gul: setting

rød: fathers outlook on lifr

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Eowyn Ivey

As the Time Draws Near

There are more ways to die in this place than a woman can count.
Ridgemont1 Glacier calves, and crushes two sightseeing kayakers. A drunken man wanders from his village in the night and freezes to death alone on the tundra. A Bush pilot lands to deliver supplies at a remote cabin and the paranoid cabin-dweller shoots him with a 30-06 hunting rifle as the pilot steps out of the plane. A young mother wraps her newborn baby against her chest beneath her parka and heads out on a snowmobile to visit a neighbour, but when she arrives she discovers that the infant has been smothered to death, a tiny trail of blood dribbling from its nose. On Kodiak Island a teenage boy shoots his first deer, but the bullet passes through the animal and hits and kills his father, who is standing in the brush on the other side. Two girls drown while trying to canoe the Matanuska River.
Piper’s father falls out of the sky.
Her entire life she had been waiting for this news, though she didn’t know what form it would take. She had long since fled Alaska, but continued to watch from afar – television broadcasts, the Anchorage newspaper, emails from old friends. She marvelled at the spinning, diving, spectacular deaths. She watched and waited and wondered: how long could a daredevil like her father survive when there were so many ways to die? “Take a look at that.” The Bush pilot’s voice fills her earphones, distant and muffled as if coming from another world. The left wing dips and the small, shuttering plane leans to the side. The pilot nods downward.
Far below on the Alaska tundra several bull caribou run along a thin, twisting game trail. The pilot drops the plane to get a closer look. Piper’s stomach ripples with nausea. The caribou turn from the trail and begin to run faster, their antlers bone white like branches of driftwood raised to the sky.
“Beautiful,” she says into her headset. Because that’s what her father would have said, and he would have peered over his Ray-Ban sunglasses and shook his head in disbelief, as if he hadn’t seen a thousand caribou like these. And then he would have been off, pulling the plane back up and out over the tundra, grinning like this was all some grand adventure that would never end.
The metal box holding his ashes is a cold weight in Piper’s lap.
… stalled on take-off … sorry to inform you … the plane stalled on take-off …
The early-morning sun pools in the tundra ponds beneath the wings of the airplane, and as far as she can see in any direction the earth is made of rust-coloured flatlands broken up by odd-shaped, glistening slices of water. Then the pilot changes altitude slightly, the ground shifts beneath her and instead of silver sunlight, the ponds below reflect dark blue sky and strips of white clouds. The small airplane’s engine roars violently in her head and a patch of turbulence causes her seat to jump and lurch. She closes her eyes and holds on to the metal box.
“Is Tuttle expecting you out there?” the pilot asked when she called to book the flight.
“No. I’m sure he isn’t,” she said.
“Because he’s not your warm, fuzzy type. If you show up there unexpected, the old man is likely to run you off.”
But she has no choice. Tucked in with the maps and pilot directory in the pocket behind the seat of her father’s destroyed Super Cub airplane had been a will, signed and dated June 21, 1991 – the year Piper
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graduated from high school and left Alaska. Twenty years, he had carried it with him. He had even gone as far as to have it laminated in plastic so that it might survive a water crash. It was simple and to the point: I,
Red Robertson, leave everything I have to my daughter, Piper Robertson. I want her to cremate me and take my ashes out to Ernest Tuttle’s place and spread them beneath the spruce tree. He’ll know which one.
Unless he’s dead, too. Then just dump me at his doorstep and say a prayer for both of us.
Though he didn’t include it in the will, Piper suspected her father would have wanted a drunken wake on his behalf, too. She remembered when she was a little girl and Red’s best friend Braden died in an avalanche. It was December. Dark and cold. The grown-ups gathered in a circle on frozen Wolverine Lake and recited poetry – Robert Service and Walt Whitman. Perhaps soon, some day or night while I am singing, my voice will suddenly cease. Then they built a bonfire on the snowy shore and got drunk on beer and whiskey while the children ran wild like heathens and waved flaming spruce boughs in the darkness. Late that night, or maybe early the next morning, Red fired up his snowmobile. Someone brought out Alpine skis and a long tether, and they took turns pulling each other around on the lake, the snowmobile on full throttle, flying across the pitch-black ice. There was a mad, grinning danger to it that frightened Piper. The grown-ups stood on the ice and laughed and shook their heads. Even at six years old, though, she was perplexed. Why throw yourselves headlong into cold death when it is already hunting you down?
It was a question that never left her.
“This is Lieutenant Dan Richards with the Alaska State Troopers. I’m calling about your father, Red
Robertson. I’m sorry to inform you that he was killed yesterday afternoon … I’m sorry, ma’am … The investigation is ongoing, but it appears that the airplane was overloaded and the plane stalled on take-off.”
Of course. That is how her father would die. Diving. Reeling. Overloaded.
The landing is terrifying, and the pilot warns her before he begins the descent.
“This is a tight airstrip. Hold on to your hat.”
The term ‘airstrip’ is an embellishment. A month ago, the pilot said, the stretch of dry riverbed was beneath three feet of rushing water. When the river level dropped, the sand bar emerged and now allows for a short, rough landing in a narrow, rocky valley. The plane bounces on its balloon-like tyres and comes to a sudden stop not far from the edge of the spruce forest.
“Yeehaw! Here we are. That landing always wakes me up.”
She climbs out of the plane. Her legs are wobbly and she has the sudden desire to lie down.
“Go on up – see if Tuttle is around before I take off. I’ve got some goat hunters waiting for me to pull them out of Knik Valley, then I’ll be back for you.”
The cabin is visible through the trees, set back from the river. Piper walks unsteadily across the sand, carrying the metal box under one arm, and finds a trail through the willows. She follows it up the steep embankment and into the spruce forest.
The cabin is small and dark and made of peeled logs and a sod roof; it looks like it sprouted from the woods. There is no sign of Ernest Tuttle, but the leather-hinged door is ajar.
“Hello? Mr Tuttle? Hello?”
“Who the hell are you?”
The old man steps out of the cabin with a rifle in his hands. He raises it to his waist and aims it at her.
“I said, who the hell are you?”
“I’m ... I’m Piper Robertson. I think you knew my father, Red?”
He squints his eyes, shakes his head slowly. And then he sighs, leans his rifle against the door frame and rubs his forehead with the palm of one hand.
“I don’t suppose you come with good news.”
“No, Mr Tuttle. I’m afraid not.”

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He was racing bad weather and overloaded his Super Cub with the last load of meat and supplies from a moose-hunting camp. He had no passengers. When he took off from the mountain ridge, the plane stalled and fell into a nosedive. There wasn’t enough time to recover.
“Dad said something in his will about wanting to have his ashes spread by a certain spruce tree. He said you would know where.”
“Yep. I do,” Tuttle says. “I’ll show you.”
The woods are quiet, and she inhales the scent of her childhood – sun-warmed spruce needles, mountain air, moss. Small red berries dot the forest floor. White flowers bloom on a large plant. She used to know all their names, but has forgotten them. She follows the old man along the river’s edge, and then up from the valley and towards the steep, rocky cliffs.
When they reach the top of a rise, a cold breeze blows off the river, glacial and pure. She hasn’t breathed air like this in a very long time. It brings tears to her eyes. The old man stops in front of a large spruce tree, but he doesn’t speak.
“Is this it?” she asks. “It’s nice. But why here, I mean, of all the places Dad has been?”
“We knew each other a long time. He saved my hide more than once, flying in and out of here when I needed him. He liked this part of the river. He used to say if he had been a settling-down kind of guy, he would have called it home. I remember when your mother died – he brought some of her ashes out here.
He put them at the base of this spruce tree. It was a little sapling then, and he liked to think it was the same age as you.”
“I had no idea.”
“Course not. You were just a baby.”
“Three. I was three years old. And he always told me Mom’s ashes were back in Colorado with her family.” “Yep. Her folks wanted to put her to rest down there. But he snuck some ashes, just a thimbleful, really, and sprinkled them right here. I think this is where he would have liked to see you grow up, with him and your mother. If things had been different. He said he always pictured a little cabin facing out to the river, you on a tyre swing, your mother in the garden. He had a big heart, you know. Loved you two like there was no tomorrow.”
Piper shrugs, though she knows it’s true. All she can feel is a kind of hot, sobbing anger that reminds her of her adolescence.
“I never understood. If he cared so much about me, why did he take all those chances? He was all I had.”
Tuttle puts his hands in his pockets and turns to face the river.
“It’s the damnedest thing,” he says. “I’ve got a black bear shadowing me. Last few weeks or so. He pops up along the river every few days. Yesterday he and I ran sideways of each other along this trail. I couldn’t get a good look at him, but he was in those alders there, following me, like maybe he was wondering how good I’d be to eat.”
Piper fidgets with the metal box. Why did she think the old man would be any help at all?
“I’ll bet your dad always told you if you’ve got a black bear after you, you don’t go running and shrieking.
That just whets his appetite. Your fear makes him want you all the more. He’ll chase you down. Try to hamstring you. Swipe at your back and knock you to the ground. Then you’re done for. No,” he says slowly,
“you can’t outrun him.”
For the first time, she looks into his eyes – old and watery with faded blue irises. But there is a gentle sadness she hadn’t noticed before.
“Your dad knew there was no running. So he wanted to face it down. Look right into those black eyes and let it know he wasn’t afraid. Even if he was. He wanted the beast to believe that he would go down

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fighting, eye to eye, and that he was so crazy he was even looking forward to the fight. Maybe then your dad could chase it off, even if it was just for a little while longer.”
Piper crouches beneath the spruce branches and opens the metal box. The fine, grey powder inside reminds her of the ashes from the woodstove when she was a child. She tips the box until the ashes begin to spill on to the ground, over exposed roots and layers of spruce needles. She tries to recall a line from a poem or a verse from the Bible. But all she can envision is her dad locked in a standing embrace with a black bear, like two Greco-Roman wrestlers. The bear is all roar and claw and teeth and glistening black fur, and there is her dad. Punching. Hollering. Fighting with everything he has.
She latches the metal box and follows Tuttle down the trail. Neither of them speaks, and Piper is glad for the silence, the forest and the river.
When they near the cabin, Tuttle stops in the trail.
“Look at that,” he says quietly. “There’s that fellow just now.”
Piper searches the sky, expecting to see the airplane, but Tuttle is looking toward the river.
On the other side, a black bear paces at the shore. It stops, turns, walks along the water’s edge and turns again, as if it were thinking of swimming across. Then it stands on its hind legs and puts its muzzle into the air.
Piper imagines her father charging across the river at the bear. The water splashes around him, shining and glistening. He grins and yells and when he hits the far shore, he starts throwing punches.
But she is nothing like her father. Even from here, the black bear a dark figure in the distance, all she wants to do is run.
(2012)

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