第2章 Weather Off the Wahtuk

The first sign was a roughness, a small arrhythmia in the engine that she felt in her feet before she heard it. Two thousand four hundred feet, descending into the Keshika, the valley opening beneath her like a hand that had been closed and was now deciding to open. The roughness came and went. She watched the tachometer needle shiver at a reading it had held steady for an hour, and she did the thing every pilot in the north does without thinking, which is to reach for the carburetor heat and pull it full out. Warm air into the throat of the engine killed the ice that warm most air in the valley was busy making. For a moment the engine ran worse, the way it always did when the heat went in, and then it cleared, and she exhaled. Carb ice was common and it was survivable and it was why a carbureted engine had a heat knob at all. She noted the time and the altitude and the fact that she had run the heat for less than a minute, and she told herself to run it longer next time. The snow had thickened. It was not a blizzard; it was worse than a blizzard, in the way that a slow leak is worse than a cut, because it left her the room to keep going. Visibility came down to a mile and then to half of that, and the walls of the valley, the low brown shoulders of the Wahtuk, dissolved into a white that had no bottom and no top. She was on the gauges now, the map on the clipboard between her knees, flying by heading and time, and she had done this a hundred times, and the hundred and first time is the one the country takes. The engine coughed again. This time the carb heat did not answer. She held it out and watched the manifold pressure fall and the RPM sag, and she felt the aircraft begin the long soft descent that no pilot ever chooses. A cylinder was missing, maybe two. There was a smell she could not name, thin and hot, and the propeller turned out of true in the white air, and the whole machine began to feel less like a machine and more like a falling thing. She did the drill in the order Ove had drilled into her, out loud, so that the checklist lived in a voice rather than a page. Mixture rich. Fuel on. Auxiliary pump on. Magneto check, left, right, and the left one faltered and the right one faltered and together they held her a few hundred feet above the trees. The trees were directly below her now. She had traded two thousand feet of altitude for thirty seconds of options, and the options were gone. The valley floor had narrowed to a corridor of black spruce and frozen muskeg, and then, ahead and left, the ice of Oolamut Lake, grey and flat and ringed with brown sedge, and beside it the gravel bar where the Nakwasin ran shallow, a pale scar of old flood rock laid along the river's edge like a runway that had not been graded in ten thousand years. She turned for it. She was low and slow and heavy and the turn cost her more altitude than she had, and she put the nose down to keep flying and the airspeed came up and the gravel bar came up far faster than it should have. She got the aircraft level a hundred feet from the ground. She got the flaps down. She got the carb heat off and the mixture full rich and her right hand flat on the throttle and her left on the yoke and her feet ready on the rudder, and she said, very calmly, the way she had been taught, "Okay." The main wheels touched the gravel. For one second everything held, the way it does in training, the way it does in the stories pilots tell in warm rooms. Then the left wheel found a boulder the size of a footlocker, and the gear leg folded, and the left wing tip went down and dug into the rock, and the aircraft slewed a quarter turn left and stopped being an aircraft and became, instead, a heavy thing traveling fast across a hard and indifferent surface. Haldis was thrown against the harness and then against the side of the cabin. Something opened along her left forearm, hot and immediate. The yoke whipped and caught her across the ribs and pressed the breath out of her as if a hand had reached in and squeezed it out like a rag. The wing tore. The fuselage came around and pitched forward, hard, and the nose went into the slough at the bar's edge and stopped, and the world went very quiet, and there was only the sound of her own blood and the dripping of water and, somewhere at the back of the cabin, a small mechanical click that repeated itself over and over, patient and maddening and meaningless. Cold water began to come in around her boots. She sat for a moment, in the tilted cabin, her forehead against the control yoke, and she did an inventory the way she had been taught to do inventory, from the top down, because the alternative was to scream. Head: present, aching, a wet spot above her left brow. Neck: movable. Shoulders: movable. Ribs: not movable without a bright white line of pain drawn from her sternum around to her spine. Left forearm: opened, bleeding, not spurting. Legs: movable, cold. Feet: dry, for now. The water was over her ankles. The fuselage was filling from the front, where the nose had gone into the slough, and the fuel smell had thickened, and Haldis had been raised around aircraft long enough to know what a fuel smell in a flooded cockpit meant, and it meant she was standing in a pool of gasoline and swimming in the same water, and the click behind her was the ELT switch, arming and disarming itself against the buckle of a survival vest. She unclipped the harness and got the door open against the bent frame and fell out into the water, which came up to her waist, and it was so cold that it did not feel like cold. It felt like being struck. She hauled herself onto the gravel with her good arm, one elbow at a time, and the water ran out of her clothes and the wind found her, and the snow went on falling into the slough around the drowning aircraft as if it had all the time in the world. She lay on the gravel with her cheek on the cold rock and watched the tail of the Whimbrel settle into the water and stop settling, because the water was shallow and the aircraft had run out of things to sink into. Then she thought about Ove's voice, and she thought about the word rescue, and she made herself sit up, because the water she was lying in was the water that would kill her if she did not get out of it, and there was no one in the valley to tell her so except herself. ---