Alaska (153 page)

When they reached the closed end of the valley, Jeb looked back and saw one of the loveliest sights of his hunting career: a herd of more than ninety nannies and their kidsnot a billy in sight grazing on rocky slopes interspersed with strips of succulent grass. One view like this, with nannies watching as their kids frolicked in bright sunlight, coats gleaming white, horns a jet-black, and the mountains looming protectively overhead, was worth a lifetime of hunting. 'Marvelous,' Jeb whispered as they drew closer to the herd, but then his hunting instinct prevailed: 'Where are the billies?'

'Hiding by themselves, even higher up,' and although he was fifteen years older than Jeb, Markham led the way out of the goat-filled valley and up a steep climb which would place them high on the flanks of Mount Wrangell, a thousand glacier-covered feet above the nannies.

'The trick with billies,' Markham explained for the third time, since Jeb had shot nothing on his previous two trips in search of goats, 'is to get well above them, because they keep looking for trouble from below, and this way we can get the drop on them.'

The tactic did not work, not that day, for the billies, who traveled in twos and threes after the rutting season ended in December, easily detected them and moved well beyond rifle range. Seeing them go, Markham said: 'Strange, isn't it? In season they fight one another furiously. Great gouges with those sharp horns, to the death if necessary. But when the

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passion wanes, old friends. Three weeks fighting and mating, forty-nine weeks traveling about buddy-buddy.'

'I wish some of them would buddy-buddy over my way.'

'By the way, Jeb, when does your own mating season come on track?'

As they trudged down the valley past the wonderful gathering of snow-white mothers and kids, Jeb said: 'I used to invite some pretty fine women up for the weekends at Dartmouth.'

'You mean girls?'

'The kind I invited didn't like to be called girls anymore. They made that very clear: ”You're men, not boys. We're women, not girls.”'

'Very tough to live with a girl like that. I've watched.'

'They're the only kind fellows like me would want to live with,' Jeb said, and Poley laughed: 'It ain't never easy, son. Regardless of what the current rules might be, it ain't never easy.'

'You divorced?'

'Not on your life! That way lies bankruptcy. My wife lives in Los Angeles, goes to cultural affairs at USC, and this may shock you, but she also takes care of our money.'

'They tell me at Prudhoe that you're making a killing on the North Slope.'

'Eskimos need guidance. They deserve the best advice they can get, and I provide it.'

'Like bond issues and proxy fights and lobbying in Congress?'

'If the United States says ”Stop eating walrus blubber. It's time to move into the modern world,”somebody has to show them how to make the move.'

They dropped the subject, and in the two remaining days, during which they never came close to a billy but did remain in contact with the nannies and kids, it was not reopened, leaving Jeb as uninformed as he had been when the hunt started, but as they packed to await the plane that would carry them back to Anchorage, Poley said: 'Jeb, you could do me and yourself a big favor. Vladimir Afanasi has asked me to come up to Desolation Point and sort out the problems in his village corporation.

I simply haven't the time, but I owe Vlad a lot. Would you go up and see what needs doing?' Jeb said: 'I'd like to see that place again. Maybe get me my polar bear.

Looks almost impossible to bag a mountain goat.'

'One problem, Jeb. I never charge Afanasi for the help I give him. He's sort of the charity that keeps me decent. And I don't want you to charge him, either. But of course, a lawyer can't work for nothing, so I'll pick up your tab,' and 936

as the plane flew over the majestic Matanuska Glacier on its way to Anchorage, Markham wrote out a first check for ten thousand dollars.

IN THE EARLY YEARS OF ALASKAN STATEHOOD, SEVERAL

contrasting groups of American citizens trekked northward in search of adventure and wealth. With the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, roustabouts from Oklahoma and Texas flooded in to earn enormous salaries on the edge of the Beaufort Sea, a frozen arm of the Arctic Ocean. Notable were the lawyers and businessmen like Poley Markham and Jeb Keeler, who often spoke of taking up permanent residence but never did. In 1973, when President Nixon authorized the building of a gigantic pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valde'z, construction workers poured into Fairbanks, from where they worked north and south to construct this miracle of engineering. And now the Flatch family of Matanuska entered the picture.

Son LeRoy, the aviator, was eager to become involved, but just when the oil companies at Prudhoe were sending out urgent calls for local planes to serve as couriers spare parts needed at once, important visitors to be ferried in from Fairbanks, evacuation of an injured roustabout Leroy had the bad luck to crack up his postwar Waco YKS-7, so he could not participate in the bonanza.

When, in a degree of panic, he looked about to see what planes suitable for work in Alaska were available and he insisted upon one fitted with the revolutionary improvement of permanent snow skis through the middle of which wheels could be let down the best deal he could find was a new fourseater Cessna-185 at the frightening cost of $48,000, a price far beyond his means. Gathering his family, he said: 'I've got to have the Cessna. We're losing a fortune every day.' His wife suggested that he try to arrange a loan from a bank, but he feared that this would be impossible, since he had just cracked up his only collateral, and it looked as if the combined savings of the elder Flatches, LeRoy and his wife, Sandy, his sister, Flossie, and her husband, Nate Coop, would fall far short of the down payment.

But now the miracle of Prudhoe Bay intervened, for so many workmen were required at the site that even Elmer Flatch, crippled and in his seventies, was dragooned to serve as a paymaster at the oil rigs, Sandy Flatch was given a job as liaison in Fairbanks, assuring that workmen and their materials moved promptly to Prudhoe, while Flossie and her nature-loving husband received the best jobs of all.

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”The head man came to see us particular,' Nate explained. 'He'd been hunting at our lodge and remembered the way Flossie understood bears and moose, and he offered us a deal in a way you'd never guess. He said: ”Nature freaks are beginning to hammer us over the future of the caribou. They say if we build that pipeline right down the middle of their emigration routes, the caribou will be cut off from their natural habitats. They'll all d
ie.
”He wants us to work with the naturalists from the university to see what can be done to help the caribou.' They were to start work immediately, and the various Flatches could save practically their entire earnings because food, lodging and transportation to the job would be paid in addition to their wages.

So it became a simple matter for LeRoy to borrow from all of them, fly down to Seattle, pick up his bright new Cessna-185 with permanent skis and retractable wheels, and fly it back to Fairbanks, where he became the busiest courier in the Prudhoe operation.

With all maintenance and fuel costs covered by the company, he netted $165,000 the first year.

One night as Hilda Flatch totted up her family's income, which she banked for them, she broke into laughter, and when her husband asked: 'What's so funny?' she replied: 'Remember how they warned us when we were starving in Minnesota? ”If you go to Alaska, you'll never grow nothin', and the polar bears'll eat you”?'

Salaries like these lured workmen from all over the United States, and Fairbanks was filled with the babble of strange accents as gape-mouthed laborers from Nebraska and Georgia paid $12.50-plus for a breakfast of one cup of coffee, one pancake, one egg and one strip of bacon. Dinner, of course, ran into the high twenties. Not many of these hastily imported workmen would remain in Alaska when the twin Golcondas of the oil field and the pipeline ended, but those who did remain added enormously to the vitality and excitement of Alaskan life. They tended to be outdoorsmen who loved the Alaskan patterns of life and served as the twentieth century version of the frontiersmen. They were welcome additions.

Oil riggers, bulldozer drivers, welders for the pipeline, lawyers with vivid imaginations such men continued the tradition of the gold-field immigrant, the daring men who built the first towns and the sailors who served on the Bear

under Mike Healy, and once more Alaska created the impression that it was a land for men. But there were also women who sought their fortunes in this wild frontier, just as in the old days: nurses, wives, dance-hall girls, fugitives like Missy 938

Peckham, and a few daring souls who simply wanted to see what Alaska was like.

In these years one young woman in particular experienced the lure of Alaska, and her coming north set many wheels in motion.

A FLAMBOYANT MAYOR OF NEW YORK ONCE OPPOSED

censorship by saying 'No girl was ever seduced by a book,' but in 1983 a young woman in Grand Junction, Colorado, was deceived by a magazine cover. Kendra Scott, twenty-five years old, was teaching her geography class about Eskimos of the Far North, when Miss Deller, the librarian, came to her room with two books Kendra had requested: 'I've checked these out in your name. You can keep them till April.'

Kendra thanked her, since good material on Eskimos was not easy to come by, and Miss Deller added: 'And I've brought you our latest copy of the National Geographic, the February issue, but you can have it for only two weeks. We have another request for it.'

Since Kendra already knew what was in the two books, she looked first at the magazine, and when she did, she was lost forever. On the cover was one of the most ravishing pictures of childhood she had ever seen. Against the white background of a blizzard in northern Alaska, a little girl or it might have been a boy, for only the eyes were visible was walking into the blowing snow, covered from head to toe in the colorful dress of her people: big fur slippers, blue denim trousers double thick, colorful smock edged with fur, bright beaded belt, two caps, one of white wool, the bigger one of heavy quilted corduroy edged in wolverine fur to repel ice and snow, and an enormous brown knitted scarf wrapped around her head three times. Her hands were protected in brightly decorated mittens, and Kendra could only guess that underneath the smock she must have had three or four more layers of clothing.

But what made the child adorable, and Kendra had convinced herself that it had to be a girl, was the resolute manner in which she pressed forward into the storm, her little body fighting the blizzard, her determined eyes, all that could be seen, staring ahead at the goal to be achieved despite the driving snow. It was a glorious portrait of childhood, a depiction of man's will to survive, and Kendra's heart went out to that child battling the elements.

And for a protracted spell she was not in a comfortable elementary school in Grand Junction but on the northern

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slopes of the arctic, and her class did not consist of middleclass white American children with a few interesting Mexicans thrown in, but a group of Eskimos living in darkness half the year and in bright sunlight nearly twenty-four hours a day the other half. Kendra had been taken prisoner by a little fur-bound child on a magazine cover and she would never again be the same.

For some time she had been aware that she ought to change, that her life was heading into such sterility that unless she made a radical shift, she was destined for a desolate, picayune existence. The responsibility was hers, that she admitted, but her mother, a distraught and frightened woman who lived with Kendra's father in Heber City, Utah, some thirty miles northeast of Provo, was a contributing factor. The Scotts were not Mormons, but they shared the stern discipline which that religion imposed, and when Kendra graduated from high school they enrolled her, without any input from her, at the respectable university in Provo, Brigham Young, where young men were taught to be FBI agents and young women to be God-fearing and obedient wives.

At least, that's what Mrs. Scott believed.

'The good part about Brigham Young,' Mrs. Scott told her neighbors in Heber City, 'is that Grady and I can drive down most weekends to see how Kendra's doing.' And this they did, wanting to know what classes she was taking, whether her professors were 'decent, God-fearing men,' and checking particularly on her roommates, three girls with such disparate backgrounds that the elder Scotts had to be suspicious of at least two of them. One was a Salt Lake City Mormon, so she was all right, but another was from Arizona, where anything could happen, and the third from California, which was even worse.

But Kendra assured her parents that the two outsiders, as Mrs. Scott called them, were more or less respectable and that she, Kendra, would not allow them to corrupt her. This phrase,

corrupt her,

loomed large in the Scott set of values, for Mrs. Scott saw the world as an evil place, more than three-quarters of whose citizens were bent on corrupting her daughter, and she was morbidly suspicious of any men who hove within her daughter's orbit: 'I want you to tell me about any man who approaches you, Kendra. You simply must be on your guard against them, and a young girl is not always the best judge of a young man's character.'

So during her weekly visits to Brigham Young, Mrs. Scott pumped Kendra for a detailed report on any young man whose nam6 surfaced during her long interrogations of her daughter: 'Where's he from? How old is he? Who are his 940

parents? What business are they in? Why is he studying geology? What do you mean, he spent last summer vacation in Arizona? What was he doing in Arizona?' After eight or ten such grillings Kendra summoned up the nerve to ask her mother: 'How were you ever able to find a husband, if you had such endless suspicions?' and Mrs. Scott saw nothing impertinent in the question, for she felt this was a major problem for any young woman: 'Your father was raised in a God-fearing family in South Dakota and he was not contaminated by going to any college or university.' Kendra thought: Nor was he contaminated by anything else like books or newspapers or talk in a corner saloon. But as soon as she voiced this opinion to herself, she was ashamed of it.