Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery (5 page)

“I can check the post office for you, Gran.” Goldie wondered if her grandmother was still upset that she hadn’t come home for dinner the night before. Yukon Sally had invited her to stay and join the lodge staff for a barbecue, as an introduction and welcome for her cousin’s son, Mark. Goldie had even had a glass of wine – Mark offered it to her himself, and she felt she couldn’t refuse – although the last time she’d had anything to drink she’d sampled Tessa’s brother’s moonshine with Tessa after school. That time, Gran had smelled the alcohol on her breath and gave her a stern lecture on the dangers of drink. “Remember Ellie Thomas? Froze to death in her own outhouse, passed out drunk,” was one of the examples. Last night, Gran hadn’t mentioned alcohol, but she’d been angry that Goldie was so inconsiderate. The old woman refused to have a telephone, so what was Goldie supposed to do to let her know she’d be late? Send smoke signals?

“Sure you can check the post office, but then you won’t be back here until you’re finished at the lodge – whenever that might be.” Goldie had no trouble picking up the sarcasm in her grandmother’s voice. “I’m expecting a package on the mail plane today.”

“So will you pick me up after I’m finished at the lodge?”

Gran smiled a lop-sided smile and gave her a faint nod. Goldie didn’t like the look of it. Was the old woman planning some kind of payback for her being late last night? “Are you ready?” she asked. I don’t want to be late–” She stopped mid-sentence when she saw Gran’s face.

“Yes, we don’t want you to be late,” said Gran, shrugging into a padded vest. “You don’t want to keep Sally waiting.” Gran held out her hand for the keys.

It was only five or six miles to Eagle and another couple of miles to the lodge, but it was slow going on the rutted spring road. The old Merc needed new shocks, among other things. Gran was silent on the way, and Goldie found herself thinking about how her grandmother had changed. She’d always been a little crusty, but now there was a bitter edge to her crankiness.

She had been strict with Goldie as a child, and Goldie realized as she grew older that she had to be. Life in the wilderness doesn’t leave much room for mistakes. How to handle the dogs, for example. Sled dogs could be trouble if you didn’t treat them right; they could kill each other, or they could even turn on you, or they could run off and leave you stranded miles from home. You had to know how to hunt efficiently so you didn’t starve over the winter. How to kill and not just wound a large animal; not only was it kinder, it was important in case the wounded animal charged and hurt you back. How to make sure the river ice was thick enough to walk or run a sled on, or you could fall through the ice and never be seen again. How to protect your winter food supply from bears. How to safely tend your stove so you didn’t burn down your cabin. It was basic survival, and some lessons had to be learned well the first time or you could pay with your life.

Goldie thought she knew the reason why the old woman was changing; it was fear. Betty Salmon had been self-sufficient and independent for so long, she wasn’t adapting well to aging. She didn’t want to have to give up her independence; she hated to have to ask for help, even from Goldie. She knew the old woman tried to be as active as ever, but now her finger joints were swollen and Goldie frequently saw her massage them with warm oil distilled from juniper berries; as her strength was slowly being sapped by age, she had to rest longer and more often. Gran probably felt that her body was turning against her and she was helpless to stop it. It had to be making her fearful, and it had to be making her angry.

Goldie was afraid, too. She was afraid that she was trapped with an angry old woman who needed her. She felt such a powerful yearning – it must be in her heart, for it seemed to be deep in her chest – a yearning for a new life, a much different life than she’d experienced so far. She wanted to see the world, she wanted to go to school, to learn new and interesting things, to accomplish something important, and she wanted to fall in love. But she owed her grandmother so much, and her grandmother had no one else in the world to look after her as she aged and lost her independence.

She studied her grandmother’s lined brown face, bright and alert as she looked ahead through the windshield. I couldn’t bear to hurt her, Goldie thought to herself. Oh, God. Please show me the way. “What are you waiting for from the post office?” she asked. “Something for the garden?”

Her grandmother smiled a tight little smile that had an air of mischief. “Maybe,” she said.

“Don’t be such a tease, Gran. Give me a hint.”

“Guess, then.”

Goldie inhaled deeply and looked at the ceiling of the old Merc while she thought. The cloth lining was torn and drooping above the rearview mirror. “Seeds? Some special kind of seeds like Jack’s beanstalk seeds? I’ll come home and find a giant beanstalk in your garden, and no trace of you, just Hootie snoozing at the bottom waiting for you to climb back down.” She grinned at her grandmother, but there was no reciprocal smile.

“I won’t leave my Hootie behind.” The old woman spoke with such grim resolve that Goldie’s grin disappeared and she spent the rest of the drive in silence, wondering what she really was going to come home to.

Hunter first heard the noise several miles north of Prophet River. It was a faint kunk-kunk-kunk that he hadn’t heard before, at least not in the thousands of miles he’d driven the Blue Knight so far this year. At first he wasn’t sure if it was a result of the road surface or if it came from under the hood. When the sound subsided on a smoother patch of pavement, he decided it must have been the road and was relieved. The last thing he needed was a mechanical breakdown on a long, lonely stretch of the Alaska Highway. Well, maybe not so lonely. Every five or ten minutes, they passed a vehicle going the opposite direction on the two lane highway, either a southbound tractor-trailer, a loaded RV, or a dirty pickup truck.

Sorry was still driving, and Hunter was enjoying the chance to concentrate on the scenery instead of the road, watching for wildlife along the edges of the highway. The highway wound around gentle hills in wide curves, flanked on either side by stands of white spruce, lodgepole pine and subalpine fir, with a wide margin of low scrub between the trees and the road that allowed drivers to see a bear or moose approach the highway before it darted across the asphalt. Signs of human habitation were long distances apart, giving Hunter a sense of just how vast the northern wilderness could be.

Sorry had been chatty after breakfast in Dawson Creek. There were sarcastic comments about every passing vehicle and driver, especially if the driver was a woman, and his sentences were peppered with expletives if the driver did something that didn’t meet with his approval. In between, he delivered colorful recollections of the best and worst breakfasts and breakfast stops he’d had on the road, and eventually he settled into an analysis of his problems in life.

“My old man wanted me to be just like him, you know what I mean? Settle down and marry a local girl, have kids, work in a hardware store nine or ten hours every fuckin’ day of my dreary fuckin’ life and come home to meat and potatoes on the table and a couple hours of boring chores around the house and then fall asleep in front of the fuckin’ depressing national news at the end of every day.” He turned and looked at Hunter with raised eyebrows and an intense stare. “What the fuck was he thinking?”

Hunter pointed urgently at the road and Sorry reacted in time to avoid running the right front wheel onto the gravel shoulder. “Everybody’s different,” was all he said, although he found himself thinking that a quiet, orderly life with his wife and two daughters might not have been a bad thing. There was a familiar ache in his chest, thinking about his wife and daughters as they’d been ten years and more ago. He’d loved each of them more than his own life, and yet he’d spent so many hours working that his wife had felt neglected, and as his daughters grew older they often seemed like strangers to him. Would Christine still have divorced him if he’d worked in a hardware store?

“I mean, what kind of life is that? Every day the same thing. Yes, Bob, you can have ten percent off this bag of screws. No, Fred, we don’t stock that brand of paint. Sorry, Chuck, you can’t have any more credit with us until you pay your bill. Can you imagine me behind the counter in a hardware store six days a week?” Sorry shook his head but kept his eyes on the road. “Or you? Could you imagine yourself putting in ten hours a day selling plumbing parts and screwdrivers to Joe Q. Public?”

Hunter was doing just that, trying to imagine himself working nine to five, Monday to Friday, and coming home to spend time with his young family. Going to PTA meetings, taking the girls to swimming lessons, watching their soccer games and taking Chris out for a nice dinner once a week. Would that have saved his marriage? Or was he just like Sorry, needing to be on the move every day, whether in a police cruiser or on the seat of a Harley, just on the move. He snorted softly. On the move, like a long haul trucker. Maybe that’s just who he was.

“Well, can you?”

“Maybe not, Dan,” he said. “But then again, maybe you get used to it. Maybe there are tradeoffs that make it worthwhile.”

“Like?”

“Coming home every night to a good woman who loves you. Watching your children grow up, hearing about their day at school, their new friends, their heartaches and fears. Listening to them practice playing piano…”

“Whoa! What fuckin’ piano?”

Hunter frowned. “I hope you don’t swear like that in front of customers when you’re driving my rig.”

“Jesus! What’s your problem?” Sorry sighed, paused a moment, then said, “My kids don’t have no fu…, I mean, no goddamn piano. Where the hell did that come from?”

It came from Hunter’s past, but he didn’t say so. “Maybe not a piano, but some kind of keyboard. Every kid wants to be a musician. Doesn’t Bruno have a drum set yet? Does Sasha play a flutophone or whatever?” His own girls took piano lessons. It had been Chris’s idea, but Hunter was supportive, even if he wasn’t around much in the evenings to hear them play. Hunter’s parents had made him take violin lessons. That was okay until he hit his teens, began listening to rock and roll, and his friends started playing guitars and drums. Did his girls still play? It had been a long time since he’d even thought about it.

A dirty white pickup truck passed them – a Ford diesel – doing ninety miles an hour and spewing smoke from its exhaust. Sorry held up a finger, but there was no way the driver could have seen it, nor could he hear Sorry call him a fuckin’ asshole, then apologize to Hunter. Sorry pressed the pedal down and again Hunter heard that kunk-kunk-kunk, accompanied by a noticeable vibration. It was his turn to swear, silently to himself.

“Slow down,” he said. “This isn’t a Harley.”

“Yes, boss.”

Sorry let the Freightliner slow to sixty miles an hour and the noise went away.

– – – – – FIVE

The package Betty was waiting for – kale seeds in spite of how she had teased her granddaughter – was not on the mail plane. There was nothing at all at the post office this week, neither for her nor Goldie. Betty waved a vague thanks to the postmaster, who also happened to be the town’s mayor, and got back in the old blue pickup. It was warm inside from the sun, and she just sat a moment, savoring the comfort of that warmth, thinking about all the work ahead of her. It seemed like there was precious little time to enjoy easy living during the north’s short summer, because there was always so much to do to get ready for the next winter. Stocking up on food and firewood, smoking and canning fish, meat and vegetables, making jam, repairs to the cabin, obtaining supplies for her sewing and beadwork; it never seemed to end. It had been that way ever since she could remember, but this was the first time she dreaded the work ahead.

“I’m tired,” she said to herself, or perhaps to God, whoever he was and if he listened to aging half-Athapascan women feeling sorry for themselves. Even if he did, she didn’t expect God to answer, nor help her out. Perhaps a tonic would help. As she often did, she thought out loud. “Maybe I should brew up some swamp tea.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Betty looked up, startled. The voice came from a man she’d never seen before. Or had she? She peered at the face looking back at her through the Merc’s open window, but it was mostly hidden behind a tousled grey beard, unevenly streaked with brown and white, and a moustache that hid the man’s upper lip. He wore what once might have been a grey cowboy hat, sweat-stained around a hatband of braided horsehair which sported a single raven’s feather. His grease-splotched shirt and dirty blue jeans were at odds with his British accent.

Normally Betty would have said, “I wasn’t talking to you”, rolled up the window and fired up the engine. For some reason she didn’t understand – did some small part of her want to believe this old man was God’s answer to her unsaid prayers? – she said instead, “I thought I might brew up a tonic. I’m in need of a little pick me up.”

“What a lovely thought.” By the way the corners of his moustache moved, he must have smiled broadly. “May I join you?”

“It’s just swamp tea,” she said, realizing that he probably thought she meant something alcoholic.

He pointed to an old brown and yellow pickup truck parked beside the post office. “I could contribute a little something to sweeten it up.” Again the moustache rose at both ends. He had a gentle voice, and right then Betty felt in need of some gentleness. “I’m Orville, by the way.” He stuck out a hand that matched his face, weathered and creased. “Orville Barstow.”

“I live out of town,” she said, not taking his hand.

If her rudeness was meant to discourage him, and she wasn’t sure that’s what she meant to do, it didn’t work. Less than twenty minutes later, his old truck pulled up beside her own at the cabin. There was an old Arctic Cat snowmobile in the bed of his pickup, and tucked around it were several oil-stained canvas sacks. She noticed that he had a Yukon license plate. As soon as the man’s feet were on the ground, Hootie trotted up and sniffed at the old man’s boots, then offered his head for a pat.

“Lovely old Mercury you have,” he said before slamming the door of his truck. “About a ’68, if I’m not mistaken. I have a distinct fondness for earlier Ford products, as you may have noticed.” He indicated his own vehicle with a wave of his hand. “I call her Tinkerbell. She is currently carrying everything I own.”

Now that they were standing side by side, his physical presence made Betty extremely uncomfortable and she could barely contain the urge to ask him to leave. She imagined herself reaching inside the cabin door for her rifle and pointing it at him until he drove away. What if he refused to go? Would she really shoot this stranger? If she did, what would she do then? Hide his body? Drive his truck into the Yukon River after dark? She held her breath, and he seemed to be watching her intently, and as far as she could tell, sympathetically. Was he so different from the trappers she used to welcome to stay the night in the cabin upriver not that many years ago? It wasn’t that she feared him physically, she told herself, it was that this odd old man from Canada threatened her privacy, something she had guarded from the people of Eagle and Eagle Village ever since she’d arrived here.

“Oh yes,” he said. “The sweetener for the tea.” He reached in behind the seat of his truck and pulled out a brown paper bag. “My one indulgence, an infrequent one at that.” His moustache tilted up at the corners again, and he motioned toward the cabin door. “Shall we?”

Betty didn’t want this man inside her cabin, so she led him around the cabin to the two frayed lawn chairs that Goldie had brought home from the lodge, left behind by tourists with a big RV. They faced a campfire littered with lumps of charred wood over a pile of ash long since gone cold. “Here, have a seat,” she said. “I’ll bring out the tea.” She felt suddenly ashamed being so inhospitable, so she added. “Hootie here will keep you company.”

She went inside and made sure there was enough hot water in the kettle that sat perpetually on top of the woodstove. She tried to keep live coals in the stove at all times, both for cooking during the day and for heat at night, when the temperature sometimes dropped to freezing, even in June. Then she tossed what breakfast tea was left in the aluminum pot out the cabin door and took a jar of dried Labrador tea leaves down from the shelf, tossed a handful of leaves into the teapot and filled it from the kettle. Teapot in one hand and two mismatched mugs in the other, she went back outside.

“It has to steep some,” she said to her visitor. He was leaning back in the chair, one hand on Hootie’s head, the other resting on his stomach, and his eyes were closed. She saw that he had removed his hat and his boots, and was wiggling his toes inside grey wool socks.

He opened his eyes and nodded. “This is a lovely, peaceful place,” he said. “You are a lucky woman, Miss –?”

“Betty. Just call me Betty.” She put the mugs and teapot on a block of spruce between the two chairs.

“How lovely that we are on a first name basis right at the start.” His eyes sparkled and she found herself admiring how brown and clear they were. They looked kind. “You are a lucky woman to have found such a peaceful place to settle. You weren’t always here near town, though, were you? I see by the traps and snowshoes hanging on your cabin, assuming they’re yours, that you’ve led a more adventurous life.”

“I still do,” she said. It rankled that he also assumed she was no longer trapping. “I still trap and hunt, just not so much and closer to home.”

“Ah, yes. That’s the advantage to trapping here in Alaska. No exclusive concessions like they have across the border. I have just said a poignant goodbye to my trap line concession near Stewart Crossing,” he said. “A young couple from Manitoba has taken it over, and I wish them well.” He nodded and took a couple of slow deep breaths before continuing. “I came very close to death on my trap line this past winter; my strength failed me and I didn’t make it back to shelter during a storm. At the ripe old age of seventy three, I was forced to admit that unless I was ready to become wolf bait, it was time to retire.” He smiled, his eyes wistful. “Dust to dust. A cycle we all face, and I’ve had to accept that I’m nearing the end of it.”

A cycle we all face. Betty drew some unexpected comfort from his admission, a sense of relief that she was not alone in facing her increasing debility and eventual mortality. She nodded, mirroring his wistful expression.

“I feel that you and I are kindred spirits, Betty. I was very close to a woman much like yourself for many years. We are two denizens of the northern bush, our spirits forged in the wilderness. We’re peas in a pod, much of a muchness. Don’t you feel it, too, Betty?”

Betty was still waging an internal battle against feeling any kind of a personal relationship with the man, but what he said described just what she felt herself struggling against. It was as though this man, this odd little Englishman who appeared out of the blue this morning, was in a way her counterpart, her male equivalent. It appeared that both had been forced to emerge from the northern wilderness, almost against their will, by the ravages of age.

“Why didn’t you just stay in the bush and face your fate, like the old bear and caribou?” she found herself asking him. She had wondered the same thing about herself. Wasn’t that the way of the wilderness? You get old, you get eaten by younger and stronger creatures. Wasn’t that a more honorable way to leave this earth than allowing yourself to get weak and lazy? But she had Goldie to think of and care for, hadn’t she? Goldie needed her, or at least she used to.

“Because ultimately we’re survivors, my dear. We have spent our lives being cautious to avoid being frozen to death, or drowned, or eaten by bears. We have had to know and respect our physical limitations in order to stay alive, and now we have had to adjust to the depletion of our physical vigor. We can no longer trek for days or weeks to obtain supplies, our arms and shoulders can no longer maneuver our canoes through the river rapids nor can our fading hearing and eyesight detect the approach of predators through the underbrush.” He sighed and looked as if he were scanning the surrounding tree line for bears and wolves.

Betty took the lid off the teapot and peered inside. The spicy aroma told her it was ready to drink, so she arranged the mugs and prepared to pour.

“To continue being the survivors we are, we must adapt to this thing called age.” He scratched his bearded chin with thick, uneven fingernails. “I suppose I should have married. If I had some grown children somewhere I could move in with them, but it’s too late now, isn’t it?” As he said this, he pulled a bottle of Southern Comfort out of his paper bag. “But age and civilization have their perks.”

She watched the edges of his moustache turn up again, and this time she smiled back at him. She surprised herself by saying, “It could be you are right.” She settled herself into the other lawn chair and watched him pour some liquor into each mug of tea. “Perhaps it’s time I try to find the advantages of getting old.”

“Yes, indeed. Why try to hold on to a lifestyle that no longer suits your life? You wouldn’t keep wearing your parka in the summer, would you? The bull moose doesn’t keep carrying his antlers around when the rut is over, does he? He doesn’t need to be a show off for the ladies during the winter, he just needs to feed himself well and survive.” He blew on his tea and took a cautious sip. “Mmmm. Delightful. You make the best swamp tea in Alaska, my dear Betty. I’m sure of it.”

Since when did she become his dear Betty? She didn’t totally approve of it, but she felt a warm little thrill in her chest when he said it. She didn’t dare look at him, afraid it would betray her pleasure at this unexpected intimacy, so she blew on her own tea and inhaled the sweet and spicy combination of Labrador tea and the syrupy liqueur. She tried a sip, and tasted the sweetness of it on her tongue and felt the warmth of it as it slid down her throat.

“Good, isn’t it?” Orville was smiling again, and there was a twinkle in his gentle eyes.

Betty coughed, then nodded. “I guess I could learn to like this.” In fact, there was no learning required. Why had she not wanted to like it? Why did she feel guilty for enjoying it as much as she did?

“Wonderful! Perhaps you’ll let me camp in your yard for a day or two until I decide where I’m headed, if I promise to repay you with some Southern Comfort in this northern home of yours. I could cut some firewood for you …” He indicated jumble of logs near the edge of the clearing, some of them pulled from the Yukon after breakup, now awaiting splitting and stacking. “… or perhaps do some odd jobs around the cabin?”

He was terribly bold, and in most men, it would have angered her and she would have sent them packing immediately for presuming that she would welcome their intrusion into her life. But Betty realized she was tired of trying to hold on to her old way of life, with Goldie trying to wiggle out from underneath it. It would be so easy just to embrace the presence of this old fellow – although he was only a couple of years older than Betty herself – and let him entertain her and help with the work here, at least for a day or two. She had no doubt that he would soon be ready to move on, and that she would soon be impatient to see him go.

“Are you hungry, Betty? I have some bear jerky in my truck. Would you care for some?”

Over a picnic lunch of Orville’s bear jerky and some of Betty’s homemade bread, spread with goose fat and sprinkled with salt, Orville told Betty more about himself and she found herself listening with great interest in spite of herself. Like many men in Alaska and the Yukon, he had come in pursuit of gold. Surely there were unexplored streams or undiscovered deposits waiting for him to find. To support his quest, he trapped and hunted in the winter, trading mostly marten and fox, but also the occasional wolf and lynx pelt for supplies. Like Betty and Goldie, he tanned the hides of any caribou or moose he shot for meat. He was close enough to Stewart to obtain other supplies every few months.

“I have a particular fondness for potatoes,” he admitted, “and I sometimes treat myself to carrots, cabbage and beets when they’re available. I see you have chickens. A rare bird indeed in this part of the world! I love a good English breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and toast.”  He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, the sun full in his face. There was a long comfortable silence between them, then, eyes still closed, he said, “How about you, Betty? You must have led an interesting life. Tell me about yourself.”