The runs were still plentiful enough that silver backs of salmon gleamed up through the water as the Super Cub circled overhead. They hovered in groups of three to a dozen, shoulder to shoulder, noses pointing determinedly upstream. Wy wondered why the villagers had ever left.
But left they had, some three hundred years before, according to Professor Desmond X. McLynn, Ph.D., University of Arizona 1969, archaeologist, and teacher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He could have hauled a four-wheeler to the Air Force base and driven to the site, he could have hired a skiff down the coast and up the river, but for reasons best known to Professor Desmond X. McLynn, Ph.D. and archaeologist, he chose to fly. The site's airstrip was makeshift at best and liberally adorned with boulders and hummocks. Although Wy's Cub was equipped with tundra tires, the bluff upon which the village had perched so many years ago stretched only eleven hundred feet in length before it dropped forty-five precipitous feet straight down into the Snake. The Snake, a wide river that slithered southeast in a series of lazy S-curves, had over the years swallowed its share of boats, planes and snow machines, along with their drivers. The prospect of immersion made for a brisk few seconds during critical periods of flight, such as landing and takeoff.
Wy lined the Cub up on final. The Cub hit a thermal and the plane bucked, only slightly, but enough for Professor Desmond X. McLynn's hands to slap down on the back of her seat. “What's wrong?”
The Cub's wheels touched down in what would have been a runway paint job if there had been any paint, or any true runway, for that matter. Professor Desmond X. McLynn's rapid respiration could be heard over the sound of the headset. Wy didn't much care for the pompous little ass, but it served no purpose to scare him to death and she kicked the rudder over as soon as ground speed allowed, bringing the Cub around to halt a hundred feet short of the abyss.
The engine died and she folded back the door and got out to assist her passenger. His face was pale and his watery blue eyes showed a rim of white all the way around their irises. “Here we are, sir,” she said cheerfully.
McLynn was a fussy little man in his fifties who acted the age of most of the artifacts he dug up. His face was screwed into a perpetual frown of dissatisfaction, as if upon assembling the pieces to the puzzles of the past, the one essential fragment upon which the whole picture would be built had fallen out of the box and was lost forever. His conversations with Wy over the last month of flights in and out of the dig had consisted of one long whine: why did they have to fly such a small plane, why wasn't there a proper runway, why couldn't he have electricity on site, why couldn't he have fresh milk every day? Fresh milk wasn't available in Newenham every day, let alone Tulukaruk. Wy knew this because she had a son who could flatfoot a quart in one gulp.
McLynn recovered enough to take his bag and stagger off to a large olive-green tent. It was made of heavy canvas and was pitched twenty feet from the edge of the cliff. The door flaps were closed and fastened against the stiffening breeze. He must really feel sick, because he usually headed straight to the dig, which consisted of two twelve-foot-square excavations, covered with another canvas tent the twin of the first. The breeze at the top of the bluff was brisk and as McLynn untied the flap of the first tent the wind pulled it out of his hands. The flap ties on the second tent held, although its olive-green sides billowed concave and convex with sharppops.It sounded a little like a cap gun going off.
Wy began unloading McLynn's supplies. Said supplies consisted of, among other essentials, four loaves of Wonder bread, a case each of Spam, shredded wheat, Carnation instant milk, baked beans, Nutter-Butter cookies, and enough Sterno to power one of the C-130s over at Chinook for a search-and-rescue mission to Round Island. The dig sat on one of the best fishing rivers south of the Wood River Mountains, in the middle of one of the best berry-picking areas on the Bay. Wy would have thought a dip net and a basket would have satisfied all McLynn's culinary requirements, but it wasn't her camp.
The back of the Cub was empty and the pile of boxes waisthigh when she stopped to stretch and admire the view. It was spectacular. The Snake, its water shining like silver scales in the sun, curled and coiled back on itself, a convoluted journey from source, One Lake, to outflow, Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay in turn stretched two hundred miles between Port Molar on the Alaska Peninsula to Cape Newenham on the mainland. She stood on the Nushagak Peninsula, a southwesterly thumb of land that hitched a ride on weather originating from the vast blue expanse of water that stretched west of the Aleutian Peninsula to the Bering Strait.
A region one fifth the size of Texas, its winds blew hell for leather across Bristol Bay out of the northeast from October on, and then in March turned around and blew from the southwest for the next six months. It made for interesting air time. Wy flew daily over the remains of planes whose pilots had not paid proper respect to Bristol Bay's weather. What really gave her the creeps were the wrecks she couldn't see, the planes and boats lying at river and sea bottom, slowly silting over, providing housing for anything with a shell or a fin that cared to move in. Wy, like many of her Alaskan generation, couldn't swim. Not that it would matter, as the water was too cold to survive in for long. “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots,” Bob DeCreft had declaimed once, “but there are no old, bold pilots.” She also remembered him saying that “any landing you walk away from is a good landing,” but Wy had always found it more prudent to stay in the air until you had a runway in front of you.
Bristol Bay's topography ran anywhere from tundra that often seemed to lie lower than sea level to the five-thousand-foot peak of Mount Oratia. Keep going three hundred miles farther north and fifteen thousand more feet up and you'd find Denali, the highest mountain in North America. In between lay icy glaciers, narrow, windy passes, grassy plateaus, heavily wooded bays, thousands of springs, brooks, creeks, streams, rills and rivers, lakes that ranged from shallow ponds to narrow fjords, sandy, soggy, silty river deltas and hundreds of miles of beaches. A cartographer's wet dream. The only stop between Newenham and the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia was the Pribilof Islands. The Pribilofs, where German tourists made Kodak moments of the seal harvest, horrifying Europeans and infuriating the islanders.
Wy grinned to herself. A late and not very lamented one-term governor of the state had proclaimed, and on prime time, too, that nature simply could not be allowed to run wild. On that, if nothing else, the people of the Pribilofs agreed with him. The people of the European Community did not, but then they didn't vote in Alaska.
A teeming marine life, including everything from herring to walruses to gray whales, had once provided for the support and maintenance of one of the healthiest and most stable populations of indigenous human inhabitants anywhere in the world. Their modern descendants, the Yupik, still fished the same rivers, hunted the same moose and caribou and walrus and duck and geese, picked the same berries as their ancestors had. The only difference was that present-day Yupik hunted from skiffs with outboard engines instead of kayaks, and four-wheelers and snow machines instead of dog sleds, and much of the time they did it commercially, for sale and not for subsistence. In a good year, Bristol Bay contributed as much as sixteen percent of the world's catch of red salmon.