The Permafrost Horror

The Russians asked us in at the beginning of the year. They'd heard about our success in Alaska, duct tapping the permafrost to keep it from melting and flooding the forests and cities. So naturally they wanted us to come over to Siberia to do the same thing. On a much larger scale, of course. Their own duct tape wasn't worth crap. Although they wouldn't admit it, they knew that our American duct tape was top quality and would last a hundred years under any conditions. That's because we didn't stint on the zinc powder or adhesive when manufacturing it. I know -- I've got a cousin who runs a duct tape plant in White Plains. He told me all about it.

So once the contracts were signed and the bond was paid I rounded up the boys and we took ship to the Kamchatka Peninsula. Once there, we offloaded out giant duct tape spools onto the winch trucks and headed out into the tall timber. We had to hire plenty of local help -- it was part of the contract. The problems started when my team boss, Big Rudy, couldn't tell the difference between Russian laborers and grizzly bears. They kinda looked the same, and they sure smelled the same. They even ate the same kind of disgusting grub -- berries and bark and half-rotted road kill. So Big Rudy started bringing grizzly bears into the camp as workers. I had to get on Big Rudy's case about it.

"Look" I told him, "all you gotta do is get them talking -- the humans will jabber away in Russian, and the bears will just growl at you. It's simple."

"That's what you think" retorted Big Rudy. "To me that Russian jabber sounds just like a grizzly growl. Besides, the bears work harder than the humans, and they don't ask for any pay. They just take the empty spools for their cubs to play with."

He had me there -- we were already dealing with some serious cost overruns; so I let Big Rudy have his way and pretty soon we had a pack of bears doing all the grunt work. Like he said, we didn't have to pay them, just let them take the empty spools back to their caves for their cubs. When the Russian authorities came poking their noses into our labor situation the bears simply ate them, fur hats, bones, and all. As far as I'm concerned, it was a win-win situation.

Maybe you don't know how we use duct tape to shore up the melting permafrost. It's not hard, not really rocket science. You just unspool long swaths of duct tape over crevasses or around crumbling stream banks where the permafrost is melting fastest. This holds the water in, or back, and since it all freezes again at night, soon the whole melting process is reversed. Some egghead at M.I.T. figured it out a few years ago, and since then American duct tape companies like mine have been shaking the money tree -- there's an unbelievable amount of money available for global warming quick fixes like ours. I kept sixty men on the payroll, full-time, without batting an eye. 

But this Siberian permafrost job wasn't all skittles and beer. After the bears showed up, we kept encountering cryogenically preserved woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers that would suddenly come back to life and begin trampling and clawing the men. The bears they left alone, but my crew seemed to bring out the worst in them. Even Big Rudy, who could knock down a megatherium with one blow, was hard put to keep the creatures from grinding him to a pulp or biting off a hand. We finally had to issue each man a rifle. This really slowed down the work, and I started hearing word from Moscow that they might pull our contract and give it to some Swedish outfit.

I decided I'd better nip this in the bud, so I left Big Rudy in charge and flew out to Moscow for a powwow with the head honchos. We got things straightened out after a few days and a dozen bottles of vodka. But when I got back to camp, everything was in shambles. The spool trucks were tipped over; the tents were ripped to shreds; and I could no longer tell the men from the bears. Everyone was bent over on all fours, growling and groveling, snuffling for grubs and decayed mammoth meat. No one noticed me. All the rifles lay on the ground, muddy and rusted. 

"Boys!" I cried, 'don't ya know me?"

A creature that looked something like Big Rudy shambled up to me, sniffed my shirt, and growled some slurred words that sounded like "We go back woods. You go away or be like us." 

I fled in terror, taking the only truck that still worked.

I made it to Yelizovo before I ran out of gas and collapsed in a fevered coma. I was nursed back to health by a Koryak woman. When I was in my right mind again I married her and we now run a tourist hostel for visitors wanting to visit the nearby volcanoes. I try not to think about the bear-men I left behind -- but some nights, when the dry arctic wind moans down from the dark piney woods, I think I hear them marching on all fours, coming to slaughter us and let the permafrost flood the land . . .