Beside him, Joe was a rock. His shoulders filled the cockpit, the bulk of him made bulkier still with the puffed-up eiderdown lining of his parka. He kept a gloved finger on the yoke, stared off through the windscreen or gazed idly out one side or the other, no more concerned with the howling Arctic blast in his face than a polar bear curled up on an ice floe. He hadn't spoken-or shouted-a word for the past fifteen minutes, but then Pan didn't expect conversation, since you couldn't hear anything over the clamor of the engine anyway. So he suffered in silence, thinking only of the cabin now, of the gentle shush of the skis on the snowbound ice-of touching down and scrambling out of this torture box-and of the fire he was going to crank up in the stove. He let a long shiver work its way through him, then reached for his day pack in the backseat and extracted the silver flask.
The flask was filled with Hudson Bay rum, the same shit basically as the Bacardi 151 they used to use for flambés at the Surf 'N' Turf-tasted godawful, like kerosene, but it got the job done. Warmed you. Burned you right on down from your palate to your rectum, and he still remembered Mr. Boscovich at the board diagramming the human digestive tract-_Nine meters long,__ he called out as if he were singing, _and can anybody tell me how many feet that is?__ Pan gave a little laugh at the memory, then unscrewed the cap. He held the flask to his lips as the plane jarred and settled, a little spillage soaking into his beard and pinning dark beads of moisture to the thighs of his jeans, but it did the trick-it burned till he had to pound his breastbone to keep from spewing it back up-and then he tapped Joe's arm and offered up the flask in pantomime. “You want a hit?” he shouted.
Joe gave him a long, slow look, as if he were trying to place him, as if they hadn't lived in the same cabin for the past three and a half months and been airborne together for the better part of the day, and then he shook his head slowly and let a sad smile fill up the hole in the middle of his beard. “Not while I'm flying,” he shouted back.
“Not even a nip?”
“Don't tempt me.”
They were on their way back from Ambler, on the Kobuk River, where they'd taxied up to a shack on an island just west of town and unloaded eight cases of bourbon, rum and vodka purchased three days ago in Fairbanks. The shack was listing to the left on the uncertain prop of its stilts, sad and abandoned-looking, but there were wall-to-wall people inside, having a party, and that was a surprise. They looked at him out of their retreating eyes-all of them, men and women, trading around the same face, the face Genghis Khan must have worn after he'd got done conquering an out-of-the-way village and raping all the women and eating the dogs and sucking down the last drop of distilled rice liquor in the district. But it was cool, because they wore their hair long and spent their time getting as high as they possibly could on whatever they got their hands on and they'd never even _heard__ of nine-to-five, neckties, Wall Street and Mr. Jones. They still hunted caribou when the herds crossed the river in the fall, though the hunt was reduced now to just coasting up to the animals in a flat-bottomed boat when they were helpless in the water and shooting them point-blank with a pistol, and they all had snow machines and outboard motors and bought their clothes out of a catalogue. But they ate caribou tongue and Eskimo ice cream (caribou fat whipped into a confection with half a ton of sugar and a scattering of sour berries; Pan tasted it-“Ice cream, brother, it's ice cream,” Joe Bosky told him, egging him on, but he spat it right back out into the palm of his hand and the whole room went down in flames, laughing their asses off, funniest thing in the world, white man). They also ate Cheerios and Fritos and Ho-Ho's and Hellmann's Mayonnaise sandwiches on Wonder Bread, all of it flown in to the Eskimo store by the bush pilots who represented the world.
Joe told him that the coast Eskimos-the igloo dwellers, like Nanook-used to all piss in a trough and save it to wash in, to cut the grease on their skin and maybe discourage the lice too, but these people-the little sawed-off Genghis Khans with their nubby teeth and faraway eyes-didn't carry things quite that far, or not that Pan could see, anyway. They stank, though-good Christ, they stank, body, breath and hair. And their dogs were the rattiest-looking things he'd ever seen, ten or twelve of them staked out in every yard, no doghouses, no nothing. Rangy, ugly, yowling things chewing on caribou heads and moose hooves and the kind of fish remains Sylvester the Cat used to pull up out of the bottom of the trash cans in the cartoons. In a word, pathetic.
They stayed an hour, maybe. Pan sold a half-ounce baggie of grass to an Eskimo cat he vaguely recognized from the last whiskey run, and he had a couple rum cokes and breathed the stink of the room and joined in the general sniggering laughter, and then it was back in the plane, the dual controls-yoke on the instrument panel, rudder pedals on the floor-moving in and out on his side as if an invisible presence were sitting in his lap. They shot up off the snowbound river, the shack, the village, the naked stripped willows and softedged firs receding and dwindling beneath them, and then there was the horizon and the promise of light to the south.
Pan had made enough runs with Joe to recognize the markers along the route home, and he checked off the white suckhole of Norutak Lake, Indian Mountain sticking up out of the hills at forty-two hundred feet like an inverted Dairy Queen cone, the Koyukuk River a mad scrawl across the face of the deepening night, and finally the lights of Stevens Village and the broad pan of the Yukon. The river flowed west here, but hooked around at Fort Yukon, where it flowed north pretty much all the way from the Canadian border, so to follow it at this point would have been a waste of time. Joe crossed the river at Stevens Village and cut inland to pick it up again at Boynton, and Pan wasn't alarmed when the river fell behind them and the dark hills loomed up again-it was the direct route, the quickest ticket to the stove and the sleeping bag and the mooseburger on a defrosted bun with fried potatoes and coleslaw on the side. In two days, he and Joe would fly into Boynton for his send-off party at the Nougat, and then he was going home, back to Peterskill in time for Christmas, and _that__ was going to be something, the stories he could tell, and the weather would be nothing-he'd go around in a T-shirt, a tank top and shorts (“What, you call this _cold,__ bro?”). And the concerts, the Fillmore, that new place in Portchester, John Mayall, B. B. King, Taj Mahal. Fuck Star. Fuck Drop City. Fuck them all. He was in a zone, shivering, dreaming. He took another quick nip from the flask-just for the comfort of it.
But then, gradually, he began to realize that they weren't going directly home-they passed over Woodchopper, or what he was pretty sure was Woodchopper, and came in low over the morass of creeks and cleft hills of the Thirtymile watershed. The moon had propped itself up in the sky by now, fat, cold and full, and the snow gave back the light of it till it was brighter than it had been all day. You could see everything against the snow, clearings, bogs, even a line of animal tracks. Joe banked and came in lower still, no more than three hundred feet above the ground, his eyes trained on the shapes and shadows there as if he was looking for something.