Cold Company An Alaska Mystery Chapter One Spring was making itself heard in the Chugach Mountains south of the Matanuska Valley in Alaska. Among the bright new leaves of birch and the dark branches of spruce that shared the flats below the Knik Glacier, the songs of resident and migrating birds resounded. Swallows, thrushes, siskins, and warblers flitted through the trees, and joyful chirps of celebration filled the newly warm air of the season. Kingfishers and crows punctuated the chorus in raucous lower tones. Infrequently, from its perch on a tall spruce, a raven dropped an unusual bell-like tone or injected a grumpy complaint into the chorus, resentful of the invaders that now intruded on a territory it had claimed all winter. Adding to the cacophony, melt from snow that had slowly receded to the rocky slopes of the high peaks above the tree line on both sides of the valley provided sustained background music in dozens of streams and waterfalls. Runoff poured down steep hillsides, tumbling pebbles with gleeful burbles and cleaning out last year's hoard of fallen leaves in its rush to join other rivulets in carving larger, deeper furrows into lower ground. Cutting through the gravel and sand of long-departed ice fields, ribbons of water twisted their way into the upper reaches of the Knik River, raising its flow to cover bars and banks the cold months had left dry and bare. High above the river flats, beyond the steep flank of Mount Palmer, the Knik Glacier rose at five thousand feet in a giant ever-retreating river of ice that scoured a path, grinding away at the mountains through which it ran, moving inexorably if imperceptibly, sculpting out a channel between the ridges. Each winter's cold slowed its motion, and snow added to its bulk. Still it moved forward into the river valley at an angle that brought its foot into solid contact with the slope of Mount Palmer, forming a dam of ice that closed off part of its own melt and that of several smaller glaciers that surrounded Lake George immediately to the west. In the spring, when the snow and ice began to melt again, this dam contained the resulting water, which backed up and gradually filled the lake until it extended far beyond its winter boundaries. As summer set in and the weather grew warmer, the glacial dam would become unstable and periodically calve away in great towers of dense ice hundreds of feet tall, which would fall crashing into the lake with a roar that reverberated between the peaks. Where glacier and mountain met to form the dam, water was already gradually finding its way into a narrow crack between the two. Just a few drops followed each other through the opening first, melting ice as they ran, widening the passage until their drip became a trickle. Soon it would be a stream. Then, finally, with a huge grinding rumble, the weight of thousands of gallons of water would become too much for the weakening dam and break it apart. Carrying chunks of the ice that had contained it, floodwater would pour into the valley below with a force that had been known to tear out the bridges and roads of early settlers. In March of 1964, the strongest earthquake ever recorded in North America severely shook South Central Alaska and altered the Knik River Valley terrain enough to moderate the yearly flood and lessen its force. The water still broke through with a roar that shook the ground and filled the river from bank to bank with roiling turbulence, but the destruction it had visited upon the works of man was reduced. Even before this flood, however, the river rose dramatically with the spring melt and spread powerful icy waters over shallows and sandbars that had lain untouched and freeze-dried through the silent winter. Released from its ice-locked prison, the water scrabbled and clutched at stone-strewn flats with icy fingers, relearning old channels and inscribing new ones. Seizing fallen branches and logs to convey downstream, it carried some into tangles among the roots of trees that now waded in the shallows, hammered at bridge pilings with others, and finally deposited its vast collection of floating debris miles away in the salty waters of Cook Inlet. The restless river explored the gravel of new paths with avaricious fingers, learning what was possible to steal and what lay too heavily or was too embedded for its grasping waters to pilfer. Large boulders might groan and shudder, but most lay patiently, waiting for the river to give up and fall back below their level of dignified solidity. Other things, however, it was possible for greedy waters to loosen and, in time, sweep away. The desiccated skin and bones of a fox fell with the collapse of an undercut bank and drifted off in a swirl of sticks and leaves. Little by little, sand was scoured from around three half-buried beer cans, tossed aside by a pair of hunters the preceding October, and one by one they bobbed away, slowly filling with water until they rolled beneath the surface to bounce unseen along the riverbed. A dead tree that had hung for several seasons over the water's edge lost its tenuous hold on the earth and, with hardly a splash, fell into the current. There it revolved slowly as it was coaxed farther from shore and finally borne seaward on the flood. Far upstream the rising river tugged at a bit of fabric on a now-submerged sandbar, uncovered as the sand and silt above it was swept away like smoke in the water. At first it was only a square inch or two of dirty cloth, but inquisitive liquid fingers soon persuaded most of a stained blue shirt from its resting place. Gradually, through the long afternoon, sand and gravel were washed away until a shape foreign to the natural surroundings was exposed. A sandal floated from a bare foot and... Cold Company An Alaska Mystery . Copyright © by Sue Henry. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Cold Company: An Alaska Mystery by Sue Henry All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
