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     It was the wrong kind of day for death.
     Lazy long summer day in late July, soon to be sliding toward the icy rains of August. Teeming with noise and fun.
Before Buck walked the short distance from the village to my cabin, I'd just been sitting there listening to Stravinsky,
watching black-capped chickadees flit-doodling around in the birch trees high above slate juncos dancing on the
ground. Four trillion bugs singing like a chorus of chain saws. Blackwater pockets in the muskeg boiling with life; the
creeks near the cabin waving the thorny hellish whips of the devil's club.
Death seems to hurt more, seems to count for more, on a day promised to life.
I watched Buck pour a cup of coffee from the pot on my stove.
"Are you sure about this?"
Buck nodded. "I'm sorry."
"They didn't say anything on the radio ... about Bill. Didn't give any names."
"Karen called," Buck said. "Asked me to tell you."
The news without names had been scary enough. Even in a land of incredible beauty and occasional violence, when you
hear that someone slips the familiar mental boundaries and kills his tent mates, it gets your attention. It gets everyone's
attention. Little else had been on the radio news all morning: four men found dead in the Talkeetna Mountains. You
hear news like that and say, boy, that's a shame.
But Bill Turner…
"Karen's a mess," Buck said. I nodded.
Life bubbling everywhere and Bill was gone. Bill, who had had the future mapped out. Bill, who had known exactly
what he was going to do for the next thirty years until he retired.
"Want me to fly you in?"
"Oh ... no thanks, Buck. I can use the drive."
"Yeah," he said, patting me on the shoulder. "Need anything . . . call."
"Thanks."
Hell of a morning. Hell of a beautiful morning. Hell of a tragic morning. I walked out to the dog lot and fed and watered
the eight huskies. They wanted to leap and run and maybe go fishing, but that would have to wait. We were all waiting
through these summer days. The team waits for those first leaden snows of October so they can run again. I wait until
the velvet has been scraped off the antlers of the moose and caribou. I wait until the largest and nastiest of Alaska's
animals are at their peak and the game regulations say it's all right. Then I set up the white canvas wall tents on the other
side of the Alaska Range, beyond the big white mountains, and I take my chosen hunters in for a few weeks they'll
remember all their lives.
In the meantime there's fishing and fixing this log home that has been in my family for generations now, and listening to
some Mozart or Brubeck on the stereo and cutting firewood. There's always firewood to cut. But now, even the
waiting will have to wait.
Bill's dead and Karen wants me to come to Anchorage, and that's why I spent a hard hour first with my splitting maul,
readying firewood I wouldn't need for three months.
I wanted that time. I wanted to look at the seasoned logs of my comfortable home. I wanted the time to look at each of
the dogs and their happy faces. I wanted time to try to deal with the feeling that rose in me like a ghost that says this will
change things. This will change everything. Like putting a heavy red filter on the camera lens of the mind, things will
forever look the slightest bit different.
I looked at the cabin and hoped I would have more years here, years where the sun will shine, unfiltered by pain, but
now I couldn't be sure, because a shadow had crossed my life and blown the cold breath of death across my neck.
I cleaned up and changed clothes, then slowly drove the two hours along the forested highway to Anchorage.
~
Bill and Karen Turner bought a sensible house in the Muldoon area of Anchorage three years ago. It had three
bedrooms, just right for them and the children. Shelly must be about five now, and George ... I think George is going on
three.
George is named for me. In a way.
I have one of those Alaska names tourists have a hard time handling. On the birth certificate it's Jepsen George. The
Jepsen comes from my mother's maiden name and dates back to some nasty folks from the North Atlantic who were
heavily into pillaging others' villages from their home ports in Norway. My mother's side gave me the blue eyes and a
fondness for polka dancing. The George comes from my father's side of the family, which is Athabascan, the Indian
people who live in the interior of Alaska. In school, the kids shortened Jepsen to Jeep for me, and I've been Jeep
George ever since.
In downtown Anchorage, about five miles from Bill and Karen's house, is the old movie theater with brick walls that
made it through the big quake and a whole lot of little ones. If you go around to the alley and look, you'll see a door
with Jepsen George, Guide and Outfitter, on it. Unlock the door, walk up a flight of stairs, and you'll find a cubbyhole I
jokingly refer to as the office. It is used more often as a bedroom, really, but does have a phone and a desk and a
shower and a few nice mounted heads and a wall with some framed pictures of hunters I've gotten particularly fond of
over the years I've been guiding on my own.
Call it a poor man's hotel, anyway. About six years ago, I did a rather large favor for the man who owns the theater
(and other downtown property besides). I refused to take any money for the favor and he painted my name on the
door, put the furniture in, mailed me a key and said I was responsible for sweeping it out. He has never accepted rent
for it.
Any number of people have seen the sign on the door, or read my name in the phone book and called me Mr. Jepsen,
but I'm used to it. It's just one of those names. The George family gives me dark hair to go with the Jepsen blue eyes,
and the combination makes me a hunting guide, a dog musher, and in winter a dancer of polkas down at the South Seas
roadhouse at home in the little village of Kahiltna.
The dog musher part tends to make a man a bachelor, too, as a lot of women don't understand why a man with a
college education will feed eight dogs just so he can stay away from a warm fire in cold weather. Most of us who do
that aren't really good candidates for faithful attendance at delivery rooms or PTA meetings.
If I tried that for very long, I'm afraid I'd start remembering what the early morning sky looks like from my moose
lookout hill over across the Alaska Range. During those winter-night PTA meetings, when the parkas are hung up and
everyone is nodding off, too hot in three sets of longjohns, I'm afraid I'd remember that night in the hundred-mile race
when the dogs and I crossed the ridge and dropped onto the ice of Kroto Creek, As the dogs trotted ahead in a
sinuous line on the meandering ice, the moon showed the black spruce timeless along the banks. Above all, it was quiet.
On the slick ice, there wasn't even the usual crunch of snow beneath the runners. The only sound was the occasional
creaking of the sled as we cornered on the oxbow turns, and the ticking of a hundred and twenty-eight dog toenails on
the ice.
After two hours of that, the temperature dropped, and just when I thought it couldn't get any prettier, the northern lights
came out over Mount Foraker and made a liar out of me. The shaky green dream curtain gave depth to the fields of
snow in the swamp systems along the creek. The dogs broke into a run, then, in pure joy. I let them. I understood. We
were made for this, the dogs and I. We had our instincts, we had our training. We had our jobs, that cold night, and for
a few hours it all came together, the team and I working in a smooth ballet, winding like a shadowy, happy snake
through a gentle frozen forest in the God-light of a winter moon. Later that night, when we reached Joe May's cabin, I
almost hated to go in.
Sometimes Alaska is woman enough for a man. I'm not sure it's that way with me, because there are those times at
night when I want to talk about things and no one is there.
There are those times.
But mine wasn't the way of life Bill Turner chose. And he did choose it. For some people, life just happens. For Bill, it
was family all the way. He came to our little village of old sourdoughs and young homesteaders and Indian families
when he was very young, as a foster child. None of us knew much of his life before that, and I don't imagine anyone
asked much. Those things aren't too important in Alaska. Up here, it's just today and tomorrow that count, and
yesterdays are just melted snow and things that happened first.
Maybe it was something in the time before we met him that made him such a fanatic about family. When we were going
through college and working the hunting camps and fish canneries together, Bill was as jovial as anyone. But inside him
was this streak of stability that made the rest of us look at him a little strangely. The official state sport in Alaska is being
spontaneous and dreaming big for eighty-five years before telling the attendants at the Pioneers' Home what you plan to
do next year if you could just get out of this wheelchair.
Maybe for him it was just that the aching to belong was so deep it took the permanence of a rock to settle it. Bill's
degree in engineering was as carefully planned as every other move he'd made in his life. He met Karen in college, and
those of us around them knew they would be married. Marriage was a calculated move, but Karen wasn't. She was
Bill's love, and could've talked him into being reckless, I imagine.
But she wanted him just the way he was. If ever a man was custom made to be a husband and father, it was Bill
Turner. I was the only one who could tease him about it, though.
Bill and Karen even came to resemble each other some. It didn't take long. He got a little chubby and his hair thinned
prematurely. Karen chubbed up a bit, too, but into a comfortable motherly kind of shape you'd expect of someone
twenty years older who makes quilts. I realized, on that trip to town, they both wore glasses that gave the same general
impression of steadiness, of maturity.
Bill loved that modest house in Muldoon. Each time I visited, I got a fresh tour of the place, with each new
improvement pointed out in detail.
"Jeep, I don't believe you've seen the shelves I've built in Shelly's room ..."
"Sure I did, Bill. Saw them last trip."
"That was May," he said with a smile. "You know how kids are. She decided after a couple of weeks she didn't like
them, so I tore them out and put some thinner ones in. I think you'll like what I've done with them."
So I finished the tour, admiring the shelves as though I was the building inspector. I felt guilty each time this happened,
but never said anything to Bill. To me, shelves are good if the books don't fall. Pearls before swine I'm afraid.
The last time I'd been in the house was on the Fourth of July. Bill had just the right number of steaks and he naturally
remembered how everyone liked them done. Besides Bill and Karen and the kids, there was me and a young woman
from down the street. . . single and about our age . .. who owned her own home.
She had a pretty smile and listened to a guy's stories, but it didn't take. The steaks were great, though, and I really do
enjoy meeting women. They say you never know. That's what Bill always said. You never know.
"You never know, Jeep, when that lady who's right for you will be around the next corner."
"Thank you, Mother Turner."
"No, really. Like when Karen and I met...."
"You met in your first year of college," I said, ticking the familiar points off on my fingers as we sat later by the little gas
fire in his fireplace. "It was love at first sight. You were born to be married to each other. You'll live together until you're
both a hundred years old, and lie side by side forever."
He grinned and shook his head. "You make it sound so ... so planned."
I laughed so hard I choked on my soda pop. I like the orange ones.
That day, just a few weeks ago, Bill talked for more than an hour about the various insurance policies he had, and some
bonds he was buying with each paycheck to salt away for the kids' college.
Bill Turner was a planned man. Had been. But now Bill Turner was dead. The kind of man he was, and the kind of
friend he was, made it all the more shocking. He was the kind of guy you could picture retired and traveling in tours
with Karen after the children were seen safely through the university and into taxpaying.
My gut had started to hurt. I hadn't been driving fast to that remodeled house in Muldoon. I knew I would never be
fully able to remember it with laughter and smiles after this day. That is how the death of someone diminishes our own
horizons, taking away little pleasures by tingeing them with pain.
I listened to the radio news again on the way in.
Four men working for the Shan-Dor Mining Company were found dead when a supply plane arrived in a remote camp
in the Talkeetna Mountains. The state troopers are treating the deaths as homicides, and the names of the dead have
not been released pending notification of next of kin. A source close to the investigation says a fifth member of the crew
is missing and is being sought for questioning.
I'll bet he is.
Well, world, the name of one of those men was Bill Turner. William Henry Turner, actually. Bill Turner was there in my
cabin on the fringes of Kahiltna the night I found my Grandpa George's body in his favorite chair by the stove. Bill was
there all night, saying almost nothing, but keeping the coffee hot and listening to the ravings of a wild man. Well, actually
a wild kid more than a man. My grandmothers had died when I was younger, and my Gramps Jepsen had died just the
year before. My parents had both been killed in a plane crash when I was small. Chada, my Grandpa George, was all
I'd had left. Then he was gone, and I was orphaned altogether at just that age when you turn from a child to a man. The
village, which is the ultimate parent of any of us up here, accepted me as an adult after that, so I became one. It often
works like that.
Karen met me halfway across the mowed lawn and threw herself in my arms and sobbed. We went in the house and I
got her to the couch.
"Where are the kids?"
"Mother's. I wanted to get myself together before I told them. Oh Jeep, what …why did this happen? I don't even
know what happened. They won't tell me!"
"What did they say?"
She pulled herself up straight and wiped her face. It was red and puffy and her hair was like damp seaweed. I'd seen
her looking a lot better.
"Well," she said, trying to sound logical, "this morning a trooper came here with a minister. I don't even remember the
minister's name, Jeep. He wasn't our minister. Do you think they just have a minister who does this?"
"I believe there are several who take turns."
"He was very nice and offered to call a friend or go for my mother. I forget his name. I don't even remember which
church he was from."
"That's okay. What did the trooper tell you?"
She paused, trying to organize the hellish memory into something I could understand and that she would never forget.
"He asked me if I was Mrs. Turner. I said I was. And he said Mrs. William Henry Turner? I said yes. And he said he
was sorry, but my husband is dead. Just like that."
"Sometimes it's best like that."
"But it was just like that, you know?"
"I know."
"So I asked him what happened and he said someone killed Bill and three other men in camp and they didn't know who
did it or why they were killed."
"Where were they?"
"They were in a camp."
"Yes, I know. In the Talkeetna Mountains. But do you know where it is?
"I don't know. Bill said he'd only be gone a couple of days. He would've been back here tomorrow. Maybe even
tonight. Oh Jeep, he would've been back maybe tonight." I just held her until the shaking subsided.
"I asked the trooper if they'd been . . . you know, dead very long? Like overnight. There's bears out there . . . and
wolves."
"You shouldn't worry about that."
"The troopers are there now," she said. "They won't let anything ..."
  "Of course not."
"I haven't told the children yet."
I put my arms back around her and she tried to push her head through my chest as she sobbed.
"This wasn't supposed to happen."
"I know."
“I haven’t told the children yet, Jeep.”
“There’s time.”
"They know something's wrong, though."
“Yes.”
"The trooper didn't say anything more. Why would anyone want to kill Bill?"
"Three other men were killed, too. Who knows how these things happen?"
Alaska can be a strange chemical brew. She tends to bring out whatever traits you have, but to ridiculous extremes. If,
for example, you liked to tell jokes around the barber shop down in Kansas, you could become a laughing jackass in
Alaska. If you were inclined to be a bit snappy at your neighbors down in Ohio, a winter or two in Alaska could leave
you with a police record.
Or, in some rare cases in this state's history, if a person was strange enough, people could die in the far places, and the
state troopers wouldn't know why.
It happened that way in the Cache Creek mining camps back in the 1930s. All they found were the bodies of the
miners and their wives. The man they suspected had vanished forever. Some say he perished in the mountains, while
others still say they know he made it back to Seattle.
Similar killings have taken place at the old ghost town of Kennicott and at Barrow. In each case, there seemed to be no
obvious reason for the killings except that Alaska had finally snapped the fragile twig inside a human being that
separates eccentricity from homicide.
In one of the breaks between tears, I broiled some mooseburgers for us. She ate a little, which is better than I thought
she would. To me, even the succulence of moose tasted like cardboard.
When death hits, it seems to wipe the color and flavor out of everything. The outside world may look the same as it did
yesterday, but death tars it with the blackness of shock and pain. About all you can do is tough it out and get through it.
My father's people have ways of letting these things work themselves out over three days. If that doesn't remove
enough of the hurt to get back in life again, the potlatch helps later. Unlike the bizarre bankrupting blowouts the Tlingits
threw a century ago, the Athabascan potlatches are just little quiet parties, with food and presents for those who sat
with the body and stayed and cooked for the family.
It seems to work well for us, and that's all that matters. Find something that works and use it.
It's times like these when I pity those who come from a single culture and a single set of customs. It must be sad to be
stuck like that. I count myself lucky. The blue-eyed part of me can draw on Anglo America and the great brotherhood
of the Sons of Norway. The dark-haired part can draw on thousands of years of animism, heavy medicine, omens, and
my personal totem, the raven. And, if the pain or the situation seems too much for either of these methods, I have no
hard-nosed ethnic qualms about mixing and matching until I find something that works.
Karen wasn't that lucky. She had a culture that came from California. As far as I could tell, it consisted of a frantic
pinball game between large sterile office buildings, large sterile school buildings, large sterile shopping malls, and a
house made of stucco and painted a color that wouldn't offend the neighbors. She had only her mother left of that
culture. She used to have Bill, too, and that had been enough. Now Bill was gone. Karen will, I'm sure, pull out of this
and take care of business, because she's that kind of woman. But that night she was jelly and nerves, all shaking on the
couch, sometimes talking, sometimes crying.
It was starting to get twilight outside, so I knew it must be late.
"What do you want to do about the kids tonight?"
She took a couple of deep breaths and tried a shaky smile.
"I don't want to frighten them when I'm like this. I guess I'd better call Mom and see if they can stay over."
"Good idea."
She did. But her mother, in confusion, had told Shelly and George that Daddy had been in an accident and couldn't
come home any more. They wanted to know why, and Grandma didn't know what to say next.
"I'd better go over there," Karen said, giving me a long hug and kissing me on the cheek. She gathered up her coat and
hat and took my hand again.
"Thanks for coming. I needed you here. I'll be okay now. Well, I don't know if I'll ever be okay again, actually ..."
"Yes, you will."
"I guess I have to, for the kids. What am I going to tell them, Jeep? They'll want to know what happened and why. And
so do I. I couldn't think of anyone else to call."
"You did the right thing."
"Would you find out for me? Would you talk to someone and learn what really happened? The trooper wouldn't tell me
anything."
"I'll see what I can do."
"Thank you, Jeep. Will you be in Kahiltna?"
"I'll stay here in town at the office tonight so I can use the phone tomorrow."
"And you'll call me?"
"Just as soon as I know something."
I knew, even then, that there would come a time I'd wish I hadn't made that promise.

                                                                         Chapter Two
I awoke with the light, which comes early this time of year. The morning, which is really the middle of an ordinary night,
is the only nice time to be in Anchorage, because ever since it was simply Mile 114 on the Alaska Railroad, it's been
trying to act like a big city. Lately it's been succeeding.
I rolled up the sleeping bag and stuffed it into the closet, took a quick shower and dressed, then walked the few blocks
to Ship Creek.
It's not much to look at any more. The creek empties into Cook Inlet right at the base of downtown Anchorage. The
raging tides here regularly transform Ship Creek from a placid sheet of water with waterfowl on it to a series of killer
mud flats.
This morning it was mud flats, and that was all right because I was in a mud-flat mood. For once, I didn't even mind the
encroaching industries around the creek.
But the day coming on was beautiful: clouds to the east over the Chugach Mountains and just the pale pink of eternal
snow on the base of McKinley, a hundred and fifty miles away, beyond my village of Kahiltna.
The sky becomes light gently this time of year. There are usually a few lights left on in the sleeping city, and a few
blocks away on Fourth Avenue there is still activity around the bars. The girls are still standing their eternal watch on the
sidewalks, hoping for construction workers. But even on Fourth Avenue it's quiet now, as if in deference to the coming
day. Tony and the band have gone home from the Montana Club. Only the winos are left, along with those few people,
usually men, who find life so terrifyingly lonely here they have to cluster together to weather it through. I like to take an
early morning walk to Ship Creek when I'm stuck in town, because there is often life in it. Some ducks or geese. I've
seen muskrats in there, but they were a little farther upstream toward the boundary of Elmendorf Air Force Base. Near
there is a pond where the hot water from the base's boilers empties out. A handful of hardy ducks tough it out there all
winter and are celebrated throughout the city.
Down the inlet, I could see the offshore rigs and their tiny flames amid the vastness of the ocean. Somehow, the magic
of visiting Ship Creek early in the morning didn't work this day, so I walked back up the hill and drove out a ways to
Peggy's Airport Cafe for breakfast.
By eight I was back in the office over the movie theater, making some calls. My pal at the Daily News hadn't been told
any more than the rest of us about the killings, but he knew it was up in the Talkeetna Mountains, which I'd heard on
the radio anyway.
A call to Shan-Dor Mining Company narrowed the hunt a bit. .. after five minutes of listening to some nineteen-year-old
girl tell me no one was available to talk to me. No, Mr. Shannon wasn't taking any calls. No, Mr. Dorio wasn't taking
any calls, either. What exactly did I want? Yes, that was certainly a terrible thing. We're just. .. well, we don't know
what to think about it here. Maybe if you call in a few days? Where did it happen? Look . .. maybe I shouldn't tell you
this, but it was at a place called Murder Lake? Can you believe that? Murder Lake? It's even on the map here. Next to
a place called Stephan Lake.
She pronounced it "Steven" instead of the correct Alaskan pronunciation of Step-ANN. It was named for Chief
Wasilla Stephan, whose family was murdered just a few miles away and many years ago at Murder Lake. Grandma
George always said we were related to him on her side of the family.
I thanked the girl and hung up and thought about it for some long minutes. Murder Lake. There weren't three people
who lived within twenty air miles of it. It is a place of incomparable beauty, with spreading forests, lakes dotting high
tundra ridges, and mountains that shoot up from the tundra, making secure homes for Dall sheep. It is good hunting
country. I guided that area years ago as an assistant guide for Bob Gordon. Some open country, but a lot of taiga forest
as well. . . black spruce and birch in the lower areas, dissolving into the hells of alders up higher where the soil thins and
the tundra takes over.
I called trooper headquarters and asked to talk with Captain Strickland. I didn’t really expect him to be there, and he
wasn't. Jim Strickland is one of the finest woodsmen I know and I pretty much guessed where he'd be.
"Captain Strickland won't be back in town for several days, sir," said the voice of a young police officer. "He's pretty
busy right now, but perhaps I could take your name and phone number?"
"Is he working the homicides at Murder Lake?"
"I'm sorry. We never give out that kind of information."
"Well, would you please tell him Jeep George called and it's important?"
"Jeep George the dog musher? Yes sir, I sure will. Uh, Mr. George, I don't think it would hurt anything to tell you
Captain Strickland is working that mining camp case, yes. We don't expect him back for a few days."
"Can you tell me anything about it?"
There was a hesitation.
"No sir. I prefer you get anything like that from Captain Strickland. He's in charge of the case."
"Thank you, officer. I appreciate it."
"Mr. George? I've heard a lot about you from the captain and some of the other officers. The captain has talked about
you ever since you traveled together on the Iditarod race. Would you mind answering a question for me?"
"I believe I owe you one."
"Well, the captain told us a story about when you two got to Nome and were out celebrating later. I was just
wondering . . ."
"Does this story have to do with the cavernous size of the urinal and how slippery the floor is in the Board of Trade
Saloon?"
"Well, yes sir, it does."
"I'm afraid it's all true."
I could hear him laughing as I hung up.