Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Retreat to ride tiger, turn round and kick horizontally, shoot a tiger with bow, step up, parry and punch. She may have put a little extra into the punch. Apparent close up and conclusion as the light faded above and the river rolled inexorably on.

She repeated the entire form twice more, commencement through conclusion. At the end she straightened, brought her right fist into the palm of her left hand, let her hands fall to her sides, and bowed, deeply. Respect for the form. Respect for the sifu. Respect for Moses. She blinked back tears and went inside.

In a gift to the last fishermen and the first hunters of both seasons a high had settled in over Southcentral Alaska from Bristol Bay to Prince William Sound on the Friday before Labor Day, and took up residence for the foreseeable future in NOAA’s ten-day forecast. Wy woke very early on Labor Day to clear skies, visibility unlimited, and light, variable winds out of the southwest. The winds were included, she thought, only because the forecasters couldn’t bear to give out a perfect weather report. If she’d submitted a request to the weather gods to facilitate the quickest, smoothest, cheapest, least wearing on the engine flight from Newenham to Blewestown, this would have been it. It was almost as if the fates were conspiring so that she had no excuse not to get in the air and put the nose on east-northeast.

She put the sheets in the washing machine and did form on the deck until it was time to put them in the dryer. She showered, dressed, and did a final walk-through of the house. She carried a small duffel to the door and locked it behind her, and then had to unlock it again in a scramble to find the current book, the third in the kickass Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr series. She only wished she was that tough. And then she locked the door again and left the keys for Zach and Alexis on the highest shelf inside the arctic entry.

They’d sold their vehicles because the price of shipping them from Newenham to Blewestown was more than a new vehicle would cost them—another advantage of being on the road system—and she drove her rental to the airport, and turned it in. The girl behind the counter was unknown to her, a relief because she’d been dodging goodbyes for the past three months. They all thought she was running away, and they weren’t entirely wrong, but the sympathy touched her on the raw. Best just to be gone. Like Bill, she’d write.

Or not.

She had topped off the tanks the previous afternoon. All that was left to do was the walk-around and to run the checklist. She let 68 Kilo use up most of the runway and they took to the air over Newenham for what might well prove to be the last time. She made a large, slow circle as she climbed, the Wood-Tikchik Mountains to the north and west, the Four Lakes parallel streaks of silver reaching deep into the mountains, the wide river rolling down to Bristol Bay in the south, the town itself spread out over the hills and hollows of the broad north bank of the river, surrounded by thickets of alder and black spruce. The town of Newenham was always more attractive from a thousand feet up.

She banked right and headed east, following the river up just far enough to fly over the spot where Old Man’s Creek joined it. Moses’ fish camp was still there, although the cabin looked even more dilapidated than it had the last time she’d checked on it. The Arctic was hard on everything.

“Goodbye, Grandfather,” she said, and was surprised and perhaps even a little forlorn when her eyes remained dry. It seemed she was leaving the worst of her grief at her loss behind her, too.

She banked right, climbing again, leveling out at five thousand feet, and put Carly Rae Jepsen on the soundtrack. Wy preferred real instruments to synthesized but the girl had pipes. She followed the river up to where it petered out into braided lakes and tundra, crossed the Kvichak and emerged onto the southern shore of the massive Iliamna Lake and proceeded up the east shore. There was a tiny bit of chop for about a nanosecond and then, poof, gone. Wy wished Liam were along for the ride, just to prove to him that every flight in Alaska wasn’t a death-defying feat on the order of a shuttle launch. How she had managed to fall for a guy who held up in the air every aircraft he ever flew by the arms of his seat remained a mystery to her. A reluctant smile spread across her face. To both of them.

The lake was a bright sheet of glare beneath the rising sun. There no sign of the infamous albeit elusive lake monster to be seen over the entire seventy-seven mile stretch, which was disappointing, but she did catch a brief glimpse of some of the lake’s freshwater seals. She’d read that there were only two freshwater seal populations in the world and that predation, pollution, and climate change was eating at their numbers to the point that application had been made to classify them as endangered. She had very little faith left in the government doing the right thing so she was happy to see them while she still could.

She followed the dirt road from Pile Bay over the mountain pass to Williamsport on Cook Inlet, mostly because she had heard stories for years of death-defying transits over that road. She had herself never seen it, so she dropped down until she was about eye level with a pickup that looked way too small to be hauling a fifty-foot fishing boat on a trailer up a track barely wide enough for the wheel base of both vehicles. It made her glad she was traversing the pass by air. Even more so when that track was halfway up a dizzyingly sheer mountainside with nothing between the edge of the road and the abyss and oblivion.

She climbed back up to cruising altitude and flew on. Over the headphones she heard sporadic communications from various pilots in the area, picking up and dropping off guests at fishing lodges, spotters looking for late schools of silvers, a bunch of hunters en route to harvest their share of the Nelchina caribou herd. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game had increased the hunting season by ten days as the latest estimates had the population of the Nelchina herd at fifty thousand plus, which was about twenty thousand over what the area could sustain. Wy had flown aerial surveys for the ADFG and she had seen up close and personal what happened when herds over-grazed their ranges. Malnutrition and starvation weren’t pretty in any species.

Iliamna Bay passed beneath, a long stretch of gold on blue. She banked left at North Head and maintained a heading just off shore for the circumference of Iniskin Island, with Iniskin Bay and Oil Bay passing in review. For a few heart-stopping moments all four stratovolcanoes lined up on either side, a stalwart line of ice and granite. Douglas, seven thousand feet; Augustine, forty-one hundred feet, an island volcano, an almost perfect white cone floating in a dark blue sea; Iliamna, ten thousand feet; and Redoubt, also ten thousand feet. Spurr, eleven thousand feet and the fifth in line on the west side of Cook Inlet and nearest to Anchorage, was visible, too, if much less spectacular in appearance after its peak-altering eruption in 1953. They formed the northern thrust of the Aleutian Range, a two-thousand mile arc of mountains beginning at Lake Chakachamna west of Anchorage and ending with the Rat Islands at the tail end of the Aleutians. This was the northernmost arc of the Ring of Fire. These five mountains would be her guideposts to the south and west for the foreseeable future.

The fact most prominent regarding these mountains—What was the collective noun for volcanoes? An eruption? —was that they were all active and in the habit of sending ash high in the air and hundreds of miles in every direction, rendering a severe hazard to aviation. She eyed Augustine attentively as she approached it but it seemed calm today. On her left Iliamna showed steam from two vents, as did a single vent on the west side of Mt. Redoubt north of it. South of Augustine, Douglas bestrode Cape Douglas, a protrusion of the Katmai National Park. Katmai was where the tourists who could afford it flew in to watch bears and where the Apollo astronauts had trained for survival, although NASA would have had to work awfully hard to put a capsule down that far off course.