I heard the plane before I saw it. The whine of the engine preceded its appearance above the treetops. I saw the people on the ice shade their eyes and point, and I followed the direction of their raised arms until I saw the white-and-blue Cessna 172 come swooping down like a fish hawk through a cloud of snow showers.
The sight brought back the memory of my first ride with Charley, two years earlier. Wanted for murder, my father had escaped into the North Woods. Charley had flown down to the coast to take me to the search area. He’d had a Piper Super Cub then. It was as fragile as a model airplane, and it broke into a thousand pieces when it crashed into Rum Pond, its fuselage pierced with bullet holes.
I got out of the truck and removed the Cap-Stun canister from my belt. If the pepper spray discharged inside the cockpit, it would blind us both, and the plane would fall from the sky. The wind vibrated the wings of the Cessna as it skipped down onto the ice. I raised my hand in greeting and ventured out to meet my friend as he taxied toward the ramp. The ice was slick beneath my boots, making me wish I’d paused a moment to fasten on the cleats I usually wore.
The door popped open-literally popped-and I found myself gazing into the smiling face of Charley Stevens. He looked as craggy as ever, with his sun-browned skin and lantern jaw; his eyes were as clear and green as sea ice. His white hair was longer than I’d seen it before, and he wore an outfit of heavy wool clothing that his grandfather might have worn half a century earlier, going off on a river drive.
It took me a second to realize that Charley was seated in the passenger seat and that someone else was behind the controls of the Cessna.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Howdy do!” he replied, hopping down with surprising agility to shake my hand.
“It’s been too long, Charley.”
“That it has.”
“I’ve never seen you riding shotgun before.”
“I’m just the flight attendant for this trip. You’ve got the top pilot in the fleet today. Mike Bowditch, meet Stacey Stevens.”
A young woman leaned toward the open door, but she remained seated behind the yoke, the belt drawn across her chest. Her mirrored sunglasses and the awkward headphones clamped down over her brown hair made it difficult for me to act a good look at her. I saw high cheekbones and a slightly pronounced chin.
“Hello,” I said.
“You two need to stop gabbing and get inside before you frost up all our windows,” she said.
Charley chuckled and clapped me hard on the collarbone. “You heard her. Captain’s orders.”
He slid the passenger seat forward so that I could clamber onto the seat behind him. The Cessna, like the Piper before it, was packed with all sorts of odds and ends, making my patrol truck look neat by comparison. Snowshoes, ski poles, an ax, blankets, first-aid and survival kits, extra parkas and boots, and God knows what else were stowed in various canvas bags and pack baskets. I leaned forward between the seats to make a joke, but Stacey stopped me before I could speak.
“Use the mic,” she said.
I put on the pair of headphones and moved the microphone so close, I was almost sucking on it. Charley slammed and locked the door. Stacey stepped on a pedal on the floor to turn the nose of the plane and then pushed a lever forward. We began taxiing toward the wide part of the lake, where we could take off without running over ice fishermen.
“What were you going to say?” Charley asked over the intercom.
“Stacey, your dad didn’t tell me you were a pilot.”
“Yeah, I’m full of surprises,” she said without humor, although the electronics made it difficult to catch subtle intonations.
Now that we were in the clear, she opened up the throttle, and we began to slide faster and faster on the skis. Stacey pulled gradually back on the yoke until I felt the nose of the plane rising, although it looked as if we were still on the ground. Suddenly the ice dropped away beneath us and we were airborne, ascending sharply into a cold headwind.
“I had the devil’s time teaching her,” said her father. “She was the worst white knuckler I’d ever flown with.”
“Watching your parents crash tends to have that effect,” she said.
Charley had told me that his daughter blamed him for the flying accident that cost her mother the use of her legs. I hadn’t expected to hear that long-standing grudge expressed so soon.
If Charley felt stung by his daughter’s words, he didn’t show it. “You ever do one of these aerial moose surveys before, young feller?”
“No,” I said. “Maybe you can explain to me how this works.”
“We fly transects within a random sample of survey plots,” Stacey said. She had recently gotten a job as an assistant wildlife biologist, Charley had told me. “We record the number and sex of the moose we spot. The presence of antlers this time of year isn’t the best indicator, so we’re also looking for the vulval patch on the females… Stop snickering.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“I was talking to my dad.”
She went on to explain that, because of tree cover, it was impossible to see every moose, especially in a fixed-wing aircraft that couldn’t hover, so the biologists had developed a model to overcome what she called “visibility bias.” I couldn’t quite follow the rest, but it had something to do with visual obstruction being a covariate of something or other and bulls being estimated as a ratio of cows to calves seen, or maybe it was the other way around, but she used the term confidence interval as if it was a phrase I should have picked up in elementary school. Results would be adjusted for sightability and sampling, she said. “Does that make sense?”
“Sure.”
“Just tell me if you see a moose.”
She leaned forward to wipe away some frost that was forming on the windshield in front of her. At that moment, a gust grabbed the plane and gave it a shake, the way a cat does with a mouse. Neither Stacey nor Charley seemed alarmed, but the flurries seemed to be gathering into a white vapor around us.
“How are we going to see anything in this snow?” I asked.
“What snow?” asked Charley.
“Those big white flakes falling all around us.”
“Oh, that’s just a little scud.”
I glanced down at the rolling pine forest and snow-covered muskeg beneath us. The ancient history of the landscape showed itself as a series of geological scars. Round kettle lakes, left behind by the last glacier’s advance, pockmarked the face of the land. There were undulating moraine ridges, miles long and dotted with boulders the size of houses. There were peaked eskers bisecting sprawling blueberry barrens. There were bleak expanses of frozen swampland, layers of frozen peat piled atop sandy glacial till, through which urinous streams wiggled like worms. One of these swamps might be the Heath that bordered the Sprague property, although, by my reckoning, we were many miles south of that trackless bog.
“I promised Mike we’d do a spy mission for him over that game ranch in Narraguagus,” said Charley. “Maybe we should buzz over there first.”
“You didn’t tell me about that!”
“It’s just a quick detour.”
“No way.”
“Tell Stacey about your zebra,” said Charley.
“What zebra?” she asked.
“I knew that would pique her curiosity,” her father said.
It was difficult telling the story over the intercom, above the drone of the engine, with the windows of the plane rattling and gusts buffeting us from every direction. But I described the poor animal with its frosted haunches and rictus smile, and that was all I needed to say.
“You mean some idiot imported a zebra to Maine and then released it onto his property in the middle of winter for hunters to shoot?”
“Not just the zebra,” I said. “Brogan advertises other exotics. He keeps bison, red deer, and who knows what else.”