She could talk, she was all warm and comfy back there with him as her wind foil, but she did have a point.
The white swath of snow-covered ice wound through a landscape of low banks and rounded foothills. Thick stands of willow flashed by, leaving Johnny with retinal after-impressions of enormous brown lumps, moose in groups of four and five, curled up in the snow, conserving energy, waiting out the cold snap before they got up to feed again. High overhead, a bald eagle soared, looking for the unwary rabbit or that foolish pika who had been improvident in preparing for winter and whom hunger had forced out to feed. Eagles mostly ate fish, Johnny knew, but with the Kanuyaq frozen solid and the salmon out to sea anyway the eagles made do with what was on the ground. Or in the garbage dump. Maybe Benjamin Franklin was right, maybe the turkey should have been the national bird.
It was a clear, cold, calm day, the sky a pale, sere blue. The sun was up after ten and in bed before four, and in the few brief hours that it traveled above the horizon its reflection off the snow felt sharp enough to draw blood. They all wore goggles with polarized lenses to guard against snow blindness.
Ahead of them Ruthe goosed her Arctic Cat with the verve and enthusiasm of a woman half her age, following truck trails when there were any, breaking new trail where the wind had blown the snow into sculptured drifts that were so beautiful and otherworldly that it seemed a shame to Johnny to destroy them. Ruthe skimmed their tops or plowed through their bases without a backward glance, resulting in explosions of snow that momentarily obliterated the trail. When now and then he managed to pull even with her he could see the grin beneath her goggles. "She's loving this," Van shouted.
He felt an answering grin spread over his face. "Yes, she is!"
There was traffic on the river that day, other snow machines as well as pickups and four-wheelers and one guy on cross-country skis towing a sled. When asked, he said he was from Anchorage, just out for a weekend wilderness experience. He seemed rational, which was unexpected, and shared with them some homemade fudge that even frozen solid melted in the mouth like chocolate silk. It could have been a highway anywhere north of the fifty-three, if there wasn't the occasional guy fishing through a hole he'd chopped in the ice, hoping for a mess of whitefish for dinner.
The others were inhabitants of the villages they passed, isolated clusters of log cabins and small prefabricated buildings brought up- or downriver at great expense, for most of whom their airstrip doubled as main street. Usually downtown consisted of a tiny store with inflated prices and an even tinier post office in someone's front room. Most had a government building that might also house the rare village public safety officer and whatever air taxi flew there. They all had schools, in spite of steadily dwindling school populations as more and more people moved to where the jobs were. Johnny had heard that topic discussed by the four aunties more than once. He wondered if the mine would help, if it would stop the drift of Alaskans from the rural to the urban world. He knew Kate didn't think so. "How do you keep them down on the farm," she had said once in his hearing, "after they've seen what's out there on satellite television?"
They didn't stop to talk, though, so he couldn't ask the people who lived there how they felt about it. One group of three, all wearing helmets, circled around and came back by them, and then circled again and roared by a third time. A pickup came into view, and the three jumped a low section of riverbank and disappeared into a stand of spindly spruce trees.
"Who was that?" Van said.
"Dunno," Johnny said, "but they sure know how to drive snow-gos." He was nagged by the feeling that there was something he should have made notice of. He faced forward to see Ruthe going up the bank on the opposite side of the river. "Hold on, Van!"
He followed Ruthe's tracks off the river and over the bank and found her waiting at the top. "Still good?" she said.
"Still good," he said. He might be cold but he wasn't frozen, and he was enjoying the feel of Van's arms around him. He could keep going all day.
"Okay," Ruthe said, and off she hared again, he and Van faint but pursuing. They climbed for almost a mile, Ruthe perforce slowing down for safe passage through giant and mostly dying spruce trees crowded by thickly growing birches, all on the south-facing slope of what resolved into a high valley. Once in it, mountains rose up on either side to give it a wide, exaggerated U shape edged with sharp peaks, notched peaks, double peaks four and five and six thousand feet high. They were in the foothills of the Quilaks.
Ruthe halted and Johnny pulled up beside her. Ruthe killed her engine and Johnny did likewise, and everyone pulled their hoods back and pushed their goggles up, eyes narrowed against the brilliant sunlight. The sudden and immediate silence fell like a blow. The scene before them was like a painting, richly textured in the subtle hues of an Arctic winter day, hushed, serene, and achingly beautiful.
"Wow," Van said, and dismounted.
"Don't!" Ruthe and Johnny said simultaneously, but before they could stop her Van had stepped off the machine and almost immediately sank into the snow up to her waist. She blinked up at them, astonished.
Ruthe threw back her head and laughed, the explosive cackle frightening a ptarmigan from beneath a bush, wings as white as the snow, a blur of motion. After a moment's inner struggle, Johnny started to laugh, too.
Van couldn't help it, she joined in, followed by a quick yelp of distress. "Oh no, I can't laugh, it makes me go in deeper!"
At that Ruthe lay back on the seat of her snow machine and simply dissolved. Johnny pulled himself together and by dint of superior upper body strength, which he did not neglect to point out to both of them, managed to lever Vanessa up on her belly, like a seal, across the seat in back of him. She banged her boots together to get the snow out of her laces, and pulled herself up and back in the saddle. "That's me, ladies and gentlemen, the light relief for the day. Well, how was I to know? I've never ridden out in the backcountry before, just on roads and trails."
Ruthe grinned at her, deep laugh lines creasing her lean cheeks. "What's called throwing you in at the deep end."
Johnny and Van were accompanying Ruthe Bauman, the Park's self-styled naturalist, on an expedition to check on the Gruening River caribou herd. It wasn't much of a herd, less than two thousand strong, but it was part of the Park ecosystem, and Ruthe was the self-appointed patron saint of all Park wildlife, flora and fauna. She tolerated the presence of Dan O'Brien's Park rangers, even if they did tend to get in the way when they were least wanted. They meant well, and she was even on occasion pleased to approve of this or that action taken, but she'd watched almost forty seasons come and go from her front porch, and the rhythm of the life of the Park was as natural to her as her own. It was a byword in the Park that Ruthe could step outside the door of the cabin perched on the hillside with the southern view, look at the sky, take a sniff or two of the wind, and give anyone who asked a forecast that would be more timely and more accurate than any National Weather Service weather report. When Ruthe said to put the snow tires on the truck, Park rats put them on their trucks. When she said it was safe to take them off, they took them off. She was a handy neighbor.
Lean as a tough steak, brown eyes still clear beneath a mop of soft white gold curls, Ruthe Bauman was an ex-WASP who had towed targets for WWII fighter pilots doing target practice over the Atlantic. After the war she'd come north hoping for a job in aviation in Alaska when they weren't on offer to women Outside. She and her friend, Dina Willner, dead three years now, had joined forces with an enterprising travel agent out of Fairbanks that specialized in big game hunts. They bought him out in 1949, acquiring two de Havilland Beavers in the deal, and added air taxi services to remote sites to their business model. In the 50s they bought a cabin and eighty acres twenty-five miles south of Niniltna, added another ten cabins, and took out an ad in Alaska magazine. In that hour one of the world's first eco-resorts, Camp Teddy, was born. So was the Park's conservation movement, which came as something of a shock to the Park rats.