The end of the runway was fast approaching.
“Wy?” Liam said.
So was the Nushagak River.
“Wy!”
She waited until the last possible moment to cut power. When she did, they had maybe a hundred feet of runway left. She pushed in the throttle and kicked right rudder simultaneously. The Cessna pulled hard right. A gust of wind came screaming down the runway and hit the tail. It raised up, enough to pull the plane up off its right wheel. The left wingtip dipped toward the ground. They were still rolling.
“Wy?”
The gust seemed never-ending, pushing, pushing, pushing. The left wing of the plane dipped lower and lower, and they were still rolling, right toward a stand of three large cottonwoods. She cut power completely. The prop stopped straight up and down.
“Wy?”
Momentum kept them moving. Ground loop, she thought, goddamn it a goddamn groundloop, we’ll be okay but what about my goddamn plane goddamn it. “We’ll be okay Liam we’ll be okay we’llbeokaywe’llbeokay oh shit!”
The Cessna paused, poised on nose and left gear, the left wing barely a foot from the ground. It seemed that everything was holding its breath. Wy, Liam, the Cessna, even the wind.
The wind died. Just like that. Stopped in mid-roar, for that precious second the Cessna needed to recover. The tail settled down, the right gear fell back on the runway with a thump, and the left wing came up.
They were still rolling. Wy hit left rudder hard, swerving to avoid the cottonwoods, only to run into a stand of alders. Smaller trees, but still trees. The Cessna hit them hard enough to bury its nose up to the leading edge of the wings. They bounced back once from the impact, and stopped.
They sat there for a moment in silence. The wind as suddenly started up again, a long, angry howl.
“You’re a good pilot, Wy,” Liam said finally, in a conversational tone.
“The best,” she said in a very faint voice.
“I wonder if my heart is ever going to get back to normal sinus rhythm,” he said, still in that same conversational tone.
“I wonder if mine’s going to start beating again anytime soon.”
They sat for another moment, trying to grasp the fact that they were still alive, and trying to remember what it was they were supposed to do next.
Tim. That’s why they were here. Tim. There was a crazed killer on the loose who might hurt Tim. Moses. Bill. Amelia.
Wy stirred. “We’d better get going, see if we can find a boat.” She unstrapped her seat belt with hands that did not seem to belong to her. The door was hard to open against the alder branches crowded up against it, but once the wind caught an edge she had to hang on so it wouldn’t be yanked out of her grasp. On the other side of the plane Liam was having the same problem. A branch caught at his uniform, ripping a hole in his sleeve, and he cursed.
Wy tugged a backpack from the cargo compartment and pulled it on. Liam did the same with his. They were both wearing heavy boots and jackets. She forced the smaller door shut and turned to leave.
“What about the plane?” Liam said.
“Leave it,” she shouted back. “Those alders are probably better than a tie-down in this wind. Come on.”
He paused, looking up.
“What?” she shouted.
“Did you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
He stared over her shoulder. “Nothing.” Any sensible bird out in this wouldn’t waste time croaking out hellos, he’d be keeping his beak shut and his head down.
They staggered down the strip, bent double into the wind. It wasn’t very cold, Wy thought dimly, and noticed that the four inches of snow that had fallen overnight had almost completely melted away. “Chinook?” she yelled.
“It feels like it,” he yelled back. “Did the forecast call for it?”
“No.”
“Figures.”
The runway ended in a small berm overgrown with more alders and salmonberry and raspberry bushes. The red and yellow fruits seemed almost incongruous on such a day, hanging in fat succulent clumps from stalks bowed beneath their weight. Bears, Wy thought suddenly. “Bears,” she said out loud.
“Shit! Where?”
“Berries,” she said, pointing. It was hard to get words out, the wind snatched her breath away.
“Oh. Yeah. Right. Where’s the dock?”
“Over the berm.”
They found the path and struggled down it. It terminated in a dock, a rectangular pier surfaced with one-by-twelve wooden planks. There was no boat.
“Shit!”
“Well, great,” Liam said, more tired than annoyed. “What do we do now?”
“There has to be a boat, there has to be. It’s September, there’s nobody left on this part of the river except Moses.” She turned and let the wind blow her ashore.
“Where are you going? Wy, wait, wait for me!” He lumbered after her, to find her wading through the brush along the river. “What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for a boat,” she said. There was a crash of brush ten feet to her right, a hasty scramble of feet and big body, a panicked breaking of branches; Wy didn’t even look around. Liam never did see what creature’s hiding place they disturbed. “There has to be one, Liam, a lot of people with fish camps leave their boats here over the winter. They pull them up on the bank and-” She stopped, so suddenly that he ran into her.
He looked over her shoulder, and there was an old wooden skiff, about twelve feet long, he estimated, lying hull up on a trampled patch of ground.
Wy was already bending down and hooking her hands beneath the gunnel. He moved forward to stand next to her. “Ready? One, two, heave!”
The boat was heavy and went over reluctantly, but Wy was determined and over it went, landing with a thump and rocking a little on its rounded hull before coming to a rest. She went to the bow and found the bowline threaded through a crossbar nailed inside the prow. “Come on,” she said, and started hauling.
He picked up the pair of oars that had been lying on the ground beneath the boat and tossed them in. He pushed from the stern, going knee deep into mud. Great, there went his uniform pants. It wasn’t twenty feet to the edge of the river and the boat slid easily into the water.
The surface of the river was choppy, and the current was strong. They began drifting downstream immediately. Oarlocks dangled from twine and Liam slipped them into their respective holes. The oars went in. “Do you know how to row?”
“No,” Wy said, the wind ripping the words out of her mouth almost before they were said. “It can’t be that hard, though.” She sat down on the thwart and grabbed both oars, pushing forward. The blades dipped in the water, skimmed the surface, splashed a lot of water around and didn’t provide any thrust. She looked up, surprised.
For the first time in days Liam felt like smiling. “Here,” he said. “Let me try.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll get it, I just need to-”
“Wy. Get up.”
Something in his voice made her comply. He remained standing, face forward, and the oars dipped, rose, dipped, rose. The chop hit the bow with regular taps as they moved smoothly forward.
“You’ve done this before,” she said.
“I like boats,” he said.
“Better than planes.”
“A whole hell of a lot better than planes.”
“I’m going to teach Tim how to fly,” she said.
“Are you? Good.”
Wavelets slapped at the hull. Liam felt a coldness around his feet and looked down to see that they were taking on water. Not a lot, and not very fast, but there was some in the bottom of the boat that hadn’t been there when they shoved off from the airstrip. “Wy?”
“Oh great.” She found a bailing can cut from a Clorox bottle wedged beneath the bow thwart and started scooping up water and emptying it over the side. A log thudded into the skiff and they both held their breath, waiting for a hole to open up and the leak to become a gush. It didn’t happen. Cold sweat trickled into Liam’s eyes and he wiped his forehead against his arm. The wind took the opportunity to gust hard against the port side and push the stern halfway around, so that the bow was headed toward the south shore of the river. Liam battled it back, shoulder and arm muscles straining as he pushed hard on the port oar, the starboard oar horizontal and motionless above the surface, water dripping from the blade. “How far is the fish camp from the airstrip, again?” he said when they were straightened out and headed downstream once more. He was proud that his voice remained level.