Aaron Elkins: Where there's a will

John led the way into the white-painted kitchen, where they found Axel and his wife Malani at a scarred table in somber consultation over a dog-eared account book. Two half-filled mugs of coffee were beside them, the cream congealing at the surface. A difference of opinion hung in the air: Malani was in the process of shaking her head “no,” while Axel, with his finger on one of the columns, was making an earnest point, but when they came in he jumped up.

“The romance of modern ranching,” he said with an embarrassed grin. “Now you know the truth. It’s all about number-crunching. I haven’t been out on the range lassoing cattle for almost two hours now.”

Indeed, for a cattleman, Axel Torkelsson looked as if he didn’t get out much. He was somewhat puffily built to begin with, and a bookish stoop, a concave chest, and a pair of mild, watery, pale eyes behind black-rimmed, 1970s-style glasses did away with any intimation of the open range. Add to that a worried, slightly dazed expression that suggested he was always trying to remind himself not to forget something, and he seemed as if he would have been more at home with a green eyeshade and arm-garters than in a ten-gallon hat.

John made the introductions. Gideon was warmly received and told that he and Julie were to consider the house, and indeed, the ranch, as their own. When Gideon had thanked them and expressed some interest in, and even some knowledge of, the history of cattle-ranching in Hawaii, Axel’s wrinkled brow smoothed. His pinched face seemed to fill out.

“Actually, ranching is a totally different affair from what it was ten or twenty years ago-back when John was our number-one hand.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” John said.

Axel clapped John shyly on the shoulder and went on speaking to Gideon. “Of course, the paniolos -that’s what we call the cowboys here; it comes from the word espanol, because the first ones came from Mexico, but you probably already knew that-anyway, they still use lassoes, and they brand and castrate and all the rest, but nowadays it’s really about devising and maintaining a viable system of intensive range management because, if you think about it, a cattle ranch is first and foremost a grass farm. Today’s cattle-rancher has to understand that if he’s going to survive.”

“I never thought about it before,” Gideon said, “but I can see how that would be.”

Encouraged, Axel plowed ahead, his weak eyes blinking enthusiastically away. “See, you can’t just depend on the natural range grasses if you want to compete. You have to sow. But what do you sow? That’s the big question. Right now, I have experimental plots going of Natal red top, brome, cocksfoot… well, you name it. And then besides that, intensive range management means a whole lot of things they never heard of in the old days: symbiotic seeding, selective brush control, and, above all, above everything else, a strategy of long-range water-resource development and conservation. And today’s-”

John was laughing. “I knew you guys would get along. You both talk in lectures.”

“I most certainly do not,” said Axel.

“You most certainly do,” Malani said, “but it’s hard to tell with Gideon. You haven’t given him the chance.”

“Come on, honey, he said he was interested-”

“I am interested-”

“May I make a suggestion?” she said. “It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t you show our guest his room and let him freshen up, and then get some horses and take him out and show him around the ranch. Take Johnny, too. Wouldn’t you like that, Gideon?”

Malani, a porcelain-doll-faced Hawaiian woman a few years older than her husband, had taught at the Kamehameha School on Oahu before she married Axel, and she still had something of the resolutely patient schoolmarm in her speech: a natural bossiness moderated by a precise, sugary, sing-song trill, as if she were explaining things to a not-particularly-swift class of fourth-graders, or maybe to a hard-of-hearing, not-quite-with-it group of oldsters. Heard occasionally, it was no doubt pleasant rather than otherwise, but Gideon wouldn’t have wanted to live with it day in and day out.

“I’d love it, Malani,” he said dutifully.

“So would I,” Axel said, “but I’m due at Inge’s at four-thirty. See,” he said to Gideon, “they just found my uncle’s bones in-”

“I told him all about it, Axel.”

“Oh, fine. Anyway, the thing is, there isn’t time to saddle up the horses and-”

“Then don’t take the horses,” Malani said. “At least you can walk up along the side of Pu’u Nui. You can see half the ranch from there. A beautiful view.”

“But what about the accounts?” Axel asked her, looking longingly at the columns of figures.

“I can take care of the accounts, sweetie. Go. You can use some fresh air.”

“Well, but-”

“Go,” she said, hustling him away from the table with a fluttering of hands, as if she were scattering a flock of pigeons. “Go-go-go-go-go.”

A pu’u, Gideon learned, was a volcanic cinder cone, a common, relatively minor vent in the long, sweeping sides of Mauna Kea, the colossal volcano that had created the northern half of the Big Island. Most dated back to the 1500s and before, so that by now they were grassy, treeless hillocks, smooth and symmetrical, anywhere from a hundred to five hundred feet high. It was these old pu’us that gave the Kohala uplands their characteristic hummocky, green-carpeted appearance.

While they trudged single-file up a narrow horse trail that wound around the hill, Axel, in the lead, prattled happily on about ranch operations without requiring much-without requiring any-feedback. The Little Hoaloha was a “cow/calf” operation, meaning that they raised calves but didn’t “finish” or butcher them. At six hundred pounds they were shipped by container ship to Vancouver, Canada, where they grazed on local grain until they reached nine hundred pounds, whereupon they were trucked to feed lots in Calgary, fattened for a hundred days until they reached twelve hundred pounds, and then slaughtered.

Now, Axel proudly pointed out, if John and Gideon looked around, they would see not a sign of over-grazing, even though they ran eight thousand head of cattle on their eleven thousand acres; a heavy load on the land-had Gideon known it took almost seven pounds of grasses to put one pound of meat on a cow? The lushness of the landscape was the result of a fenced paddock arrangement that Axel himself had devised, in which the cattle were rotated to a new grazing section every three days…

John, who had heard all this before, was mostly looking out at the view, humming a little to himself. But Gideon, who hadn’t, was also drawn to the constantly changing scene as they rounded the hill. They were at an elevation of four thousand feet. Around them were clumps of scrub oak, prickly pear, a few small trees, and some rocky outcrop-pings, but the overwhelming impression was of a wonderfully green, rolling grassland, dotted with groups of grazing cattle, that fell gradually but spectacularly away to the ocean in one direction, and flowed equally gradually and spectacularly up toward the distant, two-mile-high summit of Mauna Kea in the other. That, he realized, was why this stupendous landscape could be so peaceful, so calming. There were no vertical surfaces, no threatening precipices or jagged mountain walls. Just these welcoming, gently upsloping fields of green and brown, so gentle that it looked as if one could begin at the coast and easily, even pleasantly, stroll right to the top of the immense volcano, given the time.

From here he could see all the way to the gorgeous, gleaming hotel- and resort-lined Kohala Coast, thirty miles away, three-quarters of a mile below, and seemingly existing in some future century. Farther off and looking like Bali H’ai itself, was the island of Maui, from this distance a huge, mysterious, fog-wreathed mountain growing straight out of the ocean.