She banked right and headed east, following the river up just far enough to fly over the spot where Old Man’s Creek joined it. Moses’ fish camp was still there, although the cabin looked even more dilapidated than it had the last time she’d checked on it. The Arctic was hard on everything.

“Goodbye, Grandfather,” she said, and was surprised and perhaps even a little forlorn when her eyes remained dry. It seemed she was leaving the worst of her grief at her loss behind her, too.

She banked right, climbing again, leveling out at five thousand feet, and put Carly Rae Jepsen on the soundtrack. Wy preferred real instruments to synthesized but the girl had pipes. She followed the river up to where it petered out into braided lakes and tundra, crossed the Kvichak and emerged onto the southern shore of the massive Iliamna Lake and proceeded up the east shore. There was a tiny bit of chop for about a nanosecond and then, poof, gone. Wy wished Liam were along for the ride, just to prove to him that every flight in Alaska wasn’t a death-defying feat on the order of a shuttle launch. How she had managed to fall for a guy who held up in the air every aircraft he ever flew by the arms of his seat remained a mystery to her. A reluctant smile spread across her face. To both of them.

The lake was a bright sheet of glare beneath the rising sun. There no sign of the infamous albeit elusive lake monster to be seen over the entire seventy-seven mile stretch, which was disappointing, but she did catch a brief glimpse of some of the lake’s freshwater seals. She’d read that there were only two freshwater seal populations in the world and that predation, pollution, and climate change was eating at their numbers to the point that application had been made to classify them as endangered. She had very little faith left in the government doing the right thing so she was happy to see them while she still could.

She followed the dirt road from Pile Bay over the mountain pass to Williamsport on Cook Inlet, mostly because she had heard stories for years of death-defying transits over that road. She had herself never seen it, so she dropped down until she was about eye level with a pickup that looked way too small to be hauling a fifty-foot fishing boat on a trailer up a track barely wide enough for the wheel base of both vehicles. It made her glad she was traversing the pass by air. Even more so when that track was halfway up a dizzyingly sheer mountainside with nothing between the edge of the road and the abyss and oblivion.

She climbed back up to cruising altitude and flew on. Over the headphones she heard sporadic communications from various pilots in the area, picking up and dropping off guests at fishing lodges, spotters looking for late schools of silvers, a bunch of hunters en route to harvest their share of the Nelchina caribou herd. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game had increased the hunting season by ten days as the latest estimates had the population of the Nelchina herd at fifty thousand plus, which was about twenty thousand over what the area could sustain. Wy had flown aerial surveys for the ADFG and she had seen up close and personal what happened when herds over-grazed their ranges. Malnutrition and starvation weren’t pretty in any species.