Four Quarters of Light

  Mike waved us forward, the slow-motion movement of his hands signalling us to be deadly quiet. In Alaska, the wilderness is always only a few yards from any door. When you are as consciously near to a creature as we were, the relationship between you and it changes. Your senses heighten with the same kind of nervous energy that is part of any wild creature’s survival mechanism. In animals, it triggers aggression or flight; I could only feel fear crawling slowly up my spine.

  Mike gestured us to stand and pointed to a clearing in the alders below us. At first I could see nothing. The comic conformation of the creature made it difficult to discern in the undergrowth. Then the cow lifted her head, and I saw the unmistakably floppy face and jaw. She turned her head towards us and stared enigmatically, her ears twitching with what I imagined was static electricity passing between us. Then she hoisted herself up, first on to her front legs and then her haunches, the flowing movement belying her ungainly shape. It was as if invisible strings were attached to her body, for she unfolded like a marionette being gently lifted to life by a well-experienced puppeteer. But her looming bulk displaced such fanciful associations. She stared at us imperiously. Then the calf stood, its spindly legs shaking as it nudged into the mother’s underbelly. Dappled as they were by the sunlight and camouflaged among the bark browns and early greens, it would have been so easy to have walked right past this intimate tableau.

  The cow chewed her cud loudly and nuzzled the infant nearer to her body. I had seen a few moose before, but never this close. Until now I had thought of it as a big brown beast of a creature and little more. But now I could see the dark, shiny coarseness of its mane and the tininess of its ears on that great big head. Its hide was a collage of browns; it was like looking at a big bowl of all the various kinds of nuts that festoon a Halloween or Christmas table, hazel, walnut and almond shades flowing down into the soil-dark underbelly where the infant nudged and pumped.

  She turned and began to move. Her rear was the colour of dry grass at the end of summer when the lightness has been bleached out of it and it turns the colour of old pinewood. Then it was gone, and the small blur of quivering chestnut that was her calf was gone too.

  Among indigenous peoples, there is a belief that animals give themselves to the hunter, and I liked to think that these moose had given themselves to us for that brief moment. While watching them I’d felt my whole demeanour change from dread caution to a profound sense of calm. I seemed to remember it from before, that time when I ventured out alone into the bush at Denali. There was a serene quiet when the land and everything in it seemed to open itself up to me and I was flooded with the premonition of the wolf’s death.

  We returned to our cabin excited by our close encounter and dismayed at the need to pack. We had a last supper with our hosts and talked about moose and the mountains and our different plans for the future. As Mike was leaving I asked if he would have shot had it been necessary. His answer was simple and immediate: ‘It’s never necessary if you obey the rules.’

  In that moment when our worlds had intermeshed, something had been shared between the moose family and my own. Such was the intensity of the shared moment that part of me felt that the fact she chose to fade before our very eyes into her own dark world was not because she had judged us and found us wanting, but quite the reverse. She had willingly revealed herself and her world to us. At least I chose to think so.

  Mongrelized like some animal Frankenstein out of the body parts of an African zebu cow, an Asian camel and an American mule, the moose appears to be a Disney cartoon creature animated into life in this Alaskan wilderness where it must endure the most extreme hardships. But in that moment this mother and calf had become a dreamlike, numinous apparition that I felt humbled by and grateful to.

  On our last morning I rose early and hiked up into the hills, alone, like the moose. Ptarmigan clucked and shuffled noisily in the alder as I passed. But that all-pervasive sense of being watched which always accompanied me when I took myself into the bush seemed to have left me, temporarily at least. This was the best time to be in the wild, along with late evening, when the midnight sun spreads a quilt of monolithic quiet so intense you are afraid to breath in it. It’s also a time when the lenses of your eyes seem to triple their focal capacity. Everything you see, you see with hypnotic amplification. I stood looking out past the groves of alder and willow, hazy with that pale green of early-summer growth; past the copper greens and the forests of spruce and fir as they spread up to the mountains, only a shade darker than the sky above them, the blushed snow line separating them. Then your eye is sucked into much smaller spaces where real colour bristles like burning sparklers. Blue forget-me-nots squat close to the ground and the other lilac blues of lupin and Jacob’s ladder start upwards, purple monkshood and white mountain avens, and everywhere the tall fireweed burning to its tip. On that morning, as with others I spent there, eagles were wheeling so high they looked like specks in the colossal skyscape. They were not hunting at such a height, but they were watching all the same, like guardians watching over me.

  I looked back at the red and white livery of the mammoth mill. It had climbed up the mountain like a caterpillar. Sixty years of Alaskan winters had not destroyed it, nor had the stormy winds blown away its ghosts. It looked like one of those fairy-tale monasteries you find in Syria or Greece, built high on a cliff. Time, age and memory had sanctified the mine too, as it clung to the wilderness serenely.

  The last note in the diary of my stay in the St Elias mountains is a quotation from an artist, Juan Varela Simo:

  The light, this is my remembrance of Alaska. In Alaska every moment is the right time to paint, and the constant light of summer, every hour of the day and night, softly bathing the landscape and revealing the tiniest details of every leaf and every piece of stone. Secondly, the silence; the forests were a true description of the word silence. Just like entering a European cathedral, one feels overwhelmed by the high commanding tree trunks, like the columns of a church . . . the light comes from the treetops as if sifted by the polychrome windows of the cathedral.

  And into the middle of all, the sound. The splash of an eagle catching a salmon in the creek, the thunder of another piece of glacier ending its way along the ice tongue. The sudden chat of a jay! Trying to catch the sense of wilderness, this is the task for a lifetime . . .

  Churchers, Birchers and Searchers

  I had convinced myself that I had conquered my fear of flying in a small aircraft until the arrival of our Australian pilot to fly us back to Chitina. She was a diminutive lady, so small in fact that having instructed us how best to stow our baggage she packed two cushions onto the pilot’s seat to enable her more easily to work the steerage pedals and reach the instruments.

  I was already sweating nervously as the small Piper Cherokee blasted down the runway, but the amount of crosswind buffeting we took before we levelled out must have pumped blood beads onto my forehead. Our pilot had spent some years flying supplies to outback farmers back home and had come to Alaska for a change of terrain, and to improve her flying skills. I wished she had stayed in her own outback, or at least improved her abilities with someone else on board. Flying into the wind forced the engine to scream with effort, and I was exerting huge efforts of my own part not to scream back at it. But for everyone else’s sake, and my own ego, I acted cool and unperturbed. Fortunately I had a camera hanging round my neck, and when I felt panic rising I lifted it to my face and pointed it out through the cockpit glass as if I were taking a photo. It allowed me to shut my eyes on the whole affair and quietly deep-breathe myself out of terror. The pilot was oblivious to my ruse and wanted to facilitate my photography. She would bank the plane steeply and drop several hundred feet. Every time she effected this manoeuvre I was sure I would roll out from the cockpit and freefall to oblivion. I quickly decided to dispense with the camera trick. In any case, there was no film in the machine and sooner or later the Biggles lady would become wise to the fact that the camera’
s motor was not winding. From then on I had to endure the fright, with Audrey reassuringly patting me on the shoulder as if she were comforting a child.

  From Chitina, our destination was Valdez, and thence by ferry to Whittier through Prince William Sound. In Whittier we would rejoin the main highway system and head for Anchorage, where I was going to leave Audrey and the kids. I intended to fly back to Fairbanks then make my way onwards to spend some time with a tribe of Athabascan Indians in the Arctic Circle. I had remembered Pat’s advice to get to any ferry port at least twenty-four hours before we were due to sail and to ensure we had our place confirmed and booked. Because of this imperative there was no time for dallying or sight-seeing. We had to backtrack along the road we had taken to reach Chitina then hook a hairpin left and follow another secondary road which paralleled the oil pipeline into Valdez. We made only three stops, and each of them confirmed our original impression about this area. There was almost an air of repulsion about the place, a preternatural sense that not only were you a stranger here but you were not wanted. It seemed to ooze up out of the ground, and every scenic view out of the Pequod seemed to hide something malign, something threatening, something nasty in the air, palpable yet intangible. It actually revealed itself on a few occasions during our hurried drive to the coast.

  Somewhere along the road we came upon an emporium displaying the most glorious collection of bric-a-brac, junk and the oddest curiosities imaginable. The ground outside was littered with the rusting chassis of ancient cars and flatbed trucks, what I now know from my experience with Dan were old wooden freight sleds, old tin bathtubs, parts of machinery of whose purpose I had no idea, cast-iron pots and pans, and caribou and moose antlers. Hides and the broken remains of stuffed animals festooned the porch. I couldn’t wait to get inside. Audrey warned me we had neither the time nor the space for anything I might choose to buy. She knew that such places were second heaven to me. I was addicted to them. She was all too aware that once I enter them I disappear for ages only to emerge with some hideous, obsolescent piece, my eyes glassed over with rapture.

  Inside, I poked through box after box of all kinds of everything. The place was piled to the roof with debris. Broken banjos and busted accordions littered the place; boots and snow shoes hung on the walls with hunting guns and pistols; trays of buttons and broken spectacles with full sets of dentures; the carcasses of old ham radio sets, wirelesses and old Victorian-style telephones. The list was endless and I was left to explore undisturbed. After fifteen minutes or so I began to wonder where the owner was. Just for the hell of it I wanted to know what some of the things were and what price they might be. I shouted several times, but no-one responded. I rattled and banged around the place to call attention to myself, but no-one appeared. By now Audrey was pumping the horn for me to hurry, and I was about to depart when a voice croaked behind me. I couldn’t make out what the old man had said. His voice box had obviously been corroded by more than half a century of tobacco and cheap booze. He had not bothered to wash himself or his clothes for a similar period of time. I doubted he had even removed them in days. His eyes were jaundiced and watery. He stood and looked at me as if he was sizing me up to be hung on the walls with the rest of his paraphernalia.

  ‘Just browsing,’ I said, and moved away.

  He stood and watched me for some minutes as I slowly edged myself towards the door. I didn’t want him to get the impression that I was scared, so I dawdled and fingered a few things with my back to him. I heard him shuffling up behind me. I pretended not to notice, but then, smelling him close to me, deadly silent except for his throaty breathing, I turned slowly towards him. His face was close to mine.

  ‘You want a hand?’ he asked, grinning widely and revealing the rotten stumps of his yellow teeth.

  Before I could answer his arm flashed up as if about to strike, and my eyes swung up to the hand raised above his head. Momentarily I was breathless with fear. He was holding a big jar, inside it a blueish-grey human hand floating in some clear liquid. I was too stunned to react, and pretending to be unfazed asked where in the hell he’d got it. He tilted his head sharply towards the jar, then, without moving it but darting his eyes across to me, he demanded, ‘What hand do you use?’

  ‘My right,’ I answered automatically. Then, feigning a real macho persona, I smiled at him and added with a wink, ‘But both if I have to.’

  The grisly shopkeeper shook his head and tutted aloud. ‘Pity,’ he said, then walked off into the cluttered gloom without, I was sure, any intention of returning.

  After a few moments I concluded that the old man had indeed crawled back into his shell. I returned to the Pequod, laughing to myself that the creepy old bastard was probably looking for another limb to make a matching pair.

  As we drove off, Audrey asked me if I had seen anything interesting.

  ‘Sure,’ I told her. ‘An old man tried to sell me a human hand in a glass jar.’

  She raised her eyebrows in wary disbelief.

  ‘Honestly,’ I pleaded. ‘I told him I had two pretty good ones of my own and didn’t need a spare.’

  Audrey turned away, sighing. ‘You’re so full of it, Brian Keenan.’

  I shrugged my shoulders and said no more, and Audrey got up and went back to the kids to make sure they had something to drink.

  ‘But I was right, wasn’t I?’ I asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About me having good hands!’

  Audrey yawned, and I put my good hands to use, driving as fast as the Pequod would travel.

  I could only conclude that the hand in the jar had once belonged to an injured miner from Kennicott and that it had ended up in the old man’s possession along with other things looted from the infirmary when that mine suddenly ceased to operate and the town cleared out overnight.

  Our second incident was less dramatic but most unusual. We called at a petrol station to fill up and purchase some bottles of water. The man who was sitting in the box-shaped office beside the pumps watched me approach but made no movement himself. I thought it only a little strange. On the back road we were on he would have little enough trade. I approached the window and had only asked ‘Can I . . .’ when the attendant told me to go away. It wasn’t a case of ‘Sorry, sir, we have no gas today.’ It was as plain as the surly look on the man’s face that we were not welcome.

  I was not pleased. The idea of being stuck in the arsehole of nowhere with a wife and two young children and a ferry to catch was not something I wanted to think about. But I could tell from the man’s expression that sympathy was not one of his finer points; neither did I think he was open to any kind of persuasion. A rifle propped against the door dissuaded me from letting the perverse bugger know what I thought of him, his seedy petrol station and his cowboy toy. I had not forgotten Mike’s warning about the police and murder in these parts. I climbed back into the cab and roared off.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Audrey asked.

  ‘God knows,’ I answered. ‘The crabby bastard has obviously been sucking too many lemons all day.’ It was pointless to try to explain as there was no explanation. I drove on.

  Then there was the discovery of a burned-out encampment, replete with teepees and log shelters. It had been some kind of community spread over two and a half acres, but not one of the pyramid tents or the log cabins had burned down, though there were buildings that had been razed to the ground, or as near as damn it. No natural fire spreads through any structures that are sited so far apart. The fact that they remained, blackened shells, the tents still hung with hide covers and the log buildings upright, were evidence to me that no natural catastrophe had occurred here. The fact that no-one had returned to rebuild it puzzled me, but only for a moment. The whole place just stood there in a state of semi-dereliction, begging too many questions. I would have loved to explore, but time was more pressing than my curiosity. Anyway, the sight contributed to the growing feeling that there was something unreal and uncomfortable about the pla
ce.

  We were now getting near the sea and our jump-off point in Valdez. The sky was filling up with gulls and my ornithological studies at Denali helped me to identify the occasional arctic tern halfway through their twenty-three-thousand-mile annual migration. As we neared the ocean more and more birds presented themselves. I recognized harlequin ducks and the occasional low-flying V of some species of goose or swan that reminded me of Pat and Mary’s debate on the Chena. Trumpeter swan or Canada or snow goose – it made no difference to me. But they did serve to remind me that where I was heading I would be alone, without the comfort of my own birds-of-a-feather.

  I was beginning again to sense the omnipotence of water in the landscape we were driving through. As the fish started to move upstream to spawn they triggered havoc in the skies, screaming birds intoxicated with the fish feast below them. Sea and river vegetation also exploded, larval life and plankton multiplied and matured at incredible speed, and fish life with it. The sock-eye and king salmon were already shaking off their sea lice and making a move; sea otters, seals and sea lions would be waiting for them out in Prince William Sound. If they made it upstream, shore birds and birds of prey such as those circling above us would be waiting to take them. And every single fish that avoided these hazards had yet to face the bear and the wolf.

  I knew now why Juan Varela Simo had worshipped the light the way he did. I did too, but I was still troubled by the sense of rejection I was feeling. I couldn’t explain it. I just had this horrible feeling that the Pequod and her crew were being chased out of the place. Something unnatural existed out there which was somehow out of sync with the light and the urgency of life. I wanted to be away from it, and I stood hard on the pedal of the Pequod.