Unbearably Deadly (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 9) Read online

  “On weekends we’d drive a couple of hours up into the Sierra east of Sacramento and fish for trout in the American River forks or up higher on the Feather and Truckee Rivers. On the good trips we’d come home with a couple of 2-3 pounders for the freezer, and eat a smaller fish for dinner if we were camping overnight.

  “There were also salmon runs up the Sacramento River every fall, but that was bank fishing or trolling from a boat out on the river. I think the biggest salmon I ever saw my dad catch was a 50-pounder off the shore in the city limits of Sacramento. That one got frozen and we had chunks of it for backyard barbeques the rest of the year.”

  Suzanne paused to sip her beer, then turned to Joe Corti to ask, “How about you Joe? Where’d you grow up and learn to fly-fish, and how’d you become a guide here at the lodge teaching tourists how to fly-fish and pan for gold?”

  Joe took a couple of long pulls on his glass of beer, then smiled at Suzanne and answered her questions. “I’m a local, born and raised down in Anchorage. My father was a gold miner here in Kantishna until the mines were closed down, then he worked for one of the big oil companies until he retired. He taught me to fish and hunt as soon as I was old enough to shoot a rifle, and how to look for gold as soon as I was old enough to hold the pan steady. I graduated from high school in Anchorage, joined the Marines for a 3-year hitch, then came back here, got a degree in biology from the University, and became a high school teacher at my old alma mater. The high school schedule lets me get a job in the park where I can get paid to play all summer, so life is good.

  “If you ever get invited to visit any of the locals, check out their furniture. If they spent a ton of money for satellite TV and DVDs, it’s a good bet they live here all year round and survive the winters with the home entertainment center. If the freezer is bigger than the dining room table, they’re probably natives who are serious about hunting and fishing to stock that freezer for the winter.”

  Suzanne sipped her beer. “Can you pan enough gravel while you’re out with the tourists every day to make any money from the gold you recover, Joe?”

  “No,” he said pensively after a short pause. “I’ve found a few nuggets I could sell through the years, but gold panning is a lot of hard work for very little reward. I’d rather spend my time fishing and restock my freezer with some fresh fish while I’m actually having some fun in the creek, like we did today. Speaking of which, I’ve got to get going. My next tour starts in half an hour and I need to check the gear before everyone shows up.”

  We shook hands after he gulped the rest of his beer. “You folks are staying here, right?”

  Suzanne nodded yes.

  “Don’t forget the party out back every night, starting around dusk. Maybe I’ll see you there tonight.” And off he went.

  “What did you think of Joe?” Suzanne asked me.

  “He seemed like a nice enough guy,” I replied. “But he’s still a suspect. They all are. It sounds like the best way to meet the staff is going to be staying up late and joining the parties every night while we’re here.”

  Chapter13. More activities, more suspects

  We’d also signed up for a 4-hour hike to the old Kantishna Mine (lunch included) as part of a very long, very busy day dedicated to meeting our suspects and potential suspects. Next up would be another of the staffers, guide Howard Cram, and seeing some real wilderness flora and fauna from up close. Not to mention seeing how the old timers mined gold in Alaska. Instructions were simple: Comfortable sturdy hiking boots, sunscreen, insect repellant for the flies and mosquitos, pick up a bag lunch at the front desk, bring 2-3 bottles of water, plan to hike in comfortable clothes, bring layers of clothing in case it gets cold or rains. Don’t sign up unless you can handle moderate exercise levels! Meet in exactly 30 minutes in front of the Lodge. We picked up our second lunch for the day so we’d look like everyone else on the hike and joined the tour.

  There were eight of us assembled for this tour, including a few from the earlier gold panning tour, the couple from Seattle and the patient lady who stood at the back of the group and was always quiet. Our wilderness guide walked up to the group announcing, “Hi. I’m your guide for today, Howard Cram. Call me ‘Howey’.”

  I think everybody was surprised by the guide’s abrupt entrance. He seemed to just materialize from nowhere. Physically, Cram could have been Joe Corti’s cousin. He was about five foot ten, one hundred sixty five pounds, lean and hard bodied. He had the same tanned and outdoor look. His hair was lighter with a better haircut, no mustache, a few years older. Howey reminded me of the young Robert Redford in the movie “Jeremiah Johnson”, but nowhere near as good looking. He smiled a lot less than Corti, with a perpetual look of serious absorption in his job.

  Howard got the group together in a tight circle around him. “This will be an easy hike, mostly on the old fire roads the miners used to bring workers to and from the mine and to carry enriched gold ore back to the main road. They’re called fire roads because they were also used to move volunteers to fight fires when they broke out, which was a pretty frequent occurrence in the old days of oil lamps and wood stoves. All of the old mining equipment ran off waterpower or steam engines, and the steam mostly came from heating water over wood fires or burning coal. The machinery started its fair share of fires too. Now follow me, and be sure to let me know if we’re going too fast or if anyone needs to stop for a rest. I’ll stop pretty often to point out interesting sights along the way. Does anybody have any questions before we begin?”

  Before anyone could think of a question to ask, Cram was saying, “Let’s go. Follow me.” And, so saying, he started to lead us to an old trail that headed generally westward away from the Lodge.

  We walked along the main road for a few hundred yards, then on a fire road into the forest for another few hundred yards, then off on a well-worn hiking trail through forest and tundra in a generally northwest direction. The main road was wide, well graded, and easy walking. The sun had indeed come out and the sky overhead was a deep blue with occasional white, puffy clouds. The creek flowed steadily downhill back towards the Lodge on our right, with trees and bushes lining the far shore, while we saw mostly thick birch and ash forest on our left. The fire road when we reached it was narrow, about one truck wide. After we turned onto the narrow fire road from the main road, which ran alongside the creek, it was much darker, with large trees shading us from much of the sunlight. Thick woods lined the narrow man-made fire lane on both sides. The hiking trail angled through a short patch of thick forest before bursting out into the sunshine surrounding the grassy meadow of the tundra.

  Howard set a brisk pace for the terrain, which was gradually sloping upward as we got into the foothills of the major mountain range behind the Lodge. I hoped everyone was in good enough shape to keep up.

  Twenty minutes later, our guide signaled a stop and motioned us to be quiet. He pointed at a grizzly bear about 200 yards away, patiently fishing for salmon in a fast moving creek further west of the hiking trail in the large meadow we were walking through. The tundra was lush and green, mostly grasslands and small shrubs, with occasional pools of water scattered about seemingly at random all around us. Flowers bloomed everywhere, looking as if a mad painter had wanted to add additional colors to the scene, especially in small blue and yellow patches. The creek was wider and seemed deeper than it was as it passed by the Lodge.

  “That bear knows we’re here. He can hear and smell us. As long as we don’t get any closer I think he’ll ignore us and keep on fishing. Let’s take a rest break, sit here, drink some water, eat our lunches, be as quiet as we can, and enjoy watching the bear catch his lunch. There’s plenty of salmon for the bear; I don’t think he’ll be attracted to whatever food we’re carrying. But remember to pack whatever food and wrapping materials are left over in your backpacks so they can be properly and safely disposed of back at the Lodge.”

  “What kind of bear is that?” asked the gentleman from Seattle.

  �
��Technically it’s a brown bear,” replied our guide. “As you can tell from the almost orange colored fur it’s a grizzly bear, by far the most common sub-species of brown bear in the Park. The fur gets an orange color up here because of the berries and fruits they eat, which supply the pigmentation.”

  A few moments later, Howard Cram pointed upwards and asked us, “Can you see those large birds circling high up, straight over the stream where the bear is doing his thing? They’re bald eagles, the US National Bird, hoping to help clean up whatever pieces and scraps are left over when the bear finishes fishing and moves on.”

  We all looked up into the deep blue cloudless sky. Four large birds were soaring in lazy circles where our guide was pointing. They seemed effortless in their glides on the thermals despite their large size. It was as if they were huge kites hanging in mid-air, where they could apparently defy gravity.

  We all refocused on watching the grizzly catch fish. His front paws were incredibly quick. He stood in knee-deep water where he could catch the salmon as they swam against the strong current in the creek. His right front paw would flick out, occasionally catch a fish, and throw it onto a growing pile behind him a few feet out of the creek. One of the fish flopped violently off of the top of the pile where he’d been thrown, landing a few feet further away from the bear than the other salmon. With amazing speed, one of the circling eagles dove several hundred feet down to the lone struggling fish, grabbed it with his talons, and flew off with his prize almost as fast as he’d arrived. The eagle was huge, with a wingspan of about 7 feet, and unbelievably fast. He was also well on his way to being adequately fed today.

  A few minutes passed as we watched the bear gather salmon to feed himself and his family, and to lay down extra fat for the long winter hibernation. Cram silently indicated it was time to move on. Our group continued hiking towards the old mine, being very careful not to disturb the bear as we moved away from its fishing spot.

  We were still gradually climbing through a broad expanse of tundra. The guide pointed out various bushes and flowers as we passed typical examples of the local fauna. “Look over there,” Cram exclaimed several times as he pointed towards various animals sharing the meadow with us. “That’s an elk. Those are caribou.” As we climbed into more mountainous terrain, he pointed out a small group of Dall sheep, with their characteristic yellowish-brown horns curving over their front shoulders, and several mountain goats on a steep high peak of rocks off to our left. The goats were most notable for their short black horns shaped like an upside-down pair of pliers and their nimble leaping ability.

  Suddenly, we were at the old mine. The mine itself was sealed. All we could see was a large entrance into a shaft built into the side of a steep, scrub covered hill with rocky outcroppings reaching upwards to eventually become part of the mountain. A fast-moving stream ran down the slope of the hills and out into the vast tundra we’d walked through. At the closest point it was less than 100 yards from the mine entrance. Along the banks of the stream on the hill, where it flowed fastest and deepest, we could see the remains of ancient rockers and sluice boxes the old time miners had used to process the gravel from the river and the crushed rocks they pulled out of the mine. There was also an old stamping pad they’d used to crush the larger rocks before they’d put the newly made dirt and gravel into the rockers.

  Cram took off his backpack, removed and opened a small bottle of water, took a few sips, and started to explain what we were looking at. “This far away from the road there really wasn’t any good way to bring in heavy mining equipment. And the only way to get the gold ore out was by dog sled in the winter months or on the backs of humans after the snow and ice thawed out in the summer. The miners would do a mixture of hard rock mining with pick, shovels, and dynamite and of placer mining to concentrate the gold before they took it out of here. It would have been a perfect place for a smelter on the mine site, but that wasn’t possible. Where would the fuel come from? It would cost more to ship coal in by dog sled than the gold was worth. The forests didn’t help. Trying to burn green wood or collect the huge amount of deadwood you’d need in this wet climate on the scale a smelter requires would have been impossible.

  “All the placer mining equipment you see here at the mine was to concentrate the gold as much as possible before shipping it out by dogsled the six months of the year when the tundra was frozen. After everything thawed, they used human labor connecting with canoes and boats on the navigable rivers the rest of the year. This all made sense if you located a rich vein of gold you could dig out with picks and shovels. They did at this mine. When the vein disappeared they closed the mine. Who knows? There might be millions of dollars worth of gold above or below that original vein they worked, but nobody is allowed to mine for it on National Park property.”

  The guide took a few more sips of water before continuing. “On a typical workday at this mine, there would be one crew digging out gold by old-fashioned hard-rock mining techniques, another group moving the rock over to the stamping and crushing devices, and a third crew concentrating the gold and the gravel containing the gold in the rockers and sluice boxes. If they had ten dogsleds available they could probably move a ton or so of ore concentrate out of here every day or two when the ground was frozen or covered with snow.”

  Cram paused. “We have time to look around the site for half an hour or so before we have to start back. Feel free to explore anything around here, but stay away from the mine entrance. The wood is rotten and nothing in the old shaft is safe. If you have any questions I’ll be here to try to answer them. If you’re tired from the hike I’d suggest you just sit down near me and relax. It’s generally downhill going back so it shouldn’t be as hard as it was coming up here for the less experienced hikers.”

  Suzanne and I wandered over to examine the old mining equipment. We’d seen all of these items before in museums and State Parks throughout California, especially in the old mining areas of the Gold Rush era when the 49ers dug up gold rather than playing NFL football. There were several State Parks in the Sierras east of Sacramento where Suzanne had grown up that featured almost exactly the same equipment we were looking at here. The basic equipment hadn’t changed much in the half-century between the California and Alaska gold rush eras.

  We took advantage of ten or fifteen minutes to chat with Howard Cram, our guide. He was not a big social chatter, and I really didn’t have any sense of knowing him better after we talked. It didn’t matter what we asked. The answers all came back as pre-recorded “talking points”, worthy of the best-trained politicians. It was like having a chat with Wikipedia. The image of the old TV series “Dragnet” flashed through my mind, with Cram saying the tagline of one of the detectives in the series, “We just want to get the facts, Ma’m.” Perhaps at one of the evening parties in back of the Lodge we’d have a chance to test whether there was truth in the old adage, “in vino veritas” with Howard and some local beer. In the meantime I’d guess Joe Corti made a lot more in tips than old Howie.

  Our return trip was uneventful. We saw a lot of eagles, soaring and perching. I have to admit it got less and less exciting to spot the majestic birds as familiarity bred lack of novelty. The bear was nowhere in sight as we passed his former fishing hole. He was probably taking a nap to work off the effects of his big lunch.

  With the daylight lasting past 10 PM at this latitude we had plenty of time to take a four-hour hike and still participate in a few other activities later the same day. Our next stop was the dog sled demonstration in the backyard of the Lodge. The Iditarod racer we’d seen the last time, Rodney Parks, was doing his presentation on how to harness the dogs to the sled and how to breed the best sled dogs. Our goal this time was to evaluate him as a potential suspect in the Roberts killings, however unlikely this might be, and determine if we could eliminate him as a possible killer. My plan was to engage him in discussion during and after his presentation just to get some feel for the man underneath the performer.

  Parks
was explaining which dog went where in the harness arrangements for an eight-dog team in a race like the Iditarod, or for any dog team on an Alaskan sled for that matter. “There’s an old joke they tell up here that explains the problem we have to solve as we decide which dog to put where. Does anyone here know about Sergeant Preston’s Law of the Yukon?”

  An older couple volunteered some obscure trivia, “There used to be a comic strip and some movies whose hero was a fictitious member of The Royal Canadian Mounted Police named Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. I think he was on the radio, too. His big old Husky dog named King saved our heroic ‘Mountie’ whenever he got into any trouble. So, in a way he was the law south and east of Alaska.”

  Parks smiled and nodded. “You got the right Sergeant Preston, but the wrong Law. Does anyone else have any ideas?”