Marcus Johnson was but one member of a small community of rural Alaskans who lived partway between the old-fashioned frontier lifestyle and the 21st century.
Half the residents of Salt Jacket existed without at least one of the major modern conveniences of power, plumbing, or telephone. A good number of those folks were missing all three. Marcus was in the latter group.
For most, it was the lifestyle they preferred. They commuted to their jobs at Eielson Air Force Base twenty miles to the west, or all the way down to Fairbanks, thirty miles past that. After spending the day in high tech offices or running noisy construction equipment, they unwound on the drive home, where they would enter the world of silence. It was a world unknown to urbanites in the lower forty-eight.
Few city people have any idea just how quiet the world can be off the grid. More accurately, what they do not understand is how noisy their urban surroundings are. In the quiet of the small cabins and houses of this deeply forested paradise, there is no hum of electricity, no buzz of fluorescent lights, no whir of computer terminals. No television noise or constant droning of traffic. No human chatter or incessant scraping of people walking the streets all hours of the day and night.
The only sounds are the natural sounds of life, of the living world. When a person relaxes enough, the wilderness comes alive with the light tick of a bird’s bony toes as it walks on a fence, or the muffled snort of a moose snuffling at a willow branch fifty feet away. At times, one can hear the crackling of a leaf falling off a branch and drifting to the ground.
That’s why most of the residents of the forest stayed here. That’s why Marcus came back to his hometown after twenty years of service in the military. He returned to a town and lifestyle where he could actually live reasonably well on the modest pension of a Marine Corps Master Sergeant.
No more noise. No more crowds. No more looking over his shoulder. No more war. He was glad to be home.
Marcus rose from the comfortably thick Lazy-Boy recliner next to the woodstove and again stretched his aching muscles. He had been chopping firewood all afternoon, until it got too dark to continue. Although Marcus had only been out of the Corps, and daily physical fitness training, about six months, he found the work of splitting wood to be exhausting. Maybe his friend Linus was right—military life had made him soft, at least as far as the Alaska bush was concerned.
He crossed the main room of the small cabin and looked in the mirror that hung on the wall above an old-fashioned washbasin. After twenty years of hard living his medium brown skin was still smooth and wrinkle-free. Few people properly guessed his real age of thirty-seven. They usually dropped ten or more years and assumed him to be in his mid-twenties. Large, deep brown eyes with almond-shaped lids belied the genetics of his Athabaskan mother. Tight, black curls of closely cropped hair atop a high forehead matched those of his father. While his skin and hair were that of a black man, an angular jaw, pointed nose, and high forehead revealed his grandfather’s quarter-Puerto Rican ancestry.
Marcus was born and raised in Salt Jacket. He had been gone with the Marines for nearly all of his adult life, serving in Force Recon for most of that time, the “Elite of the Elite”. He would never have imagined being so tired after swinging an axe for a few hours. Not a person who was typically prone to perspiring, he was surprised by how much water there was in his clothes by the time he was done.
The two-hour nap by the woodstove had both revived him and dried him out. Upon waking, he had a taste for some hot coffee, soup, and a fresh sandwich down at the store. He put on some relatively clean jeans, a fresh undershirt, and a flannel shirt. He narrowed the vent and turned down the damper on the woodstove and then slid into his tan Carhartt insulated coveralls and jacket and drew a black knit cap over his head. In the center of the room, he rotated the knob on the Coleman white gas lamp suspended on a chain that hung from the log beam that supported the roof, where it lit the main area of the cabin. He picked up his black and silver snowmobile helmet and headed out the door of the small cabin on his fifty acres of paradise deep in the quiet Arctic forest.
He hopped on the snowmobile parked in front of his cabin and pulled on the helmet. It squeezed his head snugly. The padding was warm against his ears and cheeks from the heat it had absorbed in the cabin. He started the engine and headed for the snow-covered trail that ran parallel to and slightly below the road to make the ten-mile run to the store that sat alongside the Richardson Highway.
As he pulled out of his property, he noticed that the Hamilton’s farm was dark. Usually the light on their porch lit up the end of their driveway. There were no lights on in the house, either.
Hmm. That’s strange. Must be a power outage. Oh, well at least that’s something I don’t have to worry about. When you’ve got no power, power outages won’t do you no harm.
A quarter of a mile down the road, the lights of an oncoming vehicle reflected around the bend. The trail beside the road rose where it intersected with a farmer’s driveway. As Marcus came up the incline and drew level with the road, he sensed something large and fast come up behind him. Surprised by
