Dana Stabenow - Better To Rest

The Wood River Mountains grew on the horizon, four-and five- and six-thousand-foot peaks covered with the winter’s first snowfall. A series of four long, deep, narrow landlocked fjords filled up four long, steep, narrow valleys between the mountains, lying before them like the fingers of a giant’s spread hand. Not quite like the outspread hand of the night before, but close enough to bring it to both their minds.

Liam cleared his throat. “So. Where are we landing?” He tried not to let the fact that he didn’t care where it was so long as he was on the ground, alive and whole and soon, show in his voice.

Wy made an unnecessary adjustment to the prop pitch. “It’s a dirt strip, about three thousand feet. I think the Parks Service put it in during a survey of the Togiak Wildlife Refuge.”

“And everybody’s been using it to hunt from ever since.”

“Pretty much. I know Charlene patrols up here pretty regular, and she sees planes down there a lot.”

Charlene Taylor was the fish-and-game trooper for the Newenham district. “Poaching?”

“She thinks so, although she has yet to catch anyone in the act.” Wy adjusted her headset and fussed with the arm extending the voice-activated mike to her mouth.

“You have any ideas about this wreck?”

She shook her head. “It’s got to be old, before my time.”

“Did you ask around the airport?”

“Didn’t have time; you wanted to be in the air at first light.”

“Right.” He made a minute shift to ease the strain on his vertebrae. The plane hit an air pocket and bounced. He stiffened back into immobility, like that would help smooth out the flight. Wy’s braid dangled over the back of the seat in front of him. It swayed gently with the motion of the Cub. He tried not to look directly at it.

They flew on for a few minutes more, until they took a sudden, hard right bank and nosed down. Liam sucked in a breath. “There,” Wy said.

It seemed to Liam’s fevered gaze that she was intent on their doing chin-ups on the peaks of the Wood River Mountains. “Right there, do you see it?” Wy said, and aimed 78 Zulu at a strip of snow that might have had a patch of gravel beneath it the size of a baby’s diaper. The strip got bigger the nearer they got to it but not much. Wy circled once, taking a look at the surface and coming much too close to the sides of the encircling mountains, and brought them in on an approach that feathered the tops of the stand of slender birches surrounding the strip. She pulled so far back on the throttle that they were practically hanging stationary in the air when they touched down. They didn’t use up much of the strip, either-a good thing, Liam thought when a bull moose wandered out of the trees at the other end of the runway. He stopped and regarded them with an expression of mild surprise for a moment, before wandering back into the woods, evidently unworried by the thought that they might be after his rack.

They set off, finding and following the track through the brush and snow left by John’s and Teddy’s four-wheelers without difficulty. It was late October and they were lucky. It had snowed twice already that year, but so far only enough to stick, and the good news was it wasn’t over their boots.

“Did they get anything?” Wy said when, after twenty minutes, the silence got too oppressive to bear.

“What?”

“Teddy and John. Did they get anything?”

“Oh. Yeah. A moose. Big bull. It was skinned out and hanging in the shop.”

“Good.”

“Yeah. Isabella and Rose’ll be happy.”

She stood it for ten minutes more. “Liam-”

“Look,” he said. “We’re here.”

They had emerged from the woods into an area of glacial moraine, pile after pile of gray gravel so uniform in size it looked graded.

“There’s no snow on the gravel,” Liam said, confused.

“That’s why,” Wy said, pointing.

In back of the moraine loomed the glacier, and even at that distance they could hear the sound of running water. “It’s not cold enough yet to stop the meltoff. Won’t be long, though. Teddy and John hit it just right. Another snow and they wouldn’t have found a thing. How close did they say they were to the face when they found the arm?”

He pointed at the four-wheeler tracks, which continued straight to the mouth of the glacier. “I figure we follow those, we find what Teddy and John found.”

Wy took another look at the glacier, which looked far too unstable for her tastes. “Right.”

They followed the tracks, which ended short of the wall of ice. The bottom half of the face was rotten and riddled with holes that created gaping caves, too dark to see inside.

“You don’t think it’s inside one of those?” Liam said.

“Even John and Teddy aren’t that dumb,” Wy said. She felt a prickle at the base of her neck. It was nippy out this cold, clear morning. She should have exchanged her jacket for a parka.

They cast back and forth along the wall of ice, careful not to stray too close, the detritus from recent calving fresh on the ground in front of them. They’d almost given up when they found the blood and guts of the moose John and Teddy had shot. Wy unshouldered the.30-06 she had brought from the plane.

“You hear a bear?”

She shook her head, eyes watching the edge of the trees. “Not yet,” she said, which didn’t reassure him.

“I thought they were all asleep by now.”

“Nope.”

There were ravens gathered at the corpse, shredding intestine with strong, bloodied beaks. They were unalarmed by the arrival of the humans, and continued to feed.

“So I’m not seeing any plane wreckage,” Liam said, almost relieved. “They might have been shining us on.”

Wy felt the prickle at the back of her neck again and tried to zip up her jacket, but the zipper was as far up as it would go. The face of the glacier glittered in the cold, clear light, fractured and chasmed and impenetrable. Bushes and grasses had implanted themselves at the sides of the face wherever a handful of dirt had collected in a hollow of rock. Even-

“Hey,” she said. “Blueberries.”

They were large, as big as the first knuckle of her little finger, and frozen. They melted in her mouth like candy, sweet and tangy.

Blueberries. She’d loved them as a child, loved picking them, loved the rich blue stain they left on her hands and lips and tongue, loved the tart, tangy taste that exploded in her mouth when she bit down. She could hide herself away in the bushes taller then than she was, and sit with a pail in her lap and pick and eat and pick and eat, and not come out again until the strident voice of her foster mother called her out. And sometimes not even then; sometimes she thought that if she could just fall asleep in the blueberry patch, when she woke up her real mother and father would be there, all love and smiles and welcome home, Wyanet.

An eagle flew overhead, for a moment blocking the sun, aware of their presence but indifferent to them, and she started, staring down at the handful of berries. “Liam! Come have some berries! They’re-” She stopped.

Hidden until she’d been drawn to the berries, hidden almost completely behind a pile of ice-encrusted gravel overgrown with diamond willow, was a large patch of gray. As she approached, it resolved itself into a fragment of airplane fuselage. The edges were ragged and worn, the gray paint streaked and faded.

“No tail numbers,” Wy said out loud. It wasn’t much more than a foot across and she lifted it easily. “I’ll be go to hell.”

His footsteps came to a halt behind her and she felt him look over her shoulder. “What is it?”

“World War Two,” she said.

“What about it?” He caught on. “Oh, you think-”