Chapter 3 Inventory of a Wreck

The first hour was about movement. Haldis had learned this from a bush pilot in Talvosk when she was nineteen and thought she was immortal, a woman named Ragnhild who had lost two fingers to frostbite and still flew with her stumps on the yoke, and what Ragnhild had said was that the cold does not care how brave you are, and the only thing it respects is motion and dryness, and if you cannot have both you find a way to have the one that keeps your heart going. So Haldis moved. She walked the length of the gravel bar and back, and each step was a negotiation with her ribs, and each step pumped the cold back a little from her fingers. At the upstream end of the bar the Nakwasin ran black and shallow and fast between rocks skinned with new ice. Downstream the bar ended in a wall of black spruce, crowded and dark, the ground beneath it spongy with moss that had already frozen into a crust that cracked when she stepped on it. She went back to the aircraft because that was where the things were. The Whimbrel sat nose-down in the slough with its tail in the air, the left wing folded down against the gravel like a broken arm, and the cabin half full of water that had already begun to grow a skin of ice, and she stood at the door and looked into it and understood that whatever she retrieved from this aircraft in the next half hour was all she would have for the rest of the winter, and everything she left would be under the ice by morning. She worked from the floor up and she worked fast. The canvas satchel came out first, soaked but whole, and she carried it up the bar and set it on a dry shelf of rock and went back. The tool roll. The survey stakes, a crate of them, pine and light and dry, worth more than their weight in firewood. The aviation radio was shattered, its faceplate in pieces on the flooded floor, and the handset floated on the water like something drowned. Beside it, in its bracket behind the seat, the portable transceiver lay under an inch of water, and she pulled it free and shook it and held it up and saw the crack running corner to corner through its case, and she put it in the satchel anyway, because it was the only thing resembling a radio she would ever see again, and hope is a species of salvage. The emergency locator transmitter had been mounted on the rear bulkhead. It was gone, torn off with the piece of skin it had been bolted to, and she found it later buried in the slough mud beside the fuselage with its antenna, its whole whip antenna, snapped off flush at the base and nowhere in sight. She turned it over in her hands. The switch had been in the armed position. The power light was dark, and the case was cracked, and the antenna was a stub of nothing, and even if the case had held and the battery had been new, a locator transmitter with no antenna broadcasts its cry into a bucket and no one hears it. She stood in the snow holding the dead box and did the arithmetic that she had been refusing to do since she had fallen out of the door. Her route had been filed for the pass, which meant that when she did not arrive in Talvosk, they would search the pass. A locator transmitter with no antenna is a mouth with no voice. They would search the Nakwasin corridor. They would search the whole drainage eventually, when the weather let them, with aircraft and sleds and dog teams, and the drainage was two thousand square kilometers of spruce and muskeg and frozen lake, and it would be a month, at the earliest, before anyone walked a bar this far off the route. It would be months. If the planes could fly at all. She put the dead beacon in the satchel with the dead radio, because she could not make herself leave them, and then she went back one more time and pulled the sleeping bag out, and the tarp, and the two five-gallon drums of avgas that had been strapped behind the seat, though she had to float them one at a time to the shallows and roll them up the gravel and her ribs went white and red with every roll and she did not stop until both were out of the water, because fuel was fire and fire was life, and she would figure out the danger of it later. The light was going. In this country the light did not fade so much as get withdrawn, like a tide going out, and the temperature was dropping with it, and she could feel the drop against the wet wool along her back. She had one dry thing left in the world and it was the sleeping bag, and she would not have it long if she did not get a roof over it before dark. She built the shelter the way Ragnhild had taught her, though Ragnhild had never taught her this; she had taught her the principle, and Haldis made up the rest. She dragged the tarp to a stand of spruce whose branches came down almost to the ground, and with the four hundred feet of paracord she lashed the tarp across the branches on the side the wind was coming from, and with the broken wing strut, which she had found lying on the gravel like a gift, she propped the low edge off the ground. Then she cut boughs, armfuls of them, and packed the floor until it was a mattress a foot thick, and she cut more and stacked them against the windward wall, and she cut more still, until the spruce trees around her looked shorn and the shelter was a dark scented cave a woman could crawl into. The pemmican was in the satchel. She ate a quarter of the strip and drank water from the creek, and she did not boil it, because she had no fire yet, and she told her stomach what it could do about that. She unrolled the sleeping bag on the boughs and got in with her boots on, because a man in this country who took his boots off at night sometimes could not get them back on in the morning, and she lay in the dark and listened to the wind work along the valley and to the ice ticking as it closed around the aircraft at the edge of the bar. The click was still there. She could hear it, faint and patient, the dead ELT in the satchel, its switch hunting back and forth, on, off, on, off, as if it were still trying to tell someone where she was. ---