Iliamna Bay passed beneath, a long stretch of gold on blue. She banked left at North Head and maintained a heading just off shore for the circumference of Iniskin Island, with Iniskin Bay and Oil Bay passing in review. For a few heart-stopping moments all four stratovolcanoes lined up on either side, a stalwart line of ice and granite. Douglas, seven thousand feet; Augustine, forty-one hundred feet, an island volcano, an almost perfect white cone floating in a dark blue sea; Iliamna, ten thousand feet; and Redoubt, also ten thousand feet. Spurr, eleven thousand feet and the fifth in line on the west side of Cook Inlet and nearest to Anchorage, was visible, too, if much less spectacular in appearance after its peak-altering eruption in 1953. They formed the northern thrust of the Aleutian Range, a two-thousand mile arc of mountains beginning at Lake Chakachamna west of Anchorage and ending with the Rat Islands at the tail end of the Aleutians. This was the northernmost arc of the Ring of Fire. These five mountains would be her guideposts to the south and west for the foreseeable future.

The fact most prominent regarding these mountains—What was the collective noun for volcanoes? An eruption? —was that they were all active and in the habit of sending ash high in the air and hundreds of miles in every direction, rendering a severe hazard to aviation. She eyed Augustine attentively as she approached it but it seemed calm today. On her left Iliamna showed steam from two vents, as did a single vent on the west side of Mt. Redoubt north of it. South of Augustine, Douglas bestrode Cape Douglas, a protrusion of the Katmai National Park. Katmai was where the tourists who could afford it flew in to watch bears and where the Apollo astronauts had trained for survival, although NASA would have had to work awfully hard to put a capsule down that far off course.

“The shoulders of giants,” she said out loud, and indeed the massifs seemed to be holding up the blue dome of the sky itself.

She followed the long, wide gravel beaches of the west side of Cook Inlet north, pausing at Silver Salmon Creek to circle around a pair of grizzlies digging for clams in the mud left by the outgoing tide, skirting the inner shore of Chisik Island to fly part way up Tuxedni Bay just so she could say she had stared Redoubt in the face, then doubling back to bank left over Squarehead Cove and Redoubt Point.

At Harriet Point she banked right and flew out over the vast blue expanse of Cook Inlet, her new home.

Four

Monday, September 2, Labor Day

LIAM WAS A SINGLE MALT SCOTCH MAN BUT on his way out of the brewery he bought a growler of Firebreak Lager to support a fellow local. He stowed it in the cooler behind the driver’s seat of the Silverado and stood for a moment, irresolute. He should go home and finish unpacking. Although he had made the bed, which was the most important thing. It was his sincere hope that the bed would desperately require clean sheets in the morning.