Wy descended to five hundred feet as unostentatiously as possible in the hope that Liam wouldn’t notice, banked right to follow the bay east, and soon they were over the mouth of Mussel Bay. While the leaves on the deciduous trees had turned they still clung stubbornly to their branches, brilliant splashes of yellow and gold against the lush green backdrop of the evergreens that marched determinedly up the sides of the mountains, checked only by the snow and ice marching as determinedly down. Standoff. A dark red undergrowth formed picket lines between the warring factions, fireweed that had topped out and gone to seed and rusty leaves.

“Look,” she said, and tipped the Cessna very slightly and very gently so he could look down at the water. He actually turned his head and even more miraculously kept his eyes open when he did. As if in reward, a late run of silvers jumped and splashed in the water below, powered by their own frantic need to return to spawn in the place of their birth. “Everything else followed those silvers into here,” Wy said. “The Sugpiaq first; the Russians next, following the sea otters that followed the silvers; Western colonists after that; and après ça, le déluge. The Outside canneries, the white forefathers of the town of Kapilat, the ships of the Alaska Steamship Company, the US Postal Service, the US Coast Guard, the Blue Canoe.”

“How big did it get?”

“I looked up the census numbers. In 1959, the year the US Congress passed the statehood act, Kapilat had a population of eight hundred. Doubled in the summer when all the Outside workers came to catch and can the salmon.”

“Like Newenham.”

She nodded. “Then in 1960, the Sterling Highway was built, 138 miles long, from Blewestown to Tern Lake, connecting the Seward Highway in mid-spate between Anchorage and Seward.”

“The death knell.”

“The first toll, maybe.”

Once it became one of the few Alaskan towns with road access, Blewestown began to grow in population. Already in decline, the deciding blow for Kapilat came in March 1964 when the 9.2 Alaska Earthquake dropped Mussel Bay and Kapilat and the entire coast of Chungasqak Bay five and a half feet in elevation. The following April the moon and the sun lined up opposite each other with the earth in the middle and the spring tides washed up over the boardwalk that was Kapilat’s main street. It cleaned out the first floors of the homes and businesses built alongside it, too. A year later the canneries had decamped for Kodiak or offshore in the form of floating processors that caught, flash froze, and transported everything direct to Adak or Dutch Harbor, there for air shipment Outside or internationally.

“The Japanese do love Alaskan fish,” Liam said.

“Lucky for us.” She banked left and flew halfway up the bay to a salt-water slough with a bridge over it. Over the bridge the end of the strip appeared and she set down as gently as she could. The tension leached out of Liam as if someone had pulled a plug. He saw her noticing and he laughed, a short, relieved burst of sound. “At least no one shot a blade off the propeller that time.”