“Hey, Joe,” Ronnie shouted. “Hey, man, what's up? Aren't we going home?”
Joe rotated the heavy ball of his head to give him a look, then turned back to the window. “Hand me the rifle, will you?” he said.
Despite himself, despite the cold and the misery and his essential _needs,__ Pan found himself smiling. “You going to tag a couple wolves?”
The engine pulled them through the night, past the swoop of the trees and the leaping hills and falling declivities. “Check the bolt on that thing for me,” Joe shouted.
_No complaints,__ Ronnie was thinking. He was thinking, _All right, why not?__ The wolves were there, money on the hoof, or the paw, actually, greenback dollars gifted up by nature, as Joe put it. They'd been out three days ago, on the way back from Fairbanks with the booze-they'd meant to fly directly up to Ambler but Joe saw wolf sign below and got distracted. It was a kill, a moose laid out in the snow in a Rorschach blot of blood-reddened loops and spiraling paw prints. The wolves were on it, six or seven of them, soapstone gray quickening to black, their eyes feasting, heads twisted round to assess this ratcheting threat from the sky, and then suddenly they were running and Joe buzzed them and banked to come at them again. Once he'd leveled the plane and angled in behind the straining dark forms below, he shouted, “Take the yoke,” and Pan held them steady as he hung out the window and took aim.
The snow leapt where he missed, white blooms flowering in a bed of shadow, and Pan could see it all though he was concentrating everything he had on keeping them level. _Crack! Crack! Crack!__ The wolves flowed like water. A long minute, and they fell away beneath them till Joe took the controls, came round again and again had Pan take the yoke. This time, when he leaned out, sighted through the scope and fired, one of the dark streaks suddenly compressed as if it had been ground down by an iron heel, and it was a streak no longer, but a wolf, writhing. They chased on after the pack and shot a second one a mile away, then circled back and found a place to land. The snow was knee-deep. The first wolf's spine had been broken. It lay there in the snow, staring up at them in incomprehension, bred and whelped in hidden places, fed on moose, on rabbit and vole and caribou, helpless now, and staring. “Go ahead,” Joe said, “but don't mark the fur. Aim for the eye.”
Now Pan strained to see what Joe had picked out below even as he lifted the rifle out of the back, bought new out of the display case at Big Ray's Sporting Goods in Fairbanks with Eskimo dollars-a.375 Holland & Holland with a 4X Weaver scope-pulled back the bolt and handed it to him. There were tracks in the snow below them, he saw that now, a beaten trail that might have been made by a full-on congress of wolves, and it looped in and out of the clumps of trees, disappeared for whole seconds at a time and then reappeared heading south along the banks of the river. The moon had never been brighter, never in all Pan's experience, and he'd seen it hanging in the sky too many times to count, in the back alleys behind the clubs, through the windshield of his car, big and luminous and enhanced by the full range of the pharmacopoeia that lit his perceiving eyes. Tonight, though, tonight it ran back at them, everything silvered with it, Joe's parka, his face, the hands on the controls, but where were the wolves?
And then suddenly, out from under the trees, there they were, a pack running in formation, and Joe was hollering “Take the yoke, take it!” The air inside the cockpit went from frigid to terminal as Joe pushed open the window and the flash-frozen breeze hit them. Pan had the yoke, the plane in a bank left, Joe aiming, but wait-these weren't wolves, were they? No, no, they weren't-they were dogs, and that was a sled, and two figures separating themselves from the flowing script of the page below, people, men, and what was Joe thinking, had he gone blind or what? “Joe!” Ronnie shouted. “Joe, those aren't wolves!”
No matter. Because Ronnie was holding the plane in a steep bank and Joe was firing, once, twice, three times, the bank steepening, Joe cursing-“Fuck! Fuck and goddamnit to hell!”-and neither one of them noticing just how close to vertical the wingtips had become until Joe dropped the gun and pulled them out of the spin and just cleared the bank of trees ahead of them. The engine screamed and there was a jolt, a sickly amplified wet hard slap as of skin on skin and the tip of the right wing had a crease in it suddenly and the whole plane was shuddering as if it were about to fall apart.
Joe fought it. Joe knew his stuff. Joe wasn't about to crash an airplane that cost him twenty-five thousand dollars just because the tip of the aluminum wing was folded in on itself like a crushed beer can, oh, no, not Joe. They must have gone two or three miles, struggling back toward the river, and where was the altitude here, why didn't he pull back on the yoke and get them up out of the treetops? before Ronnie understood that they were going down. There was something ahead, not the river, just a break in the trees, muskeg, hummocks of dead snow-crowned grass like so many fists thrust up out of the ground, and then they were down, the landing gear buckling under them and the whole fuselage pitching mercilessly to the left and into the looming impervious bark-clad shins of the trees.
Nobody much liked Joe Bosky-he was respected, feared, maybe-but he wasn't the sort of cat people would praise for his gentleness and his niceness and his manners. Ronnie dug him, though. Ronnie had a sort of younger brother — older brother bond with him, and if you said one thing for Joe you had to admit he had his shit together, and if you looked and listened and paid attention you could learn everything there was to know about the country. About guns. About flying. He'd already given Pan half a dozen lessons and let him take the controls sometimes when they were just cruising from point A to point B, and that was something to be grateful for. Pan thought maybe someday he could come back up into the country-some summer, next summer even-and make a go of it as a bush pilot, guiding hunters and fishermen, beating the weather, riding the breeze, going in and out as he pleased. Another thing about Bosky was that while he might have been part of the war machine at one point, a Marine, no less, he had a pretty loose attitude about things-he wasn't a flag waver or any kind of fascist at all and he never ran off at the mouth about Claymore mines and gooks and all the rest of it. What was his goal in life? Pan had asked him one night as they sat at the table with Sky and Dale, picking sweet dark ptarmigan meat from the bone. To have a good time. To get drunk, get laid, raise some hell and answer to nobody. “So you're a hedonist, then?” Dale had put in. “Bet your ass I am,” Joe said.
And Joe would know what to do in the present situation, except that Joe wasn't talking. He'd said one thing only after Pan had cut the seat belt with his hunting knife and dragged him out of the crumpled cockpit an hour and more ago, and that was, “Build a fire.” That problem had taken care of itself, though, because when they veered into the trees the left wing folded back against the fuselage and the gas tank let loose and they were lucky even to have gotten out before the whole thing went up. Which it did. No sooner had Pan dragged Joe out into the snow than there was a flash and a thump and their ride home became a bonfire. Now it was nothing but a smell on the air and the cold was seeping back, and Joe was beyond giving advice.
Ronnie could feel his heart shifting gears in his chest. They were in trouble here and no doubt about it, but he wasn't thinking too clearly because he'd hit his head a couple times on the control panel-it just seemed to go after him, as if it had suddenly come to life with the sole purpose of beating his brains out-and that crust of frozen liquid that kept splintering every time he involuntarily grimaced over the red blur of pain that had settled in his left shoulder and made his arm trail away from him as if it didn't want to belong to him anymore, that was blood. Joe was unconscious. Not dead-he was breathing still, though Ronnie was no doctor, and even if he was it wouldn't do him much good out here with no drugs or instruments or tools beyond his knife and the dead weight of the pistol strapped to his thigh. What he did do was cut a couple dozen spruce branches and mound them up so Joe wouldn't have the exposed ground leaching the vital heat from him, and he was in the process of trying to get a fire going. He'd collected some of the dead and yellowed inside branches and snapped them across his knee to make a whole tottering pyramid of kindling, and he'd dragged a few bigger sticks out of the snowheaps as well, and he did have matches and even a few odd scraps of paper in the bottom of his backpack-the only item of survival gear he'd managed to drag out of the plane before it went up.