Buried Alive! (5 page)

Chaz looked startled. “Absolutely not—I didn't touch 'em. That's exactly how I found them, Dr. Landon, and that's a fact.”

“Do you have any thoughts on how two males were that close?”

Shrugging, Chaz said, “I'm not a scientist, so I have no idea about the male part. They all look the same to me.”

A look clouded Olivia's face. She seemed to be turning something over in her mind.

“I wish I could be of more help,” Chaz rushed on. “Thing is, the last year of my life has been dedicated to the wolverines. No offense to grizzlies and the like, but the grizz and the wolf have more people protecting them than you can shake a stick at. Not the wolverines. I don't know, maybe it's their feistiness that made me fall in love with them. So to find two of them dead….” He paused, then awkwardly cleared his throat. “Dr. Landon, you can count on me to help in any way I can,” he finished quickly. “I just wish I could help you more. It's really a mystery.”

“I appreciate that,” Olivia said, nodding. “Well, have fun mushing, kids.”

“We will,” Ashley answered excitedly.

“That's the ticket. Ready?” Chaz cried. “Let's go!”

Feeling a quick tug on the line, the dogs leaned into their harnesses and, with a burst of energy, exploded onto the snow-covered tundra.

C
haz yelled out, “Gee,” and the sled turned seamlessly to the right. Jack could feel the arctic wind in his face; it turned his cheeks numb with cold. Blake had been right, this was like flying.

Beside him trees whizzed by in quick succession, some of them at fantastic angles. Beyond the trees, in the distance, Jack saw mountains sculpted by ice and water and wind. The tops of the mountains themselves were barren and silent looking under their shroud of white. Jagged peaks rolled one into another, as if multiplied by mirrors.

“See those trees growing all crazy-like?” Chaz asked, pointing to a stand of black spruce. “Around here, that's what we call a drunken forest. Seems like they're just gonna topple over.”

“I think they look like the trees out of a Dr. Seuss book,” Ashley said. “Look at how they bend toward the ground, with those big bush things on the top. Those trees are weird.”

“That they are. And you never know what's hidden in there, just watching you glide by. Guess what I saw when I was out mushing two weeks ago,” Chaz rattled on, not waiting for an answer. “I saw me a grizz. Yes I did. I was mushing the Lower Savage, only then it was just me and five dogs when out from the trees comes this big old bear. Kenai and Sasha got real nervous, but I just gave them the command. I said, ‘On by!' To a sled dog, that means don't-you-go-and-get-distracted-by-anything-you-just-keep-right-on-a-going. And that's exactly what they did. That bear was no more than 30 feet away.”

“So did it run after you?” Nicky asked.

“Nah. I was lucky, though, 'cause grizz'll go for a dog team. My heart was a-pumpin' like crazy, but we made it. I thought to myself, ‘Chaz, you just dodged a bullet. This must not be your day to die.'”

“Wow,” Jack said, trying to imagine it. “Mom told me that wolverines are called little bears. Have you ever seen a live one? A wolverine, I mean.”

“Heck no. I've seen their tracks, though. And I've definitely seen the damage they cause. But it's a rare thing to spot one roaming in the wild. I haven't been that lucky. And to find two dead ones—well, that sure was strange.”

“Why'd you start the Wolverine Rescue Program?”

Chaz shrugged his small frame. “Like I said to your folks, I like how fierce they are and how they make their own way. Plus, that wolverine—he don't take nothin' from no one. Some even say they're mystical. Way back a friend of mine got tired of a wolverine that kept slashing up his food cache—swore he'd take care of it. I warned him it was bad luck to kill 'em 'cause natives say they're magic. But my friend, he did it anyway. Yep, he shot that wolverine dead.”

“That's stupid. If it was me, I could have rigged my cache to keep the wolverine out,” Nicky bragged.

“So, you know what happened to my friend who shot the wolverine?”

“What?” all of them asked.

“Later that same day, my friend's Jeep rolled over, and he was killed.” Chaz waited a beat before saying, “My point is it pays to respect the ancient ones. I put that story on my Web site. Lots of donations rolled in because of it. Folks really liked the magic angle.”

Nicky scoffed, “I don't believe in magic. You said you dodged a bullet, and your friend didn't. Must have been his day to die.”

Chaz's voice became flinty. “Must have been. You just never know, do ya?”

They fell silent. The trees disappeared, replaced by vast, open tundra that glittered in the sun like white sand. The dogs seemed to chew up the earth, one glassy mile after the other, as they followed Moose Creek toward Wonder Lake. Ashley asked about the dogs, so Chaz told them that the two dogs directly behind the leads were called swing dogs, then the next three pairs were team dogs, followed up by a pair of wheel dogs. Each did a different job, working in tandem to keep the sled sliding across the snow.

After an hour on the sled, Chaz seemed to run out of things to say, which was fine with Jack. In the silence that followed, other thoughts—the ones Jack had tried to push down—began to nibble at him like termites. First came Nicky and his fantastic story. It didn't make sense, not any of it. Why all the lies about his dad being a spy? What was Nicky doing here? And why, Jack wondered, was Ashley so ready to believe him? He wished he could just give himself over to the wind and the snow crystals that stung at his skin and get lost in all the open beauty unrolling before him like a silken scroll. Instead he kept returning to what Nicky had announced under the flash of the aurora borealis. “You don't know how crazy I can be,” he'd told them. Well, Jack thought he knew.

Nicky was a crazy punk, and the worst part was that Ashley couldn't see it. Unbidden, Jack's mind flashed to the picture of Nicky with his arm around Ashley. Shaking his head he tried to get the image out of his mind, but he couldn't jar it free. She said she liked him. His own sister had been fooled by Nicky's wild story—how dumb was that? Maybe she didn't think it mattered if you let someone spin a CIA fantasy, but it mattered to Jack. And, he had to admit, it wasn't just that he cared about truth. The real reason ran deeper.

It was the fact that his sister had chosen to trust this strange kid over him—that was at the core of it. Even though Jack had sounded a clear warning, his sister still believed the punk. Nibble, nibble, nibble; the irritation kept biting him. His cheeks were frozen from the spray of snow the dogs kicked up as they ran. Jack wished they could go back to Kantishna. A necropsy couldn't be that bad. Besides, no one said they had to watch!

Suddenly, Ashley cried, “Up ahead—that huge mountain—is that Denali?”

“It is,” Chaz answered.

“Oh my gosh, it's amazing!”

There, to the south, rising like an enormous crown, was a massive mountain with a peak that seemed to scrape the very bottom of the sky. Jack had been born and raised in Jackson Hole where the Tetons had always dazzled him, but this—this was almost too much to take in. The sky was a clear turquoise that framed the mountain like a jeweler's velvet. At the base of the mountain, a long stretch of clouds hovered over the foothills in an endless streamer, bisecting the view. Just beyond, emerging from the snow, was the jewel of Denali, its scalloped ridges tinted in shades of palest blue and silver-white as if light itself had carved the facets. It was immense, brilliant, incomprehensible.

Jack breathed it in, instantly glad he'd been here to see it, Nicky or no Nicky.

“Denali is 20,320 feet high—the highest mountain on the North American continent,” Chaz told them. “It is also called Mount McKinley. In fact, that's its official name, but everyone around here calls it Denali. Sometimes, if you get here on a clear day, you can see the mountain reflected in Wonder Lake.”

“Just look at it,” Ashley said, her voice reverent, while Nicky added, “That is one big mountain.”

Ashley turned to Chaz. Her stocking cap had been pulled almost to the bridge of her nose, but a few tendrils of hair had escaped. The wind blew them over her cap like dark, curling shoots. “You know so much about Denali—have you lived in Alaska all your life?”

“Nooo. I'm originally from the lower 48. About five, no, six years ago, I decided it was time to get away from all the city life, so I came up here. See, I thought the city was wild, but I had no idea what Alaska could dish out. Almost died my first winter. Now I got snowshoes and a shovel and candles and all kinds of stuff packed in my sled, 'cause the backcountry will kill you if you're not prepared. Even carry a gun, just in case I tangle with an animal that won't let me go my way. One thing I know, this place is wilder than the city.”

Ashley asked, “Where were you from?”

“I was born in Texas, but the years before Alaska I spent in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, to be exact.”

Jack felt, rather than saw, Nicky stiffen as he asked, “You lived in Philly?”

“Yeah. You're from Philly, too, aren't you?” Chaz answered coolly. His voice had become as frosted as the air. “It's amazing, huh? The world seems to be such a big place, but in the end, everybody knows everybody, right? So how'd you get from there all the way to Jackson Hole, Nicky? Did your daddy take you there?”

Jack turned to see Nicky stammer, “I…I don't know.”

“Why's that? You seem to be a pretty big kid to not know how you ended up somewhere.”

Chaz's jaw tightened as he gazed straight ahead. He had small eyes that were set deep, so deep they were hard to read, and the expression on his face was as blank as a sheet of white paper, but those eyes—they kept zeroing in on Nicky. A smile curled the edges of his lips as he asked, “So where's your dad now?”

“He's…gone.”

“Gone? Doesn't sound like much of a dad to just up and leave you.”

“My dad is none of your business!” Nicky flared.

“Nicky!” Ashley scolded, “don't be rude!”

“Stay out of this, Ashley,” Nicky snapped. “You don't have—just stay out of it!”

Leaning over the handle bow of the sled, Chaz said, “You remind me of my wolverines, kid. Fierce. Maybe a bit nasty, even. But I can deal with that. Oh, yeah, I can deal.” His gloved hand moved smoothly over his chin, like a snake. The dogs kept running, faster now, making Jack's eyes teary from the wind.

“Um, Chaz,” Ashley began, trying to change the subject, “do you know any other stories you could tell us about the wolverines?”

Chaz shook his head. “I'm fresh out of stories, kid. Why don't you ask Nicky here to tell some stories. I bet he knows a lot of them. I even bet his daddy's the kind that likes to talk, although in my experience, people who talk are sorry in the end. Am I right, Nicky?”

Nicky didn't answer. There was something very wrong here, Jack sensed. It was as if currents were running beneath the water, forces that pushed in unseen ways that were cold and deep and unfathomable. Chaz seemed to be enjoying a truth that only he and Nicky understood, and Nicky looked scared. Then Chaz yelled at his dogs, and they began to run faster still.

Ashley looked at Jack and mouthed What's going on? but he could only shrug in reply before he turned to face forward again. Even if they wanted to end this bizarre episode there was nothing they could do, not out here in this wilderness. They kept mushing along the frozen river that wound through the woods like a piece of discarded string, then onto a road, and back to the creek bed. Once again the trees thickened, a shoulder-to-shoulder army of fir trees and spruce. The riverbed forked into two main branches, one to the left, and one to the right.

“Haw!” Chaz cried. At the fork the dogs veered off to the left, and from the shadows Jack could tell they were curving to the east. They rode on, slipping past small clots of wood and hills where the snow had sheered off rock faces, past more sweeping meadows polished smooth by the wind. Clouds in the north were darkening the sky to an ominous steely gray, although Chaz seemed unconcerned as they raced on. Jack tried to convince himself that everything was going to be all right. But something deep in his gut was twisting.

“Chaz,” Ashley cried, “we're getting farther from the mountain.”

“Seems that way,” he agreed.

“Maybe we should go back.”

“We can't go back now—our fun is just starting! It's only us and the wild, wild animals. Hey, Nicky, why don't you keep an eye out for a wolverine? I heard that some guy caught one right at the base of that mountain in a trap.”

Jack corkscrewed all the way around so that he was facing Chaz, and Ashley did the same. Chaz smiled, exposing all of his teeth. “Actually, I think I'll just go ahead and tell you the truth. See, that's the problem with crime—you can't tell anyone when you've done something truly unique.” He pumped his thumb into his chest. “I'm an original. I caught those wolverines and turned tragedy into cash.” Raising his hands as if he were a criminal surrendering, he declared, “I might as well confess all the way. It was me. I dumped the wolverines.”

“What—what are you talking about?” Jack gasped.

“I got me one wolverine here, and then I caught me four more way out in the wilderness. Kept them in cages until I was ready. Nasty suckers—meaner than spit. No one will ever figure out how I did 'em in. See, I figured they might take a blood sample and check for disease or maybe poison, but I'm smarter than that. There's no poison. So five wolverines, all dead from unknown causes, found in the snow near Kantishna—the publicity was worth its weight in gold. It was exactly what my Wolverine Rescue scam needed.”

Was Chaz playing some kind of sick joke? Nicky stared straight ahead, his face stone.

Squinting, Chaz seemed to look off into the distance. “Didn't think about them being all males, though,” he added, making a clucking sound. “Your mom caught that mistake. She's pretty sharp. Well, I guarantee she won't figure out the rest. Anyway, I put pictures of those pathetic wolverines right on my Web site. Along with a bleeding-heart story, those photos really tugged on the emotions. Credit card donations poured in.”

Ashley's voice filled with horror. “Chaz?…”

But Chaz kept talking as if he were telling them a story about the weather. “Do you know how much money I already got from suckers who thought the wolverines were in trouble? Two hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Two-hundred and twenty thousand, and my plan had just barely begun. That would have been big for sure, but it's all over now, thanks to Nicky here. They called me, Nicky, right from Philly. Gave me another job to do.” Reaching over, he ruffled the top of Nicky's head. Nicky jerked away.

“You're my job now, kid.”

Jack's heart jumped. “Are you serious?” he cried. If Chaz was joking, his mind must really be twisted.

“So I had to clean out my bank account. When I'm done with you kids, I'll be headin' on down to Mexico. It's a pity, though. I really think my dead wolverine thing would have scored big.” Chaz suddenly burst out laughing. “What are you lookin' at, Jack? You look like your eyes are gonna pop right out of your head. Hey, I'm just messing with you. I wouldn't think of trapping an animal—I'm the originator of the Wolverine Rescue Program, remember?”