Like flying bowling pins they came around the bend of the river at lightning speed. I rose up in fitful attempts from stiffened knees. I brought the shotgun to shoulder height, pointed it vaguely in the direction of the quacking pins and blasted. The morning air shocked the boom against a small mountain opposite the river and bounced it back threefold in strength. Woody popped up and was halfway into the water looking out expectantly for the splash, his signal to do what thousands of years of genetic programming had inspired--to leap and swim that river with feet pumping and tail rudder straight for the feathered prize.
There was no splash. The bowling pins swept out of the picture like phantoms. Woody stood amidst the river grasses up to his knees in the water looking after the disappearing ducks as if a curtain had come down prematurely on a good movie. He turned with a look that said, “What? I’ve been doing my job hovering in the cold with you for 45 minutes? And this is what I get…” I was six foot two inches of ashamed man, ashamed by a dog cheated at the height of his birthright promise, a powerful, capable, hunting dog…looking right at me with no where to go.
I never was much of a hunter. But, the stirring I had seen inside Woody from an early age—the generations of British Isles calling, the ancestors shivering on the foggy flats in the duck blinds in pre-dawn, the anticipation, the restraint, the waiting, the coming of wings, the shotgun blast, the adrenaline rush, the great plunge into icy water, the noble duty, to rush out and bring warm feathery creatures proudly back to the praising hands of the one who feeds him had led me to try, on his behalf.
Often on beach walks I had seen him instinctively look toward ducks when they flew overhead like he was hearing some ancient siren song. Then he’d turn to me, as if I had the answer. I was not a fan of killing animals. But the look of countless eons of work and desire in those dog eyes made me attempt to serve that call inside him.
“Come on man,” I said to him as I turned to walk away up the little rise to the logging road, to the truck and a warm fire back at the red cabin. At the road, I turned back. Woody was still down below in the river up to his knees, staring at me.
Two days hence my brother Louie and his wife Franny were coming to Ketchikan. Louie had bought me my first shotgun, a Winchester 870 pump. I had been practicing at the local rod and gun club yard, hitting two out of ten skeets—on a good day. I had been training Woody with a special retriever toy that used 22 blanks and shot a hard white cylinder 75 feet out to the water. I'd make him wait, shivering with energy. When the charge exploded he would watch in absolute amazement as the white bird ascended to the sky and fell back to the ocean like an Apollo capsule returning to earth.
I'd hold him at my side by command and keep his eye on the spacecraft until it hit water. Then I’d whisper, “Woody" and he would blast off, the great leap of ages, dog-breast crashing waves and swimming unerringly to the floating capsule. He'd smack it out of the water, whip his head around immediately, paddle hard to deliver the missile to me, snorting exertion through his nostrils as he swam. He’s rise out of the water like a dripping teddy bear, shake off and then dance around the beach rocks waiting for the next blastoff. After a few months of this, I figured he was ready for the real thing. Today however, along the White river, I had failed him.
Franny and Louie and their Golden Retriever Jake arrived in Ketchikan on Alaska Airlines flight 67. I picked them up in my 21-foot Sabrecraft, the boat I had bought from my dad. The ride back from the airport was as rough as my relationship with him. The boat that had appeared in numerous recurrent dreams of mine over the years. The dream always of this very boat floating away from me, floating away from the dock. Sometimes I'd run after it. Sometimes my dad would be in it. Almost unconsciously I had bought it from him, to keep him close, I guess.
The day was sunny but blustery, 25-knot winds from the north, five-foot waves. We docked in Ketchikan—a strewn out, “industrial dump by the sea,” and made a beeline for one of Woody’s favorite hangouts, the Arctic Bar, whose logo was a couple of bears humping. Woody bopped right in and went out back to the deck and greeted his friends, any drunks who he might engage in a little game of toss the beer cap, or might give him a bite of cocktail peperoni stick. The deck of the Arctic was a special place where crunchy Alaskans sat in afternoon glinting sun, watching the fishing boats go by, having a smoke, and looking out over at the crisp outline of trees and funky homes on Pennock Island across the Tongass Narrows.
That night in my little red cabin we laid out our provisions. Franny was in the kitchen making up some food for the hunting trip. Jake was busy eating Woody's dog chow. Every time Woody went near his bowl Jake would shove him out of the way and gobble up as much as he could. Woody accepted such impudence with a kind tolerance, a Taoist gracefulness of being the guest in one's own home. Louie, quiet as usual, his six-foot sturdy frame and dark brows concentrating on a task. He had the shotguns out cleaning them. Franny was pouring water from the Jerry Jug on the kitchen sink.
Water for the red cabin came from a mile away, a creek that came down from the mountains behind town. She was a countrywoman. Blond, pretty, without an ounce of fat on her body, thin limbs and strong—a worker. And she was six month pregnant with her first child, a kid they’d name Jeff and whom I called Goober. As she hefted the Jerry Jug back to the floor Jake and Woody began wrestling, tumbling over and lying next to each other boxing and clashing teeth. This felt good to me, a rare moment of family. For two years I had been diving deeper and deeper into solitude, just Woody and me.
The next morning woke cold. I had slept on the floor of a small side room shivering in my sleeping bag. I went out to the main room with its bare wood floor, simple in all respects. The main window to the beach was fogged over by the breaths of Franny and Louie and two dogs. Franny was lying on her stomach on the bed looking through a place in the window she had cleared off. A large eagle sat on the beach. His white head gleamed, his eye clear in the morning light. I made coffee, Louie fired up the woodstove. Franny, Louie and I stood looking out the window letting the coffee warm our hands and insides. The morning waves were midnight blue and crested with snowy tops that splashed in the sunlight.
Then no more than sixty feet out from us the ocean exploded. Two killer whales rose like nuclear missiles, full bodies leaping out of the water and crashing in slow motion majesty, waves rolling over the reef like a dam had broke.
I yelled and whooped. Louie said Whoa! Franny hooted. Woody and Jake popped up ready and we all tore out of the cabin running down to the beach. There were fifteen to twenty whales in all, a large pod coming along the reef, like piano keys rising, their ebony flukes glistening in the morning sun. Another two cetaceans leaped in front of us, towering ten feet above our heads. Woody and Jake ran like madmen around and around in circles. We ran down the beach alongside them, our little yells and hoops swallowed in the great percussive blasts of air that blew through gargantuan slick-valved blowholes. Giant spumes of whale breath mist formed cones in the air and disappeared like snow blown off trees in a wind. We stopped where the beach sands turned to rocks and watched the Goliath's pass, the wolves of the sea, their great submarine bodies disappearing down the coast.
We took it as a momentous sign of good fortune and spent the morning expectantly packing for our trip—to a lake on Prince of Whales Island to stay in a rented Forest Service cabin—to hunt for ducks. After everything was packed up in the truck. Louie brought out a little wooden sign he had made and painted in funky white letters. He hung it down from the little shed I had built on the back of the pickup to cover the dogs and our gear in the rain. We went off down the road in the beat up 67 Chevy, with a sign from the back swinging over Woody and Jake’s head that read: Trucka-de-la-Ducka.
“How's the spare tire,” Louie asked? Louie always worried about flats. He was an engineer by trade, a brilliant inventor really; his mind always on goals, considering the details of what made things tick and considering contingencies, always planning ahead.
"Fine. Don't worry about it," I said.
We took the small ferry over to Prince of Wales Island and drove up the island as the afternoon light faded. A small misty rain began to fall. Woody and Jake were happy to have their little house with a roof in the back of the truck. Their noses were rich with the smells of forest and wolf, gasoline from chain saws, sweat, marmots, heron breath and lupine. The drive was longer than we figured. By the time we got to Sweetwater Lake, it was dusk.
We parked close to the lake and hiked down to the shore and poked around with our flashlights. No cabin. We did however find a small skiff with an Evinrude 15hp on back pulled up against the shore. There was a gunshot in the bottom. We decided to borrow it and search for the cabin by water. We loaded up all our gear and dogs and six-month pregnant mom and went cruising. I used a little cedar cone to plug up the gunshot hole in the floor. The lake was beginning to freeze over, the boat had to crunch through the ice. I sat in the bow with a flashlight poking into the dark. Woody and Jake leaned forward on either side of me bristling with life; always, to them, every moment a new adventure.
The lake was dark and silent. The trees along the shoreline were tortured and twisted and seemed to reach out at us. The sound of the Evinrude echoed from the woods and advertised our presence. It gave me a spooky feeling. It seemed we were moving through some Halloween landscape, red slavering eyes about to be caught in my flashlight beam. I took comfort in the fact I was flanked by 160 pounds of dog energy. Then we saw the cabin. It was small and dark brown and engulfed by black trees around. It really did look like some set from a horror movie. We landed at the beach in front. There was no sound but the few small waves from the boat hitting the rocky sand shore, and the clanging of aluminum as dogs and people made for the beach. We went up onto the little porch of the cabin and opened the door.
Inside, where we expected an empty cabin were guns, playing cards, sleeping bags, Campbell’s soup cans half opened, dirty clothes strewn on the floor, a kerosene lamp, a half package of beef jerky, Rainier beer cans on the wooden table, a couple more on the floor crushed in half, a Bowie knife out of its sheath. Shotgun shells. The air smelled of burnt beans and men and oil. No one spoke. It was hard to figure out what was going on, where we were. We expected the flashlight to any moment reveal a bloody body. If I felt spooked before, we all felt downright creepy now.
Then we heard a sound, like people in a fistfight from somewhere down the beach. We went back outside. We saw flashlights waving around down the shore from where we had picked up the boat. Voices were yelling at us.
"Hey, bring that boat back here. Goddammit. Hey…Shit. Bring that boat back!" Another voice joined in and then a third. We couldn't make out the words anymore, only an angry drone. It sounded like maddened bees drunken out of their minds.
We climbed into the skiff and made our way slowly back along the watery path we had made through the broken ice. Intermittently, we could hear the men screaming and an occasional "Goddammit" floated across the lake to us. Their flashlights poked at us like swords. As we got closer the beams cut across us. We could see the outlines of guns, three or four men. We were so vulnerable coming in to them from the water. Just three weeks before two people had been killed at a lake close by during a shootout at a Forest Service cabin. Drunken men, Alaska, guns. It felt to me like any moment a gunshot would ring out, a bullet ripping through my chest. I put my arm around Woody who sat next to me on the wooden seat. As we drew closer to the beach the drunken bees got louder.
“Hey,” I yelled. “We got a pregnant lady here.”
The four men had their guns ready and leveled at the ground. One kid about seventeen, skinny and chewing Copenhagen rocked his 30.06 around in small circles waiting for the slightest provocation to use it.
"What the hell you taking the boat for?" sputtered a medium size guy, with a scratchy little mustache in a camouflage hunting jacket and Ketchikan Pulp Mill cap on his bald head.
"Hey,” Louie said to him with a soothing yet fatherly inflection as the boat crushed against the sand. "If you can settle down a moment, I want to explain our mistake to you guys. I don't think we pose any threat to you gentlemen.”
Woody hopped out and went over to the biggest guy of the bunch, a tire bellied black-bearded Alaskan guy and gave him a friendly body language dog hello. The guy couldn’t help himself from reaching down, petting him and returning the greeting. He laughed slightly and told his friends to calm down. Louie explained to them what was going on. How we had come here, hadn’t found the cabin, seen the boat and had borrowed it. I told them we had the cabin reserved for the weekend. This set up a howl of protest from the guy with the crummy mustache in the pulp mill cap. “No way, we got it tonight. We got it reserved,” he said. His little mustache flicked side to side over his thin lips that were as taut as piano wires. He was in his thirties but never quite got past high school in a small town. Lot of them kind up here in Alaska.
Stupidly, I had left the receipt for the cabin back in Ketchikan. We worked out a negotiated settlement. The drunken bees would spend this last night in the cabin. We would camp out on the beach. Tomorrow the cabin would be ours.
It was a cold night camping out, but quiet, in crisp October air. Stars so rich in the sky they looked like champagne bubbles. I kept pulling Woody over on top of me to get some warmth. He shuddered every now and then and dreamed of flying birds and laughing whales.
Early the next morning a big old raven woke us up to tell stories. Then we heard the outboard coming back across the river towards us. The bees were heading our way. When they hit shore, they were pretty quiet, almost sheepish. Maybe they felt a little bad for making a pregnant woman camp out on a frozen beach. They didn't apologize, but they left quickly. The skiff turned out to belong to the Forest Service.
We motored over to the cabin, swept it out and moved in. For the next two days Louie and I cracked through the ice with the boat and tried to find ducks. But mostly we watched Woody and Jake ice skate. We sang songs and joked around and got drunk on box wine. Franny made great meals. We even shot a duck. Jake got to plunge in and bring it to us, a sad little merganser that we cooked up on a campfire and tried to eat a little of. It tasted like old sharks. We fed it to the dogs who were delighted.
By the third day, the ice had grown so thick we couldn't break through it. We decided to hike out. We packed up and walked a mile through the forest next to a small creek, beneath soft cedars and spiky spruces, avoided the spidery arms of devil’s club and picked blueberries when we could. We came out on the road a quarter of a mile from Trucka-de-la Ducka.
We piled on down the highway. It started to rain. Woody and Jake huddled together in their little condominium, dipping their noses into folds of warm fur. Louie was driving. Bumpa bumpa bump. Flat tire. There was something about my brother and flat tires. He was hexed I was sure of it. We changed the tire and drove on.
"We better not get another one, "Louie said." Just before sunset we pulled into Craig, a tough little fishing and lumbering town on the south of Prince of Wales Island at the base of surrounding hills denuded of all trees from the voracious unchecked logging in the Tongass. It faced the Pacific Ocean. If you could look far enough across the harbor you might see the fishing fleet in Yokohama. We checked into a hotel. The next morning we would have to make the two-hour drive to catch the ferry in Hollis to take us to Ketchikan.
We put Jake and Woody into the front of the Chevy and walked up the street toward the Hill Bar, a frame building that looked like an oversized house painted pink with gargantuan deer horns—maybe dinosaur’s horns—presiding over the front door. As we walked down the muddy street Jake and Woody sat behind in the truck like Pharaohs, motionless with intense eyes beaming onto us, dog minds full of miscomprehension, serious long nosed faces arrested in noble indignation: "How could you possibly be walking away from us? You obviously didn't mean to forget us? How could you possibly go somewhere without taking us?"
The Hill Bar was a big dark wood place. You smelled the residue of a thousand weekend fights, blood and bad beer ground into the wood floor, and swashed out each morning with an old mop. We picked a table over on the side. Louie went up and got some beers. Out the window we could see the big gray door of the day's coffin ready to close as the clouds lost their light. Seiners at the dock had turned on their 1000-watt quartz lamps and turned the dock into a Hollywood set. As Louie sat back down with the round of four-dollar beers we started to laugh about the adventures of the past three days.
A shadow arose over the table. I looked up to my left to find this enormous dark wall standing there, this huge man like a three hundred pound sack of black beans, looking down directly at Franny. She sat at the end of the table on the opposite side from me, Louie beside her. Our conversation dwindled under the gaze of the dark leviathan before us. Maybe he was the guy who killed the dinosaur over the door. His head was the size of a large and spoiled pumpkin. Surrounding the pumpkin was thick hair so black it seemed stolen from the darkest fibers of the earth. He was a walking black hole. He could block out the sun with a fist. He had a fierce mustache and beard like black steel wool. We couldn't see his lips, just a dark maw where his mouth was supposed to be.
"The abyss," he said, his voice slowly rumbling out from the catacombs of his mountainous body. The abyss. That's all he said. Then he sat down. I had to move over to accommodate him. He took up two thirds of the table. He stared at Franny with a hunger. She returned his stare not showing any fear but rather disinterest, like she wasn't convinced he existed.
The abyss spoke again. "The pretty bird flies in the petrified air.” He spoke like some dark prophet. "Everything is frozen like steel,” he said. “A man works. And the workin’ man is kept down. Little men fall. Legs crossing the river stumble. We step on the bodies to survive.” The abyss waited for this to sink in.
"Well yeah, it’s like that isn't it," I said in a half joking tone trying to befriend the dark wall next to me. “And sometimes we take a swim ourselves." He turned slowly towards me acknowledging my existence for the first time. He looked at me the way a man might look down on a fly on the table just before slamming its guts with a big palm. His forearms were bigger around than my neck.
“Hey he was only kidding,” Louie said, deflecting the dark wall's attention away from me. “He didn't mean anything by it.”
The wall looked at Louie and then over to Franny. He towered over her. She looked like a small deer caught in the headlights. I wasn't afraid for her though. I knew if it really came down to it—if Franny got threatened and fired up—she could stare down a brown bear. What's more, she’d make a huge scene and a posse would be at her side in no time, a dozen strangers ready to defend her. I wasn't so confident about my chances though, or Louie's for that manner. Subterranean danger seeped from the pores of this dark slab of meat.
"A man can do anything he wants," he began again slowly like thick blood, "A man can work, man can search, can try to cross the great river. But always, no matter how he tries, the man comes face to face with the abyss." There was silence at the table. None of us knew where to take this.
"The abyss," he said. There is only the abyss." He looked at Louie a long time and again at Franny. Then he got up from the table, turned his back as big as the night sky and went and sat down at the bar.
Franny, Louie and I didn’t say a word. I took one more huge slug of beer and we three beat it out the door. Outside when we were safe, we couldn’t hold back laughing and we stumbled back to Trucka-de-la-Ducka. We snuck Jake and Woody into the hotel room, taking them around the back and pushing them in through the window. We all slept cozy that night and tried hard not to dream about the abyss.
The next day we got up and packed to go to the ferry. To our astonishment and dismay, Trucka-de-la-Ducka had another flat tire. Impossible! Louie, for all his gifts and talents and attributes in life has one terrible karma to bear. In some prior life he must have run around loosening up wheels on chariots before the big races in old Rome or something. I never get flat tires; for three years not one—and in one sixteen hour period we had two.
We had just enough time to get to the Hollis ferry with about twenty minutes to spare. I set out to jack the truck up and Louie took the other flat and went off down the street to find somebody to fix it. It was 8AM on a Sunday. I wasn’t feeling hopeful. Maybe we would get stuck in the abyss after all. Louie was lucky enough to find a little auto repair shed. He beat on the door of an adjoining apartment until a guy opened it. The guy assessed the damage and reported, "Them's are split rim tires. I can't touch those."
"Who can?” Louie asked.
“Well maybe try JD around the corner."
JD turned out to be one of the few experts in the world on split rim tires in Craig at 8:10 am on a Sunday. Took him twenty minutes and we had us a tire. We put it back on, waved good-bye to Craig and the Abyss and hauled across the island as fast as Trucka-de la-ducka could barrel us. Woody and Jake stood on opposite sides of the truck, their noses pointed forward, eyes blinking back the wind, joy and exuberance everywhere reading the day’s clues and happenings through hyper sensitive noses at fifty miles an hour. The absolute freedom of it all. We made the Hollis ferry with five minutes to spare.
