"Hellfire, man," said the pilot. "I'm not gonna leave anybody out here alone, I just wanta get on the radio and tell "em I"m here and find out when they're coming out to pick you up."
Just then I heard the roar of a motor and in a minute I saw a big snow machine crawl around a snowbanked road and head toward us.
Bart Mahaffey a bearded, belligerent 250-pound driller with a smashed nose and broken teeth, was at the controls. Seated alongside him and climbing down now was a whipped dog, who I assumed was the departing miserable failure of a cook.
The whipped dog didn't look at us, he just pulled his hood over his face, climbed in the plane and sat there, looking out at me and shaking his head. "Go back now," he cried, "while you've got a chance. These guys are crazy!"
Mahaffey unbuttoned his red parka and flapped it in the breeze, airing it out. "Hi, Bubba," he greeted the pilot, "you got some joker of a cook here who knows how to make hot coffee out of ice water?”
Bubba jerked a thumb at me. "There he stands, but I don't think he even knows where he's at, let alone how to make coffee."
Mahaffey looked me over and growled, "You some kind of poor excuse for a cook?"
"Who, me?" I replied.
A look of incredulity spread over the big man's face. He wrinkled his brow, then shaded his eyes with a hand and turned around in a circle, peering off into the distance at forty miles of tundra, elaborately pretending to search for someone else he might be talking to.
He turned back and barked at me, "How do you make your pancakes, round or square?"
"Huh? Why, round, of course," I said.
"Hurray," shouted Bubba. "You're in!"
"What kind of food do you guys like?" I ventured.
"We like good food," Mahaffey roared, "and plenty of it! Get in!" We climbed in the snow machine and took off.
In great fear for my existence, I watched Bubba roar down the strip and climb away. There went my last tie with civilization.
Why they ran off the last greaseburner!
The big man at the controls of the cat closed one eye and glared at me with the other. "One thing we might as well get straight right now. Breakfast is the most important meal out here, and we've gotta have plenty of coffee so we can fill up our thermoses and take "em with us out to the drilling sites. There"s twenty-five of us out here. We're out at the sites all day and we don't get back to camp until dinner, so we like to take plenty of coffee with us. You got that? We like plenty of coffee. That last belly-robbing bean jockey we had out here couldn't never make enough coffee so that's why we run him off. Besides that, his pancakes was square!"
We arrived in the center of a large snow-covered compound. Bart Mahaffey got out and walked off, giving me a final glare of menace. "See you in the morning," he muttered, daring me to show up, I suppose.
On one side of the compound, I was to find out, was a log cabin for the geologists, and next to it were indoor shower stalls and a long bunkhouse for the drillers. On the other side were the cookshack and a separate log cabin which was my sleeping quarters. This setup is similar to the army's practice of keeping cooks separate from the troops.
I've often thought that the official reason given for the universal practice of keeping cook's quarters separate from the troops' is wrong. The army thinks cooks need a private room because they have to get up before everybody else and can't get any sleep listening to card games and carousing all night in the barracks.
But the army's wrong, as usual. The real reason for separate quarters is to prevent the crew from having the cook conveniently at hand to bitch at all night about the quality and quantity of the food. Tempers can get short. And not just when a bad meal has been served. It's common practice everywhere for crews to ride the cooks; it's part of barracks humor, usually good-natured, sometimes not. But the them-against-us syndrome is wearing.
Another muttering old grouch!
An old-time cook knows he's the natural target for men who want to strike out against somebody because of their dissatisfaction with the system in general. That's why, in self-defense, most cooks become muttering old grouches, like me.
