A/N: A one-shot to showcase the late Brian Dennehy's character in the 1983 movie "Never Cry Wolf".
Turning Native or Turning a Profit
"Rosie" Little stood behind the counter that operated as both the business desk for his hotel and a bar. He didn't serve any individual drinks, but for a price he could provide a bottle of various beers, wines and a few choice whiskeys. As he checked his reservation book for the next month, he heard clumping footsteps on the wooden porch outside - no doubt one of the guests needed fresh towels. The burly man looked up as the door opened, and immediately ducked down behind the mass of the wooden desk; he came up with a shotgun leveled at the new arrival, a short man wearing round glasses that seemed to move his eyes to the center of his head. Rosie aimed for the bridge of the glasses. "One step forward and I'll have to call the cleaning lady to wipe up your remains."
Slowly and deliberately the man spoke without moving. "I don't have a weapon and I came in peace; I'll remove my coat to prove it." He waited for approval and Rosie waved his shotgun to proceed. He did as he said he would, removing the light coat and carefully leaning over to set it on a nearby table before he returned to his upright position with arms raised. "Satisfied?"
"Considering the last time I saw you I was at the other end of YOUR rifle, Tyler, let's just say I like my position a whole lot better at the moment. What are you hear for?"
"To apologize, and to get a drink. I'll settle for the first, but I'd really like the second afterward."
"Well Hell," Rosie said and he lowered his gun and put it back behind the counter. "Cease fire works good for me. It wasn't loaded, anyway. Get over hear and I'll open something up." Tyler lowered his arms and came over to the bar. Rosie stuck out his huge hand and grabbed Tyler's much smaller one, pumping it enthusiastically while almost bowling him over with a warm slap to his arm. "Apology accepted."
"But I haven't offered one yet."
"No need - up here it doesn't pay to hold a grudge with a population density of less than one per twenty-five square miles." In the far north Yukon Territory, Rosie had met Tyler when the later was sent by a Canadian animal science group to study wolves and caribou. As one of the few bush pilots in the area, Rosie had flown Tyler 300 miles north from the railroad's northern terminal of Nootsack before leaving him and his equipment on a frozen lake before the spring thaw. He didn't really expect to see the man again, but months later Tyler had shown up at a campsite Rosie had set up with a couple of well-to-do hunters.
"No, I have to so let me speak my piece. I'm sorry I took a shot at your new plane - I saw those wolf pelts in the back of it and thought you were hunting wolves. When I got back to my campsite I found the two wolves I had befriended were gone and left their pups. I figured you or your friends had shot them, so when you showed up I wanted you to go away. I found out later it was someone else that probably killed them. But I shouldn't have shot at you; I was just so...so...angry at the moment."
"What color were the wolves that went missing?"
"White, both of them."
"Yeah, I think it was that guy you're talking about that sold 'em to us. My clients were there for the caribou, not wolves. Me, I hunt business opportunities; I wasn't kidding when I said that the gold was south of 60. I'm just trying to bring a little of it up here," Rosie said proudly as he indicated the building they were in. The '60' in question was the 60th Northern parallel, south of which most of civilization existed.
"I thought you said you had a 1400 acre hotel?" Tyler asked. "Or did you lose it in the two years since I saw you?"
The entrepreneur laughed and slapped the counter/bar. "Oh, I've got 1400 acres all right - most of it's empty ground. This building has the lobby, my office, a staff room that doubles as a laundry, and an indoor hot tub you have GOT to try. Those other six shacks out there are my 'hotel rooms', if you want to call them that - for the tourists I call them bungalows. What did I tell you the problem was with people while we were flying up here?"
Tyler almost paled at the thought. While flying him up from Nootsack, the single engine on the De Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver had quit. Rosie had handed the controls over to Tyler while he crawled outside to bang on the fuel line. While shaking a wrench at him to emphasize his point, Rosie had given his opinion on what the problem with people was.
"Boredom."
"Damn right. They go to the same jobs, attend the same schools, pray in the same churches and drive to the same locations to see the same tourist traps. Well, I just tell 'em to try something different up here. Solitude, hunting during the season, so much natural beauty it could make you cry, and a place that you can go back home and brag to others that have never been here. You personally may have come up here to count wolves or whatever - and if someone wants to do that I'm fine with it - but all I ask of my customers is to just pay your tab when you check out and tell your friends back home."
"I just thought your place would be bigger. In my mind you had the whole countryside covered in a huge gaudy building with cars and lights and...and...a McDonald's in your parking lot. And how about that drink?"
Rosie laughed and disappeared as he ducked down and rummaged behind the counter, before reappearing with a couple of bottles of beer and a larger, unmarked bottle. Another trip and he had two large mugs and coasters to rest on the counter. He opened the larger bottle and filled the mugs half full, then topped each with beer. Tyler grinned and started to reach for a mug but was told to wait while a mint leaf was added to each mug. The host slid the drink over. "Moose Juice Deluxe," Rosie announced. "Not just a 50/50 blend of ethyl alcohol and beer anymore - we're sophisticated up here. Don't swallow the mint."
"Too late," Tyler managed to cough, then laughed. "Hold the leaf next time."
"Heathen," Rosie kidded, but put the small container of mint away. "Notwithstanding that, I like you Tyler. You got pluck. It's a wonder you survived up there, even with those 24 cases of beer you smuggled into the canoe under my old plane. One more case and we would have probably ended up in the trees after we took off. And you're not afraid to say what you feel. I figured you for some college-type professor that didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground; but you turned out to be crazy, and crazy I can deal with!" he said as he slapped the counter again for effect.
He set up another round of Moose Juice and continued. "Now, I'd be the first to admit that there are parts of that hotel in your head that I like. Mostly, the money. I'm a pilot, a businessman, a gambler and if you ask the right people any one of those labels is redundant. People call me crazy, but they do it with a smile on their face and they always come back."
The drinks were having their effect on Tyler and he started to feel a warm glow; the same feeling that had allowed him to overcome his fear of flying the first time when he was introduced to Rosie and the medicinal properties of his Moose Juice. "I thought you were crazy too. Maybe I'm the one that's crazy. But...I don't know, something changed inside of me while I was out there. I got to appreciate life. And nature. And how well beer helps you eat mice," he said with a laugh.
"You turned native. I've seen it before, and I've heard about it before that. It can happen when you're put in a situation you've never even been close to before. So-called savages that were brought back to Europe from the new world when Columbus and those guys went exploring. Soldiers in the war that decided that the life of the locals looked a hell of a lot better than being in a war. It's not a bad thing - it's good to get an appreciation of other ways of life, even if it don't sit with you. Like my ex."
"You were married?" Tyler hadn't even thought about leaving anyone behind when he made his trip north - he lived alone, so there was no one to say goodbye to for six months while he went on his Yukon study.
"Yeah, but it didn't last. She wasn't crazy!" Rosie roared, slapping the counter again with his huge paw. His laughter eventually subsided and he continued after a sigh. "Yeah, her family was pretty well-to-do. Beautiful as all get out, friendly, a real great girl. But she wasn't cut out for the country any more than I was made for the big city. You see Tyler, when it comes down to it - I love this place. Flying over it so much, I guess I just fell in love. I could have built a large hotel here, but it...would...stink. Ruin the whole place. That's why I keep it small, 'cause I don't want to spoil the beauty. Don't get me wrong - I know how things work. It may take awhile, but civilization is going to creep up here eventually. It's happened everywhere else before, why not here. I don't know, maybe we're helping the whole process along; but if it wasn't us, then some other poor sap will be the one."
"I know what you mean," Tyler agreed. "I worry what I might have done to the Inuit people. Ootek and Mike were always curious about what I was doing and how I did it; I hate to think that I was the biggest influence on what they thought civilized people acted like."
"Ha! Civilized," Rosie said, scoffing. "Civilized is whatever you're living in. If it works for you, you're civilized. If you see someone else and want to adopt some of the things they do, you're still civilized. I said you had turned native - that didn't make you less civilized, just a different civilized. My customers think they're embracing the rough life coming up here, but they go back to their same lives after they leave. They don't turn native - but I turn a profit. In the meantime, we can appreciate the land and manage it in our own little ways. Believe it or not, I even talk a little conservation while I have them out. Does it do any good? I don't know, but I can try."
"I like you Rosie," Tyler said, he speech slowing down a little. "You're good people. I went back and told them that the wolves weren't bad for the caribou - they're actually good. Did they understand what I was trying to say? Who knows. All I know is...is..." he paused for a moment. "Sorry, I guess it's been awhile since I drank - I lost what I was going to say."
"Enough for you, then" Rosie said, putting away the mugs and bottles. "Unless you've got somewhere to be, you're going to be my guest for the next day. In the meantime, I wasn't kidding about that hot tub. Let's get you set up and then you can explain how the hell you got up here again."
The End
A/N: This film came from an "autobiography" by Farley Mowat - the term in quotes because quite a bit of it has been either debunked or of questionable hyperbole; the author himself was quoted as saying he never let facts get in the way of a good story. But I wanted a story to highlight the late actor Brian Dennehy, and I had forgotten that he played the eccentric bush pilot that takes Charles Martin Smith up into the Yukon. So a wrote a short to reconcile the two characters in the years after the events of the film.