Better To Rest

FIVE

The next morning was clear and cold enough to generate a thin layer of frost, but the wing covers were quickly removed and the problem solved. She was sorry for that. She wanted to be very busy. Liam had the worst case of fear of flying she’d ever seen, and so long as she was doing things with the plane he wouldn’t bother her. If she made it look too easy, they would have to talk about the night before.

They leveled off at a thousand feet and she drew a bead on Bear Glacier, which according to the map hung off the lip of Carryall Mountain. “Carryall,” if the little Yupik she retained from her upbringing in Ik’ikika, a village on the shore of One Lake, was accurate, was an anglicized version of one of the many words her ancestors on the Yupik side of her family used forbear. She didn’t know if it stood for black bear or brown bear or polar bear, or feeding bear or sleeping bear or running bear, for that matter. She ought to study up on her Yupik. Maybe she and Tim could take a class. Maybe she and Tim and Liam could take a class.

She gave a mental snort. Yeah, right, that’d happen. Liam was all but packed for his transfer back to Anchorage, where he would have no use for Yupik. Other language skills, perhaps. Bureaucratese, maybe. Brownnosing, definitely.

She pulled herself up short, ashamed for automatically assuming the worst. Just like Jo. Liam hasn’t said if he’s leaving or staying, she told herself. You could ask, instead of getting mad over nothing.

Then again, if she asked, he’d have to answer. And then he’d ask her to come with him, which would entail leaving her home, selling her air-taxi business, and pulling Tim out of school to start all over again in a city whose population thoughtBush meant half an hour out of town.

And then she would be faced with her own decision: Go or stay.

It wasn’t like she didn’t have a choice. It hadn’t killed her to break it off with Liam the first time.

It had only felt like it had.

She found herself getting angry all over again. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, grateful the noise of the engine covered the sound. She cast a surreptitious glance over her shoulder at the man sitting behind her, rigidly upright, knuckles white on the edge of his seat, his breathing audible over the headset. Liam wasn’t noticing anything except how he was personally holding the plane up in the air.

According to John and Teddy, the crash site wasn’t far from an airstrip not too overgrown with brush and long enough for a Super Cub, which in turn was accessible by what had been a game trail just wide enough to take a four-wheeler in from Icky. It was quicker to fly, though, and Liam had wanted to inspect the site as soon as possible.

The Wood River Mountains grew on the horizon, four-and five- and six-thousand-foot peaks covered with the winter’s first snowfall. A series of four long, deep, narrow landlocked fjords filled up four long, steep, narrow valleys between the mountains, lying before them like the fingers of a giant’s spread hand. Not quite like the outspread hand of the night before, but close enough to bring it to both their minds.

Liam cleared his throat. “So. Where are we landing?” He tried not to let the fact that he didn’t care where it was so long as he was on the ground, alive and whole and soon, show in his voice.

Wy made an unnecessary adjustment to the prop pitch. “It’s a dirt strip, about three thousand feet. I think the Parks Service put it in during a survey of the Togiak Wildlife Refuge.”

“And everybody’s been using it to hunt from ever since.”

“Pretty much. I know Charlene patrols up here pretty regular, and she sees planes down there a lot.”

Charlene Taylor was the fish-and-game trooper for the Newenham district. “Poaching?”

“She thinks so, although she has yet to catch anyone in the act.” Wy adjusted her headset and fussed with the arm extending the voice-activated mike to her mouth.

“You have any ideas about this wreck?”

She shook her head. “It’s got to be old, before my time.”

“Did you ask around the airport?”

“Didn’t have time; you wanted to be in the air at first light.”

“Right.” He made a minute shift to ease the strain on his vertebrae. The plane hit an air pocket and bounced. He stiffened back into immobility, like that would help smooth out the flight. Wy’s braid dangled over the back of the seat in front of him. It swayed gently with the motion of the Cub. He tried not to look directly at it.

They flew on for a few minutes more, until they took a sudden, hard right bank and nosed down. Liam sucked in a breath. “There,” Wy said.

It seemed to Liam’s fevered gaze that she was intent on their doing chin-ups on the peaks of the Wood River Mountains. “Right there, do you see it?” Wy said, and aimed 78 Zulu at a strip of snow that might have had a patch of gravel beneath it the size of a baby’s diaper. The strip got bigger the nearer they got to it but not much. Wy circled once, taking a look at the surface and coming much too close to the sides of the encircling mountains, and brought them in on an approach that feathered the tops of the stand of slender birches surrounding the strip. She pulled so far back on the throttle that they were practically hanging stationary in the air when they touched down. They didn’t use up much of the strip, either-a good thing, Liam thought when a bull moose wandered out of the trees at the other end of the runway. He stopped and regarded them with an expression of mild surprise for a moment, before wandering back into the woods, evidently unworried by the thought that they might be after his rack.

They set off, finding and following the track through the brush and snow left by John’s and Teddy’s four-wheelers without difficulty. It was late October and they were lucky. It had snowed twice already that year, but so far only enough to stick, and the good news was it wasn’t over their boots.

“Did they get anything?” Wy said when, after twenty minutes, the silence got too oppressive to bear.

“What?”

“Teddy and John. Did they get anything?”

“Oh. Yeah. A moose. Big bull. It was skinned out and hanging in the shop.”

“Good.”

“Yeah. Isabella and Rose’ll be happy.”

She stood it for ten minutes more. “Liam-”

“Look,” he said. “We’re here.”

They had emerged from the woods into an area of glacial moraine, pile after pile of gray gravel so uniform in size it looked graded.

“There’s no snow on the gravel,” Liam said, confused.

“That’s why,” Wy said, pointing.

In back of the moraine loomed the glacier, and even at that distance they could hear the sound of running water. “It’s not cold enough yet to stop the meltoff. Won’t be long, though. Teddy and John hit it just right. Another snow and they wouldn’t have found a thing. How close did they say they were to the face when they found the arm?”

He pointed at the four-wheeler tracks, which continued straight to the mouth of the glacier. “I figure we follow those, we find what Teddy and John found.”

Wy took another look at the glacier, which looked far too unstable for her tastes. “Right.”

They followed the tracks, which ended short of the wall of ice. The bottom half of the face was rotten and riddled with holes that created gaping caves, too dark to see inside.

“You don’t think it’s inside one of those?” Liam said.

“Even John and Teddy aren’t that dumb,” Wy said. She felt a prickle at the base of her neck. It was nippy out this cold, clear morning. She should have exchanged her jacket for a parka.

They cast back and forth along the wall of ice, careful not to stray too close, the detritus from recent calving fresh on the ground in front of them. They’d almost given up when they found the blood and guts of the moose John and Teddy had shot. Wy unshouldered the.30-06 she had brought from the plane.

“You hear a bear?”

She shook her head, eyes watching the edge of the trees. “Not yet,” she said, which didn’t reassure him.

“I thought they were all asleep by now.”

“Nope.”

There were ravens gathered at the corpse, shredding intestine with strong, bloodied beaks. They were unalarmed by the arrival of the humans, and continued to feed.

“So I’m not seeing any plane wreckage,” Liam said, almost relieved. “They might have been shining us on.”

Wy felt the prickle at the back of her neck again and tried to zip up her jacket, but the zipper was as far up as it would go. The face of the glacier glittered in the cold, clear light, fractured and chasmed and impenetrable. Bushes and grasses had implanted themselves at the sides of the face wherever a handful of dirt had collected in a hollow of rock. Even-

“Hey,” she said. “Blueberries.”

They were large, as big as the first knuckle of her little finger, and frozen. They melted in her mouth like candy, sweet and tangy.

Blueberries. She’d loved them as a child, loved picking them, loved the rich blue stain they left on her hands and lips and tongue, loved the tart, tangy taste that exploded in her mouth when she bit down. She could hide herself away in the bushes taller then than she was, and sit with a pail in her lap and pick and eat and pick and eat, and not come out again until the strident voice of her foster mother called her out. And sometimes not even then; sometimes she thought that if she could just fall asleep in the blueberry patch, when she woke up her real mother and father would be there, all love and smiles and welcome home, Wyanet.

An eagle flew overhead, for a moment blocking the sun, aware of their presence but indifferent to them, and she started, staring down at the handful of berries. “Liam! Come have some berries! They’re-” She stopped.

Hidden until she’d been drawn to the berries, hidden almost completely behind a pile of ice-encrusted gravel overgrown with diamond willow, was a large patch of gray. As she approached, it resolved itself into a fragment of airplane fuselage. The edges were ragged and worn, the gray paint streaked and faded.

“No tail numbers,” Wy said out loud. It wasn’t much more than a foot across and she lifted it easily. “I’ll be go to hell.”

His footsteps came to a halt behind her and she felt him look over her shoulder. “What is it?”

“World War Two,” she said.

“What about it?” He caught on. “Oh, you think-”

“I could be wrong, Liam, but I think this is a piece off an old C-47.”

“What’s a C-47?”

“It’s the cargo equivalent of a DC-3.” When he continued to look blank, she said, “Liam, I can’t believe how little you know about flying and still manage to live in Alaska. The DC-3 was the first economically successful commercial airliner. The C-47 was the military application, a cargo and troop transport. Parachuters bailed out of them during the invasion of Normandy, for crying out loud. Mudhole Smith built Cordova Airlines around them. At the end of World War Two, when we knew we had the war won, the plant in Georgia started converting the cargo plane into the passenger plane, and Alaska Airlines puddle-jumped one all the way across the continent to Anchorage in May 1945 and started flying passengers.” She looked at him and said incredulously, “Do you mean to say you’ve never been in one?”

“I don’t know,” he said, trying hard not to sound defensive. “I never pay any attention to the plane I’m in, Wy; you know that. All I care about is that they stay up in the air long enough to get me where I’m going.”

She shook her head. “Man.”

“Besides, that’s just a little piece. How can you be so sure it’s-well, it was a DC-3?”

“A C-47,” she said. “It was a military plane. The color alone tells us that.”

“How long’s it been here? When did it crash?”

“We need to find something with numbers on it.” Wy began foraging, climbing over boulders, pulling brush to one side only to have it pull free and slap her in the face. “Ouch. Damn it.”

“John said they found the arm next to a big chunk of quartz.” He walked upslope, crunching through a surface trickle of water frozen into a thin, rapidly melting crust. It had spent the summer running off the end of a slab of ice the size of Wy’s house, with man-high holes melted through it. “There.” He clambered over the ice, pieces of it collapsing beneath his weight as he went.

“Be careful!” she said as a big chunk fell with a loudthunk! Liam disappeared and for a moment she thought he had fallen through. His voice came to her a moment later. “Here it is, Wy. Walk around, though; don’t climb over-the ice is rotten right through.”

“Imagine my surprise.” She walked around the slab, a scramble of smallish boulders in her way, and found him standing between the slab of ice he had negotiated and the face of the glacier itself, a wall of prismed white with shadowed blue highlights creating narrow, unexpected windows into an inconsistent past. Another dark cave yawned at its base, curving high and large behind the ice. The ground here was a gray mixture of sand and gravel, more textbook moraine. Water was trickling down somewhere, but not much and not in a hurry about it. Winter was coming on fast.

“Kinda spooky.” Liam’s voice echoed hollowly back at him from the cave.

“Kinda,” Wy said, her voice short.

Liam looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t like being this close to the face of a glacier. Glaciers calve. Where do you think that slab you just hauled your butt over came from?”

He squinted up at the face. “Think one might fall on us?” he said, sounding interested.

Her shadow lengthened on the ice in front of her, and the sun, well up over the horizon by now, felt warm on her back. “That’s what glaciers do. Where’s that quartz?” She followed his pointing finger. “I don’t see- Oh.”

He followed her, watched as she extricated a piece of plastic from the sandy gravel. “What’s that?”

She turned it between her hands. “Transparent, convex. Part of a window, probably, or the windshield.”

He repressed a shudder, his all-too-active imagination actively pursuing a picture of what the last few moments in the air had been like. Had they known they were going in, those unknown men in the cockpit of this unknown aircraft? He hoped not. He hoped it with fervor.

Two hours later, their total was three shards of metal that had been twisted like corkscrews-proving to Liam once again just how insubstantial were the craft to which he trusted himself in the air-and Wy’s piece of plastic. Other, more macabre findings included the cuff of a dark blue shirtsleeve, and a tattered dark blue sock containing what appeared to be some small bones held together by what appeared to be sinewy cartilage.

Liam bagged and tagged everything they found.

“Nothing with numbers on it, though,” Wy said with a sigh.

“Is there enough here to tell you what kind of a plane it was?”

Wy shrugged. “Military, for sure, with that paint job.”

“When?”

“Not lately.” She stared up at the face of the glacier.

“What?”

“It’s just… you don’t expect to see a glacier giving up an airplane when it calves. A T. Rex, yeah, but a plane? Glaciers have been around a lot longer than planes. Takes a long time, centuries, millennia for a glacier to give up a secret. The face of a glacier, man, it’s thousands of years old. It’s-” She cocked her head. The prickle at the back of her neck was back.

“What?” he said.

“Shhh.” She held up a hand. “I thought I heard-”

There was a distant, cracking sound, and the next thing Liam knew Wy had him in a low tackle that rolled the both of them over the blueberry bushes and beneath the high-standing lip of the chunk of ice he had climbed over. There was aBOOM! that caused chunks of ice to fall from the roof of their shelter, one of which hit Wy’s head and another of which struck Liam smack in the left eye. “Ouch! What the-”

There was an extended rending sound, deafening in decibel level, so that he couldn’t hear himself speak, let alone talk. The ground shook beneath them. Earthquake? Wy buried her face in his shoulder and he held on. There was a split second of pure, clear silence. The light outside their shelter altered, shifted somehow, and then there was aCRASH! as something immense fell heavily to the ground, and a lingering series of cracks and thumps and bumps as it splintered into pieces and slithered down the gravel moraine.

He didn’t know how long it took for the ringing in his ears to stop. “Wy?” he croaked. She was unmoving against him. “Wy! Are you all right?”

He could feel the jolt that went through her. “What? Liam?”

“Are you all right?”

He felt her come alive all along the length of her body. “I… yes, I’m all right. You?”

“I think so. Can we get out?”

She raised her head and peered over her shoulder at the way they had come. “I think so.” She eeled backward, just enough room for her wriggle over onto her back. She kicked, and something shifted.

“Wy!”

“It’s all right. I’m just clearing a path. Follow me out.”

She didn’t have to ask him twice. He barely remembered to hang on to the evidence bags.

When they were well clear of the ice and a safe distance from the face of the glacier, they stopped to take stock. Wy winced a little when she stretched. “Something got me in the shoulder.” She looked at him. “You’re going to have a shiner.”

He touched the swelling surrounding his left eye. “Ouch.”

Her lips twitched. “And your uniform’s kind of changed color on you. Well, maybe not changed, exactly, but it’s sure bluer than it was.”

“What?” He looked down to find his dark blue jacket and pants embedded with multiple squashed blueberries. “Oh, hell.” She was looking over his shoulder at the face of the glacier. He looked up and her expression made him straighten. “Wy?”

“Liam,” Wy breathed, and raised one shaking forefinger.

The skeleton of the plane was impressed into the face of the glacier like a gigantic fossil, the ribs of the fuselage curving up and around, one wing folded like paper, the tail miraculously upright. The nose was gone and the cockpit with it, but there was a barred white star on the side close to the tail, and small letters or numbers in the same white paint on the upright portion of the tail.

“Liam,” Wy said again, closing her eyes and opening them again. “Do you see?”

“Of course I see,” he said.

She swallowed. “Good. For a minute there, I-”

“What?” When she didn’t answer he said, “Let’s get the binoculars from the plane.”