Chapter 4

Norman Wells, On The Mackenzie River

Like the steady fire of a million cannons, the ear-splitting roar of the river ice cracking up reverberated off the distant Mackenzie Mountains, still shrouded with their winter mantle of snow and ice. Locals knew better than to be caught out on the river this time of year, when the thick winter shell begins to split and break into huge, house-sized chunks, sometimes rising from the frigid waters like giant freshwater glaciers, slowly beginning the long journey downriver to the Arctic.

This was a time of year when you traveled by land, or by air, or you didn't travel at all. During this short transition from winter to summer, without the luxuries of spring, there could be no travel on the Mackenzie at all, and travelers found themselves stranded in the north country's few settlements until the river was clear enough for boat traffic to resume. Once in a while, some foolhardy soul would venture out onto the ice with his dogsled or modern snowmobile, and if he was lucky, he might make it back with only a wet chill and soaked clothing, but if his luck ran out, they'd never find his sled or his body as the surging Mackenzie carried him to the frozen Arctic.

Arnie Dennison was no fool, there could be no question about that. Maybe he paced his cabin like a caged polar bear waiting for the river to clear so his barges could resume hauling gear and supplies for the mineral exploration sites downriver, but he knew better than to tangle with the elements. Up here in the Arctic, a man develops a healthy respect for the fickleness of Nature, in a land where wandering out for a breath of fresh air in the perpetual darkness of midwinter can mean quick death, a land where temperatures sometimes soar from fifty below to eighty above in less than a day, and can swing the opposite way just as quickly.

He'd been up here in the forgotten part of Canada too long to make the kind of mistakes newcomers sometimes died from, and he planned to leave this frozen land one day a hell of a lot richer than when he'd made his way North in 1956. He was hardly more than a kid then, and single, searching for that overnight million he knew was just waiting for him somewhere up here. Gold, maybe, or oil, or that new mineral everybody was talking about then, uranium.

But he'd learned the hard way that there was no quick and easy way to get rich, here or anywhere else, and by 1960, after four years of working on riverboats, roughnecking on oil rigs, and finally, flying geologists into the Arctic tundra for a charter- plane operator he'd met in Alaska, he began to see the pieces falling into place.

He must have watched a thousand men straggle into this desolate country at one time or another; some of them found what they were looking for, most didn't. But through it all, through rich strikes and crushing near-misses, the ones who stayed on, year after year, were not the miners, not the geologists from the big oil companies back in the States not the crackpots with their homemade Geiger counters, but the merchants--the men who sold them the food, the wolfskin parkas, the rifles and ammunition, the men who carried them in with stars in their eyes, and ferried them out, often broke and disgusted. No matter how well or how poorly the fortune-hunters fared, the suppliers came out on top. And that was where Arnold L. Dennison wanted to be--right on the very top.

Four years later, when he met Flo in Vancouver, he was more in a position to seriously think about getting married than in those rugged, leaner years scrounging for every cent. Business was surprisingly good right from the start, despite all the fatalistic warnings from the old-timers along the river. He shrugged off their admonitions as just what they were: fearful, empty predictions from frightened old men, afraid of new blood, new competition.

He'd tried his best to get along with the longtime residents, but he knew only too well that some of them resented his success, though he gave it little thought how they cared.

Florence was working in a British Columbia beer bar when they first met, through a girlfriend of hers who just happened to have a date the night Arnie arrived in town and gave her a call. Her loss was Flo's gain, Arnie always told himself, and he made sure she remembered it. Flo never complained about the harshness of life in the sub-Arctic, and Arnie liked that--a woman's place is at her man's side, no matter how rough the going gets, he often said.

Flo was still in bed when Arnie stomped in with the mail, shaking the matted snow from his parka and boots in the narrow hall before entering the living room. This cozy cabin was his most important accomplishment, he felt, and it gave him great pleasure to know he'd built it with his own two hands, the materials either hauled in from his own forest holdings or paid for with his struggled-for earnings.

It had started as a two-room cottage, just after Flo came up from Vancouver, and half a year before they were married. They lived in it for nearly two years before Arnie was able to save enough to really finish it like he'd dreamed of on those long winter nights. It had cost him about fifteen thousand dollars, in all, but he had a home that couldn't be duplicated back in the States for twice that amount, and twenty-five acres of land surrounding it besides.

The new kitchen had been the first addition to the old structure, furnished with all new appliances that had taken nearly four months to make the long journey from Whitehorse, down in the Yukon Territory. Then came the three bedrooms, and Arnie's pride, his paneled office. That was when he knew he'd really made it, the day that plush retreat was finished. In the snowed-in winter months, he ran all the operations of Dennison Suppliers & Outfitters from that office, and he spent most of every single day behind that door, poring over his books, wracking his head for a better or cheaper way to run his business, or a new angle to try, a new dollar to earn.

"Flo, get your ass out of bed!" he shouted this day. "It's not your birthday." He hung his heavy jacket by the door, over the heater vent so it could dry out, and tugged off his leather boots. Placing them close, but not close enough to crack, to the heat source, he plopped down in his favorite chair in the living room, directly in front of the smoldering ruins of the fire he'd started before he left for the post office two hours earlier.