MIKE, CHARLEY, JEWEL & WOLF

By Jim Hunter

From earthquakes to floods, atom bombs aimed at Amchitka and Black Gold to prostitution Mike, Charley, Jewel and Wolf persevere in Alaska’s wilds Jewel is not destined to be the teacher her mother wished, or to be romantic with Mike. All must find their own paths, not just through Alaska’s wilds, but also summer’s ninety and winter’s sixty below. Little in Alaska is easy, as this book reveals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Aug 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781698714974

Jim Hunter

Jim Hunter arrived in Alaska in 1955 as a seventeenyear-old Air Force private watching Russian jets on radar screens taunt the United States. He met and dealt with most of the characters in this book, which is the sequel to Mike, Charley & Wolf. Following discharge he earned a degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State College. In 1976 Chronicle Books published his widely acclaimed guide to Mexico’s Baja Peninsula: OFFBEAT BAJA. Jim and his wife, Marilyn Mount of New Jersey, a retired School Counselor, divide their year between homes in Tucson, AZ and Fairbanks, AK.

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MIKE,

CHARLEY,

JEWEL &

WOLF

JIM HUNTER

©

Copyright 2023 Jim Hunter.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1496-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1498-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-1497-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023913249

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Trafford rev. 08/10/2023

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CONTENTS

Part One: The Final Frontier

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Two: Black Rain

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Books by Jim Hunter

Poetry

For

Marilyn J. Mount

Exit 8 New Jersey

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PART ONE

The Final Frontier

1957 – 1964

Got no right pontificatin’—nothin’ but twenty years in-country.

CHAPTER 1

In November 1957 Mike Cane found himself bleeding face down on a frozen creek. He could hear the ice below him begin to crack, and an inch from his face the panting of a trapped wolf.

F ollowing their initial battle—the wolf leaping and growling while trapped and chained—and the man screaming and rolling in pain, the two lay still. Daylight was leaving quickly as Mike’s blood froze to the ice, and the wolf’s began to freeze onto fur and steel. In split seconds the two would roll again into each other; the wolf in a fight for its life, and the human for reasons it would take a book to tell.

Mike thought "Of all things you’ve ever done out here, you sure climbed the wrong mountain today." Knowing neither the wolf, nor Alaska weather was that day going to provide a single ounce of mercy.

Not one.

During the first twenty seconds of their chain-dragging struggle the man and the wolf may have looked to the black ravens circling slowly above them like gladiators in Rome. The ravens didn’t care who won. The nine or ten gliding up and down on the wind current were waiting to see from which skull they would peck the eyes.

When the struggle began the wolf was weak from two days in the trap, and the human from his daylong effort to reach the place.

Once Mike Cane decided to free the wolf, he knew it would be costly. There would be Charley Lassiter’s fury back at the cabin, not only because of lost fur but also because of the injuries to himself, which would complicate their wilderness life. But once Mike decided to do it, there was no hesitation.

He knew, before throwing his body on the wild animal, that freeing a wolf’s foot from the jaws of a steel trap—one he’d set himself—would expose him to the teeth and strength of a desperate, wild animal. He would be injured.

As they lay—the first part of the battle over in less than a minute—Mike continued to hold apart with two gloved hands the steel of the traps jaws, knowing his grip would soon fail. He felt as useless as a fallen statue. His scalp was torn, one cheek sliced open from jawbone to eyelid, and all wounds bleeding badly. Then, even as he heard the male wolf’s own breathing, his grip on the trap failed. All he’d done was for nothing.

The jaws slammed shut, the wolf’s leg came out.

Mike found new energy, and quickly began using his elbows and the hard rubber heels of his white air boots to push himself away from the rising wolf toward his pack. There was no chance to stand.

He sought by feeling with his hands behind himself—without taking his eyes off the wolf—the wooden grip of his heavy .44, which he’d placed earlier beside his pack—even then pointed toward the wolf.

He had to assume the wolf would attack. He had to defend himself. Six feet of blood stained snow separated the two, the animal by then up on three legs, now staring down at Mike, wobbling after fifty hours, trap caught.

Feeling his pistol by touch and keeping both eyes on the wolf Mike brought the weapon around, experience and practice making the motion, even while he was injured, a smooth action. As his hands bled and began to shake he pointed the dark barreled old Ruger directly at the wolf. Prepared to pull the trigger.

The wolf was gone.

* * *

The upright creature crawling away on hands and knees meant nothing, nearby brush and trees meant everything. Running on three legs Wolf leaped awkwardly upward, pushing himself with his hind legs through wet snow, never slowing. Once out of sight, he twisted like the wind itself up the slight incline to get away from the trail the trappers used. His goal was to be gone, invisible in the weaving sea of tree trunks, brush and low hanging limbs.

He halted several hundred yards up hill, hungry, resting briefly, Mike’s blood and his own staining his fur; then turned to look back down. The man was small in the distance, moving away. Wolf moved further uphill; on a course he knew the other creature could never follow.

That night, over the next ridge, sleep overtook Wolf. By morning he was able to keep moving and forced himself toward an old kill site. Arriving a day and ten miles later, he lay for fifty hours gnawing bones and scraps fox, ravens, squirrels and insects had rejected.

He ate snow, and on the third day killed a rabbit unwise enough to have hopped into his jaws. Fur, ears, bones, and the lucky foot, all later to be left as scat.

Wolf limped west on The Rex Trail toward One Chance Mountain and the Totatlanika River. Instinct drove him toward the place he’d last been with his old pack. His trap-damaged leg would never be the same but would function. His buckshot body, the wounds the aerial hunters had caused, ought to have killed him, but they would heal. For now, they were nothing but pain, an irritating hindrance.

The forest was the same. Long trails, exhaustion, and nothing he could kill. No pack to work with; his own family gone. In seven days he was improving, and learning fast how to make the limping leg work, and not drag; how to not fall, how to be ready to leap on three legs, not four, how to use the jaws he still had, the skull and the brain above the gun-shot fur.

He could smell, he could feel, he could hear but he could not eliminate exhaustion, hunger and his failure to be more alert. A wolf stood before him.

Each wolf braced to kill the other, for lone wolves of the Arctic and most of America are—if not a part of a pack—always vulnerable. The pack, like any tribe, will protect itself first, preserve what it is, and accept new members, if at all, sparingly.

Wolf watched as the other wolf, somewhat smaller than him turned and ran; to where? And why?

He moved forward again, but this time more alert, not knowing what to expect up the Canyon of the Totatlanika when he came to a small cave in the high cliff’s side, just above the high water mark.

Not anything a bear would choose, as it was too large. It was not a place he remembered, though the canyon itself was home to him and to the pack he’d been born into. On the odd and unexpected shelf of rock below the cave he rested three days, feeling better each day than the last, his wild body not having been destroyed was slowly seeing to its regeneration.

During his third night in the cave, little larger than he was, he heard the howls. He rose and limped toward them. The Totatlanika River was frozen to its bottom as December 1957 worked toward January of the coming year, the ice thick and solid. The white of it like a book cover saying there are stories here beneath me than you will ever know, but try me anyway, walk me, use me, and let me carry you. Wolf continued and was surprised when he heard growling.

He’d been concentrating too much on not slipping, had not seen the wolf pack in the forest, silently tracking him, matching his pace with theirs’, paralleling his effort below the cliffs of One Chance Mountain.

As he leaped from the ice to shore, where the canyon was no more, all the land higher, and beyond it the great valley where the creatures made their home, the attack began.

Two wolves hit Wolf together, both high, rolling him over and leaving his throat exposed. Rather than battle back he lay still. Should they decide to kill him, he would be dead in moments. His throat exposed Wolf made no motion to resist.

A third wolf stood over him. His father, Leader, bent down, did not moan, lifted his head twice, as if king, the rest of the pack, the original two and more, watching him as he did not kill the stranger.

Wolf moved. Leader growled. Wolf went still. Then with practiced slowness Wolf began to rise from the Earth and wobbled upward to stand on his three good feet. The two, the father and the son, in a wild acknowledgement of it, put themselves then neck to neck. Shoulder to shoulder; one head south, the other north.

They parted; Leader gave a signal the pack knew, which was to hunt, and the Beta wolf, one of the two which had attacked Wolf, led them efficiently from the shadowed, thirty-below glade, on a new route of deep, wet, white snow, Wolf falling into last position, barely able to maintain the pack’s steady pace. To be known for the rest of his years in the Alaska Range Mountains as The Limping Wolf.

All that winter Wolf hunted as best he was able with the pack, leaving signs in the snow difficult to see, but if checked by experienced woodsmen were obvious. The depths of the paw prints on three legs were deeper than the fourth; and the fourth paw pointed the wrong way, while his other three feet with wilderness efficiency pointed straight ahead. Keeping up with the pack had not been easy.

* * *

By mid-summer—in June’s twenty-four hour daylight—Wolf lay with his old pack on a small river island on the eastern edge of their territory, below the city-sized Yanert Glacier. His one leg was oddly placed, his paw a broken compass. On two sides of the resting pack, like small boundaries, ran a thousand rivulets of inch deep oddly colored water, blue and white, brown and gray, and even clear as it made its way through gravel which had once been great boulders, to gather further on as the headwaters of The Wood River.

Melting snow from the many square miles of the Alaskan ice together with rains a week earlier made its nearby streams high and difficult to cross. Grizzly bears were out and hungry, but Caribou had not come east from McKinley National Park, as they should have.

Summer’s clock was ticking—all parts and pieces from grass seed to butterflies, termites to raindrops were in place, and noon was near—the pack was hungry, but they would have to wait to find not just weekly food, but also the important surplus.

One female remained hidden at the den site—nothing more than a small hole in a half-hillside from which the wolf pack had driven a fox. They’d made it larger where it sat in a small landslide just above an unnamed creek flowing into the Wood River.

The blind pups—only four of seven had survived six weeks—would soon gain sight and hearing. They would exit their home within the week. They would see and feel the twenty-four hour sunlight, as the rest of the small pack brought parts of kills for their mother to eat and cause her milk to continue.

The flat valley just south of the Wood River’s West Fork, with its brush and shelter, was their rising point that morning, and would be their first home.

One day earlier Leader had seen sheep. Calm on high cliffs with their permanent horns—quarter to full curl—looking down calmly, knowing the wolf pack, even far below, had to be watched.

If the wolves came up the first easy slopes and kept moving upward over the difficult rocky slides, the old rams would be forced to decide, as almost monthly they had to, to fight from the ridge top, or use their own climbing and balancing skills to flee to a steeper ridge, leaving the wolves atop the one with no way to get to the other.

Where Copper Creek flowed into the Wood River the pack crossed its mouth. Seeing, not scenting the high sheep, they climbed up through the tall spruce at six-thousand foot elevation, two and three on each side of the narrow stream until they reached a waterfall dropping straight down rocky cliffs, a wet blue-black color from the constant spray, misting and noisy, turning a great boulder over a thousand years into a small round bathtub, still sheltering in the shade the last of the winter’s ice, and above those falls not only the pure white ram with its full curl yellow horns watching them but a ewe moving quickly higher up, urging on the lamb she’d birthed; teaching it in a few short weeks how to survive.

What is rarely seen did happen. The lamb fell. The ewe turned and leaped downward faster than the wolf pack could charge upward. Landing on its back the lamb rolled over legs wobbling, somehow stood, shook, found new footing and came close to falling again when the ewe dropped from a high shelf, butting it forward, up up, and up again.

It was s dead-end. Leader turned.

The pack—five males and three females—eight with Wolf, retreated east back down Copper Creek’s narrow canyon to the Wood River, then trotted north on it. Leader led them down stream to Mystic Creek, to the left, then went west up that small creek’s tight turns, around its boulders and deep pools to a near level plateau halfway to the real top where six months before, at an easy lope, alternating between chasing and following Caribou relentlessly, so the Caribou could never rest, the smaller pack had run two caribou to exhaustion, stumbling in deep snow, not falling but being leaped upon and brought down the first by weight, the second by teeth gnawing, eventually the jugular.

The wolves had taken turns rushing at the caribou and her antlers. When they missed she was unable to avoid the tearing at her legs, then her neck and head as she too fell, not dying during the battle even as she was disemboweled, but from loss of blood, shock and terror as she was eaten.

The taking of large prey by a comparatively small predator—cow caribou are smaller than moose but larger than deer—is not always swiftly done, but rather a grinding down process where the many succeed and the few in deep snow do not escape.

That was six months earlier, and no marrow was left in the bones of that old kill. Food might on planet Earth wear out but hunger never did. Never. If gravity had not made the Earth spin, Hunger might have, the old trapper Charley Lassiter had said to the ears-covered boy their first season, more than one time. "Wolves", he’d told his new partner that first year, go to the grocery ‘bout like we do. They even put some food away on a high shelf the old man had said, talking more to himself—or to the sky Mike had wondered, not for the first time.

As the pack approached Mystic Creek’s small, high valley where the remains of their winter kill still lay, a black raven stood unafraid on white bones, having himself checked the old kill site, and like the wolves found nothing to feed hunger.

As the pack worked its way up Mystic, a June storm came. They were above the tree line and what shelter spreading branches might have given. They were in an area of short brush, tall grasses and multiple hunks and mounds of mud and ponds as the wind pushed rapidly west over them.

They did not look back, where the mountains they’d just left were being swallowed by a blackness so wide and so consistent it was like an unreal Heavenly cloud of galactic air, wind and moisture coming down at them lightening lit.

There would be no kill that day as Leader led them further west up Mystic Creek to a cliff he knew, to an old den site; and to an island of tall trees, rare at that altitude, where that night they slept.

Unfed.

* * *

As the pack worked the next morning up the ever-steeper slopes of Mystic Creek, the plane came. They paid little attention to the sound of it, because one or two aircraft came almost every day south from Fairbanks. The sounds of aircraft had become, for wolf packs near Alaskan towns, no more or less than a different wind, or an irritating bird, unless they were too close. Then the wolves would work to disappear, sometimes in single file into the deeper forest.

The sound did not change Leader’s plan. He’d seen moose in the next small valley, feeding in a place no bigger than some they’d already checked. Leader and his Beta Wolf saw at the same time the cow and calf. Without instruction the small pack spread out and began to flow downhill toward the two.

Mother and calf quickly stood, the one small, and the other large and old, just as a red and white Citabria aircraft, seeing the charging pack, reduced throttle and began a slow, circling descent down toward the small looking moose, and the even smaller looking wolves coming in a half circle, all eight now moving quickly at the cow and calf.

The cow fled up the steep southern slope, the wolves having attacked from the north, the calf slow in following. The wolves caught it, first one then four, and took it down, its legs still kicking, before the mother could return; her great hooves rising, her head down to battle, propelled not only by the down slope, but instinct too, she charged the pack, which had begun to rip open the calf’s stomach.

The Citabria came lower, and now a new challenge was about to begin. The pilot was good, and while there was no strong wind to help hold the bush-ready plane in the air while the passenger sighted on the wolf pack the aircraft was able to glide in, the wolves in their hunger ignoring the loud roar of the descending Lycoming engine.

The winds were not good, and the pilot had to keep adjusting the throttle so the plane would keep flying, even while moving as slowly as possible. The single-engine plane glided lower toward the ground, so the sighting passenger could hit his target. The pilot held the airspeed at five knots above stall, and switched off the irritating stall warning buzzer, using all parts of his body to keep the machine he was piloting not only level, but in the air at all; keep it from crashing and killing them both.

As he did these things the pilot could hear behind him the clicks of his passenger’s weapon, and see below not just the cow, but also the hungry wolves ignoring his plane. Good, he thought. Good.

The cow moose and the wolf pack were completely occupied with each other and ignored the aircraft’s roar as nothing more than another kind of thunder, a natural part of all there was.

The killed calf stopped kicking, but the wolves were forced to focus on the charging mother. They spun off the bleeding carcass, the gliding aircraft closer by the second.

The pilot throttled back and biologist Bob Steffason, in the back seat was able to click off essential color slides in Ektachrome of a hunting pack in action, with his old 35mm camera the Alaska Department of Fish and Game had provided him.

On a dangerously low second pass he counted the wolves accurately. Then scribbled down, while strapped tightly into his seat the number, location, and time of day, as the pilot gave power, pulled them up as if in a carnival ride, to escape the valley. Both were pressed so hard backwards the pencil slipped from Steffason’s grip.

Back in Fairbanks in the four story State Building at Sixth and Barnette Steffason would prepare his report for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

* * *

His twenty page report would include not only raw physical data gained that day, but also other phenomena registering repeatedly now on his mind as he completed his tenth year of working summer and winter in Alaska’s wilds, solo on foot up and down its still unexplored rivers and mountains where he camped and observed, counted and kept notes in uncounted field books full of drawings, suspicions and conclusions, as well as his uncounted, but multiple aircraft journeys.

CHAPTER 2

In February 1958 sixty-knot winds pushed truck-sized blocks of ice blocks toward Hidden Lake’s rocky shore—and the cabin there—as if the rolling giants were children’s toys.

L ooking out the small cabin’s single window, sipping precious coffee, Charley Lassiter could feel the log walls shake and move. He was startled. Storms came and went, but this one was different. His five-ten body trembled as one of winter’s blue and white ice pans came up out of the lake like some great whale up onto the beach, then was pushed by the wind across gravel, loudly toward him and the boy.

Losing no strength, the wind dropped the great piece of ice on shore; then wrapped itself around the cabin with a frightening howl—as if it had arms—to remind anyone inside how weak they were.

Charley remembered lecturing his young partner Mike the wind was nature’s messenger. So, what was it trying today to tell them? Both men shuddered, neither looking at the other. Charley continued to stare out the window, and Mike kept staring at the walls, wondering if he ought to kneel and pray. Wind might be invisible, but its effects were not.

Charley put his calloused left hand on the moving wall nearest him. The round logs were making a moaning sound as if the wall itself could experience fear. Mike looked up, attentive, catching the old man’s eyes.

This crazy wind was not raging up from Anchorage as it usually did—coming from the south over the twelve-thousand foot peaks of the Alaska Range—but from a greater wilderness behind them: The Brooks Range, and the North Pole itself.

Turning back from glancing at Mike and looking again at the window, Charley spoke directly to the glass, as if he and the window; the logs and the boy were all old friends. He hoped Mike would hear him, though he was facing the window, If town folks would just ask me, I could tell’ em. Ain’t no physical and mental out here.

Mike wished Charley would shut up. He loved the Old Man but not his odd chatter, and his constant mixing of salt with sugar,