'Yeah, but the guys who fly the big planes…' Lightstone said. 'I mean, who…?'
Then the light suddenly dawned. 'You mean he's a pilot?' Henry Lightstone rasped in a horrified voice, pointing an unsteady finger at the youthful-looking special agent who, to Lightstone's disbelieving eyes, suddenly looked even younger.
'Who, Thomas?' Sally Napaskiak laughed. 'Yes, of course he's a pilot. Didn't you know? Everyone was so proud of him when he finally got his license, too. You should have seen the family gathering,' she said to Marie. 'We had so much food-'
'When?' Lightstone asked in a dulled voice.
'When what?' Sally Napaskiak asked, a puzzled look on her face.
'When did he get his license?' Lightstone said slowly.
'Oh, not so very long ago,' Sally Napaskiak beamed. 'It was such a party. And we were all so proud of Thomas because he had worked so hard. I mean, you could not believe how hard he had worked. Hours and hours he had to practice because they are so picky, those licensing people, about how they want you to land these little toy planes. Can you believe it? I mean, really, these planes are so simple that even a child could-But you're not afraid to fly, are you?' Sally Napaskiak suddenly asked Marie.
'Who, me? God, no, I love to fly,' Marie Pascalaura laughed. 'I can't wait.'
Lightstone walked slowly to the plane. Woeshack quickly took his bags and stuffed them into the back storage compartment.
'Going to be a little tight in there, but Marie looks pretty small, so we should be okay on weight,' Woeshack said as he finished stuffing in the last bag and then stood up, a pair of long broom handles in his hand.
Lightstone started to say something, but his attention was caught by a reflection off the overhead wing.
'You've got ice on the fucking wings?'
'Oh, yeah, sure. We got a lot of that up here.' Woeshack shrugged as he handed Lightstone one of the broom handles. 'Believe me, it's no big deal. All we've got to do is get it off.' He grabbed the edge of the wing with his left hand for balance, brought the broomstick up over his shoulder with his right, and then slammed the stick down hard on the wing surface, sending small chunks of ice flying in all directions.
Henry turned and walked back to Marie and Sally Napaskiak.
'You know we're going to crash,' he said in a strangled voice. 'Either we're going to be too heavy to take off, or we're going to ice up, or the fucking wings are going to fall off because our pilot has been pounding on them with a goddamn broom handle.'
'Oh, don't you pay any attention to him,' Sally Napaskiak advised Marie, shaking her head. 'You two are going to be just fine. Thomas has been a federal government pilot for three whole weeks now, and he hasn't killed anyone yet. So why should you two happy people be the first?'
Chapter Thirty-One
Tuesday September 14th
To virtually any other resident of the southern shoreline of Skilak Lake, the sudden cracking of a dried branch would have been immediate cause for alarm. But in this remote and isolated area of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, the fiercely protective Kodiak had no natural enemies. With her cubs close by, she was completely engrossed in the alluring clumps of lush, ripe, raspberry-like salmonberries and low- bush cranberries. She had every intention of seeing her small cubs develop the fatty tissue necessary to carry them through the cold Kenai winters.
Relaxed, confident, and only mildly curious about the source of the crackling noise, the mother Kodiak grunted her annoyance as she rose up to her full nine-foot height. Once upright, so that she could see over the interwoven salmonberry stems and alder branches, she quickly focused on her young male cub, who had wandered too far. More branches snapped as he awkwardly tried to work himself in closer to an especially sweet-smelling loop of fibrous material that seemed to be drenched in berry juice, and the repetition of the familiar sound caused the last of the mother Kodiak's residual concerns to vanish.
The Kodiak bellowed a long, grunting whooof to warn the cub back, then dropped down again to continue foraging. She was reaching out toward a particularly enticing clump of red salmonberries when the sudden, terrified yowl of her cub erased all thoughts of eating from her instinct-regulated brain.
In an instant, seventeen hundred pounds of furious motherhood exploded through the mass of interwoven branches and stems that would have hopelessly trapped any lesser mammal. Charged with adrenaline, her eyes bulged as she saw her tortured baby cub dangling from a rope held by a relatively small and mostly hairless upright creature.
Had the sow possessed any sense of what it meant to have natural enemies, she might have hesitated. But in nature, the desperate urge to protect the young at any cost is always the dominant instinct.
Exposing her huge teeth in a savage snarl, the enraged sow brought her massive shoulder muscles down in preparation for attack. In her fury, she paid no attention to the shiny, long-barreled pistol that suddenly appeared in the creature's hand, nor did she ever actually hear the gunshot that tore into her right shoulder. The fractured joint gave way, sending the roaring bear tumbling muzzle-first into the soft earth.
Mindless of anything but the sound of her squalling cub, she staggered up onto her three functional legs, her right foreleg dangling useless. She tried to make the uphill charge once more… only to go down again when the carefully aimed second bullet ripped into her left shoulder socket.
There was another momentary flash of pain, so severe this time that it threatened to eclipse her awareness. But then the white-haired predator yanked on the rope, causing her cub to cry out again, and the mother Kodiak suddenly rose up on her hind legs like a demon out of hell, her neck bowed like a huge striking snake as she lunged upward, her fearsome teeth bared for the kill.
The third high-velocity bullet shattered the knee joint of her right rear leg, and she came down heavily on her side. But this time she was only a dozen feet from her tormentor, and the furious churning efforts of her left rear leg-as well as the swiping motions of her damaged but still functional left forearm-brought her to within six feet before the fourth bullet slammed into her left hip and completely broke her down.
She might have stayed there then on that rocky hillside, having done all that could possibly have been expected of an animal limited to the fearless use of muscle, bone, and heart in trying to protect its young from the most savage species on earth.
It would have been reasonable, and understandable, and even just.
But her cub was squalling steadily now, fighting against the rope to reach its mother, while the white-haired man simply laughed.
Which was all it took to send the tortured Kodiak roaring forward one last time, slashing out at the leg of her tormentor with her one functional paw even as Gerd Maas sent the fifth bullet from Sonny Chareaux's single-action. 357 Magnum Ruger revolver into her brain and silenced those unyielding maternal instincts forever.
'Look at them,' she whispered in amazement.
Henry Lightstone and Marie Pascalaura were sitting together in the bow of the twenty-five-foot patrol boat, bundled up in thermal underwear, sweaters and windbreakers under their life vests to ward off the chilling offshore breezes. They watched in silent fascination as the now-familiar pair of bald eagles continued to perform their aerobatic twists and turns over the glistening turquoise surface of Skilak Lake.
The graceful raptors had been performing for the past half hour, probably, as Refuge Officer Sam Jackson suggested, because it kept their human competitors from concentrating too much on trying to catch their fish.
Sam Jackson, a twenty-two-year veteran at the Kenai Refuge, and longtime friend of Thomas Woeshack, had shown up in a patrol boat an hour before. Wearing his reddish-orange 'Mustang' survival suit and carrying his golden retriever pup, he had been more than happy to pull out his own fishing pole and join them.
'I think they're the most beautiful things that I've ever seen in my life,' Marie said, cradling the golden retriever pup in her arms now and laying her head back against Henry Lightstone's shoulder. 'I think I could get used to days like this.'
'It isn't bad,' Lightstone agreed. 'But I'm not too sure about that idea of saving on grocery bills by catching our own food,' he added thoughtfully as he stared out at the gently bobbing lure. Although they had already hooked
