She dropped down to fly low and slow at a hundred feet above the strip, and even on this clear, calm day there were thermals enough to raise a few bumps. It would be an interesting approach in real weather. A couple of kids ran out of their houses and waved furiously. She waggled her wings and was up and over the ridge to the east, which revealed a much longer, narrower body of water forcing its way far more deeply into the Kenai Mountains. According to the chart this was called Mussel Bay, Wy assumed for the obvious reason, with a small town perched on its northeast shore.

Kapilat was a comparatively substantial community of three hundred people, with a summer population that filled the vacation homes built on pilings along the opposite shore, some of which harbored pretensions of McMansion status. The mountains rose around the narrow bay in four-, five-, and six-thousand-foot knife-edged peaks clad in an omnipresent layer of ice and snow that grew or receded with the season. Above the head of the bay their snowmelt emptied every summer into a small river whose flow had over the millennia carved a cramped chasm with multiple narrow falls alternating with gravel beds created by the moraines of retreating glaciers.

Wy banked left and turned back down the bay, coming down to a hundred feet to take a look at the airstrip. Like all the other strips on this side of the Bay it was unattended and unpaved, two thousand feet carved out of the side of a foothill with a salt water slough paralleling it. There was no traffic so she dropped down for a touch and go. As in Chuwawet the thermals made themselves felt, but the surface was well-maintained and there were half a dozen hangars, which she would bet belonged to the McMansion owners on the other side of Mussel Bay. She lifted off gently at the other end and banked left over a road on a dike that divided the slough from another slough that debouched into the Bay proper. She climbed back up to a thousand feet and debated her course. There was much more of the south shore to explore, the chart showing multiple tiny coves and narrow bays and shallow lagoons.

But across the Bay, Liam waited. Across the Bay was Blewestown, a community of ten thousand people spread along the Sterling Highway from Cook’s Point to the Wolverine River delta that formed the easternmost end of the bay. Blewestown’s primary reason for being was the aforementioned four-mile gravel spit, a spit that had been washed clean by the tidal wave that followed hard on the heels of the ’64 quake and was therefore, so to speak, open for business. From the sale of Alaska to the US in 1876 to 1960, Westerners had been trying to make a living in and around Blewestown without much success. There was gold, but nothing to compare to the Klondike or Nome. Fox farms and cattle ranches came in with fanfare and failed in obscurity.