Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Hig!

Focus Hig, breathe. Say 10-4.

10-4.

Focus on the little things. Stay alive.

10 fucking 4.

I would’ve skipped the rutted track and put down right in the sage meadow but I did not have tundra tires and a rock hidden in the brush could snap a wheel off. Better the known danger etc. Made sure I could see a few feet either side of the ruts because I was going to have to put one wheel on the center hump and the other thwacking through the edge of the bushes. Then I decided to not be stingy. The landing was gonna have to be precise within inches. Better to know exactly how the wind was blowing.

I pulled up, gained three hundred feet, and dabbed the side of my face with a corner of Jasper’s quilt. Then reached down between the seat to a little wood box I kept there and pulled the tab of a smoke bomb with my teeth and dropped it out the window. The thick orange plume boiled out of it and trailed after.

Landed twenty feet from the road and blew low and stiff east-northeast.

Damn, that was a bright idea. Good strong late morning crosswind could’ve messed with my plan. What else was I forgetting?

The reason Bangley was still alive was that he never forgot anything. Maybe he remembered a few too many things, a lot of redundancy, he didn’t care. What else did he have to do with his day? It was just occurring to me that maybe the reason I was still alive was that Bangley never forgot anything. Bangley. Husband and father. Farmer. Damn.

Oh, I know. Hig, you forgot that trying to land on a deeply rutted basically a trail in rocky sage country you mostly can’t see through—you forgot that it could clean your clock. Or clean the clock of the Beast which might be the same thing.

Okay, breathe. I came around a last time for final and pulled the bar up for half flaps and pushed down the nose, ruddered hard over for a full slip, and floated sideways into the field.

A bush landing has a way of waking you up. If you weren’t already. Powered off, engine growl to idle, and kicked the Beast straight just before touch down, left wing down low into the wind and the left gear thwacked into the brush loud. I struggled with the gusts. To keep the nose over the left edge of the ditch and not in it. Then the right main gear, the back right wheel hit the mounding dirt between the old wheel tracks and we jerked left. I struggled to keep that tire out of the rut. Must have, because I didn’t feel anything break, just heard the loud rips and tumps and squeals as the thicker sage beat at the plane and held the nose off as long as I could and when it came down there was a merciful clear bald run of low rocks and chewed down grass, thanks bighorn, or whoever, and the Beast bumped and shook and I shuddered to a stop just before the piñons.

Whew. Breathe. First thought: My paint job. The beautiful Beast scoured with stick lines. Second was: That was way too close. That was fucking dumb. All of it was dumb. If I hadn’t thrown the smoke bomb I would’ve wrecked. I looked at the digital fuel gauge before shutting her down. Just over twelve gallons left. Less than an hour. And less than an hour in the two jugs. Not even close to enough to get back. Dumb. But. I could get to Junction if I could take off with the same luck I had just landed.

Before I augured in the three stakes and tied her down facing into her takeoff, before I put two of Bangley’s Eggs of Death in the pockets of my jacket, and slung the AR over my shoulder and walked away from the Beast, I did the first not dumb thing all morning. I took out the jugs and using the strut climbed over the wings and poured one each, the last fuel in each wing tank. Fuel up now. Better to fuel up before you get your undies in a bundle. And I took the key. Put it in my right jeans pocket and said Hig. The key is in the right jeans pocket.

Never know how much of a hurry you might be in later.

Well she was not nude waiting for me by the creek, not even dressed out in the grass in front of the house singing, she was nowhere. Need not have tied myself to any mast. The smoke that had leaked from the chimney and billowed downcanyon was gone.

Place looked suddenly dead. Bucket kicked over in the yard, a dirty cooking spoon beside it. The cattle, a few sheep, were there heads down in the meadow all facing downstream. Ribbed thin, sharp hips, nearly starving. One big bird high up on the high wall gyring along the rock face. A peregrine. The ledge marked with a white ribbon of guano must be her nest. Circle out, circle back. Pity the ducks that angled down into this hole. No chickens. That occurred to me. Because of the falcon? No, the old coot had a shotgun. Because they would need a rooster then, or two, to maintain the flock—probably too loud every morning if you want to stay hidden, like letting the whole damn country know you’re here. Smart.

I turned the scope upcanyon to where the creek spilled over the wall in a twenty foot falls. The top of the hole completely boxed off by this cliff. And two sides soaring. Pretty neat spot. A length of dead pine was propped against the rock beside the waterfall, limbs stubbed in a crude ladder. Okay. If they went that way in flight they didn’t pull up and hide the ladder, maybe only because it was too heavy or they didn’t have time.

I was lying at the very rim, scrunched between two rocks looking straight down. Here my cliff was about a hundred feet high, maybe less. I was wedged tight and had to slide the holstered Glock around to my back so it wouldn’t scrape.

Think like Bangley. That’s what you need to do. Bangley’s voice, I can hear it:

Goddamn, Hig. Old man and a scrawny girl got you all in a bundle. So far you got more firepower on your right hip than he’s got by a factor of ten .

Yeah but what if there’s more of them? Or if he’s got more than the shotgun?

You see any sign of more? Stools in the yard, clothes hanging, bedding, old shoes?

Huh.

Good you’re thinking like that, Hig, can’t take that away. Ticking off the exigencies. Hig is an old dog but he learns shit little by little. But you gotta look at the intel staring you in the face. I’m not saying there aren’t three more guys with weapons hidden in the trees. Good to plan for that, too. But you gotta act on what you believe. Plus you also got the rifle, you got the grenades. You got the grenades, right?

Yeah, two.

Hig?

Yeah?

What are you doing here?

Silence.

I mean what do you want? What the fuck do you want?

Silence.

You can’t form a plan unless you got a mission. You can’t have a mission if you don’t know what the fuck you want. First rule. Have a clear mission, have an exit strategy .

I thought the first rule was Never Negotiate. Negotiate, Hig, and you are negotiating your own life …

That’s the first principle. Anyway what the fuck does it matter? You got a bigger problem to solve first. Which is: What the fuck, Hig, do you hope to accomplish?

The canyon darkened and I shivered. A cloud, a swollen cumulus tugged its shadow across the cut. Bearing away the last chill of a long winter. The shadow smelled like ponderosas. It passed over and the sun on the arms of my jacket smoothed out the goosebumps. It was comfortable snugged like this in the rocks. I could hear the buzz of a deerfly but it didn’t bother me. In the moment I realized I could lay my head on my suntoasted arms and go to sleep no problem. My nose was inches from the ground. I watched an ant climb the stem of a small purple aster. Smelled good here. Like flinty dirt and new grass, mesquite.