“Why would that make the judge angry?” Pop asked.
“Because the judge was a Polack,” I said. “So he gave me thirty days, to be followed by immediate enlistment or he’d make it two years. That part was okay, since I was going to sign up anyhow. But the thirty days was bad. My old man had to do the hay mowing without me. I got a letter from my mother last week, and she says he’s still planning to whip me when I get home.”
I noticed then that Pop’s gaze had shifted. He was staring off into the distance past my shoulder. So I turned to look, and I saw a man’s head and shoulders over the top edge of another hillock about fifty yards away. The man was wearing a coat with a fur-lined hood, and his face was a deep copper color. He appeared to be staring back at us.
“Do you know him?” Pop asked.
I squinted. “I don’t think so,” I said. “He looks like an Eskimo.”
“I believe he’s an Aleut,” Pop said. “And the only natives I’ve seen in camp have belonged to the Alaska Scouts, better known as Castner’s Cutthroats. Although that may be for the alliteration. I don’t know whether they’ve really cut any throats.”
I was still staring at the distant man, who was still staring back.
“They have,” I said.
“Then let’s mind our own—” Pop began.
He didn’t finish because of a sudden loud whistling noise from farther down the mountain. It seemed to come from everywhere below us, all at once, and it grew louder and louder every moment.
“Shit,” I said. I think Pop said it, too.
We both knew what it was, and we could tell it was going to be a fierce one. And there were no buildings up here to slow it down. It was a monster williwaw whipping around the mountain, and we had just a few seconds before the wind caught up with its own sound. The jeep was hundreds of yards away, and it wouldn’t have been any protection even if we could get to it. Our only option was going to be to lie down flat in the slight depression where the dead eagle was staked out. If we were lucky, the exposed skin of our hands and faces might not be flayed from our flesh. And if we were even luckier, we might manage to gulp a few breaths without having them ripped away by the wind. I had the thought that this wasn’t a good time to have tuberculosis.
Then, just as I was about to gesture to Pop to drop to the ground, I saw the distant Cutthroat disappear. His head and shoulders seemed to drop straight into the earth behind the hillock. And in one of my rare moments of smart thinking, I knew where he had gone.
“Come on!” I shouted to Pop, and I dropped the canteen and started running toward the hillock. But I had only gone about twenty yards when I realized that Pop wasn’t keeping up, so I ran back to grab his arm and drag him along.
He didn’t care for that, and he tried to pull away from me. But I was stronger, so all he could do was cuss at me as I yanked him forward as fast as I could.
Then the williwaw hit us, and he couldn’t even cuss. Our hats flew away as if they were artillery shells, and I was deafened and blinded as my ears filled with a shriek and my eyes filled with dirt and tears. The right side of my face felt as if it were being stabbed with a thousand tiny needles.
I couldn’t see where we were going now, but I kept charging forward, leaning down against the wind with all my weight so it wouldn’t push me off course. For all I knew, I was going off course anyway. I couldn’t tell if the ground was still sloping upward, or if we were over the top of the hillock already. But if I didn’t find the spot where the Cutthroat had disappeared, and find it pretty damn quick, we were going to have to drop to the ground and take our chances. Maybe we’d catch a break, and the williwaw wouldn’t last long enough to kill us.
Then my foot slipped on the tundra, and I fell to my knees. I twisted to try to catch Pop so he wouldn’t hit the ground headfirst, and then we both slid and fell into a dark hole in the earth.
VI
The sod roof of the ulax was mostly intact, but there were holes. So after my eyes adjusted, there was enough light to see. But Pop had landed on top of me, and at first all I could see was his mustache.
“Your breath ain’t so good, Pop,” I said. “Mind getting off me?”
At first I didn’t think he heard me over the shriek of the williwaw. But then he grunted and wheezed and pushed himself away until he was sitting against the earthen wall. I sat up and scooted over against the wall beside him.
Pop reached up and adjusted his glasses, which had gone askew. Then he looked up at the largest hole in the roof, which I guessed was how we’d gotten inside. It was about eight feet above the dirt floor.
“Thanks for breaking my fall,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “I hope I didn’t damage you. Although you might have avoided it if you’d told me what you were doing instead of dragging me.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I looked around at the mostly underground room. It was maybe twenty feet long by ten feet wide. At the far end was a jumble of sod, timber, and whalebone that looked like a section of collapsed roof. But the roof above that area was actually in better shape than the rest. The rest was about evenly split between old sod and random holes. Some empty bottles and cans were scattered around the floor, and a few filthy, wadded blankets lay on earthen platforms that ran down the lengths of the two longer walls.
But there was no Cutthroat. I had watched him drop down into the same hole that Pop and I had tumbled into. I was sure that was what had happened.
But I didn’t see him here now.
“What happened to the Eskimo?” I asked.
Pop scanned the interior of the ulax and frowned. “He must have gone elsewhere.”
“There isn’t any elsewhere,” I said, almost shouting. I pointed upward. “Listen to that. And this is the only shelter up here.”
Pop shook his head. “The man we saw was a native. He may know of shelters on this old volcano that we wouldn’t find if we searched for forty years. Or he may even be so used to a wind like this that he’ll stand facing into it and smile.”
I looked up at the big hole and saw what looked like a twenty-pound rock blow past. “I saw him jump down here. That’s how I knew where to go. And I think I would have seen him climb back out. Unless he can disappear.”
And then, from behind the jumble of sod and whalebone at the far end of the ulax, the Cutthroat emerged. His hood was down, and his dark hair shone. He was in a crouch, holding a hunting knife at his side. A big one.
“Who the fuck are you people?” the Cutthroat asked. His voice was low and rough, but still managed to cut through the howling above us. This was a man used to talking over the wind.
Pop gave a single hacking cough. Then he looked at me and said, “Well, Private, it doesn’t look as if he disappeared.”
Right then I wanted to punch Pop, but it was only because I was scared. I wished the Cutthroat really had disappeared. I didn’t recognize his dark, scraggly-bearded face, but that didn’t mean anything. I didn’t remember many living faces from Attu.
But I did remember the Cutthroats as a group. I remembered how they had appeared and vanished in the frozen landscape like Arctic wolves.
And I remembered their knives.
“I asked you two a question,” the Cutthroat said, pointing at us with his knife. “Are you M.P.’s? And if you’re not, what are you doing here?”
Pop gave another cough. This time it wasn’t a tubercular hack, but a sort of polite throat-clearing. And I realized he didn’t understand what kind of man we were dealing with. But maybe that was a good thing. Because if he had ever seen the Cutthroats in action, he might have stayed stone-silent like me. And one of us needed to answer the question before the Cutthroat got mad.