Season of Death (6 page)

It was cold. Painfully cold. His temples ached and a burning sensation was pressing against his forehead, moving across the top of his skull.

There was a split-second lull, a sense not of panic but of extreme disorientation. Was he falling, rising, facing up, down …?

Suddenly he was reminded of the promise he had made to Margaret. This seemed like a choice occasion to make good on it. In the absence of light and understanding, his prayer took the form of a single syllable: Help!

When there was no immediate answer, instinct kicked in, spurring him to action. Having spent a lifetime floating the frigid waters of the Arctic, experience told him to pull the paddle and correct the mishap. In another second, he would be back on top, sampling fresh air instead of holding his breath. Or not. He couldn’t work the paddle. He was tangled, held fast by some unseen force: Billy Bob! The cowboy still had hold of his parka and was engaging Ray in hand-to-hand combat. An elbow grazed his nose. Ray jerked to loose himself. Something hard impacted his upper lip. He heard a muffled gurgle, air escaping from lungs.

Another blow found Ray’s cheek. He was running out of time, becoming more and more disoriented. Had they been under seconds? Half a minute? A minute? Longer?

As the unplanned, snorkel-less underwater tour of Shainin Lake stretched on, Ray leaned toward panic himself. He began squirming out of the kayak. The fit was tight in order to keep a pack and other accessories dry in the event of a turnover. It was a nearly impossible task. Hanging from the surface of the lake, head dangling toward the bottom, an evil hand hell-bent on remaining attached to his jacket, leverage and agility were in short supply. But the approach of death somehow motivated him to try.

When he finally came out, he did so abruptly, like a cork shooting from a champagne bottle. He felt his pack slide out behind his feet, but made no effort to go after it. Instead, he jabbed Billy Bob in the ribs with as much force as he could muster. It worked. The fingers retreated and Ray escaped to the surface.

Bursting into the sunlight, his lungs sucked in oxygen. The air felt warm and thick after being enveloped in icy water. Hanging across the bottom of his still-inverted kayak, he watched as Lewis flipped Billy Bob over. The cowboy bobbed up, gagging.

Ray reached to steady the boat. “Billy Bob? Can you breathe?”

“… Barely.” He looked wilted, fright already giving way to exhaustion.

“Thanks, Lewis,” Ray deadpanned. “For nothing.”

Lewis swore at them both, as if they were to blame. “You guys … I tried help you. I couldn’t turn da boats over. What was you doing down there?”

“Attending a Jacques Cousteau seminar,” Ray said with a sneer. “You’re not safe.”

“Me?” Lewis’s features bunched up, as if nothing could be further from the truth. “Who was it can’t keep their boat rightways in da waa-da? Uh?”

Ray shook his head. “I’m out.”

“Out. Whaddya mean, out?”

“Done. That’s it. The trip’s over.”

“Uh-uh. Just gettin’ started. You guys, okay … uh?” Lewis was suddenly concerned, almost compassionate. “Gonna be great. Real great.”

“I’m out,” Ray repeated. “What about you, Billy Bob?”

The cowboy nodded. “I need to lie down ‘fore I …” He paused to retch.

Ray spun his own kayak over, using his legs to keep him afloat as he drained some of the water from the hole. He cursed, realizing his belongings were now at the bottom of the lake. “My gear …”

“You use mine,” Lewis chimed, bravely attempting to salvage the outing.

Preparing to climb into the semiflooded kayak, Ray reached into his pocket. He cursed again. No phone. Only a soggy Bible.

“What’s a matter now?” Lewis wanted to know.

“What’s the matter?! I’ll tell you what’s the matter. We’ve been on your Bush Adventure for maybe twenty minutes …”

“No. Count the floatplane,” Lewis insisted. “It part of da trip too.”

“Okay, for a few hours. I no longer have any extra clothing. I have no food, no pack, no sleeping bag …”

“Eh!” Lewis pulled a soggy stuff sack from Ray’s flooded boat. “Still got da bag!”

“Great …” Ray scrambled in and sat frowning, droplets running down his face and off his chin, his legs and rear end submerged in six inches of cold lake water. “Let’s see. The pack cost me $225.” He calculated. “I lost my fishing gear: Orvis rod and reel. Worth about $600. My rifle. A good 30.06 runs around $350. Add it all together and I just dumped close to $1200.” He swore softly. “Oh, and the phone. That’s another $100.”

“And $185 for my new Stetson,” Billy Bob drawled glumly.

“What’s that … about $1500 down the drain?”

“I’m shore sorry about that, Ray,” the cowboy muttered apologetically.

“It’s not your fault,” Ray told him, glaring at Lewis.

“I lend you clothes,” Lewis offered. “Still be good trip.”

“Face it, Lewis, it’s a bust. Gimme yer phone.”

“What you want phone for?” He started paddling backwards, away from Ray.

“I’m gonna call the plane back.”

Lewis pursed his lips, as if deep in thought. “Can’t.”

“Sure I can. I’ll call Jack. Or Jack’s phone service. Have him fly back in.”

“No. Jack got udder flights to do.”

“Then I’ll call a different bush pilot!” Ray insisted. He was on the verge of losing his temper. Nearly drowning had that effect on him. “Give me the phone!”

“Can’t.” Lewis shrugged, as if it was an impossible request. Working the paddle, he maintained his position, well out of Ray’s reach.

“Listen, you want to keep going and meet the caribou, fine. Good luck to you. But Billy Bob and I have had enough. Right?”

The cowboy nodded glumly, shoulders sagging.

“Give me your phone.”

Lewis shook his head. “Don’t got one.”

“Okay, then let me have your radio.”

Another shake. “No radio.”

Ray stared at him, incredulous. “You’re kidding …”

A third shake of the head.

“How were you planning to contact Jack?”

“He meet us. All set up. Gonna be great.”

“And if there’s a change of plans, a delay, an emergency … What then?”

“No. We meet him on time.”

Ray considered paddling after Lewis and giving him a taste of Shainin Lake. If the little twerp had been closer, and Ray’s kayak hadn’t been weighed down by extra ballast … “How did you ever get a guide’s license?”

“Eh, I been hunting all my life.”

“I know you can hunt, Lewis. But being a guide is … different. You’re responsible for the party you lead. You’re supposed to be ready if something happens.”

Lewis stared at him blankly, as if he was unfamiliar with the concept.

“You had to take a test, right?”

“I study hard.” He offered this with bright eyes, a sincere expression on his face.

“Did you learn anything about safety?”

“Oh, sure. Safety important. Gotta be careful.” He nodded enthusiastically. “You guys ready to go now?”

Ray admonished Lewis with his eyes, then looked to Billy Bob. “Hold on to my kayak right here.” He took his hand and attached it, hooklike, to the edge of the gasket. “Just relax and hang on. I’ll tow you over to the bank.” He began paddling. “And if you start to tip, don’t panic. I’ve had enough swimming for one day, thanks.”

The cowboy was a limp rag and probably wouldn’t present a problem in the fifty yards between their position and the shore. Of course, if they did do an encore of the submarine routine, he might metamorphose into a demon again. Ray decided to go easy. He guided the two boats toward the bank with smooth, careful strokes. Lewis trailed behind, his enthusiasm clearly waning.

“Quite an adventure,” Ray remarked as he beached the boats. “I can’t wait to see what you have in store for us next.”

“Aaargaal
Caribou!” Lewis answered, missing the sarcasm. “Gonna be great!”

Ray helped Billy Bob out of his kayak and assisted him to a wide, flat limestone boulder. They had landed on a rocky shoal about an eighth of a mile from the mouth of the Kanayut. A hundred feet east, a brook snaked its way down the mountain, feeding the lake with shiny gray water.

“I’ll build a fire,” Ray told Billy Bob. “We can dry out our stuff.” He paused. “Except that I don’t have an extra set of clothes anymore.”

“Wear summa mine,” Billy Bob volunteered.

“What will you wear?” They both looked to Lewis.

“Okay. He wear mine.”

Ray pulled a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans from Lewis’s pack and handed them to the cowboy. “Put these on.” He removed the sleeping bag from its sack. “And wrap up in this.” Ray began digging into Billy Bob’s pack, wondering if anything would fit him.

Lewis gazed up at the sun, then examined his watch. “How long you need? We gotta get movin’. Gotta get to downriver. Get to da caribou, eh?”

Ray ignored him. He was chilled, disappointed, irritated, in no mood to be hurried along. He hopped across the rocks and started gathering kindling from a copse of poplars bordering the beach. Five minutes later he returned with an armload of dry, hairlike moss, brittle twigs and a single, two-foot shaft of driftwood. After arranging the material into a squat tepee, he used a match from Lewis’s pack to light it. The flame hissed.

“Help me get my bag,” Ray told Lewis. The two of them pulled the sleeping bag from his kayak. It was soaked, the down filling having absorbed so much water that it was now twenty times its original weight. Lugging it to the fire, they draped it over a rock.

“You guys ready for lunch?” Lewis asked energetically.

From his place on the boulder, Billy Bob groaned. Draped in a shroud of blue ripstop nylon, he had red eyes, pale cheeks, and lips the color of the bag.

“We feel better after lunch,” Lewis assured them. “I got tuttu burgers. Real au-theen-tic. And pickles!”

“Yippee,” Ray muttered. He glanced at his watch: 10:38. They had already had a boating accident, were about to eat caribou sandwiches, and the day was still young.

Lewis began unloading the food. “And
muktuk.”

“Whale blubber. It’s a regular banquet.”

“No.” Lewis shook his head. “Pic-nic! First day
picnic”

Ray stretched his parka out near the fire and fought his way out of the wet work shirt and undershirt.

“Ya know …” Billy Bob said, still sounding winded, “ya saved ma life out there.”

Shrugging this off, Ray slid on a dry cotton T-shirt. It was a full size too small and clung to his chest like a second skin, but it felt good: dry, warm, soft …

“I’m plumb serious. If it wuddn’t fer you … I’d be swimming with the fishes.”

“I still owe you,” Ray reminded him. He discarded his saturated jeans and began hopping his way into Billy Bob’s. Or trying to. It was all he could do to get his feet through the pant legs. Buttoning them was a struggle that involved holding his breath.

The cowboy chuckled, life slowly returning. “Aw … that was nuthin’.”

“All ready,” Lewis announced. He handed Billy Bob a sandwich and a pickle and balanced a can of pop on the rock next to him. After delivering the same meal to Ray, he announced, “Now I give da speech.”

“Speech?” Ray was spreading his pants near the fire. “What speech?”

“Da welcome to Lewis Fletcher’s Au-theen-tic Native Bush Adventure and Hunting Service speech.”

“Oh, that one,” Ray said, wringing water from the down bag. He slumped to a rock, wishing he had a chair, wishing he were at home sipping coffee, reading the paper.

As he and Billy Bob picked at their “picnic,” Lewis stood facing them, hands behind his back, like a professor presenting a lecture to a hall full of academics.

“Da Eskimo …” he began. “We been doin’ dis for hundreds a years. We hunt da caribou. We hunt da moose. We hunt da bear. We hunt da whale. We hunt da seal. We hunt da walrus. Always we hunt—winter, summer, in between. We hunt.”

Ray decided that the theme of Lewis’s talk had something to do with hunting. The short, wiry “guide” went on for another twenty minutes, describing how the Inupiat had originally hunted with ingenious bone and stone weapons, graduating to rifles only in the past half century. Floatplanes, four-by-fours and fiberglass boats, he told them, were recent innovations, replacing wooden umiaks and nomadic, on-foot hunting expeditions. Today’s Eskimo, Lewis proposed, was a regular hunting machine—lethal, cunning, amazingly skilled, and, above all, effective. He always got his animal.

The premature lunch had a reviving effect. With the sun beating down on them, the temperature somewhere in the upper sixties, they basked on the rocks like seals, napping away the morning’s tragedy. Rested, warm, stomach full of sandwich—and pickle!—Ray decided that perhaps things weren’t as abysmal as they appeared. Billy Bob had cast off his down cloak and was checking the contents of his pack. He looked like a streetperson: short pant legs, long sleeves that only reached to his forearms …

Lewis was stretched out on a boulder, arms behind his head, smiling at the sky.

The clothing was still damp, and Ray’s bag had quite a way to go. After repositioning the articles even closer to the fire, he sat lazily gazing out across the lake. The breeze was herding ripples along the surface, and aside from the wind and the occasional pop of the flames, it was quiet. No radios. No TVs …. No phones.

It was almost comical. Almost. He and Margaret were going to have a baby—apparently. And here he was, miles from the nearest mode of modern communication or transportation, completely impotent to contact her, yet dying for the chance. It was torture.

In an effort to take his mind off his wife, their potential offspring, the unknown future that lay before them, he removed Lewis’s rod from the pack and began assembling it: poking the three flexible sections together, screwing on the reel, threading the leader and line. He found the fly box, surveyed the lake for a moment, then chose a black gnat.

“You guys ready?” Lewis asked through closed eyes.

“The stuff’s not dry yet.”

“Be careful with da rod,” he warned. “What fly you got?”

“Black gnat.”

“Adii
… Too late in da day for da gnat. Try da ratface.”

Ray left the gnat alone and stepped to the water’s edge. He lifted the rod, flinging the line forward, back, forward, back ….