Northern Lights

 
     
     
     
    PROLOGUE
     
     
     
     
     
     
    JOURNAL ENTRY . February 12, 1988
     
    Landed on Sun Glacier about noon. The flight in rattled the hangover right out of me, and severed those strangling roots of reality that is the world below. The sky's clear, like blue crystal. The kind of sky they slap on postcards to lure the tourists in, complete with a shimmering sun dog around the cold, white sun. I'm taking it as a sign that this climb was meant to be. The wind's about ten knots. Temp's a balmy ten below. Glacier's broad as Whoring Kate's ass, and icy as her heart.
    Even so, Kate gave us a proper send-off last night. Even gave us what you could call a group rate.
    Don't know what the hell we're doing here, except you gotta be somewhere doing something. A winter climb on No Name's as good a something as any, and better than most.
    A man needs a week's adventuring now and then, adventuring that excludes bad liquor and loose women. How else are you going to appreciate the liquor and the women if you don't get away from them for a while?
    And bumping into a couple of fellow Lunatics turned not only my luck at the table but my mood in general. There's little that bums me more than working a job for a daily wage like the rest of the mice on the wheel, but the woman sure will push the buttons.
    My windfall should satisfy my girls, so now I'm taking a few days with pals just for me.
    Going up against the elements, risking life and limb in the company of other men just as foolish is something I've got to have, just to remind me I'm alive. To do it not for pay, not for duty, not because a woman's nagging your balls blue, but just for pure idiocy is what keeps the spirit sparked.
    It's getting too crowded below. Roads going where they never used to go, people living where they never used to live. When I first came, there weren't so many, and the damn Feds weren't regulating everything.
    A permit to climb? To walk on a mountain? Screw that, and screw the tight-assed Feds with their rules and their paperwork. The mountains were here long before some government bureaucrat figured out a way to make a buck off them. And they'll be here long after he's winding red tape in hell.
    And I'm here now, on this land that belongs to no one. Holy ground never can.
    If there was a way to live on the mountain, I'd plant my tent and never leave. But holy or not, she'll kill you, quicker than a nagging wife, and with less mercy.
    So I'll take my week, with like-minded men, climbing this peak that has no name and rises above the town and the river and the lakes, that skirts the boundaries the Feds throw up on land that mocks their puny attempts to tame and preserve.
    Alaska belongs to none but itself, no matter how many roads or signs or rules are erected on her. She is the last of the wild women, and God love her for it. I do.
    We've established our base camp, and already the sun's dropped below the great peaks and plunged us into the dark of winter. Huddled in our tent, we eat well, pass a joint around, and talk of tomorrow.
    Tomorrow we climb.

 
     
     
     
     
    ONE
     
     
     
     
     
     
    EN ROUTE TO LUNACY . December 28, 2004
     
    Strapped into the quivering soup can laughingly called a plane, bouncing his way on the pummeling air through the stingy window of light that was winter, through the gaps and breaks in snow-sheathed mountains toward a town called Lunacy, Ignatious Burke had an epiphany.
    He wasn't nearly as prepared to die as he'd believed.
    It was a hell of a thing to realize when his fate hung precariously in the hands of a stranger who was buried in a canary yellow parka and whose face was nearly concealed by a battered leather bush hat perched on top of a purple watch cap.
    The stranger had seemed competent enough in Anchorage, and had given Nate's hand a hearty slap before wagging a thumb at the soup can with propellers.
    Then he'd told Nate to "just call me Jerk." That's when the initial unease had set in.
    What kind of an idiot got into a flying tin can piloted by a guy named Jerk?
    But flying was the only sure way to reach Lunacy this late in the year. Or so Mayor Hopp had informed him when he'd conferred with her over his travel arrangements.
    The plane dipped hard to the right, and as Nate's stomach followed, he wondered just how Mayor Hopp defined sure.
    He'd thought he hadn't given a good damn one way or the other. Live or die, what did it matter in the big scheme? When he'd boarded the big jet at