In Conde Nast Portfolio (pronounced: port-SO-lee-oh), Joe McGinniss reports on the reasons Alaska governor Sarah Palin's much-touted gas-pipeline project is unlikely to get built. But first, he has to write a lead:
For more than 30 years, a natural-gas pipeline had been the great white whale of Alaskan resource development. Tens of millions of dollars had been spent in the quest for it. The names of collapsed consortiums and failed legislative initiatives littered the tundra like the bleached horns of long-dead caribou. Then, last summer, Sarah Palin said she had harpooned the whale.
So here we have a white whale that is able to leave the sea to roam the tundra, killing caribou as it goes. The caribou themselves have evidently been trying to hunt the whale, though it's not clear whether these were a race of whale-eating intelligent super-caribou, equipped with amphibious whaleboats, or whether the terrible magic of the white land-whale transformed its human pursuers into caribou before killing them. Either way, the caribou were also some sort of mutants, or had possibly interbred with cows, causing them to grow horns instead of the usual antlers. Dangerous! No wonder they hunt from airplanes up there.
Also, the Firefox spell-checker and my deskside dictionary (American Heritage! On paper!) agree that the plural of "consortium" should be "consortia." No exceptions.
