Housing in the Alaskan Bush was always at a premium and commanded what one might kindly term extortionate prices, but she wasn’t ready to sell so she rented her house to a young couple from Icky who said they were ready to move into town. Wy suspected it was more about them escaping the too-attentive eye of their relatives, most of whom lived in Ik’iki’ka. She had relatives in Icky, too, and she knew how that went. The husband had a job working road maintenance for the state and she worked at the hospital and Wy knew them to be good people, so she signed the lease and arranged for the rent to go into her account at the local branch of First Frontier, which she also kept open. No harm in keeping all her bases covered, she thought. She didn’t mention it to Liam. Not that he ever asked. He was pretty smart that way.

It startled her, when it came time to pack, to realize how little she had in the way of personal property. Almost everything she owned was business-related, from the two planes down to her tools, pilot handbooks, aircraft manuals, work clothes, and four survival kits, winter and summer times two, one for each aircraft. Her photographs were on her phone. Her only jewelry was her wedding ring and a pair of diamond stud earrings and she never removed either.

What she owned more of than anything else was books, and those she had packed and shipped. She downloaded the Kindle app to her phone and filled it with favorites and to-reads to tide her over until her books appeared in Blewestown. Since they would travel by barge to Anchorage and then by truck to Blewestown, that wouldn’t be tomorrow. Her music had already been transferred to iTunes. Everything else she packed into 68 Kilo and lashed it down with cargo nets. 78 Zulu was already in Blewestown, ferried there by a Newenham pilot Wy trusted who had family in Cook’s Point.

Her last night she walked through the little clapboard cottage, looking to see if she had missed anything. Liam had bought a house fully furnished in Blewestown and she was renting hers the same way, which was going to save on freight. Everything had worked out so smoothly she was inclined to be a little suspicious of the whole process, because nothing in her life had ever been this easy before. She walked out onto the deck that reached the edge of the bluff and stood looking out at the great river, gray with glacial silt that made it look like a flow of molten lead moving rapidly toward the sea. A fish jumped and smacked back into the water. Probably a late silver.

She would miss this view, and this deck. Here it was that she had practiced form with her grandfather, Moses Alakuyak, almost every morning. Without thinking about it she dropped down into horse stance, feet shoulder width apart, knees bent, spine straight, arms bent at the elbows, palms cupped to face inward, body weight centered. Root from below, suspend from above. Without her willing it her limbs flowed into commencement, ward off left, right push upward, pull back, press forward, push. Below, needles rattling, a porcupine with the rolling walk like a drunken sailor characteristic of her species trundled into the middle of a dense patch of high bush cranberries and began to eat her way out again.