Die (6 page)

“I still don't get it. Why not?”

“It's their world, not ours. There have to be a few places left where we aren't the top dog.”

“I won't use the rifle unless I really have to. That's okay if you can't kill a bear. I'd do it for you.”

I could hear the wheels grinding. He scratched his beard and said, “If you killed a bear on my account, I would be responsible.”

“The park wouldn't think that if I was the one who killed it.”

“I know they wouldn't, but I would.”

I hesitated. I'm slow to anger but this was a bit much. “You're saying you don't want me to come unless I don't bring my rifle?”

“I wouldn't put it that way. It means the world to me to have you along. I'm sorry if this sounds crazy to you.”

“It's more like, it doesn't make sense.”

“We're coming from very different points of view.”

“That's for sure,” I said, and looked at the floor. I couldn't talk about it anymore. I was so upset, I grabbed my baseball cap, sunglasses, and mosquito repellent, and bolted from the room.

“Nick, I'm sorry, we'll do fine,” Ryan called down the hallway. I was already in the lobby and didn't look back.

I wandered through the streets of Inuvik and down to the river, where a barge was unloading. It took me an hour just to settle down, a couple more hours to wrestle with myself over what to do. I didn't want to call home and ask my mother. This was my decision to make. Was it worth the risk?

My mother wouldn't like the idea of me being out on the land for weeks without my rifle. Jonah would say it was pure foolishness.

Still, this was my one chance to have a brother in my life. My mother and grandfather had thought that might be a good thing, and so did I.

There's never been a mauling on the Firth River, I told myself.

I walked up the hill and back to the door of the hotel. It was midnight, with the sun suspended above the north end of the street. Back in my room, I set my alarm. I was going. Unless I went, how was I going to have any stories to tell Jonah about his hunter's paradise?

Morning came brutally early. Ryan hadn't changed his mind. My rifle stayed behind in an old bank vault the hotel used to store valuables.

O
ut at the airport, we headed for the hangar of Red Wiley Air Charters. Red greeted us with, “Howdy, boys,” and told us to help ourselves to the doughnuts and coffee. The legendary bush pilot was wearing the only outfit I had ever seen him in: beat-up cowboy hat, jumpsuit, and cowboy boots.

Red walked with a limp and spoke with a Texas accent that was still going strong after decades in the North. He was probably the only person in all of northwest Canada that everybody knew on sight. Red had been flying out of Inuvik and into the remote communities for a long, long time. Now and again I would see him at our Northern Store in Aklavik.

Of course he wouldn't know me. I hung back with a doughnut while the two of them made small talk. Pretty quick, the old bush pilot caught my eye and said, “How's Jonah?”

“Hanging on,” I said, kind of startled.

“Great hunter, even a better man.”

“Thanks. I didn't know you knew him.”

“Met him a couple of times. Admired him from afar. People will tell of his deeds for a long, long time.”

Ryan backed his pickup into Red's hangar, close to the mountain of gear he had dropped when he drove in from Arizona—the rolled-up raft and all that went with it, no end of canned food, and all the camping stuff. We shuttled everything out to the bush plane, a twin-engine Otter, and unloaded onto the tarmac.

Then we waited. I found myself chewing a fingernail, which isn't like me. I wasn't the only one who was nervous. Ryan kept studying the gear, his forehead bunched up like pressure ridges out on the pack ice. He handed me a butane lighter. I told him I already had a couple. “Keep this one in your pocket,” he said.

Finally Red appeared at the door of his office. He put on his sunglasses and limped in our direction. He was famous for having walked away from four crashes.

With a glance at the gear, Red said, “Let's load her up and make history, boys!”

A short while later we were airborne. Up front next to Red, Ryan snapped dozens of pictures as we flew west across the wide delta of the Mackenzie, pausing only to exclaim “Amazing!” and “Awesome!” and suchlike.

This was my first time to see the delta from the air. I spied some of my favorite places to trap muskrats and the exact spot where I got that moose just lately. “Aklavik!” my brother cried, fifteen minutes into the flight. I almost wished I hadn't insisted he take the copilot's seat, after Red had offered it to me.

Our pilot made sure I got a good look at home. I heard the shutter of Ryan's camera whirring. Looking right down on the airstrip and the school and Jonah's house, I nearly lost it. Had I made the right decision?

About ten minutes later we passed over that invisible line between the Northwest Territories and the Yukon Territory. I was keeping my eyes peeled for caribou as we flew surprisingly low over the rolling ups and downs of the treeless tundra, green as green can be.

An hour and a half into the flight, Red finally pulled back on the yoke, and we began to climb. The British Mountains in the heart of Ivvavik National Park lay dead ahead. “Hey, Red,” I asked through the intercom, “how come you fly your Otter so close to the ground?”

“Because I'm afraid of heights.”

Was he kidding? I really couldn't tell.

Now I was looking down on a jigsaw puzzle of the rugged British Mountains. I didn't like the sound of the name. They should be called the name that they'd gone by for a thousand years and more, before the Europeans made up their own. Jonah would have known our names for the British Mountains and the Firth River. I wished I had asked him.

Below the rounded mountaintops, the steep slopes were clad with a carpet of bright green alpine tundra. The long hours of sunshine the last couple months had melted most of the snow. What remained made white patches on the slopes facing north. I was surprised to see stunted spruce trees growing on the lower flanks of the south-facing slopes. Except for the delta of the Mackenzie, warmed by the river water, the Arctic this far north is too cold for trees. The mountains, I figured, must shield these trees from the winter blasts blowing off the frozen ocean.

Looking nearly straight down out of my window, I spied a herd of big-racked caribou bulls. There were maybe a hundred of them, headed north on their way down a rocky slope. The sight of them had my hunter's heart racing. Mature bulls make their own migration north weeks after the cow caribou head for the calving grounds. The bulls are both lazy and smart. They wait until the snow melts and the traveling gets easier. They catch up with the herd in their own good time.

Minutes short of the Alaska border, we came in sight of a major river valley cutting north through the British Mountains, which seemed to run in rows from east to west. “There's your Firth River, boys,” Red Wiley announced.

Red circled around and zeroed in on the upper valley of the Firth River. At the last, it felt like the ground was flying up. We bounced hard on the dry tundra only a couple hundred feet from the river. A couple more bounces on the Otter's balloon tires, and we were down on dry land.

The day was hot, sunny, windless, and muggy—ideal conditions if you're a mosquito. I was barely out of the airplane and they were on me, frantic for a blood meal. I hit the ground wearing my new bug shirt with the hood up and the mosquito netting zipped shut across my neck. My Carhartt jeans were bug-proof as well. All those mozzies could do was whine.

Above me at the side door, Ryan began to hand the gear down. I shuttled the gear well clear of the airplane and returned for the next load fast as I could.

Red got out of the airplane “to see a man about a horse,” as he put it. When he got back he told us that this exact spot was where all the Firth River trips launched, and today, June 15, was the traditional opening day. The Arctic River Company out of Whitehorse had always launched the first of their three trips on this date. They weren't running the Firth at all this summer, on account of the bad economy. Only enough people to fill one trip had signed up. The company didn't make any money unless they ran all three.

“There's a chance you'll be seeing a man and his wife from Montana,” Red told us. “I'm scheduled to fly them in here nine days from now. Whether they actually show up … a lot of times the private parties don't.”

It hit me how little I knew about what I was in for. There wasn't going to be a single human being within two hundred miles of us. Being out on the land with Jonah was one thing. Being out on the land with Ryan for three weeks or more was totally a leap of faith.

“I've never had a party stay out near as long as you're talking about,” Red said to Ryan.

“Wildlife photography takes nothing but time.”

“Sure, but I'm not good with waiting to hear from you. Your sat phone might go on the fritz or get dropped in the river. Give me a date and time of day, weather permitting, for picking you up at Nunaluk Spit.”

“Okay, sure,” Ryan said. “We'll look for you at ten a.m. on July fifteenth on the Nunaluk Spit.”

I fought the urge to climb back into that plane and fly home. A couple minutes later our pilot revved his engines and leaned out his cockpit window to give us a salute. Ryan took pictures as the bush plane rumbled down the tundra on those big balloon tires.

The Otter took off effortlessly, almost jumping into the air. We watched until it disappeared over the mountain. Then we turned to hauling the gear to the shore of the crystal-clear river. I scanned the valley and eyed the mountains all around. Without my rifle, I had never felt so small.

A short walk downstream from where Ryan was pumping up the raft, I came across huge tracks in the mud, unmistakably grizzly. “Hey, Ryan,” I called. “Come check this out.”

Ryan thought they were the best grizzly tracks he had ever seen. He was all excited about taking pictures, but he read my thought balloon, and said, “We'll keep our bear protection close at hand, in case that big fella is still in the area.”

Then and there, he showed me how to use the pepper spray and the bear bangers. Following his lead, I rigged my bear-banger pouch and pepper-spray holster on my belt. They made me feel like I was armed, sort of. Ryan said, “Were the tracks of that grolar bear bigger than these?”

“By a lot.”

“You know what? At this moment that grolar bear of yours is the rarest animal on earth. Photos of one in the wild would be the coup of a lifetime.”

I didn't say a thing. I didn't want to encourage him. This was crazy talk.

“You know what,” Ryan continued. “With the quote in my article to the effect that the grolar bear is probably a product of climate change, I have no doubt that a photo of one would land on the cover of
National Geographic
.”

“Don't even think about it,” I said. “You have no idea. That bear would tear you limb from limb.”

Big grin. “After I had taken his picture, leaving you to write the article.”

I rolled my eyes.

“No worries, just kidding.”

We ate a quick lunch; Ryan was anxious to start down the river. He gave me a lightweight pair of rafting gloves and we went to work. When the boat was all rigged, he gave me a safety talk. As he finished that up, I pointed to my life jacket on the ground and asked what the stubby knife in the plastic sheath was all about. It was mounted chest high and upside down. “That's in case you find yourself underwater and tangled in rope,” he said. “I've never seen it happen.”

I reached for my life jacket. Ryan said, “I don't know about you, but I'm cooking with this bug shirt over my fleece shirt and thermal underwear. I'm stowing my bug shirt. Out on the river, we'll be plenty warm with our life jackets on, and the bugs won't follow us over the freezing-cold water.”

I followed suit, then put on my life jacket and snugged the cinches tight. “That's the best life jacket money can buy,” Ryan said. “Doesn't matter if you can't swim.”

“I can swim pretty good.”

“Really? Where did you learn?”

“Indoor pool in Aklavik.”

“Really? Aklavik's got a swimming pool?”

“The elders thought it was important. Too many of us used to drown.”

Ryan went aboard and took his seat on the big white cooler located back of center in the raft. He put his hands on the oars. “Ready when you are,” he called. “Let's go find the caribou.”

I untied from the scrub willows, coiled and secured the rope, and shoved the boat into water deep enough for him to begin working the oars. Then I came aboard, keeping low. I settled into position on the cross tube in the front of the raft as the current caught us and we headed downstream.