Should be?
It’s a crap shoot anyway. We smoothed the runway, cut the tall trees at the end. The book says we need a hundred more feet. But they never met the Beast.
Short nod. Cima looked across the meadow, the canyon. If I were a painter—she was that beautiful. Maybe not her alone, but the moment. The green reflected darkly in her violet eyes, and I thought, If we crash and burn tomorrow morning, well.
Made a last fire in the dark, watched the flames lean and light the rock wall for the last time. Ate venison and potatoes, greens, drank the tea. Doused the fire with a hiss, a billow of steam. Heard the low of a cow, the rustle of the leaves.
Had loaded everything yesterday afternoon but the lambs. Cima slept in the fields with her animals, listening to them graze around her. Now we led the two lambs on strings of twine upstream, carried them up the tree ladder beside the trickle of waterfall. They squirmed, bleated. Two moms answered, followed the cries to the top of the field, confused. The sadness of our world, it underlies everything like a water. Set the lambs down foursquare on their feet and they stood tall and stiff, reassessing life from this height. And trundled after us.
Walking a lamb on a string is not at all like walking a dog on a leash. It was a constant conversation, an argument. Full of debate, concessions, sudden capitulations, obstinacy in the face of reason. They balked we tugged. They gamboled ahead, no shit, we ran after. There is no way not to laugh. It was the perfect distraction from the emotions of leaving such a place and all that it meant. Finally I picked up my lamb and carried him.
At the Beast Cima expertly hogtied the little guys and we set them on our packs behind the seats. We climbed in, pulled the seat belt harnesses over our shoulders and clipped the steel buckles at our waists. I handed her the clipboard with the checklists.
You be the copilot. Haven’t had one in a while.
I primed the motor, pulled the stiff knob from the dash, listened for the spray of gas filling the carburetor and shoved it in. Repeat. Flipped on the master switch. The revving whir of the gyroscope. Turned the key in the mags, inched the throttle forward a half inch, set my boots against the brakes and pushed the starter.
Two coughs, two half spins of the prop and I shoved the throttle forward and she caught and roared and shuddered. We all did, me, Cima, the lambs. A small plane coming to life is emotional. It’s like a whole auditorium standing for an ovation. It’s grand and a little frightening. I pulled the throttle back to an even idle which was quieter, less momentous, less shake and more tremble. Let the engine warm a little, watched the dial of the oil pressure gauge ease down into the green.
Okay, I yelled. Go down the Before Takeoff list.
Had to yell. Didn’t carry an extra headset with me anymore. What would have been the point? Jasper didn’t need it.
Trim wheel to neutral!
Check!
Align heading indicator.
Check!
Run up to 1700.
Check!
Mags.
Carb heat.
Primer set and locked.
Check!
All of it gathering its own momentum as the motor warmed, the digital columns for each cylinder on the engine analyzer climbed, the oil pressure fell—all while the motor roared, the plane shivered, all heading for the critical moment of takeoff. I loved this. It was this—the anticipation of being finally airborne as much as the flying itself that had kept me coming back again and again whenever I could.
Outside thermometer read fifty two degrees. Good. Nice and cool. Heavier air. Eased off the brakes and she began to roll. Jostled her through the sage into the newly cleaned track using the brakes to steer, turned her down to the east end and spun her in the circle we had cleared. She pointed west. Sun behind us made long shadows of the brush. High desert daybreak pungent and cool. Straight ahead across the meadow the cedar woods that were our limit, our raised bar.
She gave me a thumbs up. I checked the trim wheel one last time, shoved the throttle forward to the panel, glanced at the oil pressure, the Beast roared, shook I yelled,
I don’t know why I yelled that. It might have been the last thing I said in this life. I wasn’t thinking Jihad I was thinking Hig, those Cessna guys in the white coats never tested this. They maybe never imagined a world eighty years hence when their plane would be a Noah’s Ark for sheep. She rolled, broke inertia, almost balking at first, way too slow, and the thought flashed No way!
And then she bounded, gathered the runway, reeled it in, the trees at the end came, grew dark, larger, maybe halfway to them I felt her break ground, the airborne moment and I pushed the nose down hard, pressure, she wanted to lift off, climb, but I held her down, held her three feet off the track hard in the ground effect where she could gain the most speed. We hurtled like that barely off the dirt and then I heard Cima scream, the first trees billboarding right in our face, and I jerked up the Johnson bar and pulled the yoke, not pulled it but released to my chest and the Beast flared, the nose leapt, the plane reared, it seemed straight into sky, the single prayer Don’t fucking stall, the stall horn blaring, airspeed dial, the needle hovering at sixty, the horn, the lambs chiming in, the weird thoughts you have when it all teeters: the lambs are the same fucking key. The same key as the stall horn. Sounds like their mom.
Not Cima. She just screamed. Once. I shoved the yoke forward again, swung down the nose to near level, prayed for speed for speed, soon enough the Beast took it, accelerated like a swallow that swoops after veering upwards for a bug and we flew level at sixty five, I looked down at the trees, thought, If we cleared them by two feet.
Not a regulation takeoff. Not in the book even for a short soft field. This is what our vector from the meadow probably looked like:
Well I must’ve been glad to be alive. I loosed a yell. The junipers rushed beneath us. The Beast rolled over the next ridge fifty feet over the trees, it seemed on her own volition, like a magic carpet. Coastered down the other side. One way to enter the next dream. She was beaming the way a small kid beams after surviving the magic mountain log flume at Six Flags. She reached over and pinched my arm.
We’re alive see? Nice work.
We’re awake.
You say the strangest things.
Even the lambs had caught the mood. They no longer cried, they lifted their heads off the packs and followed the conversation, floppy eared and guileless attendants. As far as they knew, all this represented the next stage in the normal life cycle of a sheep.
We crossed the big river and Pops was sitting on his pack like any hitchhiker on a shadeless stretch of desert highway. Something in his attitude at once resolute and refractory, pinned to his long shadow, the rifle standing between his knees like the staff of an acolyte. Which he was: bent to the mission, devoted now to a new life. If we could get there. The bandana fluttered on the mile post, barely registering the breeze of a calm summer morning. I banked left and landed and tapped the brakes to a full stop right across from where he sat.
He climbed in behind his daughter. Noah’s Ark, he said glancing at the lambs. That was all. Cima pulled the door shut, latched it and we took off to the west toward Grand Junction.
Something was not right. I won’t say wrong because how it registered wasn’t anything so definitive. Ten miles to the east I had made the first call. We had cleared the far cliffs of Grand Mesa, the great flattopped butte that looked like it must have been a peninsula in some shallow, plesiosaur haunted sea. A sixty mile long outcrop risen against the sky. It was banded with purple cliffs and covered with aspen forests. In summer they were waist
