“Call him, then, this Shan Martin,” Core said.
“I tried, he’s not picking up. I got a guy going there.”
The sun broke then over the range, orange-pink and frigid-looking.
“What’s the weather say?” Core asked.
“Says clear for now. But this place doesn’t play by weather rules. Denali makes its own weather.”
“Mount McKinley, you’re talking about?”
“Denali, please, Mr. Core. You forty-eighters should quit calling it McKinley. Denali is the weathermaker. I’ve seen six feet of snow fall from a sky that two hours before was all baby blue with a smiley-face sun. There’re more lost planes in this state than there’re lost kittens in a city.”
When they approached the lake, the sky was beginning to bruise in maroon and blue, a dim amber east through trees. At the shoreline the ski plane was dressed in insulated covers on its engine, tail, and wings—a lava-colored Cessna incongruous against this vast white. Core helped Marium unfasten the covers, then with brooms they swept snow from the flanks of the plane, the air so stinging he wondered how machinery could be coaxed into motion. How metal didn’t fracture, crack from so much cold.
Core took the caribou one-piece suit from his duffel bag and began dressing at the door of the plane.
“Fancy outfit you got there,” Marium said, still sweeping snow from the wing. “Where does a guy get one of those?”
“This belongs to Vernon Slone,” Core told him. “The boots too.”
Marium stopped sweeping then. He watched Core button the suit. He looked either appalled or superstitious but said nothing.
The engine belched twice before catching, before the propeller would consent to a throaty fan. Core had expected the leather and metal odor of a vehicle but he smelled only the cold, an odor that was no odor at all. A cold that forced him to breathe through the nose. When he breathed through his mouth his throat seized up into a coughing fit.
“How’s any engine start in this cold?”
“It shouldn’t be this cold so soon in the season. And I don’t know where all this snow’s coming from in such cold. Snow needs moisture and there’s no moisture now. Something’s wrong with the weather, I don’t know what. But overall this isn’t really cold, Mr. Core. Wait till February. That’ll be cold.”
“As long as this plane stays up.”
“This plane doesn’t quit till forty below. Guys working up in the arctic? They leave their Cats running day and night, never shut them off ’cause they won’t ever start again. But us here: twenty below is a lark.”
“Some lark.”
“Thirty below, you gotta be a little more careful. Forty below and you better make sure a fire is five minutes away. And fifty below, don’t even leave the house. People on the outskirts of town, living in dry cabins? They’ll walk out in fifty below, walk down to a creek bed to cut ice for water, thinking they’ll be gone maybe twenty minutes, so they don’t dress right, and they never come back. Freeze solid right where they stand.”
They waited for the engine to warm. The crown of sun crested distant trees, and all along the lakeshore wooded acreage breathed in snow. Through a break in the wood Core saw a large home, too many windows for a day this cold, its chimney awake with smoke. A kind of madness to live here, in this land that merged weather and flesh, that didn’t let you forget.
He recalled reading accounts of those almost frozen to death in the arctic: first the lassitude, then the slurring of thoughts, memories in confusion, and then just before death you forget the freeze, a warmth spreads through the blood before your organs quit. As long as you feel the cold you’re not about to die. Core could not remember being colder.
The last time he’d been in a plane this small he was twenty years old, being flown to pass twelve days in the remotest north of Minnesota. That was a winterscape like this one, limned with snow and ice, in the sun a crush of bright. The weather, he remembered, was like this—it had its own language, its own grammar of invigoration and hurt, but he was young then and welcomed it.
A plane floats on air as a boat floats on water. A friend from high school who became a Navy pilot had once told him this, but he could not understand the sense of it, the physics that performed the feat. Many tons of metal midair always seemed to him a supernatural act.
The cockpit warmed quickly. In the headset Marium’s voice sounded less severe. The anticipation of flight lent it a lightness it lacked elsewhere. The skis upset snow in trailing mists as the plane sped to takeoff—white birch in easy blur along the lakeshore—and when they lifted it was not with thrust but a seamlessness he did not expect. The skis were so waxen along the snow of the lake that at first he did not even realize they were airborne, not until he turned to see the sinking spruce and birch, the lake falling away from them by feet.
Eastward from the lake he saw the sun fleshing pink all the white below it. Denali loomed to their left and looked not of this world. Beyond town were scattered homes, then broad fields etched with the day-old harrows of snow machines, mostly covered by new fall. Behind them slate clouds like fungus, storms hidden within. Minutes later a rolling whiteness, drifts of snow like waves from this height, ripples across a plain that then erupted into hills, into swells of snow. The marvel of this land cloyed with white. It seemed to Core a miracle it should ever have been discovered, ever have allowed itself to be trod on.
In twenty minutes Marium pointed as they came upon Keelut. “Tell me what we’re looking for now,” he said.
“Northeast,” Core told him. “That valley there past the village, over those hills. You can tell the hot spring because it’s the only spot down in the side of the rock that isn’t covered in snow. Aim for those bluffs there off the plain.”
“You see those there below us? Those tracks in the plain where the trees stop? Those are new snow machine tracks.”
“Those could be anybody’s,” Core said.
“They’re somebody’s, that’s for sure.”
Soon they neared an oval of hills, uneven cliffs with a pan between, a rift inside a fort of crags. They passed low along hummocks, along corniced ridges. They looked for tracks in the snow of the escarpment. Core pointed to the steam exhaling thinly from a bald hollow in the brow of a crag, brassy rock sprouted from snow.
“That’s it there,” Core said. “See it? I don’t see a truck or tracks. You can’t be down there without making tracks to show it.”
“It snowed last night. Not much, but enough to cover whatever tracks were there.”
“I don’t see anything,” Core said.
“Let’s look closer. I can set her down there between those hills. We’ve got a bit before those clouds catch us.”
“You’re landing here?”
“I’m a smooth lander, Mr. Core, don’t worry.”
They set down on a suede drag and circled back closer to the cliffs. Marium strapped the scoped Remington across his jacket and gave the field glasses to Core. Leaning against the aircraft they smoked and ate chocolate. In quiet they considered the crags, this rock forged epochs ago. The wind came in raspy blows and chafed snow from the wide face of the cliff. The day was gaunt, already half gone, and to the west of them the land looked laced to sky.
Marium passed Core charcoal heating pads. “Slip two of those into your bunny boots,” he said. “And save two for your hands. Fingers and toes are the first to go out here. It’s probably twenty degrees colder than it was when you were last out here. Probably more. Do you recognize where we are?”