I put a finger to my lips.
The man’s brow wrinkled, but he lowered his voice. “What’s going on?”
“Did you see a couple of men sitting in a truck out there somewhere?” I whispered.
“Nope. Can’t see much of anything. Take a look.” He pointed to the windows that looked over the runway.
Outside, there was nothing but a dim milk white fog.
“You aren’t going nowhere till that burns off,” he said.
“No.” And they were out there somewhere, hiding in the fog.
The attendant stared at me, his hands fisted on his fatherly hips. “Someone got a fear in you?” he asked.
I nodded. “I just want to get my plane off the ground without being seen. Then I’ll be okay.”
“Need me to call the sheriff?”
“No. Thanks.” No, I would stay gone until the men in suits could jail these men who wanted me gone. At liberty, I would do what I could to unravel the last of the connections, and hasten their incarceration. It was foolish, I knew, a cowboy’s lonesome stance, but I did not know how long it would take to wrap up the case, and I could not picture a life of hiding.
The man nodded and walked away.
I took up a position from which I could watch the windows unseen and settled in to wait.
Fog. It was rare, although not surprising, once I thought about it. Moist air had pooled along the Platte River, condensing into a ground-hugging shroud. It was my fate to wait until it lifted and dispersed. It was a simple fact that a pilot had to be able to see where she was going in order to take off. It can’t be too long before it burns off, I told myself. Soon as the sun heats it up, this fog will fry like bacon. I’ll be in the sky by seven-thirty, eight. No problem.
I jumped as the outside speaker of the unicorn radio burst into life, booming a pilot’s voice across the tarmac: “Douglas unicorn, this is Beechcraft eight six three two hotel. I’m ten miles southeast, and all I see is fog. Request airport advisory.”
Was it the twin coming back?
The attendant’s voice came back, “Roger that. We got pea soup here, dead calm. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Three two hotel.”
I looked hopefully at the service attendant. “How long does this usually take?” I asked.
“Got me,” he said. “This doesn’t happen more’n so often. Prolly hour or two. Maybe more. You know the adage, ‘Time to spare? Go by air.’”
An hour, I told myself. I thanked the man, slithered through the lounge to the bathroom, swilled some water from the water fountain by the bathroom hallway, bought a cup of coffee, and crept back into my hiding place.
An hour later, overhead traffic was still asking when the fog might lift. “I can see the tops of the trees along the Platte,” one pilot reported, “but I can’t see you. You got an update?” I could hear his unseen engine grind overhead, describing a wide, lazy circle.
“I can hear your engines, but that’s all.”
“Well then, I’m running on up to Casper, rent a car. You call my wife and tell her I’m gonna be late?”
A car. How I would prefer to simply get into that car and slip away. To where? To Chandler Jennings? Isn’t that like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire? I froze. Until that moment, I had not owned up to the other end of the plan: I would proceed to Jackson. I would find Chandler Jennings. I wanted to argue, explain to myself how wide the sky was, how many different directions I could fly in that little plane with its full tanks of gasoline, but Jackson pulled like a magnet. Somehow, he had swollen in my mind into the key to ending things, the guide who was going to show me the way out of this hell. Or farther into it, I told myself grimly.
I waited.
At 9:15, the air suddenly began to move, and the fog melted, first into long furrows of cotton and then into wispy ghosts. I asked the man at the counter to take a look out the back way for Po’s truck. He came back with the report that no vehicles were visible between the hangar and the highway except his.
“Thank you,” I said. Sprinting to the plane, I unchained its wings and tail, fired the engine, taxied to the east end of the runway, punched the throttle to the dashboard, and took off.
I heard no shots fired. No holes appeared in the wings, no abrupt drop in the fuel gages. My plan had worked. I was free.
The cottonwood trees along the riverbank dwindled to a brown haze, fell away below me. The prairie opened up, melting into smooth contours on a lion’s back, resolving into to an abstraction of the ground I used to walk. The robust rampart of the Laramie Range, high and proud, began to shrink, drop away, reveal the far sweep of open spaces. I was aloft, a tiny gnat disappearing over the horizon.
I was flying along the north side of Casper Mountain before I remembered to radio Casper Flight Service to open my flight plan. I considered omitting this step, flying completely without surveillance, but my enemies couldn’t possibly get into FAA records and track me, could they? No, they can’t, I told myself jubilantly, my spirits rising with the plane; all thoughts to that effect were simple paranoia. Hunching with the chill of the high, cool air through which I flew, I keyed the microphone and identified not myself, but the plane, and activated the plan.
Casper acknowledged and wished me a nice trip, then gave the frequency for Denver Center should I wish to be tracked on their radar. “Thanks, six two foxtrot out,” I told them, and reset the dial for Denver Center, fumbling a little with my stiff, chilled fingers. “Denver Center, this is Piper two two six two foxtrot over Casper for Jackson Hole via Big Piney. Request flight following if able.” It felt good to talk to someone who thought I was nothing but a normal, everyday pilot headed westward. I was going to make it.
“Six two foxtrot, what is your planned cruising altitude?”
“Six two foxtrot is at eight thousand five hundred for ten thousand five hundred.”
“Roger six two foxtrot, squawk and ident four three one seven.”
I reached over to the transponder and dialed in the four digits, my mind growing calmer as I settled into the routine of flying. I pushed the button that would flash my position on Denver Center’s radar screen, moving smoothly through the motions. “Four three one seven for six two foxtrot, squawk and ident completed.”
The radio crackled.
“Denver Center, six two foxtrot; say again?” I said.
“Six [crackle] trot, cycle and try [crackle].”
I took that to mean that my transponder had failed to pop me on their radar screen, so I repeated the job. “Six two foxtrot.”
With the vagary of radio communications, Denver Center suddenly came in loud and clear. “Six two foxtrot, we don’t see you. You’re probably shadowed by mountains. You’ll be in range of Salt Lake Center soon. Suggest you try them a little way down the line.”
“Thank you. Six two foxtrot out.”
“Nice while it lasted. Denver out.”
I smiled wanly. Denver had had a nice voice.
I stretched and yawned. I had whole hours before me in which I could stand down my guard and relax. Below me, the Platte River curved south-westward toward its high mountain source. I pressed the throttle forward and eased back on the yoke, retrimming the aircraft for the climb to 10,500 feet. VFR flight rules stated that if flying westward, I should select an altitude of an even number of thousands of feet plus five hundred, which meant that either 8,500 or 10,500 was good until I needed to clear South Pass and traverse the high valley around Big Piney. Either way, the higher altitude would probably be preferable, having less turbulence. Unfortunately, the air would be less dense there, and one needed air in order to burn fuel. And to breathe.
I followed my course along the air chart, reckoning airspeed into distance traveled, matching bends in the river with the winding blue line on the chart. It occurred to me that I was following the trace of the Oregon Trail, on which. 350,000 people had walked and driven creaking Conestoga wagons a century and a half before. I looked down upon the t
race, feeling a strange kinship with the risk they had taken in their westward journey, wondering if mine would end less tragically than had so many of theirs. They had inched along, wearing away shoe leather with every step, making twenty miles a day if they were lucky. Or making no miles if they succumbed to the smallpox and cholera that swept through the tired trains of pioneers as they bent to drink from waters fouled by those who had gone before them. Staggering numbers had perished. Their bones lay below me now, crumbling to dust in shallow graves, their names forgotten. Some had left the trail right here and built a life for themselves, toiling hard under the unrelenting sun of summer and through the freezing winds of winter, carving a home out of the wilderness with nothing but strong backs and willing hearts. Their bones lay also in the shadows of my wings.
I peered southward toward Saratoga, where other bones now whitened beneath pastures turned into playgrounds for the rich and ruthless. I sent them hatred through my eyes.
Then I laughed a dry, ironical laugh. Here I was, a child of the ranching era, bemoaning the wreckage brought by the advent of the boys with money. What was I thinking of? The lives of my ancestors had not been without impact. The advent of European peoples had ripped into the lives of the Indian tribes, the Oregon Trail emigrants creating a fine legacy of wagon ruts, grass eaten to the roots, wood scavenged to the last twig, and game hunted out and driven away across a path fifty miles wide. I would see no herds of buffalo in my transit today. Those once-mighty grazers, whose countless numbers would have blackened the ground below me, were gone, having been hunted carelessly by the builders of the railroads, all but extinct in the wild, their few remaining descendants eating protected grass in the national parks, or penned up to be raised for meat that would bring a high price in Tokyo. And the ancestors of the Indians—hadn’t they hunted the woolly mammoth to extinction?
Yes, time and circumstances changed, and change often came harshly and with terrible loss. But I told myself that this newest wave of change was worse. This wave brought a new disease, the poison of a new piracy. These pirates of industry built nothing—not schools, not homes, not ranches, no herds of animals that would feed the nation. These men brought only greed. They gobbled up companies, pillaged retirement funds to cover their leveraging, sold off the sustaining assets, and left, leaving only bones where businesses once had grown. And these hobby ranches? These happy weekend hideaways? What would become of them when the people who knew how to tend the grasses and the herds had all given up and moved to the festering cities?
I looked down across the buckskin-colored sea of prairie with a heart tight with pain. I’ll be back, I promised myself. I may be running for years or decades, but I’ll be back.
Far below and to the south, I spotted Alcova and Pathfinder reservoirs, the confluence of the Platte and the Sweetwater rivers. Beyond these, I picked out the sweet knobs of the Granite Mountains and Devil’s Gate, that harsh notch in a fin of naked rock where the Platte sawed down through Seminoe Mountain. I passed Independence Rock, the broad dome the emigrants hoped to see by Independence Day if they were to make it into Oregon before the snow flew in autumn. I checked my position on the chart, back-calculated to reckon my airspeed. I was behind my estimate. The needle on the instrument panel registered ninety-seven knots, but I was only making eighty over the ground. The head winds were stronger than I had expected.
Calculating forward again, I revised my estimated time of arrival into Jackson: 1:20. An extra half hour in transit would cut deeper into my emergency fuel ration, but I was still within required limits. I stared at the instrument panel, willing it to tell me something new.
I had been under way for over an hour now, grinding westward over the Sweetwater, now certain where I was, now momentarily lost as the markings on the chart blended into one another, one twist in the river beginning to look like another. I was in a wide, lonely part of the back of nowhere, where the roads were far apart and the ranches few. I could see the Wind River Mountains up ahead and to the right, a high, wide ridge of white. I could make out vaguely on the horizon the low saddle that was South Pass.
I checked the altimeter. I had not made 10,500 feet, not by nearly a thousand. Once again, I pushed in the already-maximized throttle and eased back on the yoke, but the plane became more sluggish and would not climb. Conscious that I was at an altitude for eastbound flights, I scanned the horizon, searching for oncoming traffic. I was alone.
It then occurred to me that I had not heard a radio call since my final contact with Denver Center. Flipping the upper radio to Salt Lake Center, I keyed the microphone and gave them a call. “Salt Lake Center, this is Piper two two six two foxtrot. Request flight following if possible.”
Nothing. I heard no reply.
Giving the dashboard around the radio a good Peggy-sized slam with the heel of my hand, I flicked the power switch off and on and tried again. Nothing. Peggy had warned me about this, right? She had told me this so I wouldn’t panic if the radio cut out on me. So I wouldn’t do something stupid, like forget that flying the damned airplane was my first priority. Fine.
I shrugged off gathering fatigue and jiggled the dial, then reset the radio on 122.8, the frequency for Big Piney, and left it on standby. And reminded myself that I would be over South Pass before I could hear them.
An hour later, I skimmed over South Pass, hove northwestward toward Bondurant, and tried Salt Lake Center again. No answer, only static. I switched to the radio for Big Piney and got nothing at all.
Well, this is not uncommon, I assured myself, but a worry began to bloom in the back of my mind: had that man not been content to wait for me on the ground? What if he had picked the lock on this plane and sabotaged the radios? I had no way of knowing, had I? Perhaps he had taken the precaution of putting a tracking device on one of them, something that transmitted whatever I was saying directly to Saratoga, and it had fouled the wires. After all, I had not so much as checked the fuel tanks in my hurry to take off, let alone do my pilot’s walk-around or check underneath the dash for fresh wiring.
I spun the dial and reset it for Big Piney.
Static.
“Do your job,” I said aloud. “Remember what Peggy told you about times like this? Aviate first, then navigate, then communicate. See? Talking to people while you fly is your third priority, not your first.”
But I was talking to myself. Not a good sign. I forced myself to concentrate, to reason through my fears. If that man had decided to do something to this plane, he would simply have wired a bomb to it, or more simply drained the fuel out of the tanks. What was I thinking of, thinking he would waste energy rewiring my radios? I was simply letting my imagination get away from me, that was all … .
“I’m okay; I’m fine,” I said aloud. But then the plane suddenly shook with a new level of turbulence, and I felt my buttocks tighten just as if they belonged to someone else.
Some cowgirl I am, trying to hold on to the saddle with my butt. And what the fuck are you doing, rushing off in search of Chandler?
I realized that I didn’t have a good answer.
I tried to distract myself with the spectacular view I was getting of the Wind River Range. This was a long, straight range, an upraised block of stone glazed with snow and ice standing proud of the surrounding lowlands like the ridgepole of a house. The snow sat thicker in pockets carved by the mountain glaciers that had moved like serpents down toward the lowlands, pushing great piles of rubble before them. I could see those piles now—terminal moraines, geologists called them. I could see more of them now, great U-shaped valleys laid out one next to the other with neat heaps of rubble kicked up at their feet, much as if a colossal mountain lion had dragged her claws along the ramparts. The glacial valleys were long and wide and beautiful, and filled with high mountain lakes dammed by the moraines.
With the next heavy buffeting, I rechecked my position. I was not making good time, there were no two ways about it. As I noted that, I remembered, belatedly, to switch to the secon
d wing tank. What had I been thinking of? No wonder the plane had begun to feel a little heavy on the left aileron and rudder: the right wing tank was almost empty, increasing its lift. I had been compensating right along, slowly taking up the slack.
The buffeting increased. I took a slow turn to the right to check the horizon. The once-clear skies, which had begun to look hazy over South Pass, were now dark with clouds. I reset my course and tried to relax, reminding myself to breathe deeply and go with the turbulence. For an instant, I wished the little plane had an autopilot, so I could rest my arms and legs, but then I remembered that an autopilot would not manage turbulence this strong. I began to curse my bladder, which had long since filled with the coffee I had drunk in Douglas and begun to scream for relief.
I looked to the west. The sky was darkening.
A half hour of hard turbulence and myriad course corrections later, I was nearing Bondurant, Jackson’s Little Hole, the high meadow surrounded by mountains on four sides and hills on the fourth where the mountains squeezed together around Hoback Canyon, and I saw something that turned my heart cold.
A tongue of dark rain-filled cloud had crested the mountains to the west and filled the canyon to its bottom.
My hands rigid on the control wheel, I banked quickly to the left to head back toward Big Piney, only to find that the storm had swung even faster around the south end of the Wyoming Range and consumed ground and sky to the south. I was trapped.
I clutched the chart to the control wheel, refolding the paper twice to make it fit, as the plane now bounced harder and harder in a wide, slow circle. I reduced the throttle, bringing my airspeed down so the plane wouldn’t rip apart in the turbulence. I noted Wenz Field over by Pinedale. Maybe that’s still clear, I thought. Turning, I looked out over the hills to southeast and across the mesas to the Wind River Range. I counted lake-filled glacial valleys, north to south. Wenz would be at the foot of the fourth or fifth.
I saw only two.
I looked north. Mountains—high, impassable mountains as far as I could see. I was in a valley no more than four or five miles across at its widest place, an infinite space for turning in an automobile, but little comfort to the aviator, who must maintain an airspeed of at least fifty-five knots to maneuver without falling out of the sky. I kept turning, circling over the meadow.
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