She climbed back up to cruising altitude and flew on. Over the headphones she heard sporadic communications from various pilots in the area, picking up and dropping off guests at fishing lodges, spotters looking for late schools of silvers, a bunch of hunters en route to harvest their share of the Nelchina caribou herd. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game had increased the hunting season by ten days as the latest estimates had the population of the Nelchina herd at fifty thousand plus, which was about twenty thousand over what the area could sustain. Wy had flown aerial surveys for the ADFG and she had seen up close and personal what happened when herds over-grazed their ranges. Malnutrition and starvation weren’t pretty in any species.
Iliamna Bay passed beneath, a long stretch of gold on blue. She banked left at North Head and maintained a heading just off shore for the circumference of Iniskin Island, with Iniskin Bay and Oil Bay passing in review. For a few heart-stopping moments all four stratovolcanoes lined up on either side, a stalwart line of ice and granite. Douglas, seven thousand feet; Augustine, forty-one hundred feet, an island volcano, an almost perfect white cone floating in a dark blue sea; Iliamna, ten thousand feet; and Redoubt, also ten thousand feet. Spurr, eleven thousand feet and the fifth in line on the west side of Cook Inlet and nearest to Anchorage, was visible, too, if much less spectacular in appearance after its peak-altering eruption in 1953. They formed the northern thrust of the Aleutian Range, a two-thousand mile arc of mountains beginning at Lake Chakachamna west of Anchorage and ending with the Rat Islands at the tail end of the Aleutians. This was the northernmost arc of the Ring of Fire. These five mountains would be her guideposts to the south and west for the foreseeable future.
The fact most prominent regarding these mountains—What was the collective noun for volcanoes? An eruption? —was that they were all active and in the habit of sending ash high in the air and hundreds of miles in every direction, rendering a severe hazard to aviation. She eyed Augustine attentively as she approached it but it seemed calm today. On her left Iliamna showed steam from two vents, as did a single vent on the west side of Mt. Redoubt north of it. South of Augustine, Douglas bestrode Cape Douglas, a protrusion of the Katmai National Park. Katmai was where the tourists who could afford it flew in to watch bears and where the Apollo astronauts had trained for survival, although NASA would have had to work awfully hard to put a capsule down that far off course.
“The shoulders of giants,” she said out loud, and indeed the massifs seemed to be holding up the blue dome of the sky itself.
She followed the long, wide gravel beaches of the west side of Cook Inlet north, pausing at Silver Salmon Creek to circle around a pair of grizzlies digging for clams in the mud left by the outgoing tide, skirting the inner shore of Chisik Island to fly part way up Tuxedni Bay just so she could say she had stared Redoubt in the face, then doubling back to bank left over Squarehead Cove and Redoubt Point.
At Harriet Point she banked right and flew out over the vast blue expanse of Cook Inlet, her new home.
Four
Monday, September 2, Labor Day
LIAM WAS A SINGLE MALT SCOTCH MAN BUT on his way out of the brewery he bought a growler of Firebreak Lager to support a fellow local. He stowed it in the cooler behind the driver’s seat of the Silverado and stood for a moment, irresolute. He should go home and finish unpacking. Although he had made the bed, which was the most important thing. It was his sincere hope that the bed would desperately require clean sheets in the morning.
As if she’d heard him his phone buzzed with an incoming text from Wy, in which she ETA’d him that she was about ninety minutes out, followed by two emojis, a heart and a flame. His heart skipped a beat, because of course it did. Liam Campbell was that greatest of all clichés, a man truly, madly, deeply in love with his wife, and he didn’t care who knew it. What’s more, he was loved just as much in return, and he didn’t care who knew that, either. He could feel his swagger coming on just climbing into the truck and he was positively cocky turning the key. Even if he was laughing at himself just a little bit as he did so. Ninety long minutes, he thought, as the engine idled. How far up the bay had Erik said his dig was?
A shadow passed between him and the sun and he almost felt rather than heard the susurration of wings. He looked up. It was only an eagle, wing tips feathering the air, white head and tail almost erased against the pale blue of the sky. The likeness to Blue Jay Jefferson was even more pronounced. Not a raven, though, so all was well.
He put Brad Paisley on the speakers, turned up the volume, and drove back across the causeway that separated the lake and the tidal estuary, where he turned right on the road that led east out of town. Imaginatively named East Bay Road, he noticed. In spite of there being a hundred times the number of road miles and five times the population of
