That bluff began in Turnagain Arm in the north and continued west and around and all the way down the west side of the Kenai Peninsula and up to the head of Chungasqak Bay which, as she rounded Cook’s Point, unfolded before her in all its forty miles of glory. She studied up on it in advance but nothing could have prepared her for the disparities between the north and south shores. The north shore was almost agricultural-looking, a broad bench of mostly flat land between a short bluff at water’s edge and a much taller bluff farther inland. The south shore looked like Norway, where a range of sharply pointed, white-capped mountains slid precipitously into slivered eighty-fathom fjords. The fjords alternated with five massive piedmont glaciers, themselves depending from a seven-hundred-square-mile ice field only the mountains held in check. Between the fjords were small, rocky inlets and bays and coves and lagoons, along with the occasional spit, tongues made of millennia of glacial silt washing down Cook Inlet. The largest spit thrust out four miles perpendicularly from the north shore. A handful of islands lined up in front of two of the larger fjords on the south side, with a few more so small they could more properly be called rocks scattered by an indiscriminate hand.

Liam’s first reaction to being offered the job of the new trooper post in Blewestown had been to dive into the crime statistics in the area. Wy had hit Naske and Slotnick’s Alaska: A History of the 49th State, the Alaska Atlas & Gazetteer, Merle Colby’s A Guide to Alaska: Last American Frontier, one of the state guides published by the Federal Writers Project back in the day, and of course her personal copy of AOPA’s Airport Directory. She glanced at the clock on the dash, and on impulse turned right to follow the spit across the Bay for an aerial tour of the south side. The longer this big high hung in over Southcentral, the bigger the first fall storm would be that was certainly building up behind it in the Gulf of Alaska. If you don’t like the weather in Alaska, wait ten minutes.

She’d been making a slow descent since Tikahtnu and now she leveled out at a thousand feet, maintaining a course that held just offshore, watching and listening for traffic. There were half a dozen airstrips in the various villages and towns on the south side of the Bay, and where there weren’t airstrips at low tide they used the beaches. She checked the tide app on her phone. Low tide was just an hour away. She grew the extra pair of eyes that all good pilots held in reserve for situations like these and proceeded with enough caution to avoid a mid-air collision but with enough attention to appreciate the view. Over the headset she heard pilot chatter from three different aircraft; from Chuwawet (taking off), Beaty’s Hot Springs (landing), and Jefferson Cove (humpback cow and calf alert). The Chuwawet pilot announced his ETA for Blewestown, which prompted a brief but incendiary blast from someone on the ground in Engaqutaq who apparently had passengers and freight waiting for transport to Blewestown. No reply from the pilot, although the resulting silence on the channel was electric with expectation, everyone muting their mics in the hope of hearing the Engaqutaq ground crew tear the pilot who had changed the schedule mid-flight a new one.