Chapter 1 The Late Run

Haldis Pellerin had been flying the north for eleven years, and most of what she knew about weather she had learned from a man who would not say the word storm on the radio. Ove Thoresen had his own vocabulary for the sky. Weather off the Wahtuk, he would say, if the cloud was stacking up behind the range. A soft day, for anything a pilot could cross without thinking about it twice. He was sixty-nine, and his right hip clicked when he walked, and he had a habit of standing in the doorway of the Bluewing office as though the room still belonged to him, which in every way that mattered it did. On the twenty-first of October the forecast came in ugly, and Ove stood in that doorway and read it through twice before he said anything. "You don't have to go," he said. "I know." "The caribou will still be there in the spring." "The caribou will be there whether I count them or not," Haldis said. "The contract won't. The contract has a clause." She pulled the strap of her flight bag over her shoulder. "You wrote the clause." He made a sound in his throat that was not quite a laugh. Outside, the light off the gravel apron was the flat pewter color that meant the sun had already given up on the day, and it was not yet four o'clock. The territory was closing down the way it did every autumn, quietly and by degrees, the way a wound closes over. The float season was finished. The skis were not on yet. There was a three-week window every year when a pilot in this country either had both or had neither, and Haldis had spent the last four days taking the Whimbrel's floats off and hanging them in the shed, because the ice was coming and a man on floats in November was a man who intended to swim. The last contract of the year paid for the winter. That was the whole arithmetic of it, and she had run it a hundred times. Bluewing Air Service kept three aircraft and four pilots and one dispatcher and a fuel tank that leaked a teacup a week. The survey contract for the Keshika herd was small and honest and due before freeze-up, and if she flew it now she would spend February in a chair by a stove instead of selling the truck. Ove knew the arithmetic. He had taught it to her. "The pass is the problem," he said. "Not the valley." "The pass has been open since Tuesday." "Yes," he said. "That is what worries me." --- The Whimbrel 200 was thirty-eight years old and had been rebuilt twice, and Haldis trusted it the way she trusted her own knees: absolutely, and with a certain grim knowledge of the day it would fail her. It was a high-wing single, strut-braced, with two hundred and ten horsepower under a cowling that had been patched in four places by men who were no longer alive. On the left side of the fuselage, under the door, someone had painted a bird in flight a long time ago, and the paint had gone the color of weak tea. The bird did not look like a whimbrel. It did not look like anything with a spine. Ove had painted it himself in 1989 and refused to discuss it. She walked the aircraft the way she always did, touching it. Fuel sumps first, three of them, catching the avgas in a clear cup and holding it to the light. No water. No grit. She drained a cup and looked, and drained another and looked, and screwed the plugs back with the flat of her palm. Oil at the dipstick, a little dark, a little low, and she topped it from a jug in the shed. Control surfaces moving freely, cables singing faintly under her fingers. Tires. Tail wheel. The antenna behind the cabin, a whip about the length of her forearm, mounted on a bracket that had been re-riveted so many times the skin around it had the pinched look of old scar tissue. Her survival kit rode in the baggage compartment in a canvas satchel she had packed herself: a folding saw, a hatchet no longer than her hand, a cooking pot, two lighters, a ferrocerium rod, a first-aid pouch, four hundred feet of paracord, a space blanket, a signal mirror, a compass, a topographical map of the Keshika with the camp grid penciled in, and a strip of pemmican she did not expect to enjoy. In the pocket of her flight jacket she carried the smaller kit, the one that never left her body: rod, lighter, compass, a knife with a four-inch blade. Pilots who ditched with everything in the baggage compartment and nothing on their persons tended to be found in the baggage compartment. Dagmar Teale came out of the office with the manifest and stood with her collar turned up against the wind, which had begun to move, which was the first thing Haldis had noticed wrong all day. "Mail goes to Oolamut with the survey stakes," Dagmar said. "Two drums of avgas at the camp, you throw the sling over them and don't be clever about it. And the fisheries man wants his crate back, so if nobody's at Oolamut, you leave it under the cabin." "Nobody's at Oolamut. The crew pulled out Tuesday." "Then leave it under the cabin." Haldis signed the manifest and looked at the wind again, and at the sky to the northwest, where the cloud had stopped being cloud and started being a wall. --- The takeoff run was four hundred feet of gravel and then the air, and Lossett fell away behind her in the way it always did, a scatter of roofs and a curling rink and the fuel tank and the river bending around the whole small stubborn fact of it. From two thousand feet the town looked like something the country had tolerated rather than permitted. She could see the road going east and ending, because that was what the roads did here; they went as far as the money went and then they stopped, and after that there was river and rock and the long brown reach of the muskeg, and the sky doing its slow grey work overhead. She had filed a route that went up the Nakwasin and over the low shoulder of the Wahtuk and down into the Keshika drainage, then back the same way. Three hours and forty minutes of flying in a window she had told herself was four hours and would be three. Ove came on the radio once, at twenty minutes out, and said only, "Cloud's moving faster than they said," and she answered, "Copy," and that was the last conversation she would have with another human voice for a long time. It was not a hero's decision, going on. It was a tired woman's arithmetic in a warm cockpit. The pass was open. The herd was in the valley. The money was real and the winter was real and she had flown worse weather than this with less fuel. She leaned the mixture a touch to save the burn and watched the Nakwasin unspool beneath her like a wire pulled off a spool, narrow and brown and full of light, and she told herself the thing she always told herself in the last hour before it went wrong, which was that she would turn back the moment it stopped being a good idea. The cloud closed the shoulder of the range behind her at eleven minutes past five. She did not see it happen. It was there when she turned her head, and it was the color of the inside of a freezer, and it had already begun to snow. ---