Beyond the Bear by Dan Bigley, Debra McKinney Read Free Book Online Page A

meant. She got her wound-up hindquarters under control and jumped into the backseat. The front passenger door handle only worked from the inside, so John leaned over and opened it for me. I slid in, John cranked the engine, and off we went southbound on the Seward Highway with John Brown’s Body reggae tunes booming from the speakers.
    I had just twelve hours left, twelve hours before being plunged into darkness, twelve hours before the life I loved and assumed was mine for keeps would no longer exist.
    Until then, the day couldn’t have fit my mood better. Warm, cloudless, and ridiculously blue, that day in July was one of those classic Alaska summer days that induce winter amnesia, deleting from memory all those long dark months of icy roads, dead car batteries, and bitter winds that seep through windowsills and send backyard greenhouses flying like box kites. As we passed the turnoff to Portage Glacier, I glanced up the valley, a foyer of mountains with hanging glaciers all shimmery and mouthwash blue, and reminded myself yet again how blessed I was to have landed in such a place. Soon after, the highway bore right toward the Kenai Peninsula at the far end of Turnagain Arm—so named after a scouting crew in 1778 that included William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame , serving as sailing master on Captain James Cook’s quest for the Northwest Passage, was forced to turn around again. I leaned forward in my seat and soaked up the glacier-sculpted landscape, with Chugach Mountain peaks dolloped with remnants of winter off in the distance, multiple variations on the theme of green sloshing up their mountainsides. To my left, trumpeter swans bobbed in a marsh. Up ahead, a lone raven surfed thermal waves high above the trees.
    As the highway parted company with the Arm and started climbing toward Turnagain Pass, my mind wandered back to Amber. I debated whether to bring her up, but couldn’t stop myself. I knew John had to be wondering.
    “So, you know, Amber and I really hit it off last night. It’s kind of crazy, but I think we’re going to go for it.”
    “Oh yeah? Huh. That’s cool.” By that he meant, this better not interfere with our fishing.
    John had actually met Amber before any of us had moved to Alaska, as mutual friends of the Minneapolis-based jam band the Sweet Potato Project. He didn’t know much about her other than that, like me, she couldn’t say no to live music shows. In fact, our paths may never have intersected if not for the Girdwood-based band the Photonz, which lured us both to town. Amber was at the end of a festival-hopping road trip from Minnesota to Alaska when someone urged her to check out the band, which was playing that night in Girdwood. I’d befriended band members while they were on tour and I was a senior at Prescott, and they had talked up the place. Although John and I had sworn off girlfriends, we both knew it was only a matter of time before one of us caved. Falling for someone during ski season would have been bad enough, but during salmon season?
    John and I had been practically inseparable since the previous summer when we worked security for the Girdwood Forest Fair, keeping an eye out for drinking outside of the beer gardens and making sure freeloaders didn’t sneak in through the back gate, even though, had the circumstances been different, we might have been the ones doing the sneaking. Over the course of the three-day festival, we discovered we shared a go-with-the-wind, howl-at-the-moon spirit, and during down times had long discussions about Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, which John carried around with him like a bible. Both of us were getting over heartbreaks that neither had seen coming. Both of us were more interested in fishing, even if we ended up getting hosed, or climbing some mountain in rinse-cycle weather than pursuing new girlfriends.
    I had taught John how to roll a kayak, and had turned him on to the euphoria of skiing in deep, backcountry