Jimmy Bluefeather: A Novel (18 page)

It was no time for poetry. She didn’t even finish her laundry.

ALL NIGHT LONG, Old Keb dreamed to the rhythm of water, enchantments on the canoe, liquid voices he hadn’t heard in a thousand years, voices learned and forgotten and learned again as one life ends and another begins. He could write his story in water:
t’éex’,
k
ugóos’, naadaayi heen, séew
: ice, cloud, river, rain. Begin with his Tlingit name. From there describe his first hunt with Uncle Austin, his mother’s brother,
du káak
, how the great man taught him to see, but more important, to observe. “Each animal knows way more than you do,” Uncle Austin used to say, as if it summarized everything he knew and believed. Keb remembered how Bessie taught him to waltz, with his eyes closed. “You’re thinking too much,” she would say. “You’re counting your steps, one-two-three . . . one-two-three. . . . Let go. Close your eyes and let go.” And with that, she moved him across the floor as the wind moves a fireweed seed.

James and Kid Hugh paddled for hours while Old Keb slept fitfully in the
fo’c’sle next to Little Mac. If she moved that night he knew nothing of it. She was little more than a bundle under a blanket.

At one point Keb awoke to feel the canoe at ease. He heard James and Kid Hugh speaking in low voices as they huddled over one of those small, satellite-linked direction-finders. Forget dead reckoning and celestial navigation, the taste of salt, the smell of kelp, the voices of birds or the sound of breaking water, the waves like words slapping the hull and speaking of weather yet to come. Forget the maps and dreams of your ancestors. These boys were setting their course by a gadgetgizmo they got at Fred Meyer, on sale. Great Raven. Someday the future will sell us our instincts wrapped in a little box.

Keb once heard of an old Yup’ik Eskimo who rode a snowmachine all night long through minus-forty to get back home. When he made it, he was too frozen to move. He sat stiff as a board on his machine until his family came out and lifted him off and carried him in to thaw him out. That would be Old Keb after one night in the canoe, stiff as the boat itself, wooden, his bones like cedar. He might die there, dreaming of water.

One day, many years ago, soon after he and Bessie were married, a letter arrived from a cousin in Petersburg. Written in a tight hand, it told Keb that a famous distant relative had died in Norway. Oscar Wisting, champion skier. Not just any champion. Oscar had been one of four men to ski to the South Pole with Roald Amundsen, the legendary explorer. So perfect was their deed that they beat the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott by five weeks and made it look easy. Too easy. “These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale,” Scott wrote to the people of Great Britain as he lay dying in his tent, freezing to death. Better to fail flamboyantly than to succeed quietly. Amundsen was first to the pole, but Scott became the hero. The cousin in Petersburg told Keb that the world saw it through Scott’s eyes, not Amundsen’s. Scott left a widow and an infant son. Amundsen never married. Scott was the better writer, the better actor. Amundsen had no patience for the crowd, no witty responses to reporters’ questions. Scott came from the British Empire, Amundsen from a tiny, newly independent country, Norway. Scott’s journals were edited by his friend, James Barrie, the author of
Peter Pan
, who wrote, “Surely it must be an awful adventure to die.” Amundsen grew disillusioned, bitter. Years later, he disappeared in a small plane over the Arctic. It broke Oscar Wisting’s heart. One night, in a nautical museum in Oslo, while nobody was looking, old Oscar climbed aboard the little wooden ship that he and Amundsen and the others had taken to Antarctica. It had a rounded hull to lift it above the Antarctic pack ice as winter squeezed in from all sides. That way it wouldn’t be crushed. The ship’s name,
Fram
, meant
“forward.” Oscar climbed in and bedded down in his old bunk, surrounded by his best memories, his time with friends in an icy world more wild, pure, and white than anything he’d seen before or since. What comfort he must have felt as he closed his eyes, fell asleep, and never woke up.

A damn good way to die. In a boat.

BY THE GRAY light of dawn they could see the opening to Flynn Cove. James and Kid Hugh had raised the small main sail, and reefed it when necessary, and paddled twenty-some miles through the night, without sleep or food, across Port Thomas on an ebbing tide. “It’s still raining, Gramps,” James said, “and it’s beginning to blow pretty hard.”

“
K
uti kanigi,” Keb heard himself say. Tlingit weather watchers. They would sit back-to-back in the big canoes to study the clouds and waves and give good advice. Big canoes rounded Cape Spencer this way, long ago. All these years later, you could still see their tracks through the kelp beds. Forward, Uncle Austin would say. Always forward.

You don’t have to master nature. You only have to master yourself.

SUPERINTENDENT PAUL BEALS folded one lanky leg over the other and read the
Juneau Empire
on his iPad. Seated around him, a dozen rangers and administrators spoke softly at a conference table in reserve headquarters in Bartlett Cove. Ron closed his cell phone and said, “Kate Johnson will join us by conference call in a few minutes. We’ll run incident command from here, with coordinated public affairs and a clear search and rescue objective before this old guy paddles his canoe into the bay and dies and everybody gets excited.”

Anne thought, If words were water he could turn turbines. She listened from out in the corridor, through the open conference room door, where she sat with her back against the wall, near a large notice board filled with memoranda, evidence of a thriving bureaucracy.

“And Ruby Bauer?” Paul asked Ron.

“She wants to be in on the conference call.”

“Tell her no.”

“She insists.”

“Tell her no. And no incident command team until we ask Kate about it.”

Ron got to his feet. “Do I make the call to Ruby?”

“Yes.”

It must have been a slow news day, Anne thought. “The Old Man and the Bay” story as reported by the
Juneau Empire
had caught the attention of bloggers and media outlets around the state, including an online feature in the
Alaska Dispatch News
, which she pulled up on her MacBook Pro:

All his life, Old Keb Wisting, part-Norwegian, part-Tlingit Indian, has wanted to go home, back to Crystal Bay. Nobody ever expected him to do it in his nineties, in a canoe, in Alaskan
waters patrolled by killer whales, icebergs, and federal government rangers.

In the last hour, three Anchorage-based news networks had called Crystal Bay National Marine Reserve looking for an angle. Was Old Keb deaf? Disabled somehow? Libertarian? Leatherstocking? Little Big Man? A Tea Partier? Occupy Wall Streeter? Undaunted by danger? Tough as nails? A shaman? Medicine man? Chief?

“We’re just trying to find an angle here, something to work with,” said a producer. Is he in a war canoe? Will rangers arrest him if he enters Crystal Bay without a permit? Does he have a death wish? A magical feather? A dog in the canoe that nobody else likes but he does? A dog that will defend him to the death? And the two young men, James Wisting and this Kid Hugh, do they have hunting rifles and shotguns? And this Little Mac, this Mackenzie Chen? What’s her story? And the Gant brothers? Where are they?

Jinkaat Deputy Sheriff Stuart Ewing was quoted as saying, “Keb Wisting has done nothing wrong. He’s a good man who’s wanted for no crimes or questioning. The media is making too much of this. People need to calm down and leave him alone and take it easy.”

Anne thought: I like this Stuart Ewing.
Take It Easy
. A great Jackson Browne song made famous by the Eagles. She’d been a Jackson Browne fan ever since she’d seen him sing at a “Save the Oceans” festival in Honolulu, ten years ago. Did Stuart Ewing listen to Jackson Browne?

She pressed herself deeper into the wall and tried to think about whales, think
like
a whale. No easy thing. She pushed the door farther open to see the rangers and senior staff all talking quietly, waiting for Kate’s call. There were chiefs of various divisions—law enforcement, resource management, interpretation, administration, and maintenance—plus a cultural anthropologist from Anchorage, and Ron’s pool buddies, who happened to be rangers from Seattle, decked out in their National Marine Reserve Service uniforms, the black-and-white orca patch on the shoulder, gold badge over the heart, small NMRS pin on the lapel, long creases down the sleeves. It intrigued Anne to see all these so-called “division chiefs” assembled to discuss what to do with a real Indian. An old man in a canoe. Paul kept reading the same article that had appeared on everybody’s iPad that morning:

He grew up in the small town of Jinkaat, near Crystal Bay, where his uncle taught him to hunt seal, moose and deer. Where he
picked wild strawberries with his grandmother, who made them into pies. And where, as a boy, he fell asleep in the sunshine, and a bear bit off part of one of his toes, and he came to be known, affectionately by his Norwegian friends and others, as “Keb Zen Raven, Nine and a Half Toes of the Berry Patch.”

FLANKING ANNE IN the corridor were half a dozen seasonal scientists and field technicians like herself, all licensed boat operators who would be pressed into action. It was Ron’s idea. Use everybody. “O.F.,” he called it. “Overwhelming Force, the kind of thing we should have used in Vietnam and Iraq.”
Dear God
, Anne thought.

Next to Anne sat her friend, Taylor, texting her boyfriend in Strawberry Flats.

Kate Johnson called in and said by speakerphone, “Where are we, Paul?”

“We’ll contain it.”

“If this canoe enters Crystal Bay and causes a big fuss, PacAlaska will almost certainly use it to strengthen their jurisdiction case for industrial development. Not good, Paul. Not good.”

“We’ll contain it.”

“The
Juneau Empire
already makes Keb Wisting sound like Hemingway’s Santiago and he hasn’t even been out there for a full day. Have you heard from Ruby Bauer?”

“She wanted to be a part of this conference call.”

“Handle her carefully; contain her but also invite her to Bartlett Cove and mollify her. Tell her that at all costs we will ensure the safety of her father and nephew.”

“Kate, this is Ranger Ron Ambrose. We met in June.”

“Yes, Ron.”

“Can I tell you what I told Paul earlier?”

“Yes.”

“At Basic, at Fort Benning, we had a video game called
An Unusually Quiet Day
that taught us that you make decisions by your actions and your inaction. You choose which way things go. We need to keep things safe by being on high alert at all times. We need to accept the inevitability of the unexpected, and be chronic noticers of anything out of the ordinary. We need total control. That’s why I propose we have an incident command team and a command leader.”

Nobody said a thing.

Anne felt herself go rigid. Taylor leaned over and whispered, “Ridiculous.”

“Let me think about that, Ron,” Kate said.

Ron’s cell phone rang. “I have to take this. It’s Ruby Bauer.” He stepped out of the conference room and walked past Anne and Taylor down to a private office.

The atmosphere changed. “Kate, this is Clive Dickinson, a cultural anthropologist from Anchorage.”

“Yes, Clive.”

“Do I have permission to speak freely?”

“Please do.”

“This isn’t Iraq. This old man and the kids with him aren’t insurgents or terrorists. This isn’t a video game. These people are—”

“Armed and potentially dangerous,” interrupted a ranger from Seattle. “Ron’s right. The only way you achieve absolute safety is through a serious mind-set.”

Somebody out of Anne’s view said, “Keb Wisting isn’t our problem until he’s in marine reserve waters. Even then, he’s in a canoe, and there’s no restrictions on the number of nonmotorized vessels allowed into the bay.”

“He’s a problem if he’s headed this way,” somebody else responded.

“How? Are we going to make him a problem before he is one? I say he’s not a problem until he’s inside the bay, within our jurisdiction, or until he’s broken reserve regulations.”

Kate said, “My concern is the lawsuit, the very real possibility that Pac-Alaska will capitalize on this ‘Old Man and the Bay’ story no matter what we do. We could lose this case in the Ninth Circuit, and lose a national marine reserve. We could have gold and copper mining in Crystal Bay. Let’s keep our eye on the big picture and handle this smart from the beginning.”

Anne listened to the opinions fly back and forth.

“If we let Keb Wisting into the bay, or keep him out; if we search for him now, or not at all, there are no easy answers.”

“We know that,” Kate said. “I don’t want platitudes. I want concrete ideas.”

“Strategy and tactics,” a ranger said.

Taylor leaned over to Anne and whispered, “What are platitudes?”

“If we don’t stop him,” somebody said, “and he goes up the bay and dies, it will look really bad.”

“Are we making too much of all this? He’s a hundred years old and sleeping
in a canoe. He could get hungry and sore and be back in his soft bed in Jinkaat in two days.”

“He doesn’t have a soft bed. He sleeps on a cot in his carving shed. But the shed burned down. So he doesn’t have a cot and he doesn’t have a shed.”

“Maybe he wants to die.”

“Wanting to die is one thing. Dying is another.”

“The public is going to see this whole thing through whatever lens the media puts on it. I was in Yellowstone during the ’88 fires and the ’95 wolf reintroduction. What we’ve experienced with this ‘Old Man and the Bay’ thing is nothing compared to what’s coming if it doesn’t end quickly and quietly. Ron’s right. We need to contain it with strong public affairs and law enforcement, put an end to it before it begins. Find Keb Wisting and escort him home.”

“Crystal Bay is his home.”

“Yes,” Kate said, through the speakerphone. “We know that. He knows that. But the world-at-large doesn’t know that. It’s his home only if we allow events and the media to make it his home.”