Frozen Stiff: Chapters 18–23

The trees were a steep canyon showing only a sliver of hard blue sky.

In seconds the sliver turned from blue to white, changing with the whim of the wind and clouds.

Newscasters and geologists would have flocked to Hubbard Glacier to check out such a monumental event.

A thick necklace of shells adorned the woman’s chest, the same type of shells that decorated her poncho and mukluks.

Meat! Dripping with greasy fat, attached to a bundle of ribs. Spareribs! Of venison, probably.

She cried out in pain and, in the glint of a waning moon, saw the Tlingit woman rise off the boulder and move toward her.

Except for the wavering glow from the fire, everything else sank back in the dark shadows.

I have made a poultice for your wound.

Cody realized it was the careful way in which she laid down her words that gave them their rhythm, soft and resonant like a distant bell.

Cody winced as heat awoke her half-numb toes; then heat finally won out and the pain subsided.

“It takes more than a month to make such a journey, so all food and provisions had to be carried with them, packed on sleds and dragged over the ice like a team of sled dogs instead of men.”

The mountain is an icebound graveyard; the peak itself is a gravestone. Yet many are compelled to try to conquer it, not knowing that the mountain will demand a sacrifice in return.

Traveling over ice fields and glaciers, each man was tied to the next in case he plummeted into a crevasse. The sleds were also tied with sturdy climbing rope, linked like deadweights between them. If the line to the sled wasn’t held tight, the sled could fall into a crevasse on top of the man in front of it and crush him.

Since that time we have lived a subsistence life, alone in the woods except for a yearly journey into Yakutat to visit my family and trade for luxuries, such as fishing line and toothpaste.

Only the eerie fugue of wind and water broke the stillness around Cody and Mary Jane.

With enough fish to feed four people, they slogged back to camp in the face of biting winds.

Mary Jane used a flat rock to dig a long groove in the damp earth.

Cody glanced up when Eric ambled down the embankment.

Derek picked up a knife with a hand-hewn handle and antler blade.

Cody tried imagining winter in Southeast Alaska, the boughs of conifers keeping snow off the ground directly beneath trees, making it easier for deer and other animals to forage for scarce winter food.

Cody tried imagining winter in Southeast Alaska, the boughs of conifers keeping snow off the ground directly beneath trees, making it easier for deer and other animals to forage for scarce winter food.

Mary Jane brought a basket of berries, salmon jerky, and a gourd of tea steeped from herbs.

Out in the fjord, under skies opaque with clouds and drizzle, Cody shook hands with her paddle for the first time in almost a week.

The cool moist air was misty as always. No wonder this part of the world produced such lush forests, an extension of the rain belt of the Pacific Northwest, a
 sanctuary for both animals and men.

The lonely ice-armored ranges looked down on a hostile coast with steep, scarred rock: There was no relief in this part of the fjord, no place to hole up if they had to.

She was vaguely aware of bits and pieces of civilization off to the sides, a scant five miles away.

Nothing could be heard above the din of water and wind.

For a few more minutes they would be bound with water and weather and the fjord. She remembered how she had sworn at the elements, cursed at them for plotting and scheming against her.

She pictured her mother on the tarmac of Yakutat’s one-strip airport, huddled against the wind, waiting.

An explosive crackling and roaring reverberated through the fjord as an ice cliff three hundred fifty feet high calved from Hubbard’s face.

The cliff disappeared under its own cloud of spray, then vaulted up into the air seconds later, careened forward, and shoved a giant wall of water at the kayaks.

Only a scrap of blue canvas showed as he was swept sideways into a deeper hole: Cody’s kayak plunged headlong into the second hole, then flipped.

Derek was awash in the fjord.

Except for the hood, which had been torn off, the rain slicker remained intact; but his boots had been stripped away, exposing feet as blue as Hubbard.

Cody scanned the muddy airstrip for the voice, searching the faces milling around.