Snowbound - Blake Crouch [45]
“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.
THIRTY-SIX
For fifteen minutes, they followed the westward track of Alaska 3, climbing steadily toward cruising altitude. That gray thread of pavement hooked south toward Anchorage, but they flew on, due west into the Alaskan bush.
Not even the brown, unpeopled waste of northern Arizona rivaled this level of desolation. No sign of human habitation. Endless spruce forests interspersed