Two Cabins, One Lake: An Alaskan Romance (3 page)

Aaand, the fucker had just called me an angry hoyden.

My anger was red-lining.  I knew my limits.  Another minute
of this, and I’d either have a stroke, or I’d hurt somebody.

I took the third option, and stomped back to my cabin.

Chapt
er Two

M
y
alarm went off two hours later.  As I lay there, blinking into the bluish glow
of predawn coming through the window, my desire to hurt somebody was strong as
ever. 
Ah, who was I kidding? 
‘Somebody’?  I knew exactly who I wanted
to hurt.

My head ached, my eyes felt like they were being gouged with
steak knives, and I wanted nothing more than to roll over and go back to sleep. 
But I couldn’t.  I had a job.

So I rolled the other direction, my feet met the cool floor,
and I climbed out of bed.  I managed not to die on my way down the ladder from
my loft, and I lumbered into the bathroom with eyes only half-open and the rest
of my vision obscured by hair.

My bathroom was minimalist, the fixtures basic and
functional.  The décor consisted of mismatched Amazon purchases—a theme
repeated in the rest of my humble abode—in bright, clashing colors.

I didn’t bother turning on a light.  My eyes, and my
throbbing head, couldn’t handle the glare of a lightbulb at this juncture in
time.

I made the mistake of glancing at myself in the mirror
before I climbed into the shower.  I didn’t know why it always seemed to work
this way, but seeing the misery on my face made it real.  I had dark circles
under my eyes, distinguishable even beneath the soot smears, and what looked
like a semi-permanent crease carved between my brows.  The whites of my eyes
were reddened from smoke and tears, making my blue irises look almost green.

I made a face at myself, and then showered and dressed in
what I liked to call Fisherwoman Chic.  I had the brand names that seemed to
make my customers happy, the water-resistant synthetic materials with the
newest vents and snaps and zippers.  I honestly only wore them because my
clients took me a little more seriously when I showed up and introduced myself
as their fishing guide for the day.  Men usually didn’t like taking advice from
a woman, especially a young blonde, but if I tied my hair back in a severe
braid and wore the uniform, it seemed to help.

I had breakfast, fed the dog, packed a lunch, and poured a
healthy dose of coffee in my biggest mug; this morning I wished it was
gallon-sized, but I was already making plans to finagle a refill at the lodge. 
I let Mocha out as I stepped out the front door.  From a rack on the side of my
cabin, I gathered up a huge tackle box and two handfuls of rods strapped neatly
together.  These, I fastened to my four-wheeler.

It was five in the morning at this point, and the sky was
lightening toward dawn, though everything still had a dusky cast.  All was
silent and still; even the neighbor’s cabin, where tents had sprung up like
pimples across the yard.  A light fog hung over the lake, and droplets of dew
wet the toes of my hip waders.  I let the moment stretch out, enjoying what I
considered the last moments of peace before my hectic day began.

Then I fired up the four-wheeler.

My commute consisted of driving almost a mile through a
birch and spruce forest to the main river.  I did this on a dirt trail that’d
been carved by time and multiple passings of my tires.  I motored along at a
sedate speed, unwilling to tangle my lines or spill my coffee.

Mocha ran ahead like she always did, sniffing out points of
interest amongst the high-bush cranberry and devil’s club.  She was a husky-mix
mutt that moved like a ghost in the near-darkness, disappearing into the woods
ahead of me just to streak up from behind moments later.  She was a good bear
dog, always letting me know with a bone-chilling growl when a threat was near.

Bears and moose were always a possibility, especially since
they were at their most active at dawn and dusk.  For the most part, the large
animals we shared the woods with would turn and run the other direction when
they heard someone coming.  But there were always the exceptions, the
protective mamas, the surprise encounters.  Bears and moose could kill people,
mauling them or stomping them all to hell.  It didn’t happen often, but it
did
happen, and I wasn’t willing for it to happen to me.

So I carried a shotgun, loaded with slugs, wherever I went.

This morning, I made it to the river, and my boat, without
shooting anything.  I kept my Sea Ark river boat pulled up to the beach in a
slough, a slower tributary of the Kuskana River.  This placement kept it from
being hit and dragged downstream by passing logs or chunks of ice.  As a bonus,
it was a little harder to see by people passing on the main river, so my boat
went mostly unmolested.

The population of the river, the couple dozen year-round residents,
were an honest lot that would never touch my boat.  Hell, if it were only them
present, I could probably leave my shotgun in the boat, and it would be there
every morning till the end of time.  But in the summer, the population of our
little river ballooned with tourists and fishermen, and
they
, well… they
were known to do stupid, often illegal things.

I parked my four-wheeler next to the trailhead, and loaded
in my tackle, rods, gas, and shotgun.

Mocha sat on the shore as I pushed off and started my
outboard jet.  She watched, unperturbed, as I started to motor away.  Sometimes
she waited for me there, but usually she didn’t, instead choosing to roam and
explore until she met me back at the cabin later that evening.  She was an
independent dog; she hung out with me when it pleased her, and she went where
she wanted when it didn’t.

I got my last glimpse of her as I rounded the corner into
faster, siltier water.  I turned right, nosing my boat upstream, and throttled
the engine.  The roar of the outboard filled my ears, shattering the relative
quiet of the misty river.  The damp and wind buffeted me as I skimmed along on
step, but my layers of fancy clothes kept me warm and dry.

The river was a product of melting glaciers high up in the
surrounding mountains.  Being glacial-fed, it was both silty—swirling with
ultra-fine grey grit that made it opaque—and icy-cold, hovering around 40
degrees in the dead of summer.

There were some stirrings at the dock when I pulled in. 
Other guides, all men, rustled around in the bobbing boats, gearing up for the
day.  I recognized them all—some veterans, and some college students out for
their first or second season, making a little extra money during the summer—and
waved my good mornings as I tied off my boat and trudged up to the main
building, thermal coffee mug in hand.

The fishing lodge was a big A-frame built with local
timbers, already bustling with the morning rush.  The smell of cinnamon and
butter and bacon hit me as I let myself in the front door.

It was with a sinking feeling that I greeted my clients for
the day.  Two men, both of them obviously laboring under the sexist
women-can’t-fish delusion, eyed me dubiously.  One of them even came right out
and said it:  “Our guide’s a
woman
?”  Then he walked away, probably to
talk with management.

So yeah, if it seems sometimes like I have a chip on my
shoulder, that might be why.  That and, this morning at least, I was grumpy
from lack of sleep and still mourning my blueberries.

And I had three thousand words to write before 8 p.m.  Which,
shit
, I’d forgotten about.

It was established that yes, I would be guiding them, and
yes, I’d been doing this for several years, and yes, I knew what I was doing.  Glad
some
body was capable of diplomacy this early in the morning, I sat back
and watched the exchange between one of the owners, Nancy, and the chauvinist
man. 

The situation deteriorated just a little bit more when I saw
the two kids.  They weren’t grotesque or misshapen or anything, they were
just… 
Kids.

I groaned.  I hated guiding kids.

It was the curse of having a vagina; my employers were
forever giving me the women and children, thinking I’d know what to do with
them.  The other women, yeah, we got along fine as long as they were there to
fish and not just to look pretty and keep their French manicures immaculate and
go “eeewww!” at their first glimpse of slime.

But kids?  They broke shit, they fell in the water, they
asked about a million questions, and couldn’t cast without tangling their lines
every damn time.  They were sometimes cute, and their excitement was
infectious, but overall:  They were a pain in my ass.

My charges were still running around, taking their sweet
time gathering up the last of their dusty equipment.  Usually I’d be irritated
by this, but today it gave me time to fill my insulated coffee mug, drain it,
and then fill it again.  I sat waiting for them almost an hour before we
finally got out on the water.

We went to one of my favorite spots and first tried fishing
from the boat.  I quickly tired of this, as the children just wouldn’t fucking
stay still.  Following my three rapid-fire cups of coffee, I was also having a
bit of a bowel emergency, so I talked the men into trying out a little shore
fishing.

Once ejected from my boat, the children ran free.  They
quickly became distracted with getting muddy and making a fort out of driftwood,
and I—after my potty break in the woods—was able to actually concentrate on
helping the men catch salmon.

They weren’t bad as fishermen went.  They caught their bag
limit of Reds before noon, and then turned their attention to helping the kids
catch theirs.  We had lunch on the shore, and then went back to it.  The kids
caught their last fish, a fat, glossy Silver Salmon, around two in the
afternoon, and I was able to enjoy one of those rare days where I got off
early.

Considering the way it started, it had actually been a
pretty good day.  The men tipped well, I was able to find some TP when I needed
it, and the children had only broken my cheapest rod.  Thank God, and at the
same time, damn them.

I heard my neighbor’s helicopter before I even got back to
my cabin.  It skimmed by overhead just as I was pulling into the slough.  I’d
gotten lost in my normal daily routine, and had actually sort of forgotten
about the new resident noise-maker.

I slid in to the shore and threw my anchor out a little
harder than was strictly necessary.  Grumbling, I loaded all of my equipment
onto my four-wheeler.

Then I found out my four-wheeler wouldn’t start.

Now this sucked, sure, but my day wasn’t ruined.  Shit like
this happens when you live in the bush.  You just gotta roll with the punches. 
So I was rolling, as I gathered up my fishing gear.  I definitely couldn’t
leave my stuff out along the river where anyone could take it, but there was no
way I could carry it all in one trip, so I gathered what I could, and I rolled
on up the trail.

Purely by chance, I decided I would carry the shotgun on my
second trip.

I was walking along the trail, concentrating on keeping my
rod tips up off the ground, when I became aware of a lighter spot of uniform
brown against the dark soil ahead of me.  I looked up—and froze.

It was a brown bear, a damn big one, and it was standing
there in the middle of the trail, practically taking up the whole trail, staring
at me.

Something a lot of people from the Lower 48—and hell, the
rest of the world—don’t understand, is that bears aren’t cute, cuddly, harmless
creatures.  People go to the zoo, see that fuzzy, adorable animal snoozing in a
sunbeam, and they get this impression that bears are sweet creatures whose
greatest ambition in life is a good nap.

Well, newsflash:  Real bears aren’t teddy bears.  People who
try to hug them get eaten.  Bears are at the top of the food chain for some
damn good reasons.  They’re a half-ton of sheer muscle behind five-inch claws
and killing teeth.  They kill to survive… and also sometimes just because. 

We Alaskans have whole books full of gruesome bear attack
stories.  We’re talking detailed, gory maulings where faces and scalps and all
sorts of deliciously horrible body parts are rent open or ripped off.  There
are accounts of bears being shot right through the heart—heart, destroyed—and
they continue to kill and rampage for a full ten minutes after.

So now you know where I’m coming from, when I tell you, I
was walking back to my cabin after work Sunday afternoon, and I came
face-to-face with a bear.  There was nothing between us; no fence, no plate
armor, not even the thinnest veneer of civilization.

And in that unguarded moment, staring into the bear’s eyes, I
realized something.  Humans are just bags of blood walking around, and we’re
pretty darn easy to pop.  Despite what my forward-facing eyes said, I could be
hunted, and killed.  Sometimes, people are prey.

My heart doubled its pace, and my vision narrowed as my
fight or flight response kicked in.  But I wouldn’t win against this thing in a
fight, and I couldn’t run.

It’s something drilled into Alaskan kids:  Don’t run. 
Absolutely
do not
run.  Bears are predators, they will give chase, and
they can run thirty-five miles per frickin’ hour.  And when they catch you,
they will tear you apart…

I was frozen there, trying to figure out what to do.  I
could have put my hands over my head to make myself look bigger, but they were
full.  I could have yelled to try and scare it, but I felt barely capable of a
squeak.  I really, really wished I had my gun.

It was still staring at me.  Not afraid.  A really bad sign.

I began to back away.  Slowly.  Just one step.  Two.  Over
the thunder of my heart, I became aware of another noise, the low, thrumming
drone of an aircraft getting closer.

The bear took a step to follow me.  Then another.  Did it
look hungry?

I looked around for a tree to climb.  There was nothing
close.  I had my Leatherman, but that knife was only two or three inches long,
and it’d take a precious few seconds to pry out.