Karluk Bones is the title of my fourth Alaska wilderness mystery. The book has taken me longer to write than I had planned, but I think it will be worth the wait. This week, I want to share a portion of the opening scene with you.
Those of you who have read my other novels know Dr. Jane Marcus is a biologist at the Kodiak Fisheries Tech Center. In this scene, Jane and three of her friends camp near Karluk Lake on Kodiak. The next morning, they plan to float the Karluk River, but a fire in the middle of the night derails their expedition.
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Karluk Bones
Saturday, May 24th
“Fire! Wake up! Fire!”
The cry yanked me from a pleasant dream where my camping companions and I sat around the campfire roasting marshmallows. Now, I realized the smoky inspiration for my dream emanated not from a campfire but a forest fire.
I struggled to sit in my sleeping bag while my fingers fumbled with the zipper. Did we leave our campfire burning? No, I remember Geoff throwing water on it, and then we all watched until the last curls of smoke evaporated.
I’d worn my clothes to bed, and as soon as I struggled out of my bag, I crawled through the fly of the small tent. Smoke filled the air, and my friend and colleague, Geoff Baker, my friend, Dana Baynes, and her new beau, Jack Parker, all stood, staring to the north. I followed their gazes and saw the flames, but the fire had not yet spread far.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“It looks like a campfire got out of hand,” Geoff said.
“It’s so dry,” Dana said. “It’s bound to spread before they can put it out.”
“And the wind is blowing this way,” Geoff added.
“We’d better help them,” Jack said.
“You’re right,” I said, “but I fear only Mother Nature will be able to extinguish a blaze in the midst of all this dead, dry vegetation.”
“I’ll dump out our food buckets,” Geoff offered. “We can use those to scoop up lake water to throw on the fire.”
“Sure,” Dana said, “We’ll do a bucket brigade.”
I doubted anything we did would help, but if we stayed where we were, we’d be burned alive. “I suggest sticking anything you can’t live without in your pocket,” I said.
“Good point, Doc. I’ll grab my phone,” Geoff said.
“I’m grabbing my raincoat just in case,” Dana added.
I nodded. “I hope we need our raincoats. Rain is the one thing that will extinguish this fire.”
Geoff, Jack, and I carried our bear-proof food buckets now empty of their contents, and Dana shouldered a pack full of first-aid gear. She also carried a small camp shovel.
We hiked along the shore of Karluk Lake. It was a dark, chilly night. Correction, it was a dark, chilly morning. Darkness is an infrequent visitor in late May on Kodiak Island, but I can testify it is dark at 3:00 am. We wore headlamps to light the beach along the lakeshore, and I glued my eyes to the ground so that I wouldn’t stumble over a large rock or a tree branch. The smell of smoke grew stronger with each step.
As we neared the fire, I could see the flames growing in intensity and slowly but steadily spreading toward the south and our camp.
“We should have packed our stuff and moved it out of the line of fire,” I said.
“I don’t think we could move our stuff far enough to get it out of the fire line unless we brought it with us and stashed it upwind from the flames,” Geoff said.
We clung to the lakeshore and skirted around the edge of the fire. As we neared the tent camp where the blaze had started, we saw four young men frantically packing their tents and gear and moving everything down the beach. Miraculously, it looked as if the flames had not touched their camp.
Dana ran toward the men. “Is everyone okay?” She called.
One of the young men stopped in his tracks and looked toward her, obviously surprised by her presence. “Our campfire got out of control,” he said. “I thought we put it out but guess we didn’t.”
The man slurred his speech and seemed confused. At first, I thought he had a natural physical or mental impairment, but then, I realized he was drunk, or to be more accurate, he hadn’t completely sobered up from being drunk. I took in the entire scene and watched his camping companions stumble to move their gear, their actions clumsy and awkward. They were all in the no man’s land between drunk and sober, the period of the night when you wake up and curse yourself for drinking too much alcohol. I admit I’d been there a time or two, and now I tried to muster some forgiveness for them stupidly getting drunk and letting their campfire burn out of control.
Forgiveness was not on Dana’s mind, and she immediately understood the situation. She dropped her pack on the ground and stood, hands on hips, glaring at the young man who had spoken to her. “Are you drunk?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’m not quite sober.”
“You are camping on an island with 3500 bears.” Dana walked toward him, her voice as loud as I’d ever heard it. “Many of those bears live near this lake.”
The young man looked at the ground and said nothing.
“If you want to camp on this Refuge, you need to be responsible.” Dana gestured to the spreading fire. “You started a fire by not putting out your campfire.”
“We tried to put it out,” the young man said.
“You tried?” Dana was now only about four feet away from the poor guy, all five feet nothing of her intimidating the young man as she screamed up at him.
Although the situation was dire, I nearly laughed as I watched the much larger man cower while petite Dana approached him. He flinched at each of her words as if she were slapping him in the face, and I thought she might slap him in the face when she got a few steps closer.
“I saw a video the other day,” Dana said. “An observant camper watched and videotaped a bunch of yahoos like you and your friends. They ate breakfast around their campfire, threw a little water on the fire, packed their gear, jumped in their raft, and headed down river. A few minutes after they’d left, a curious bear began sniffing their campfire. He put his paw on the hot embers, burned his paw and limped away, holding his burned paw in the air.” She took another step toward the young man who was now backing away from her. “I thought their lack of regard for the environment was disgusting until I see what you idiots managed to do here.”
I stood, caught up in the drama of Dana and the young camper when Geoff thumped me on the shoulder.
“Here, Doc,” he said, handing me a full bucket of lake water. “Let’s get this bucket brigade going.” He looked at Dana and the cowering campers. “Yo!” he yelled. “We need some help here; we have a fire to put out.”
The campers seemed happy for any excuse to escape Dana’s withering gaze and sharp reprimand. They found two more food buckets in their gear, emptied the contents, and hurried to stand in line between the lake and the burning fire.
I knew I couldn’t be the only one in this group who saw the futility of fighting a spreading wildfire with buckets of water, but buckets were all we had, and we needed to do something. There was no firefighting agency to call in the middle of the night to help put out a fire on the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. If the fire hadn’t been extinguished by morning, we would notify the National Wildlife Refuge office in Kodiak, and perhaps they could ask for assistance from the Department of Natural Resources. Dana was a biologist for the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, so she would know what to do. At present, Dana stood in the bucket brigade between the four campers, still lecturing them. If they weren’t sober by now, they would be soon, and between excessive alcohol, smoke, and Dana’s piercing voice, I didn’t envy any one of them the headache he would have for the next several hours.
We continued the steady progression of bucket passing as the sky slowly lightened. At 5:00 am, my arms were numb, my shoulders screamed with pain, and I had one of the worst headaches of my life. My comrades and I silently passed buckets, refusing to admit defeat. At 6:00 am, Mother Nature decided to lend us a helping hand. It started as a drizzle, but soon the rain pelted us in sheets.
I stepped out of the bucket line and said, “I think we can stop now.”
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While hiking back to their campsite, Jane and her friends stumble across human bones exposed by the burned vegetation. Are the bones ancient or modern, and how did this individual die? These are the first of many questions Jane asks Alaska State Trooper Sergeant Dan Patterson, and Jane won’t rest until she uncovers the answers and learns not only the identity of the man whose bones she found but also what or who caused his death.
I will share other outtakes of my novel at intervals over the next few months. Please let me know what you think. The above scene is the beginning of the book. Did it grab you and make you want to read more?
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Robin Barefield is the author of three Alaska wilderness mystery novels, Big Game, Murder Over Kodiak, and The Fisherman’s Daughter. To download a free copy of one of her novels, watch her webinar about how she became an author and why she writes Alaska wilderness mysteries. Also, sign up below to subscribe to her free, monthly newsletter on true murder and mystery in Alaska.
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