Alaska by James A. Michener
This time the Orient Express claimed no Japanese victims.
WHEN KENDRA SCOTT RETURNED TO DESOLATION POINT after her unpremeditated visit to Jeb Keeler's Anchorage apartment, she became vaguely aware that a newcomer had moved into an abandoned shack north of the village, where he was said to be living in squalor with thirteen beautifully trained malamute and husky sled dogs. The rumors were correct.
He was one more of that inexhaustible breed of young American men, graduates of good colleges like Colgate, Grinnell and Louisiana State, who had been trained to take over their fathers' businesses, but who quit after five dreary years, leaving both an excellent job and often a wife just as superior, to try their luck racing sled dogs in the wilds of Alaska. You found them on the outskirts of Fairbanks, Talkeetna and Nome, working like slaves unloading barges or other cargo during the summer shipping season to earn the huge salaries that they spent in the winter feeding their fifteen or sixteen dogs. They usually refrained from shaving; sometimes they picked up a little money offering dogsled excursions to tourists; and quite often adventurous girls, from colleges like Mount Holyoke and Bryn Mawr, who also wanted to experience the arctic worked as waitresses and moved in with them for longer or shorter periods.
The dream of each of these men, and they numbered in the scores, was to run the Iditarod, not to win it, for God's sake, just to complete the course which was rightfully considered the world's most demanding organized competition. In the depth of the arctic winter, with blizzards howling out of Siberia and temperatures down to minus-forty, some sixty odd intrepid dogsled drivers left Anchorage and ran a punishing course to Nome, a distance which was officially stated as 1,049 miles1,000 miles plus the 49th state but which actually varied between eleven and twelve hundred miles over incredibly tough terrain. 'It's like running from New York City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, before there were roads,' Afanasi told Kendra, 'and contrary to what many think, the driver does not usually catch a ride on the rear runners of his sled. He runs behind it four-fifths of the time.'
Kendra could not understand why any sane person would dump so many thousands of dollars into dog food and pay a $1,200 entry fee to be so abused, especially when first prize was only $50,000, but Afanasi said: 'I ran it when I was younger, and the glory of gliding up to that finish line, win or lose, lasts a lifetime.'
Of course, the young men from the Lower Forty-eight who came north to compete usually ran the grueling course only once; then they returned home, married, and resumed managerial work in their family business. But behind their desks, as they grew older, hung that framed certificate proving that in 1978 they competed in the Iditarod, and finished and that separated them from the local athletes who had shot a hole in one at the local course in 1979.
The young man who had moved into the shack at Desolation, wanting to give his dogs the experience of the real arctic, was in many respects a typical example of these intruders Stanford University graduate, thirty years old, five years of work in the family business, divorced from a socialite wife who, hearing that he had decided to emigrate to the Arctic Circle with thirteen dogs, told her friends that he suffered from a mental disorder but in certain important respects he was unique. First, he was Rick Venn, scion of the powerful family that controlled the Ross & Raglan interests in Seattle; second, of all the newcomers, he alone had historic ties with Alaska; and third, because he was the grandson of Malcolm Venn and Tammy Ting, he had Tlingit and Chinese blood, which made him part Native. His complexion was so dark and his features so reminiscent of Asia that he could easily pass as another of the half-Russian, half-Native young men of Alaska.
He also differed from the others from the Lower Forty-eight in that whereas he kept his cabin as chaotic as theirs, he did maintain his personal appearance much as he would have in Seattle: he shaved; he cut his hair with his own barber's shears; and he washed a tubful of clothes once a week. But he was like the others in the affection he showed for his dogs and the loving care with which he worked them in the sand when there was no snow, in the deepest drifts when there was.
Polar was a seven-year-old husky with a strain of wolf from some generations back and, more recently, some malamute. He was not overly big, several of the other dogs in the team being larger, but he was unusually intelligent and the unchallenged leader among them. Perfectly attuned to his master, Polar quickened to Rick's commands.
Sled dogs were trained to turn to the right at 'gee,' to the left at 'haw,' while half a dozen other calls each carried a particular meaning. But Polar had the remarkable ability to anticipate Rick's intent almost before he shouted a command, and would deftly lead the other dogs in just the right direction.
Though they ran well as a team, it was not uncommon when the dogs were waiting impatiently in their harnesses for two of them to leap at each other, fangs bared, and if someone didn't stop them quickly, the confrontation could rapidly degenerate into a savage, bloody fight. Of course, if Rick was present, he halted the nonsense immediately, but if he wasn't, Polar stepped back, uttered a deep snarl, and the dogs broke off.
He also nipped at the heels of any dog he suspected of malingering, and it was always he who leaped forward with greater energy when Rick called for more speed. He was an exceptional dog, and when the snow arrived he found joy in leading his team on ten- and twenty- and even thirty-mile training runs across the tundra to the east.
There being no tourist restaurants hi Desolation, no adventurous young waitress from the Lower Forty-eight had moved in with Rick, but when he brought his team into the village for an exhibition on sand, and when the crowd had gathered, he noticed Kendra Scott standing near Vladimir Afanasi. He recognized her as the kind of young woman he would probably enjoy knowing, so after the demonstration he sought out Afanasi and asked who she was.
'Best teacher we've had in a long time. Comes from Utah.'
'A Mormon?'
'Maybe so. Maybe that's why she wanted to explore the north.'
'Could I meet her?'
'I don't see how you could avoid it.'
So one sunny afternoon Afanasi took Kendra out to the tumbledown shack, where she started to laugh as soon as she stepped from Afanasi's truck, for a rather neatly painted signboard proclaimed THE KENSINGTON KENNELS, as if this were an expensive boarding place for pampered dogs. When the owner stuck his head out the door to ascertain the cause of laughter, Kendra saw a good-looking, neat young man, somewhat older than herself, dressed in blue coveralls: 'What's going on?'
'I like your sign. You board dogs?'
'Sure do. Thirteen of them,' and he pointed to where his huskies and malamutes were tethered, each to his own stake, on a short length of chain which prevented him from molesting the other twelve.
'For the Iditarod?'
'You've heard of it?'
'You must be crazy to attempt a race like that,' and he said: 'I am,' but it was not until he left his shack and came forth to shake hands that she realized how wacky he was, for across the chest of his coveralls was emblazoned the kind of motto that quixotic college students loved: REUNITE GONDWANALAND!
'What's your war cry?' she asked, and he explained that he had been a geology major at Stanford and this had been their rallying cry.
'But where is it?' and he said: 'Land mass that broke apart a quarter of a billion years ago. The South Pole was part of it, I believe,' and she said: 'You can enroll me in your crusade.'
In the following days, the more she heard about the rigors of the Iditarod, the more interested she became in the procedures whereby Rick trained his dogs, and when snow came she began to spend her Saturdays and Sundays out at the shack, bringing it into some semblance of respectability, but she avoided any romantic involvement, for she still considered herself in some vague degree engaged to Jeb Keeler. Certainly, when the young lawyer visited Desolation on business with Afanasi he practically lived at Kendra's apartment, staying until three or four in the morning. But when Rick, observing this, asked if she and Keeler were engaged, she sa
At least once a week, when the snow was adequate, Rick took her for a long training ride in his sled, and it was a magnificent experience to sit perched there, bundled in blankets, and to head off for a ten-mile run toward the frozen lakes, with Rick running behind and jumping from time to time onto the tail end of the long runners, shouting directions to Polar and encouraging the other dogs occasionally. 'I can see why the race fascinates young men,' Kendra said one day as they rested at the halfway mark.
'Not men only,' Rick said, reminding her that women older than she had won the race in recent years.
'You mean eleven hundred miles? They must be amazons,' and he corrected her: 'For this race you don't need brawn. You need brains and stamina.'
Brains were required because each racer had to arrange with some airplane pilot to drop large caches of dried salmon or other kinds of food along the way for the famished dogs as well as for himself, and the scheduling of these drops required both judgment and money. Many a newcomer spent his entire year's savings, plus money from home, merely to cover expenses for the Iditarod.
'Where'd the name come from?' Kendra asked one day, and Rick said: 'Name of an old mining camp. A trail used to run through there, and our race hits it every other year.'
For several weeks in the early days of winter Kendra existed in a kind of dream world, fixing up the shack, working with the dogs, reveling in long weekend training trips, and she began to feel that this glorious experience on the endless whitened tundra in gusty blizzards and the wonderful assurance that Rick knew what he was doing would go on endlessly. The possibility of their falling in love had not yet surfaced, for he was still gun-shy from the wreckage of his first marriage and she considered herself more or less bound to Jeb Keeler, but both she and Rick were increasingly aware that after the Iditafod, certain decisions could become inescapable. But for the moment they drifted along.
During one of their casual training trips over the snow to the south she was reminded of how close to disaster the Inupiat Eskimos of the arctic lived, for as they were coasting along quite a few miles distant from Desolation, Rick spotted an old-style earthen dwelling with wooden sidewalls and a heavy sod roof. Without thinking that they might be intruding, he shouted 'Gee!' to Polar, who instantly headed the team toward the hut. When the sled drew up before the door, Kendra realized with horror that this was where her prize student, Amy Ekseavik, had been reared and where she now lived, helping her widowed mother, for the girl appeared in the darkened doorway, glared at the dogs from beneath her heavy bangs, and then saw her teacher ensconced in blankets.
It was an icy reunion, for Amy had lost even the slight concession to humanity that she had allowed to develop under Kendra's care. She kept the visitors at arm's length, and when they asked to see her mother she said nothing, but stepped aside.
From the widow, Kendra learned that some kind of fol-de-rol had been exercised whereby the mother was supposed to be teaching her child at home, and this satisfied state law, even though good schools were available at Desolation to the north and Wainwright to the south. But it was obvious that the flame that had finally been ignited in this miraculous child in school the year before had gone out, or was sputtering in such a sickly manner that it must soon be extinguished.
Sick at heart that she had intruded upon Amy and her insoluble problems, Kendra bade the girl an awkward farewell and headed back north, her eyes filled with tears most of the way. When they stopped at one point to rest, she said to Rick: 'My heart could break. Really, it's too awful,' and she collapsed, sobbing, against his parka. When he asked what this meant, she told him of Amy's frozen arrival at school last year and her gradual thawing into one of the brightest, most promising girls of her age Kendra had ever seen: 'We may have done a dreadful thing, Rick. Stopping there and reminding her of lost worlds.' Kendra's fears were justified. Three days later, word trickled in to Desolation that Amy Ekseavik, fifteen years old and with a brilliant future, had left her home-study workbook open on the rough table in the dim light of the sod hut, taken her father's gun, stepped outside, and committed suicide while her mother slept.
THE HISTORY OF KENDRA'S FIRST YEAR NORTH OF THE Circle was surprise at local customs, attaining plateaus on which she congratulated herself: Now I understand Alaska, followed by explosions which caused her to confess: I really know nothing. But none of the big revelations were more astonishing to her than the arrival in Desolation of a tall, determined woman who lived with her family in a log cabin some two hundred miles to the east in one of the most forlorn corners of the state, where they ran a hunting lodge from which visitors made spectacular catches of fish and bagged big game.
She was accompanied by her son, and she had a remarkable proposition: 'I've been teaching my boy at home with Calvert study courses mailed from the United States since he was a child. Although it's a mite early, I think he ought to take the SATs, because I'm convinced he's college material.'
Then she introduced her son, Stephen Colquitt, six feet one inch, shy, but with eyes that darted here and there like a hawk's, absorbing everything. 'What I came to ask you ...' she explained nervously to Principal Hooker. 'We've heard good reports of Miss Scott here as a teacher who really knows how to teach math. And we wondered if she would tutor Stephen in algebra.'
Hooker fumbled: 'That would be highly irregular ... maybe impossible ... enrolling him in our school when he doesn't live in our district.'
'Oh! We didn't mean enroll him in your school. We meant we wanted special outside tutoring,' and before the principal could respond, she added: 'We'd be prepared to pay for the outside help, that is.'
'I'd not charge anything,' Kendra said. 'I'd enjoy brushing up on my own algebra.'
'And trigonometry,' Stephen added, and Kendra said: 'We'll have a fling at that too.'
The next weeks were so productive that Stephen's triumphant gallop through algebra, geometry and trig drove away somewhat her guilt about Amy's death, and one night Kendra told Afanasi and Hooker: 'What this mother accomplished with home-teaching units from Maryland is incredible. When Stephen takes the SATs, stand back, because he's going to bust the system.'
Kasm Hooker was impressed by quite a different accomplishment of the young man: 'His father played a little basketball in college and they have a regulation basket on flat land beside the river. You wouldn't believe the moves this kid knows,' In the pickup games the village held when no visiting schools were available, it was agreed that Hooker would play Colquitt one-on-one, and in the first game the boy astounded both the principal and the villagers by displaying an ability to tap the ball in on a follow-up without bringing it down to the floor for a wasteful dribble, but what evoked shouts of praise was Steve's adroit use of the double pump, in which he made believe to shoot, thus tricking Hooker into jumping to block his shot, while he, Steve, kept hold of the ball and shot just as Hooker came down and was out of position.
'Where did you learn that?' the winded principal asked during one time-out, and Steve said: 'Father has a satellite dish and I used to watch Earl the Pearl.'
But it was when Steve's SAT scores came in that everyone realized what Mrs. Colquitt had known all along. 'This kid can go to any college,' Hooker said, accustomed to scores of less than four hundred, and he forthwith dispatched letters to a variety of schools, attaching a recommendation also from the Fairbanks coach:
Kasm Hooker of Desolation and I played some good ball at Creighton in the days when we had a team, and 1I assure you that this six-foot-one boy of sixteen, who is sure to grow, is ready for the big time right now. He's had to train alone, no chance to play on a team.
Given that chance, he'll be another Magic Johnson. Charge me double if I've deceived you.
In the spring Harry Rostkowsky flew in letters from nine leading universities and colleges offering Stephen Colquitt full academic scholarships Yale, Virginia, Trinity in San Antonio among them and another six wanted him fo
On the night they finished completing the entrance forms Kendra could not sleep, for she was trying to fathom how this gaunt woman, living in a remote cabin with not a single advantage except the Calvert correspondence materials and a television saucer, could have produced such a genius: Seems you don't need eighty-four-million-dollar high schools. Then again, maybe they help.
But as she laughed at this conclusion, Kendra suddenly began shivering and a terrible sickness of mind overwhelmed her, and in only her nightgown she ran from her quarters and banged furiously on Kasm Hooker's door. After a long silence, for it was near two in the morning, Mrs. Hooker came to the door and cried: 'My God, girl! What is it?'
When Kendra slipped inside, trembling as if assailed by some mysterious fever, it was obvious to the Hookers that she could not control herself: 'Kendra, sit down!
Throw this robe about you. Now, what in hell goes on?'
It was not until Mrs. Hooker made her some hot chocolate that Kendra regained partial composure: 'I was thinking of Stephen and his good luck.'
'That's no cause for tears,' Kasm said. 'Martha and I were rejoicing.' Then he added almost sourly: 'But that was three hours ago.'
'So was I, but in the middle of my congratulations ... to myself and to him ... I thought of Amy ... dead in the mud,' and she broke into wracking sobs. The Hookers, used to dealing at least once each term with some catastrophe, let her weep, and after a while she looked up piteously and asked: 'Why does a white boy with a determined mother reach the stars, and a girl just as brilliant but with an Eskimo mother fail?'