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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. McLy
Wy lined the Cub up on final. The Cub hit a thermal and the plane bucked, only slightly, but enough for Professor Desmond X. McLy
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. McLy
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.
McLy
McLy
Wy began unloading McLy
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 gri
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.
In bad years, such as last year, they could barely feed themselves, something that heated up talks for rural preference for subsistence every year in Juneau.