Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [103]
I’d always cherished my solitude but never more than now, sitting alone in a rocking chair on my front porch this cold Friday evening.
Stars shone through the crowns of the trees.
The constellations were sharp.
There are no cities in the Yukon to muddy the sky with manmade light.
As I rocked, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my down vest, I closed my eyes, resisting one of those twinges of surreal nostalgia that make you acutely aware of all the living you’ve done and how the choices you’ve made have led to this moment of introspection. I was forty-one years old, and I couldn’t begin to stomach the totality of my life—too checkered, too sprawling. So I tried to live safely and habitually, moment to moment.
It passed, those lethal thoughts of Walter, my mother, and the things I did in Orson’s desert now receding back into the prisons I’d built for them.
Though I had supper to make and words to write, I opted for an evening stroll. Rising, I pulled my hair into a ponytail and stepped down off the porch. I followed a deer run through the spruce grove, the air glutted with the spicy scent of sap, branches brushing against my vest, twigs snapping under my boots.
It was late October—ice rimmed the pond and autumn waned, the arc of the sun diminishing noticeably each day. Even the aspens had shed the last of their heartshaped leaves. Only the spruce held color, an ashy bluegreen, some stunted and withered from the harsh winters, others full and majestic despite existing a mere four hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.
I reached the meadow. Above the trees on the far side, the first peaks of the St. Elias Range towered in the west, hulking and austere, their snowpack blue beneath the stars. These mountains stretched on for a hundred fifty miles through the southeast leg of Alaska, west to the Pacific. They contained Canada’s highest mountain and the largest non-polar icefield in the world, a hundred mile river of ice that crept down from the slopes of the Icefield Ranges into the sea.
But the mountains are nothing but cold boring piles of shattered rock when the sky is blazing with the aurora borealis. I gazed up into the cosmos and felt it move me. It always moved me.
As a southerner who’d only glimpsed the northern lights in photographs, I’d thought of this lucent phenomenon as a still life fixture in the sky. But tonight it was a flickering ribbon that appeared to spring from a point of origin just beyond the mountains. It rose and curved sharply, a green mane running parallel to the horizon—a shock of glowing ions forty miles above the earth. It seemed an ethereal symphony should accompany this skyfire but the night maintained its massive silence.
Breathing deeply and contentedly, I laid down in the grass, and staring into that burning sky, filled once more with the rapture of knowing I was home.
4
HORACE Boone left his trailer in the village of Haines Junction after dark and followed the one-lane dirt road that passed by Andrew Thomas’s mailbox en route to the trailheads of the St. Elias Range. He pulled off the road a quarter mile from Andrew’s long winding driveway and parked his old Land Cruiser out of sight in the woods.
It was a ten minute jog through evergreens to the cabin.
The scrawny young man ran it easily in the dark, slowing to a careful walk when he glimpsed the glowing windows in the distance.
Stealing up to a window on the side of the cabin, he peered in, heart beating wildly. This was only the second time he’d come and by far the most exhilarating thing