So sure of death (3 page)

Wy lined the Cub up on final. The Cub hit a thermal and the plane bucked, only slightly, but enough for Professor Desmond X. McLynn's hands to slap down on the back of her seat. “What's wrong?

The Cub's wheels touched down in what would have been a runway paint job if there had been any paint, or any true runway, for that matter. Professor Desmond X. McLynn's rapid respiration could be heard over the sound of the headset. Wy didn't much care for the pompous little ass, but it served no purpose to scare him to death and she kicked the rudder over as soon as ground speed allowed, bringing the Cub around to halt a hundred feet short of the abyss.

The engine died and she folded back the door and got out to assist her passenger. His face was pale and his watery blue eyes showed a rim of white all the way around their irises. “Here we are, sir, she said cheerfully.

McLynn was a fussy little man in his fifties who acted the age of most of the artifacts he dug up. His face was screwed into a perpetual frown of dissatisfaction, as if upon assembling the pieces to the puzzles of the past, the one essential fragment upon which the whole picture would be built had fallen out of the box and was lost forever. His conversations with Wy over the last month of flights in and out of the dig had consisted of one long whine: why did they have to fly such a small plane, why wasn't there a proper runway, why couldn't he have electricity on site, why couldn't he have fresh milk every day? Fresh milk wasn't available in Newenham every day, let alone Tulukaruk. Wy knew this because she had a son who could flatfoot a quart in one gulp.

McLynn recovered enough to take his bag and stagger off to a large olive-green tent. It was made of heavy canvas and was pitched twenty feet from the edge of the cliff. The door flaps were closed and fastened against the stiffening breeze. He must really feel sick, because he usually headed straight to the dig, which consisted of two twelve-foot-square excavations, covered with another canvas tent the twin of the first. The breeze at the top of the bluff was brisk and as McLynn untied the flap of the first tent the wind pulled it out of his hands. The flap ties on the second tent held, although its olive-green sides billowed concave and convex with sharppops.It sounded a little like a cap gun going off.

Wy began unloading McLynn's supplies. Said supplies consisted of, among other essentials, four loaves of Wonder bread, a case each of Spam, shredded wheat, Carnation instant milk, baked beans, Nutter-Butter cookies, and enough Sterno to power one of the C-130s over at Chinook for a search-and-rescue mission to Round Island. The dig sat on one of the best fishing rivers south of the Wood River Mountains, in the middle of one of the best berry-picking areas on the Bay. Wy would have thought a dip net and a basket would have satisfied all McLynn's culinary requirements, but it wasn't her camp.

The back of the Cub was empty and the pile of boxes waisthigh when she stopped to stretch and admire the view. It was spectacular. The Snake, its water shining like silver scales in the sun, curled and coiled back on itself, a convoluted journey from source, One Lake, to outflow, Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay in turn stretched two hundred miles between Port Molar on the Alaska Peninsula to Cape Newenham on the mainland. She stood on the Nushagak Peninsula, a southwesterly thumb of land that hitched a ride on weather originating from the vast blue expanse of water that stretched west of the Aleutian Peninsula to the Bering Strait.

A region one fifth the size of Texas, its winds blew hell for leather across Bristol Bay out of the northeast from October on, and then in March turned around and blew from the southwest for the next six months. It made for interesting air time. Wy flew daily over the remains of planes whose pilots had not paid proper respect to Bristol Bay's weather. What really gave her the creeps were the wrecks she couldn't see, the planes and boats lying at river and sea bottom, slowly silting over, providing housing for anything with a shell or a fin that cared to move in. Wy, like many of her Alaskan generation, couldn't swim. Not that it would matter, as the water was too cold to survive in for long. “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, Bob DeCreft had declaimed once, “but there are no old, bold pilots. She also remembered him saying that “any landing you walk away from is a good landing, but Wy had always found it more prudent to stay in the air until you had a runway in front of you.

Bristol Bay's topography ran anywhere from tundra that often seemed to lie lower than sea level to the five-thousand-foot peak of Mount Oratia. Keep going three hundred miles farther north and fifteen thousand more feet up and you'd find Denali, the highest mountain in North America. In between lay icy glaciers, narrow, windy passes, grassy plateaus, heavily wooded bays, thousands of springs, brooks, creeks, streams, rills and rivers, lakes that ranged from shallow ponds to narrow fjords, sandy, soggy, silty river deltas and hundreds of miles of beaches. A cartographer's wet dream. The only stop between Newenham and the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia was the Pribilof Islands. The Pribilofs, where German tourists made Kodak moments of the seal harvest, horrifying Europeans and infuriating the islanders.

Wy grinned to herself. A late and not very lamented one-term governor of the state had proclaimed, and on prime time, too, that nature simply could not be allowed to run wild. On that, if nothing else, the people of the Pribilofs agreed with him. The people of the European Community did not, but then they didn't vote in Alaska.

A teeming marine life, including everything from herring to walruses to gray whales, had once provided for the support and maintenance of one of the healthiest and most stable populations of indigenous human inhabitants anywhere in the world. Their modern descendants, the Yupik, still fished the same rivers, hunted the same moose and caribou and walrus and duck and geese, picked the same berries as their ancestors had. The only difference was that present-day Yupik hunted from skiffs with outboard engines instead of kayaks, and four-wheelers and snow machines instead of dog sleds, and much of the time they did it commercially, for sale and not for subsistence. In a good year, Bristol Bay contributed as much as sixteen percent of the world's catch of red salmon.

In bad years, such as last year, they could barely feed themselves, something that heated up talks for rural preference for subsistence every year in Juneau.

Wy raised her face to the sun and drew in a breath of pure enjoyment. There was something for everyone in Bristol Bay. You could fish salmon, sport or commercial or subsistence, you could hunt caribou or moose or bear, you could run a trapline in winter, you could pick blueberries and salmonberries in summer, you could beachcomb for glass floats and walrus tusksyou could, if you chose, simply sit on your butt and admire the scenery. Most of the people who lived in the Bay could not afford that luxury, but thousands of tourists could and did, willingly. If they pulled in a fifty-pound king while they were at it, or took down a caribou with a double shovel rack, so much the better. They'd go home and tell their friends, who would fill Wy's planes next summer.

“Ms. Chouinard!

Professor Desmond X. McLynn was not in the business of admiring views. Professor Desmond X. McLynn reserved his regard for artifacts of a pre-Columbian nature, preferably in a precarious state of ossified preservation, which left more room for speculation and the positing of new theories, properly attributed to himself, on the course of anthropological and social development ofHomo sapiensin this godforsaken corner of the world. “I'm coming, she called, and turned to pile a case of Velveeta on a case of Spam. She shuddered a little as she did so, but then she didn't have to eat it, just carry it. She thought of her lawyer, Harold Abood, J.D., and her legal bill the size of which was beginning to resemble interest on the nation's long-term debt, and lugged the boxes to the campsite. Twenty feet away, a ground squirrel chittered at her angrily. There was a whoosh of wings and a bald eagle swooped down and the squirrel was airborne. Wy paused, watching as the eagle gained altitude, heading for a high bluff inland, crowned by a stand of dead white spruce, bark peeled down to a white, hard surface. Squinting, she made out the mess of twigs and sticks crammed into the fork of a branch, and imagined that she saw three heads peering over the side, hungry eyes watching lunch approach, curved beaks open in anticipation.

“Ms. Chouinard!

She sighed to herself and plodded forward again. McLynn was wearing a displeased expression beneath a sheepskin-lined leather cap with the flaps hanging down over his ears. They bounced and brushed his shoulders when he talked, and together with the hanging pouches beneath his eyes made him look like an irritable bloodhound. “Where is Mr. Nelson? he said severely.

“I don't know, she said, determined to maintain her cheerfulness. “I haven't been back here since I picked you up on Friday. She looked around. The sun glinted off the corrugated roofs of the Air Force base, ten miles away west-southeast. It was the nearest settlement, if Don Nelson had decided he needed company over the weekend and set out on foot. The journey would have been soggy in places, but if you had boots on, it wouldn't be bad. Maybe three hours to get there, four if you were slow.

Don Nelson wasn't slow. A thin, energetic young man with pale hair shaved into a vee in back, a long, inquisitive nose and bright, inquiring eyes, he was McLynn's gofer. He cooked, he cleaned, he washed clothes, he stood watch over the dig on those days McLynn was torn unwillingly from the site of this future American Ardèche. He'd been digging the last time Wy saw him, covered in mud and still young enough to enjoy it. He'd grinned up at her from one of the enclosed ditches, skin streaked with dirt and sweat, showing off his developing pecs in a tank top. “Dig, dig, dig with a shovel and a pick.

She had laughed, but McLynn had heard him. “What do you mean, a shovel? I told you, no shovels, no tools at this level except for a trowel and a brush!

Nelson smothered his grin. “Just a joke, Professor McLynn.

“Not a funny one, McLynn had said.

Nelson had winked at her as she was turning away, and she had been conscious of his eyes on her as she walked to the plane. It made her feel good, even if she did catch herself wishing Liam Campbell had been there to see that other men were still attracted to her. But he hadn't been there, and except for fleeting glimpses as he was coming into the grocery store and she was going rapidly out the other door, she hadn't seen him in months. Which was what she wanted.

She'd heard rumors that he'd rented a boat to live on while he waited for a house to come open. Good luck, she thought; housing everywhere in rural Alaska was tight, and especially so in Newenham, where commercial fishermen made enough money to have homes both here and Outside, and could afford to let them sit empty over the winter. Most building supplies had to be barged in, putting the price of new housing out of most people's reach and putting existing housing at a premium that did the same, no matter how old or run-down it was. Her house had come with the air taxi business she had bought; a good thing, since she had acquired a twelve-year-old son immediately afterward.

“Well, then, where is he? McLynn demanded, bringing her back to the present.

“I said I don't know, Wy said, a little less patiently. Good money or not, it wasn't her job to keep track of McLynn's employees. “I don't know where Mr. Nelson went. Maybe he walked over to the base and hitched a ride into town.

Chinook Air Force Base was set midway between the Snake and the Igushik Rivers. It was a broad, flat, relatively dry acreage, with access to a large bed of gravel deposited over a geologic period of time at the mouth of one of the Igushik's tributaries, perfect for base fill for runways. Chinook had two, one running northeast-southwest to take year-round advantage of the prevailing winds, and a second, northwest-southeast, to put the contractor's kids through college. Why they hadn't just run a second alongside the first was beyond Wy. Probably made too much sense for government.

Like most Alaskans, and in the Bush it was almost unanimous, the only thing lower than Wy's opinion of the federal government was her opinion of the state government. Although, if she forced herself to be fair, most of the airmen who made their way to town were, on the whole, fairly decent guys, if unrelentingly horny. Most of them were very young and a long way from home, and Newenham didn't provide much relief. The town had a base population of two thousand, the majority of which was male, and most of its female members were snapped up the day after they graduated from high school, if not before. There was one woman with seven children and no job whose rent, it was generally acknowledged, was paid by frequent contributions from the military. Other than that, and spite dateswhen local couples broke up, the girls had something to prove and the occasional airman benefitted therebyopportunities for romance in Newenham were pretty slim. So far as Wy knew, Nelson hadn't hooked up with any of the local girls, so why would he bother going into town? She glanced at Professor McLynn's red and irritated face, and thought he might be risking his job as well.

She shrugged it off. Hope springs eternal in the red-blooded American male. Maybe he had just gone to the base. Maybe he was going to enlist, to get away from McLynn. She carried the boxes into the camp tent and set them down on the table with a thump, then stretched, unconsciously seeking out three-point positions for both feet and settling for just a moment into a modified horse stance. As always, it felt as if her spine were hanging suspended in space, with no weight pulling it down and no muscles pulling it up.

The table was a folding one, four feet long, metal legs, forty bucks at Costco. It held a two-burner Coleman stove, a dingy blue plastic tub full of unwashed camp dishes, a drainer full of clean ones, and a white plastic jug full of water with a filter attached. Beneath the table, boxes of food were piled in haphazard fashion, partial holes torn in their tops to extract one can of peas or one box of macaroni and cheese at a time.