WITH THE WIND STILL on their tail and the terrain rising in front, the Super Cub jolted toward the pass at what seemed an ever-increasing speed. Under the wings, wind-whipped willows in the bed of the Angatquq blurred, sharpened, and blurred again as clouds of snow swirled over them. Away from the creek, the occasional stunted black spruce on the tundra bowed before the gale. Active thought of Jim Silver’s yarn of the winds in Shaman Pass killing caribou.
“How much wind you think we’re getting here?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Cowboy growled back through the intercom. “Forty, fifty, maybe.”
“Can you land in this?”
“If we can find a sheltered spot,” Cowboy said.
Active waited for more, but the headphones were silent. He concluded that was all Cowboy wanted to say about it.
They continued their leaflike rush upriver until they passed a big creek coming in from the left. Cowboy held up the map, looked from it to the terrain below and back again, then heeled the plane over and followed the creek upstream. Cowboy’s voice crackled over the intercom. “This is Moose Creek. Somewhere between here and the next big one, Ptarmigan Creek, is where the camp supposedly is. Right up against the foot of the mountains on some little creek too small to get on the map.”
Cowboy flew upstream until Moose Creek climbed into the mountains through a narrow gate in the rocks. There, the pilot turned the plane right and skirted the base of the mountains. Four or five miles ahead, Active could see the trace of what must be Ptarmigan Creek threading down into the Angatquq.
They were over rising terrain now, crossing a low ridge that separated the watersheds of Moose and Ptarmigan creeks, a churning blanket of snow sweeping over it. The wind was on their tail again, hurrying them across the folded tundra at what seemed twice the normal speed of a Super Cub.
They crested the ridge and immediately spotted a tiny creek running along its base towards the Angatquq. It was, they could see now, the only stream in the chunk of country between Moose and Ptarmigan creeks.
“This has gotta be it, huh?” Cowboy sounded a little nervous through the headset.
“Seems like,” Active said. “You see anything?”
“Not between here and the Angatquq,” Cowboy said. “If this is it, Robert Kelly’s camp must be back up the canyon a ways.”
By now, the wind had swept them past the creek and they couldn’t see into the canyon that ushered the creek out of the mountains. Cowboy made a wide, looping turn over the low ground toward the Angatquq, then swung back in to the base of the mountains perhaps a mile downwind from the mouth of the canyon.
Now they were headed almost straight into the gale, moving over the ground so slowly that Active thought he could get out and walk. Here, close to the hills, the turbulence was a continuous, relentless jolting, the Super Cub banging and clanging as if it would come apart.
Cowboy skirted the base of the mountains, and throttled back as they approached the mouth of the canyon where Robert Kelly’s camp should be. Cowboy lowered his wing flaps and their ground speed dropped near zero as the plane jolted past the canyon mouth. Then they stopped entirely, the Super Cub hovering raggedly in the gale sweeping over the tundra. Active marveled at this, that Cowboy should be able to suspend a plane in midair. Not for the first time, he puzzled over the two Cowboys: on the ground, a hollow blowhard in a baseball cap, in the air, a wizard in a headset and mirror sunglasses.
Cowboy saw it first. “Look at that!” he shouted through the headset. “That second bend up there, right bank, back in the brush.”
Active peered through the snow haze, saw the outline of a cabin in wind-whipped willows, a snowmachine, and dogsled—he felt the plane rolling, for an instant saw the left wing pointing straight down at the creek bed, sensed Cowboy fighting for control, heard the pilot shout, “Aw, fuck me Jesus!” and suddenly they were several hundred yards down the creek from the mouth of the canyon, the camp now out of sight.
“My God,” Active said into his headset after Cowboy restored some stability to the plane. “What was that?”
“Hell of a blast coming out of that canyon,” Cowboy said. “Some kind of venturi effect, I expect.”
Active had no idea what a venturi effect was, but this didn’t seem the time for a lesson. “Can we go back for another look?”
“You kidding?”
“Well, we came all this way.”
“Fuck,” Cowboy said. “Well, maybe if we come in higher.”
The pilot made a wide, climbing turn over the white lowlands, and brought the plane up to the canyon mouth again, but five hundred feet higher than before. They still caught a blast from the canyon, but it was less now, and Cowboy was more prepared.
From the higher angle, they could see better into the camp in the willows. “You see anything that looks like a sod hut?” Active asked.
“Nope,” Cowboy said.
“Well, Whyborn said it was a sod hut. Could this be the wrong camp?”
Just then, a man emerged from the cabin, looked up at the Super Cub, hurried to a mound in the snow a few yards away, and vanished into it.
“There’s your sod hut,” Cowboy said.
Active grunted assent and kept his eyes on the entrance. As they drifted past the mouth of the canyon and started to lose the view, Active saw the man come out of the hut with a bright blue man-size bundle in his arms and drop it into the dogsled.
“Look at that!” Active felt the heat rising in his stomach, even his groin, that meant he somehow had crossed that line past which there were no ifs or whys, only hows. “He’s taking off! Get me down there!”
Cowboy started another of his wide turns over the lowlands. “No way,” he said. “We were hovering back there.”
“And?”
“And that means the wind speed is higher than the takeoff speed of this airplane. There’s no way to land. We’ll just get blown over backward.”
Active studied the tundra whirling past beneath them as Cowboy brought the plane around and lined up for another pass by the canyon mouth. Up ahead, the gusts swept a cascade of snow over the rounded ridge that had at first hidden Robert Kelly’s creek from them. Between gusts, the surface of the ridge looked sculpted and smooth, except for a few tufts of dwarf willow sticking through. “Can you hover over that ridge?” Active asked.
Active saw Cowboy’s head turn as he studied the surface.
“Yeah,” the pilot said. “Probably, for a few seconds at least. So what?”
“So go hover. I’ll just step out onto the snow.”
“No fucking way. I’m not explaining to Carnaby how you, how I . . .” Cowboy stopped talking and cleared his throat and Active thought the pilot was feeling that heat in his stomach, too.
“Fuck, it might work,” Cowboy said. “I’ve heard of people skydiving out of a Super Cub. But what are you going to do till I can get back in here?”
“I’ll just take Mr. Kelly into custody and we’ll wait in his cabin.”
“That easy, huh?”
“One bad guy, one trooper. That’s how we do it.”
“You’re the fucking cowboy here,” Cowboy said. “You know that?”
Active didn’t say anything, but he smiled to himself a little.
Cowboy turned the Super Cub slightly, aiming at a little saddle on the crest of the ridge. “Just remember,” he said through the headset. “You’re going to be stepping out into fifty, sixty miles an hour of wind. First thing you do, drop down flat till you get your bearings and figure out if you can walk in it or not.”
The pilot popped open the clamshell doors. A hurricane roared into the cockpit. Active slipped off his headset, unbuckled his seat belt and shoulder harness, and zipped up his parka, then braced himself against the ceiling as the Super Cub jolted toward the drop zone.
Cowboy descended slowly. Finally they were over the saddle, the skis maybe three feet off the striated, wind-packed snow. Cowboy gave a thumbs-up. Active grasped the door frame and pulled himself into the opening. He put one foot in the metal stirrup below the door, gathered himself, and jumped.
As he jumped, a gust caught the plane and heaved it upward. By the time his foot left the step, the skis were a dozen feet off the snow, not three, but it was too late. As he fell, he felt the wind take him and then he was cartwheeling over the lip of the ridge and down the cliff.
He fetched up in a clump of willows in the bed of Robert Kelly’s creek, snow in his mouth and eyes, snow down his neck where the parka hood had flipped back in the fall. His left shoulder, still sore from the snowmachine crash on the ice, now was angry to have been banged again and complaining that someone was trying to pry it apart with a hot, jagged, rusty crowbar.
As Active’s breathing slowed, he became aware of the sound of a snowmachine engine, just discernible under the moan of the wind sweeping over the cliff above him. He struggled to his feet in the willows, drawing fresh protests from the left shoulder as he flipped off his mittens and groped for the Smith & Wesson on his belt. His fingers found the holster, unsnapped and empty. Frantically, he pawed through the snow around him until his wool undergloves contacted the cold, hard steel of the grip.
As he came out of the willows, he saw a black Arctic Cat headed his way, dogsled in tow, the driver’s attention focused downslope, where Cowboy was making another circle in the Super Cub and heading back toward the mouth of the canyon.
Active realized the driver hadn’t seen him yet. He waved his right arm until finally the man on the snowmachine looked his way. The driver spotted the Smith & Wesson still in Active’s hand and hit the throttle.
The snowmachine roared ahead and Active lined the sights up on the engine compartment. Maybe a couple of lucky shots would disable the machine. Then he realized the driver was not just accelerating, but also swerving—toward him.
Active shifted his aim to the driver and fired twice before the snowmachine hit him. He went down on his back, lost the pistol again, felt a front ski pass over the left half of his body, then the cleated rubber drive track, then the dogsled. He felt a jerk on his left arm, felt more pain from his left shoulder than he could have imagined, and realized his hand was caught in the frame of the sled. He plowed through the snow and rocks and willows a few yards before he could work his hand out of the rope webbing that held the sled’s wooden stanchions to the runner.
As he lay facedown in the snow, waiting for the agony in his left shoulder to subside so that he could stand up, he was dimly aware that the snowmachine was slowing, perhaps turning— was the driver coming back to finish him off?
The blaze in his shoulder wasn’t subsiding at all. It was getting hotter and hotter. Waves of fire radiated from the joint, sweeping through his stomach—the nausea!—through his head, so warm and relaxed in his head now, the shoulder barely even noticeable, what had been the problem with it anyway?