Snowbound

THIRTY-FIVE

The next morning, Will was shaving in the bathroom when Devlin knocked on the door. She walked in, climbed up on the sink, stared at her father, shaving cream smeared across his chin.

“Morning,” Will said, and went back to shaving. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Too well. I could still use a few more hours.”

Devlin smeared paste on a toothbrush, started brushing her tongue. “What are we doing today?”

“Well, you get to hang out here, do whatever you want.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Kalyn and I are gonna see if we can find someone to fly us into the Wolverine Hills.” Will drew the razor carefully over the curve of his chin.

“And if you find someone to do it?”

“Then we’re gonna go.”

“Without me?”

“Yeah.”

Devlin spit into the sink and slammed her toothbrush down.

Will turned on the tap, rinsed the shaving cream and the severed bristles off the blades.

“Honey, I have no idea what, if anything, we’ll find out there. I’ve already put you in enough danger, and you are way too precious to be dragged—”

“You wouldn’t be dragging me, Dad.”

Will picked up a hand towel, dabbed his face. “It’s just gonna be for a day, Devi.”

She’d gone short of breath, her eyes welling.

“Calm down, baby girl. I want you to—”

“Stop calling me that! I’m not a kid!” Her eyes were burning.

“You’re right. You’re not a kid, but you are sixteen, and I feel rotten enough having brought you along. I’m not making that mistake—”

Devlin wrapped her arms around him, shaking, crying. “Please take me with you. I don’t wanna be left. She’s my mother, you know. I wanna find out what happened just as bad as you.”

“Look at me. No, look at me.” He held his daughter by the arms. “I’m not putting you in danger.”

“You’re all I have, Dad. You know that?”

“Of course I do.”

“So we stay together, no matter what.”

The office for Arctic Skies was tucked into a strip mall along a river that snaked through the middle of Fairbanks. Devlin, Will, and Kalyn walked in at 10:00 A.M.—when the phone book said the business opened—found a man leaning back in a swivel chair, his feet propped up on a desk, smoking a cigar, perusing the Daily News-Miner. The office was small and spare, just a desk, computer, couple of chairs, artificial tree. Framed posters hung on the walls—photos of snowy mountains, grizzly bears catching salmon, the northern lights.

“Buck Young?” Will asked.

The man glanced over the top of his newspaper, blew a puff of smoke out the side of his mouth.

“One and the same.”

He looked trail-worn—red, watery eyes, weathered skin, salt-and-pepper beard. A Yankees baseball cap that might have been twenty years old rested on a mop of shoulder-length graying hair, unwashed for God knew how long.

Will said, “We’re looking for someone to fly us out to the Wolverine Hills.”

“Wolverines? Really?”

“Yeah. You familiar with the area?”

“Sure. Flew a hunter out there couple years back. Here, ya’ll sit down.”

There were just two chairs on their side of the desk. Devlin sat on the arm of Kalyn’s.

“Anybody live out there?” Will asked.

“Oh no. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more remote piece of country in all of Alaska.”

“So it’s public land?”

“If I recall, some of it’s public-owned, but most belongs to the Athabascan Indians. Look, if you’re paying customers, I’ll fly you anywhere you wanna go. But I have to ask, why the Wolverines? Next to the Brooks Range, McKinley, the Wrangells, they ain’t much to look at. And it’s an awful long flight for such dinky mountains.”

“I’m afraid we have our hearts set on it,” Kalyn said.

Buck swung his boots off the desk and leaned forward in his chair. “What exactly you wanna do out there?”

Will said, “We’d like to spend two nights. Do some camping and hiking.”

“You have gear?”

“No.”

“I can outfit you with everything you’ll need.” Buck took a pocket calculator out of a drawer and began punching in numbers and mumbling to himself. “Four hundred miles round trip. Gear rental for two nights. Three people. Guided? Unguided?”

“Just the three of us.”

“You’re looking at around three thousand.”

Kalyn glanced at Will. He nodded, mouthed “I can cover it,” then turned back to Buck. “We’d like to leave as soon as possible. Today would be ideal.”

They went to meet the bush pilot at 1:00 P.M. at the Chena Marina, a floatplane pond on the outskirts of Fairbanks, found Buck loading supplies into a cargo pod under the fuselage of a high-winged single-engine Cessna 185. The exterior of the Skywagon did not inspire peace of mind, the green-and-yellow design scheme chipped and faded, dents in the amphibious floats.

“I think I’ve got you all set,” Buck said. “There’s supposed to be some weather coming in this evening, so we should get in the air straight away.”

It was a four-seater, with plenty of storage space in back, the interior upholstered in light gray carpeting, the leather seats covered in sheepskin. Devlin begged to sit next to Buck, and she was awarded copilot status. They got themselves buckled in, and soon the engine was firing up, Buck taxiing away from the docks toward the end of the pond, his voice blaring through the headsets that everyone wore: “Should be up about ninety minutes.”

“How fast and high will we go?” Devlin asked.

“Hundred and twenty knots at forty-five hundred feet.”

“Cool.”

They’d reached the far end of the lake.

The three-hundred-horsepower engine wound up, the prop disappeared, and the Cessna accelerated on the water.

Will stared out the window as the shore raced by, the plane skipping across little waves, and he was thinking about their conversation on the drive over from the hotel. He and Kalyn had agreed on the ground rules of this expedition. They were going to look. Not get involved in anything, with anyone. If they found something, they’d wait for Buck to come get them, notify the authorities on their return to Fairbanks. Safety, protecting Devlin—that was their top priority.

The bumps soon turned into smooth forward motion, Buck easing back on the stick, Devlin watching his feet work the rudder pedals.

They soared over the trees. Will swallowed, his ears popping, the pond, the city of Fairbanks falling away beneath him, and he could see at once how small and insignificant it seemed, surrounded on every side by miles and miles of muskeg bogs and untouched boreal forest, marred only by an occasional road and the braids of the Chena and Tanana rivers. He reached forward, patted Devlin’s shoulder, felt Kalyn squeeze his hand.