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“Sure.” He pushed the stick and the Cessna dipped earthward, Will’s stomach lifting, Devlin squealing.

“It’s like a roller coaster,” she said.

The plane banked left.

“That’s them?” Kalyn asked.

“There’re your hills.”

They were only a thousand feet above the ground now, and the Wolverines lay beneath them like a succession of low earthen waves. It was undisputedly a minor range, a rippling uplift amid a vast, otherwise-unbroken forest. They could see the whole of the chain in one glimpse—wooded hills rising toward the biggest mountain of the bunch, a four-thousand-foot unnamed peak, most of it above timberline and blanketed in scarlet and yellow from the turning underbrush. A valley cut through the middle of the range, and it was here that they spotted two lakes, one in the middle, one on the eastern edge.

“You could land on either of those lakes?” Kalyn asked.

“Yep. I’ll set down on whichever one you prefer.”

“Joe, do you see that?”

It took Will a moment to realize that Kalyn was speaking to him. “What?”

She was pointing out her window. “Oh, now I’ve lost it.”

“What was it?”

“Looked like a structure of some sort on the shore of the interior lake.”

“Could very well be,” Buck said. “I called a friend of mine after ya’ll left my office this morning, just hunting for a little information about the Wolverines. He said there was a gold strike out here, turn of the century, along the Ice River, which flows south out of these hills. Apparently, nothing much ever came of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were still some old structures down there.”

“This thing was big,” Kalyn said. “But it was in the trees. Hard to see.”

“Well, there you go. Be a great day hike for you three to undertake. Look, this cloud deck’s starting to come down on us. Where do you want me to land?”

They touched down on the outer lake, a turbulent landing, water spraying up onto the windshield, the plane listing on its floats.

When Buck killed the engine, it was 2:30 P.M. The prop sputtered to a stop, and the Cessna drifted up onto a sandy shore.

They climbed down one at a time onto the pontoons.

It was cold, a raw, steady wind pushing small waves onto the beach, the sky a uniform, textureless gray, mist falling out of it.

Will and Buck opened the cargo pod and carried the three backpacks up onto the beach.

Buck said, “You know a little something about camping, Mr. Foster?”

“A very little. Why?”

“Think you can figure out setting up the tent on your own? And how to use the water filter and the propane stove?”

“Sure, I can do that.”

“I’d stay and give you the rundown, but this weather’s coming in faster than I expected, and I’d like to get back to Fairbanks.”

“No, that’s fine. We really appreciate your flying us out here on such short notice.”

“My pleasure.” Buck waded back over to the plane, climbed up onto the pontoons. “I’ll be back Sunday, three P.M., to pick you up. There’s no cell phone service out here, so just be aware of that. Don’t get hurt. You’ll be here?”

“Sunday, three P.M. We’ll be here,” Will said.

“I hope ya’ll enjoy your time out here, and I hope the weather holds for you.”

Buck climbed into the plane and shut the door.

The Cessna roared, and Kalyn, Will, and Devlin stood watching it from the sandy beach.

The engine screamed as the Skywagon sped away from them.

After thirty seconds, it lifted into the gray sky, eastbound.

They watched it dwindle, then vanish into the clouds, the drone of its engine fading.

Soon there was no sound but the lake lapping at their feet.

The Loneliest Sound

THIRTY-SEVEN

Kalyn knelt down, dipped her fingers into the clear lake water.

“Weird, how quiet it is.”

“I’m cold,” Devlin said.

“You’ve got gloves in the pocket of your fleece. Put them on, baby girl.”

Will sat down in the sand, pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket—a map he’d printed off from TopoZone.com.

“All right, look here.” Kalyn and Devlin flanked him, peering over his shoulder. “Obviously, the plane Kalyn saw yesterday didn’t land on this lake. Now the interior lake is the only other body of water in the Wolverines large enough to accommodate a floatplane.”

“You think that’s where that plane landed, Dad?”

“I don’t know. Part of me thinks there’s no one here but us and that we’re wasting time.”

“What was the alternative?” Kalyn asked. “Walk up to the Alaskan mob, ask them who they’re delivering kidnapped women to? We’d be buried in the tundra, pushing up glacier lilies.”

Will touched a point on the map. “We’re here.” He traced his finger over the paper. “The inner lake is here. That’s about six miles away.”

“Here’s what I propose,” Kalyn said.

“What?”

“We’ve got a few hours of light left. Let’s see how much ground we can cover. We’ll find a safe place to camp, close to the inner lake, so we can explore from there without having to drag these monster packs around with us.”

“Okay. I like that.”

. . .

There was no trail marked on Will’s map of the Wolverine Hills, but a stream connected the inner and outer lakes, and this is what they followed, progressing slowly for the first hour, taking their time navigating the mossy bank where they could, bushwhacking through underbrush where they couldn’t, the air so clean, redolent of white spruce.

They stopped midafternoon at the base of a waterfall, a set of smaller cascades above it. Will searched his pack and found the Ziploc bags containing nuts and dried fruit that Buck had packed for them. While he distributed the snacks and water bottles, Kalyn studied the map, tracing their path from the outer lake up into the hills.

“How far have we come?” Devlin asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out here.” She finally located the tight contour lines that crossed the blue line on the map, denoting the series of waterfalls.

“Looks like we’ve covered about . . . three miles.”

“Look!” Devlin whispered.

A pair of caribou were working their way carefully above the lower waterfall, stopping every few feet to look and listen.

They pushed on, the stream narrowing, becoming steeper, rockier, with fewer stretches of flat water and more cascades.

Devlin was leading the way, and she stopped suddenly, said, “Listen.”

Will heard only the babbling of the stream. “Devi, I don’t . . .” No, there it was—a man-made sound, possibly two of them, in the middle of nowhere, engines barely audible over the rushing water.

“That what I think it is?” Kalyn asked.

The sound of the planes grew louder. They couldn’t see them through the overstory of spruce trees, but they seemed to fly right over them before fading away, leaving only the whisper of the stream.

“No way one of those could be Buck, right?” Will said.

“I don’t think so.”

Devlin said, “Maybe one of them is the plane you saw yesterday, Kalyn.”

“No way to know, baby.”

It was getting colder and darker, the mist that landed and clung to Will’s black fleece jacket freezing into flecks of ice.

“We should probably start looking for a campsite,” he said.

It was another hour before they crossed a piece of ground level enough to pitch a tent on. They’d climbed more than a thousand feet from the outer lake, and the character of the forest had changed—the spruce trees more withered-looking, more space between them, the underbrush a violent red.