The Dog Stars (27 page)

That’s what I was thinking. I said, Why?

Drought.

I glanced at the burbling stream, the green meadow.

Last summer the creek almost dried up. We had to dig in the streambed to pool enough water just to drink. Half our cattle died. Pretty much been getting worse every year. Getting warmer. Just like they said it would.

He drank from his own cup.

We knew we’d have to bail. Probably this spring. We weren’t sure where to go. And there is the fear of traveling without water. If it’s drying up here, what is happening off the mesa?

He unsnapped the breast pocket of his shirt and dug out the Copenhagen. Took a small plug handed me the tin.

Then you showed up in the plane. To think I almost killed you.

Yup this definitely calls for a chew. I pinched one, handed it back. The familiar pleasure of gripping it under top lip, the mild rush.

You want to come with me?

Not a matter of want, Higs.

Rhymes with Big, I said. The old bastard.

He winced at me.

You two want to fly back with me to Erie, to the airport? And live with us? With me and Bangley? Out on the Plains?

He leaned forward on the stump, spat. I
want
to stay here. To live out my years in peace with my daughter. Call it a draw. The whole damn episode.

Shook his head as if to clear it. This life that I knew when I came back. Came out of the service, when I came back to the ranch. I knew it would be so much different than it is. Call it a draw.

He puffed out his cheeks. His hand was shaking when he put the cup to his lips. He put the back of his wrist into the corner of his eye.

It was my grandfather’s ranch. He ran cattle up here in the summer before there was even a goddamn BLM to lease it from.

It occurred to me that the death of his grazing land hurt him more, incomparably more than the death of the human race. I liked him a lot better in that moment.

Why’n’t you dig a well?

He grimaced. Don’t think I didn’t try. Underneath this whole canyon is ledge rock. Four feet down. Can’t even dig a decent grave.

In the minutes we sat, the rough sanded gray of dawn suffused with a smoother, brighter light, like clear water running over wet gravel. The country may have been dying. I knew the snowpack was less every year on the Divide, the runoff earlier, the creeks lower, more bony in the fall. But right now I heard a canyon wren, the six seven eight paced notes whistling down a scale never used by man. Answered by another. I heard a meadowlark across the field and saw the dipping flight of the kingfisher I’d seen almost every morning. Moving fast up the stream. The bigger rivers like the Gunnison weren’t drying up. Not yet.

His face was tight, he looked past me. Whoever he was, whatever he’d done, he loved his land, his daughter, with a fierceness as natural and unprompted as weather.

The immediate problem that presented itself was: could I take off from the short sage meadow with the extra weight. Not at all a given. Maybe not with both of them, maybe not with one.

I don’t have enough fuel to get back, I said.

He twitched. His eyes shifted back to my face and hardened.

Don’t bullshit me, Higs.

Hig. Rhymes with Big if you forget.

It occurred to me too just then that maybe I better be a bit more tactful. If I couldn’t fly them out of here he might just shoot me. Damn. I was starting to feel used. Loved just for my air power. Like the United States before. First Bangley then this. What if I had no plane? What if I were just Big Hig, just making my way
through the broken world offering what I could, some kindness, some compassion, some technical knowhow but no plane. Who are you kidding?
Bang
.

Ask the guys at the Coke truck.

What?

Sorry. Been so much alone I don’t know sometimes when I’m talking to myself.

I turned toward the running stream and spat.

I’m not fucking with you. I flew past my point of no return. That was right around Colbran.

He scanned my face again. The emotion was hard to read but his eyes moved over my features like a mason taking the measure of a very old wall. There was a frank reassessment in his eyes that unnerved me.

Higs, you are gonna fly us out of here. You fly us to a town, a fortified compound, I don’t give a shit, and I’ll take care of getting fuel.

I shivered. I bet he would.

Auto gas won’t work anymore.

What?

After three years none of it would. Even adding lead. Went stale. Not stable enough. Hundred low lead is far more stable. Still good but pushing its life nine years out. Anyone out here, their gas is long dead.

He chewed the inside of his cheek. Hadn’t spit once, I guess he swallowed it.

At Erie I wasn’t worried. I had a line on a warehouse in Commerce City full of PRI which “restores gas to refinery condition” according to the literature in each case. Like magic. Enough to last another decade at least. But. Out here who knows. Even avgas might not work. Depends on the condition of the tanks, mostly.

It was hard to look at him. I didn’t feel like a stone wall anymore. I felt like a rabbit. Caught out in the open.

Why’d you come here? he said simply.

Didn’t answer. Not defensive, not reticent, I just didn’t know. Not really.

You got in your plane and flew past your point of no return. In a world maybe without any more good fuel. You left a safe haven, a partnership that worked. For a country that is not at all safe, where anyone you meet is most likely going to try to kill you. If not from outright predation then from disease. What the fuck were you thinking? Hig.

My dog died, I said.

I told him about the radio transmission I’d picked up three years ago. I told him about hunting and fishing and Jasper dying and killing the boy and others, and being at the end of all loss.

I didn’t have another idea, I said.

He knew it all. He knew that a Cessna 182 of the Beast’s vintage usually carried fifty five usable gallons. He knew the burn rate per hour would be about thirteen. He knew the approximate distances. He had figured it all. He had figured I was right at the PONR, no return. Figured I had carried a couple extra cans. What he had figured and figured wrong was that I knew what the hell I was doing.

We’ll go to Junction. We’ll check out what you wanted to check out. The tower, the airport. Then we’ll get some avgas. Then we’ll fly back to Bangley. And if he doesn’t like that we’ll convince him.

I don’t know if I can take off with both of you. From that meadow.

Oh you will. If we have to cut your legs off and prop you up. I can work the rudder pedals.

He smiled grim but I saw a shadow of worry cross the winter of his eyes.

No point in slaughtering the livestock and making more jerky. We had what must have been twenty pounds from the venison I’d shot and we couldn’t take any more weight. Probably couldn’t take that. Cima said the livestock, they would fend for themselves and God willing there would be enough rain this season to make it through.

She wanted to take two lambs, male and female.

They can’t weigh more than twenty pounds apiece.

I tried to explain that a small plane was more like a kite than a truck. I told her about learning from Dave Harner in Montana, what he yelled at me the first few days as I tried to land the 172 at airports around the shores of Flathead Lake. As I came in on final and the plane swerved and veered like a sick duck he’d yell
Jeesus Hig! You drive a motorcycle?
Yes!
You drive a pickup?
Yes!
Thought so! Well this ain’t either one! This is a bird! Slight adjustments slight adjustments! Christ! That was atrocious!

She laughed.

Harner, my instructor, had been a logger. A big timber logger when there were still big trees in the Northwest. He’d run up and down the steep mountains carrying a forty pound chainsaw with a fifty inch bar and cut more wood than anyone else in all that country. Kind of a living Paul Bunyan.

Remember him? Paul Bunyan?

Of course.

Just checking. For his birthday, his thirtieth, his friends gave Dave a demo lesson at the local airport. It was Kalispell. They said they wanted him to see for himself all the country he had clear-cut. Kind of touching when you think about it. So he climbed in with a kid named Billy, a still wet bush pilot, and took the controls for the taxi and got the feel of the rudders right away, little touches—not like me, I almost ran into a box store on my first taxi—and it was his airplane for the takeoff and they climbed out of Kalispell. He did just what Billy told him, every little thing, and he was remarkably,
freakishly relaxed. After all, he told me, how freaky could it be after running up and down forty degree slopes with a vicious cutting blade screaming and a thousand tons of timber falling all around you? It was calm, he said. Just uncannily, almost divinely, calm. Not his exact words. He said, Hig it was like flying inside a photograph, one of those real beautiful ones of country you love, all quiet and still the way you want the world to be. What he was talking about was the disembodied detachment you get flying. Like the world is as perfect as a train set and nothing bad can touch you.