A Cold Day for Murder Read Online Free Page A

shared an average height of sixteen thousand feet, not the twenty thousand feet of Denali’s McKinley, but high enough to awe and to challenge. Glaciers three thousand feet thick and thirty miles long poked their cold tongues out of every pass, all of them in recession, but only slowly and very, very reluctantly. On the south was the Gulf of Alaska; in the west the more or less parallel lines of the TransAlaska Pipeline, the pipeline haul road and the single north-south track of the Alaska Railroad. The land, gently sloping and open in the west, rose rapidly into the mountains in the east and was drained by the Kanuyaq River. Two hundred and fifty miles long including every twist and turn, the river was frozen over in winter, swollen with glacial runoff and salmon in summer, wide, shallow and navigable for less than six months out of the year. The Park’s coast was almost impenetrable from the sea, choked with coastal rain forest made of Sitka spruce, hemlock, alder and devil’s club. This thinned out as the land rose, until above the tree line there was nothing but kinnikinnick, rock and ice.
    Hunters, among the Park’s few tourists, came from the South 48, Europe, Asia and Africa to hunt in the Park. Dall sheep roamed over the glaciers while caribou wandered from Alaska to Canada and back again. As the land was settled and cleared, more and more moose could be found up to their bellies in shallow lakes and streams, their mouths full of greens. There were even bison in the Park, transplanted there in 1950 and by 1980 numbering a hundred and thirty. There was one grizzly for every ten square miles; more than enough, everyone agreed. Gray wolf and wolverine, coyote and red fox, ground squirrels, lynx, beaver, land and sea otters, muskrat, mink, marmot, snowshoe hare and beaver made it a trapper’s paradise. In every creek and tributary of the Kanuyaq that staple Alaskan food, the almighty salmon in all its species, ran and spawned and died, their offspring to travel deep into the Pacific, then return and begin the cycle once again.
    The major difference between tourist mecca Denali National Park and this one was a road.
    Denali had one.
    The only road into the heart of this Park was the crumbling remnant of a railroad grade forty years old that had once supported the Kanuyaq River & Northern Railroad during its thirty-year exploitation of the richest copper deposit on the North American continent. It had been well engineered and well built, and in summer was flat and hard and drivable, if and when it received its monthly scraping by state road grader. After the first snow fell the state road crews stopped where the national park boundaries began.
    But it was a wonderful park, rich in mountains, for it took in parts of the Mentasta, Nutzotin and Chugach ranges, as well as supporting the entire Quilak range. It boasted several hundred miles of coastline along Prince William Sound, site of one of the richest salmon fisheries in the world, and you could always fly in to fish, if you could fly, or could afford to pay someone who did. A shame that so few could, Park rats told each other, some even with straight faces.
    There were dozens of airstrips within the Park, some sworn to by FAA charts, but between the time the chart was printed and the time the pilot with a ruptured oil line looked for them they would be overgrown by a hungry forest or eroded out of existence by a change of course in the Kanuyaq. There was a well-maintained 4,800-foot gravel strip at Niniltna, but tribal policemen met you on the runway and searched your plane for liquor and drugs, which, depending on what you were carrying in the back of your airplane, made putting down in Niniltna village something between a personal nuisance and a felony arrest.
    And so, though it might in name be a park for all the people, in fact only those with access to a plane and the political muscle necessary to promote a permit were able to take advantage of all that pristine