Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

“The shoulders of giants,” she said out loud, and indeed the massifs seemed to be holding up the blue dome of the sky itself.

She followed the long, wide gravel beaches of the west side of Cook Inlet north, pausing at Silver Salmon Creek to circle around a pair of grizzlies digging for clams in the mud left by the outgoing tide, skirting the inner shore of Chisik Island to fly part way up Tuxedni Bay just so she could say she had stared Redoubt in the face, then doubling back to bank left over Squarehead Cove and Redoubt Point.

At Harriet Point she banked right and flew out over the vast blue expanse of Cook Inlet, her new home.

Four

Monday, September 2, Labor Day

LIAM WAS A SINGLE MALT SCOTCH MAN BUT on his way out of the brewery he bought a growler of Firebreak Lager to support a fellow local. He stowed it in the cooler behind the driver’s seat of the Silverado and stood for a moment, irresolute. He should go home and finish unpacking. Although he had made the bed, which was the most important thing. It was his sincere hope that the bed would desperately require clean sheets in the morning.

As if she’d heard him his phone buzzed with an incoming text from Wy, in which she ETA’d him that she was about ninety minutes out, followed by two emojis, a heart and a flame. His heart skipped a beat, because of course it did. Liam Campbell was that greatest of all clichés, a man truly, madly, deeply in love with his wife, and he didn’t care who knew it. What’s more, he was loved just as much in return, and he didn’t care who knew that, either. He could feel his swagger coming on just climbing into the truck and he was positively cocky turning the key. Even if he was laughing at himself just a little bit as he did so. Ninety long minutes, he thought, as the engine idled. How far up the bay had Erik said his dig was?

A shadow passed between him and the sun and he almost felt rather than heard the susurration of wings. He looked up. It was only an eagle, wing tips feathering the air, white head and tail almost erased against the pale blue of the sky. The likeness to Blue Jay Jefferson was even more pronounced. Not a raven, though, so all was well.

He put Brad Paisley on the speakers, turned up the volume, and drove back across the causeway that separated the lake and the tidal estuary, where he turned right on the road that led east out of town. Imaginatively named East Bay Road, he noticed. In spite of there being a hundred times the number of road miles and five times the population of Newenham, he had the feeling it wasn’t going to be all that difficult to find his way around Blewestown and environs.

Near to town, the road was paved with large shoulders, a center turn lane and, if his eyes did not deceive him, an actual bike trail, on both sides no less. About five miles out it intersected with another road that led back around to the airport, named, in another excess of creativity, Airport Road. After that the road devolved into a narrow corridor of mixed residential and business, with the trees crowding in on both sides, especially thicket after thicket of alder and a lot of dead or dying evergreens. The spruce bark beetle was still single-mindedly pursuing its determination to eat every last spruce tree in North America, made manifest here by stand after stand of spruces that had died and turned from deep, dense green to dull, tattered brown. East Bay Road was one lightning strike away from a raging forest fire that could wipe out everything from here to town, and Liam wondered why the dead trees weren’t being cleared. He rounded a corner and saw a crew with a cherry picker taking down one such stand as he passed by, a tall, once-proud tree crashing down in a small cloud of dead needles shaken loose by the impact.

He watched his odometer and at about twenty miles out, after a deep dive into a ravine carved by a small creek crossed by a very old wooden bridge and a switchbacked climb up the other side, he found a driveway on the right. The street sign had been knocked into the ditch but he could make out the letters. Glacier View. He looked across the Bay, where an enormous glacier, all swirling white and blue and gray and black ridges, curved down between two mountains to preen over its reflection in the still water beneath. Glacier view, indeed.

The driveway was so steep it almost disappeared in front of him, a single lane dirt road that followed the narrow creek he had crossed. He passed several smaller driveways to the left and right. Just before the driveway ended there was another driveway off to the right. This driveway was in infinitely better condition, wide enough for two cars to pass and maintained to an excellence seen only on the other side of the Alaska-Canada border. It turned after fifteen feet, losing itself in the alders clustered thickly on either side, but there was a large roof with a handsome rock chimney looming up over the foliage.

Past the driveway the lane became even steeper with ruts that went so deep Liam feared even the Silverado would high center. After two switchbacks thrown in just to slow down the traffic, the dirt road mercifully ended in a small turnaround about a hundred feet off the beach. The beater Erik Berglund had been driving was parked far too close to the edge. A weathered post indicated where there might be a trail down, if one were suicidally inclined.

Well. God hates a coward. He parked and got out. He stood for a moment, looking out at the Bay. The blue expanse seemed to stretch out even farther the more he looked at it, though he knew it was only twenty-five miles wide and forty miles long. Distance over water, like sound, was deceiving. The fact that he was law and order for everything he saw that wasn’t muni meant he’d be flying a lot. Joy.

He walked over to the post stuck in the dirt. Sure enough, it indicated the top of what could only in jest be called a trail. Pushki, that tall, noxious Alaskan weed whose juice could blister the skin right off your body, crowded a steep gravel slide interrupted by needle-sharp black rock outcroppings and ending in a small but murderous ridge of that same rock thrusting out onto the beach itself. For a brief moment Liam debated just how badly he wanted to see Erik’s dig. He sighed and shrugged. He was here, Wy wasn’t due in for another hour. What the hell.

He inched forward, almost immediately lost whatever traction he started out with, and began to slide. He hit the first outcropping of rock, tripped, barely caught himself before what would have been a truly epic face plant, skittered over the gravel rolling beneath his soles, hit the second outcropping, and flailed his arms trying to regain his balance. Failing, his feet slid out from beneath him and he sat down hard on the trail, which wasn’t any kinder to his jeans than it had been to the soles of his shoes. He might have yelled. He certainly didn’t scream like a little girl. He slid down the rest of the way on his butt, working up enough velocity that he only narrowly avoided impaling himself on a sliver of rock extended invitingly from the ridge that protruded onto the beach.

He climbed gingerly to his feet. Bones intact, only a few scrapes and bruises. Nothing that Wy couldn’t kiss all better. He hoped no one had been photographing his ignominious descent with a cell phone. Although it would certainly have been quite the clickbait.

“Hey! Liam!”

He looked around.

“Up here!”

The creek he’d crossed ended in a stream that spread out over the beach in a wide fan. On the trail side time or tide had carved a cave into the rock, leaving a more or less level bit of shelf behind. Erik Berglund’s head poked out from the flap of a white canvas tent. He was grinning. “You believe in making an entrance, don’t you?”

Liam investigated the seat of his jeans. The fabric might be a little thinner that it had been at the top of the trail, but fortunately denim was tough stuff. “It was a little more exciting than I had anticipated. You ought to post a warning sign.”