It must have been well after midnight that the headlights of a vehicle beamed onto my window, growing so bright that the whole room was illuminated as the scrunch of tyres on gravel and the noise of an engine approached. It stopped, the engine was cut and suddenly the room was black again. The slam of doors, the sound of men’s voices gradually fading, and a moment later footsteps in the passageway outside, the fumbling of a key in a lock. They were in the room next to mine and I could hear their voices. They were blurred, of course, by the wooden partition wall, but still quite audible, and yet I couldn’t make out a word they were saying. I must have been listening to them for several minutes before I realized they weren’t speaking English, but some language that was foreign to me.
Curiosity, and the need to relieve myself, got me out of bed. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain. The truck with the dead deer was back, parked right below me, the stiff sticks with hoofs on the end looking macabre in the light of a young moon. Beyond the highway the mountains of the Front Ranges were a black wall blotting out half the sky, and high up the blackness changed abruptly to a brilliant mantle of white. I went into the toilet and shower cubicle, the voices lower now, hardly more than a murmur. And when I had flushed they ceased altogether.
The truck was gone in the morning and the sun shone out of a blue sky. I was packed and coping with a greasy plateful of bacon and eggs when Jim Edmundson arrived. ‘You got a nice day for your trip to Dezadeash Lake,’ he said. ‘Jean’s looking forward to it herself. And if the weather holds over tomorrow the track up to the mine should be okay.’ Later, as we drove into Parks HQ, he said, ‘Those hunters, by the way, they’re booked in again at Lakeside Lodge. I checked with Kevin while you were getting your bag. So just be careful. Some of them are a bit trigger-happy, shoot at anything that moves. Last year we had a guy from ‘For onto come through, two guns, all the right permits, and the bugger goes and shoots a pony, says he thought it was a bear coming at him out of the bush. Can you beat it?’ He didn’t like hunters. ‘If I had my way I’d ban shooting altogether. But up here game is about all we got to attract the visitors and keep the money rolling in. Still, if you’d come into the Yukon with a gun, I wouldn’t be giving you a lift, that’s for sure.’
He left me in the Exhibition Centre. ‘I got work to do.’ And he added, ‘I laid on the film presentation. The man who runs it will be with you at nine-thirty. It lasts twenty-seven minutes and by the time it’s over Jean will have the car waiting for you outside. Okay?’
That morning, with the sun shining and in the dazzling white of fresh snow spread over the tops of the mountains like sugar icing, the view from the Centre’s big windows was breathtaking. So, too, was the film show. There were perhaps a dozen tourists seeing it with me, but for the half-hour I was in that darkened room I wasn’t aware of them. The slides thrown on the wall-screen by six projectors took me into a world as remote as that which I had looked down on during the flight across the top of the North American continent. Ice and snow and glaciers, the thaw and running water, rare flowers opening with the sun, small animals rearing young, the aurora and the winter’s grip on frozen peaks — I sat transfixed by a glimpse into something so primeval, so terrible in its cold beauty, that the human race and all its problems, the reason for my own presence here at an intersection of the Alaska Highway, everything seemed of no account, as though I were at the birth pangs of the world, living the Creation.
Then suddenly it was over and the lights came on. I was back in the Parks Headquarters, the real world breaking in on me with the appearance of a small, plump woman with a smiling face. ‘You’re Philip Redfern, aren’t you?’
I nodded, my mind still dazed by the wild remoteness of what I had just been shown.
‘I’m Jean — Jean Edmundson. I’m taking you to Dezadeash, that’s right, isn’t it? Jim said to take you to the Lodge there and introduce you to Kevin McKie. He owns the place.’ And she went bubbling on about Jim having to go over to Destruction Bay, the Mounties having had a report of somebody with a gun stalking Dall sheep up on the mountains above Lake Kluane. She pushed open the doors and led me out to where her car was parked. ‘I’d have been here earlier only I have to take my little boy to school, he’s too young to go on his own yet, and then there’s the usual household chores. It’s nice to have an excuse to drive over to Dezadeash. It’s a lovely run, all along the Front Ranges.’ She flung open the car door. ‘And such a beautiful morning, too, after all that rain, and the snow on the mountains. Jim says the winter will be early this year. Jim’s usually right about the weather. Six years he’s been a warden here. Six years next March. Before that we were with the Forestry Service. We had a lovely little doll’s house of a place just out of Port Hardy on the Beaver Harbour road. Jim’s done all sorts of things, but this is the job he likes best. I guess he’ll stay with the Kluane Parks now, and I don’t mind it — as long as he’s happy …‘She prattled on as she drove out to the High way and turned left where a sign showed the Haines Highway breaking off from Alaska Highway No. i, which was the road to Anchorage.
We passed a police post and a Met. station, a few other buildings, and then there was nothing but the road stretching ahead through spruce and scrub with the Front Ranges a towering 8000-foot rampart to our right, the autumn colouring of the upper slopes gold and red in the sunlight, changing to the crystal white of new snow on the tops. I wondered what it had been like when Miriam had driven to Lakeside Lodge along this same highway — had she felt any sense of unease? I wished the woman would stop talking. I would have liked to consider whether there was any real justification for the tension that was growing in me — or was it just my imagination? Why should that slide show have affected me so? It was as though I had been given a glimpse into the cold realities of the world beyond, the things I couldn’t quite grasp — dust-to-dust, city lights and offices all transmuted into the glacial cold of life after death, a nuclear winter …
Perhaps I was tired. Perhaps it was the jet-lag that some people talk about, or was it the spirit of this far northern country entering my soul — or was it premonition?
‘Jim said to be sure and show you our rock glacier. You ever seen a rock glacier, Philip?’ The car slowed and we turned right into a parking area. ‘You can just see it above the spruce there.’ She pointed to a long brown gash in the scrub-covered slopes that looked like scree, except that it was heavier stuff, all boulder and rock. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’ She was bouncy and full of energy, her eyes alight with a girlish enjoyment of life, the whites bright with the health that radiated from her. ‘Come on, this way.’ She plunged into a forest of spruce on a beaten path that became a boardwalk where it crossed an area of swampland. Then we were climbing sharply up until we reached the edge of the slide, which towered above us like the decayed remains of a gigantic stone fortress. ‘It moves just like a glacier, very slowly, but never really stopping. I don’t understand the mechanics — boulder on an ice-polished rock surface underneath, I suppose. You must ask Jim. He’ll explain.’
The boulder and rubble ran in a long sweep high above me. ‘Is this anything like a placer mine after they’ve got the gold out?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been here six years, but all the Kluane mines are closed now. They’re not allowed to mine gold or anything else, not in the Park area.’