Everything To Prove. Nadia Nichols
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to her people. The geese flew south, the lake froze up and deep snows filled the long cold darkness. Conner ran a trapline out of the guides’ camp and suffered endless torments thinking about Marie falling in love with some young man from her village. He went to the lodge from time to time when his need for companionship outweighed his desire for solitude and shared a whiskey or two with Dan. He told Dan he planned to marry Marie and bring her back to the lodge to live. Dan never said anything in response, just shook his head and threw back another slug of hooch.
Spring came and filled Connor with a restless yearning as the days lengthened and the sun rose higher in the sky. The ice went out on the lake. The great flocks of geese returned, their long ragged Vs darkening the pale sky. Connor wondered if Marie had missed him during the cold dark winter, and if she would return as promised.
In early June the accountant from New York City had made his annual trip to the lodge before it opened for the season to report that Dan and Connor had done well in all their business ventures, though Connor knew that was all his father’s doing. Ben Libby’s death had made both Connor and Dan Frey very wealthy men, though Connor had little use for money. As long as he had a sound canvas canoe, a couple of fly rods and plenty of food to eat, he was content. But Dan, although he professed no interest in a fancy lifestyle, liked expensive toys. After the accountant had departed, Dan went to Anchorage and bought a de Havilland Beaver, a bright shiny yellow six-passenger plane on pontoons. It was delivered the next day.
“You might as well use those Air Force skills of yours,” he’d told Connor, gesturing to the plane with his cigar. “You can fly our clients to surrounding lakes and charge extra money for doing it.” Dan, who didn’t need to make any money at all and had a flying service at his beck and call, nonetheless liked to emphasize that the plane was not a frivolous extravagance but a sensible business expenditure. Besides, float planes in Alaska were as common as pickup trucks in Montana. Everyone who lived in the bush either owned one or knew someone who did.
The first place Connor had flown was to the tiny village on the Koyukyuk to see Marie, and she was as glad to see him as he was to see her. Her father had died that winter and she’d been running his trapline. Times had been hard and their winter had been lean, but she was glad to see him, and Connor felt hopeful. He spent several days at their cabin, eating stews her mother cooked from the beaver Marie had trapped, helping her tend the sled dogs and mend a broken sled. When he told her he wanted to marry her and bring her to live at the lodge, Marie looked troubled and shook her head.
“My mother would be all alone then.”
“She could live with us,” Connor offered, and Marie had consented.
And so it was arranged, as quickly and as simply as that. After supper that night Connor and Marie walked a long way down the river. He held her hand and kissed her for the first time. He gave her a gold necklace with a pear-cut blue diamond that had belonged to his mother. She gave him her body there beside the river, while the wild geese clamored across the arctic sky.
He remembered her gift as he stood before the mirror, thinking how much more precious it was than a blue diamond on a gold chain, and his seventh knot was as bad as the first. He picked up the jacket and stumbled out of the lodge into a brightness that startled. He left HoChi behind him in the lodge. “You weren’t invited,” he said through the door in response to the dog’s plaintive whine.
Dan was standing down on the dock, smoking a cigar.
“I can’t knot the tie,” Connor said. “My hands are shaking.”
Clenching the cigar in the corner of his mouth, Dan did it for him.
“I guess I can’t get you to change your mind and come,” Connor said.
Dan uttered a grunt of disgust and shook his head. “Hate weddings with a passion,” he said around his cigar. He finished the task and took the cigar out of his mouth. “I’m going to head up to the mouth of the Kandik, camp up there for a week or so. That’ll give you and your bride the run of the place for a few days. It’ll be the last privacy you get all summer. Make the most of it, boy. And good luck.”
Connor shrugged into the jacket and stuck out his hand. Dan clasped it in a firm handshake and slapped his shoulder before heading back up to the lodge. Connor walked out to the end of the dock where the plane was tethered, threw off the lines and climbed aboard. A man only got married once. He guessed he had a right to be nervous. He started the plane’s engine and was about to leave the dock when he spotted HoChi running nimbly down the gangway. Dan must have let him out of the lodge. He opened the plane’s door and HoChi jumped in, immediately hopping into the right-hand seat.
“Okay then, you’ll be the ring bearer,” Conner said, taking the leather thong from around his neck and draping it over HoChi’s head. The simple gold band with their names and wedding date inscribed on it glittered against the dog’s neck. “But remember, best behavior. This is an important day.”
He did a quick preflight while he taxied the Beaver out onto the lake. The weather was good, the lake was calm, and the Brooks Range reared its glorious snow-cloaked majesty against the northern sky. The flight to Marie’s village should take less than forty-five minutes. The wedding would be held there, an Athapaskan celebration officiated over by a missionary priest and followed by a traditional potlatch. Afterward, they’d fly back to the lodge and enjoy a whole week of uninterrupted bliss. Life was good. Connor pushed the throttle up and the plane accelerated through the light chop.
It wouldn’t do to keep his beautiful bride waiting.
SOLLY JOHNSON HAD LIVED out on the land most of his life, like his father and his father’s father, way back to the time when Raven first created the world. He had a wife who lived in the village, a woman who talked too much and made him crazy. He’d given her three sons, the last one two years ago, and left her with her family down on the Yukon while he ran his trapline up in the mountains. He liked it that way. He liked being alone. She raised the boys; he brought home the furs that gave her the things she wanted. He listened to her talk for a few weeks, a month maybe, nonstop, while she mended his clothes and made him a new pair of mukluks, and then he left her again and was glad to do so.
He didn’t like noise, and people were noisy. When he first came here to live in the mountains as a young man, there was no noise. There was just his canoe and his dog team, and the animals in the wilderness. It was quiet then. The only loud noise he heard was the sound of the river breaking up in spring, the thunderstorms in summer and the wild keening roar of the wind through the high mountain passes. And then the whites came. At first they came looking for furs and gold, but they went away when they couldn’t find any gold and all the furs got trapped out. But then a few years later they came back in those noisy flying canoes. They came for the fish they could catch in the rivers and lakes, and the animals they could shoot on the land, and some of them stayed and didn’t go away.
This was the beginning of the bad times.
The place he loved was where he built his cabin, near the mouth of the Yaktektuk, a small river that fed into the lake the whites named Evening but his people had always called Dayhehas. He had lived in this place for most of thirty years now. He was still a strong man, and he still had good strong dogs, but the winters seemed longer now, and the darkness was colder. The quiet places were quiet no more. The skies were full of the flying canoes that brought men to the big log house over on the warm shore.
The white man who lived there was called Dan Frey, and he didn’t like Indians. This much was true. He had been there long enough so Solly knew to keep away. Frey thought Indians stole things. He thought Indians were drunks. He hired them to work at his fancy log house on the lake, but he didn’t like them. Solly heard these things when he went to his wife’s village on the Yukon. He heard how the white man treated his Indian help. When Solly went back to his cabin on the Yaktektuk, he stayed away from the white man’s lodge. But he still came down to the shores of Dayhehas. He still liked to see both faces of the great mountain at the same time, and the way the sunlight sparkled over the big waters when the ice went out and the days got long. He liked to watch the loons when they returned to raise their young, and he liked to watch the moose eat lily roots