Chapter 20 Signal and Silence

A cold battery is a living thing that has gone to sleep, and warmth is how you wake it, and that was the last thing she knew that winter and it was enough. She slept that night on the bunk frame with the battery inside her jacket, against the hollow under her ribs where she could feel her own heart working, and in the morning the case was not stone cold anymore. It was cool. She took it out and set it on the bench in the one square of sunlight that came through the little window and she cleaned the contacts with the point of her knife, bright steel on dull metal, scraping the oxide off until the grey went shine, and then she put the cell back in the case and closed the latch and moved the case into the sun and waited, and turned the switch. Nothing. She turned the switch again. A click, a tick of static, a speaker clearing its throat, and then a hiss that was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard in her life. The dial lit up, one small orange bulb, and it held, and it stayed lit while she sat there and did not breathe, and the hiss went on, and the hiss was the world. She did not call that day, because she had one battery and one chance and she was a pilot and she understood line of sight, and line of sight from the floor of a river valley was nothing. She spent the day climbing. Behind the line cabin the ground rose to a knoll a hundred meters up out of the valley floor, stripped by the old fire, open to the sky in every direction, and she went up it with the radio in her pack and the battery wrapped against her body and she stood on the top of it at the last light and looked south down the main stem, and at the far end of the distance, past the bend, there was a light, or there was a smudge of something that might have been a light, eighty kilometers away, which was Talvosk. She slept on the knoll in a snow trench to keep the battery warm and she was up before dawn and she sat on the open ground with the radio on her knee and the antenna up and her thumb on the push-to-talk, and she said, in the flat and unhurried voice she had used on this band for eleven years, "Any station, any station, this is an emergency. This is the pilot of the aircraft reported overdue out of Lossett in October. I am on the ground at the mouth of the Keshika, south of Oolamut, on the knoll above the line cabin. Repeat, I am alive and I need assistance. Any station, any station." And the hiss went on, and the hiss went on, and the sun came up over the ridge and laid its light down the long white river, and she kept her thumb on the switch and said the words again, and again, and the hiss went on. She had said the words eleven times when the hiss broke. A voice came out of the speaker thin and far away and crackling, a man's voice, young, a bush pilot's voice if she had ever heard one, and it said something back that she could not make out except for one word, and the word was "Nakwasin," and she pressed the switch and said, slowly, twice, "Yes. Keshika mouth. Line cabin. I am the pilot. I am alive." The voice came back and it was clearer now, the way they do, and it said, "Copy, copy, hold on, I'm relayed to Lossett, hold on, they're asking—" and then there was a burst of static and a long pause and then the voice was back and it was saying a sequence of words that she would remember all her life in their exact order, which were: "Lossett says sweet Jesus. Lossett says hold that position. Aircraft is on the way. Aircraft is on the way. It's four hours out. Do not move. Do you copy, do not move." She copied. --- The plane came at two in the afternoon, a twin-engine on skis, white and red, the colors of a charter she did not know, and it came down the main stem of the river low and slow with its wingtip lights on in the day, and when it passed over the knoll it wagged its wings, and she stood in the middle of the burnt ground in the open sun with the radio in one hand and the mitten on the other and she watched it turn and come back around and put its skis down on the slush of the river ice below the cabin, and it landed, and the sound of the engines dropped, and the world had people in it. Two of them got out. The pilot was a woman about her own age with a fur hat and a clipboard, and behind her a young man in a rescue-orange parka who came up the knoll at a run and got to her and then did not know what to do with his hands and settled, in the end, for saying, "Ma'am, ma'am," a few times, and she put her hand on his shoulder and said, "It's all right. I can walk. I've been walking." They gave her a blanket and a cup of soup out of a thermos and they checked her hands and her feet and her pulse and asked her the questions they ask, her name, the date, the name of the Prime Minister, the name of her cat—she did not have a cat—and she answered them all correctly and then they walked her down the knoll to the cabin and she sat on the bench in the sun and drank the soup and the woman pilot sat down across from her with the clipboard and looked at her the way a pilot looks at a pilot, which is to say with a professional respect that has no softness in it and is worth more than softness. "You're Pellerin," the woman said. "Bluewing. Lossett filed you overdue in October. We shut the search down in December." "I know." "There wasn't a beacon. There was no ELT." "I know that too. The antenna sheared off in the crash. I found it in the slough." The woman looked at her for a moment and then looked at the clipboard and then said the thing that Haldis would carry with her down the rest of her life, and she said it in the flat and careful way of a person who has been asked to make sense of a piece of data and cannot. "That's what I don't get," she said. "We picked up a 406 hit out of the Keshika two weeks ago. Weak. Intermittent. Three transmissions, all from the valley floor, all from the gravel bar at the west end of Oolamut. The rescue centre ran it twice. There's no beacon down there. The recovery crew flew the wreck in February and the ELT is in the slough with its antenna gone. It can't have transmitted. And yet something down there was on the frequency at exactly the right power and the right place, two weeks ago, when you were sixty kilometers downriver, and it is the reason we kept the file open." Haldis did not say anything for a while. She looked out the cabin window at the river and the skis of the aircraft sunk in the slush and the light going long across the water. "I want to fly over the valley on the way out," she said. --- They flew her out that evening, north and up over the country she had lived in for six months, and she sat in the right seat because the woman pilot had asked her to, and she watched through the windshield as the land she had crossed on foot at the speed of her own body went under the wing at a hundred and sixty knots and became again what it had been in October, a distance, a chart, a set of contour lines. The confluence went by. The burn. The bluff with the black spruce on it. And then Oolamut opened below them, grey and rotten at the edges and still frozen in the middle, and she saw the wolves' trails in the snow, and the lake, and the bar. "Circle the bar once," she said. The woman pilot circled it, and Haldis looked down at the place where she had spent the winter, and she saw the wreck with the pale bird on the wingtip and the slough gone black and open around it, and she saw the shelter she had built and rebuilt a dozen times, and she saw her great pale arrow on the gravel, the signal she had made from stakes and tarp and driven into the snow in November to point at the wreck, aimed at the sky. The arrow was longer. It had been three stakes and a tarp when she left it in the last week of October, and it had been seven stakes and two tarp lengths by the time the winter was out, and she had fooled herself then into thinking she had done that, and looking down at it now from the air she saw it clear, a single long white wedge laid on the frozen river flat, twice the length of the one she remembered, with a new stake line off its western edge like a shaft feather, and no track, and no print, and no one in all that white. She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked up the valley, past the claim bench, at the long white slope where the wolves would not go, and there was nothing there, and there was everything there, and the light was going, and the plane climbed out north and she felt the country release her the way a hand releases a rope, all at once, with slack. She flew back to Lossett and Ove was standing in the doorway of the office when the truck brought her in, and he said nothing at all, and then he said, "You're late," and she said, "I know," and Dagmar came out and hugged her hard enough to hurt her ribs and then apologized for the ribs and hugged her again, and the office smelled of coffee and avgas and dog, and for a moment she was not sure she had ever left it and was not sure she had ever come back. The debrief took three days. She told them what she could and left out what she could not, because there is no line in a report form for the things that happened to her in that valley, and because she had made a decision at some point in the winter and had kept it without ever stating it. The rescue centre searched the valley once more by air in the last week of April and found the claim cabin with its door barred from the outside and her note on the bench, and the series of stakes down the Nakwasin at every kilometer, and the burned bluff, and the line cabin at the confluence, and the dead radio with a warm battery in it, and no other human being, and no sign of one, and no explanation at all for a weak 406 transmission from a beacon that had no antenna and no power and no reason to call. They gave her the mitten back. It had gone with her things into a paper bag at the hospital in Lossett, and she had asked for it, and the nurses had thought it was a keepsake and it was, of a kind, and she put it on her left hand in the truck going home and she wore it through the spring and she would still be wearing it, in one way or another, for the rest of her life. The other mitten never turned up. There was no other mitten, of the pair or of the valley or of the man, and she had stopped waiting for it and had not stopped looking, and the two of them were the same thing and always would be. At the end of April she did three things. She went to the aviation medical examiner and she passed, one hundred and nineteen pounds and a hearing test and a set of toes she could not quite feel in the cold, and she got her category one back. She went down to the Bluewing office and she stood in the doorway the way Ove stood in it and she told him she wanted the Keshika contract again, the survey, the one that had filed her overdue, and he looked at her a long moment and then he said the only thing he was ever going to say about any of it, which was, "The caribou will still be there." And the third thing she did, she did alone, at the kitchen table of her own house with the log open in front of her and a new pencil, and she began to write the season down, the whole of it, everything that had happened and everything she did not know, because she had decided somewhere on the river below the burned bluff that whatever else she had lost up there, she was not going to lose the record of it. She wrote until the windows went dark. And near the bottom of the last page, in the line she would keep coming back to when the snow came again and the length of the days began to shorten and the office smelled of avgas and the cold stood in the doorway with its hat in its hands, she wrote this: October, again, is nine months away. There is ground up there I never walked, and a slope the wolves will not go on, and a man, or not a man, who cut my snares and tied them back and marked the river to the sea. I am the only person alive who has been in that valley in winter and come out of it. I do not know what it is. I am going to find out.