A shadow veered across the Harvard, darkening its wings. I woke as a blare of engine noise drummed at the canopy. A pilot of the French training flight swept past in a shallow dive, so close that the torque from his propeller almost rolled the Harvard into a high-speed stall. I secured my harness, put out the cigar I was smoking, and prepared for a chase, when a second Frenchman dived past my starboard wing, climbing away into a steep half-spiral that would put him back onto my tail. The two planes had crept behind me as I cruised over the snow-covered wastes of Deer Lake, listening to the country music broadcast from a Medicine Hat radio station.

For the next five minutes we hauled the ageing trainers around the sky in a mock dogfight, and only scattered when a dual-control Harvard with a Canadian instructor in the rear seat sped towards us from the south. Deer Lake was out of bounds, while mock air battles and unauthorised low flying were court-martial offences. The mink farmers of Saskatchewan, a powerful political lobby, were our sworn enemies, and their farms were marked on our maps like so many German ball-bearing factories in World War II. We liked to overfly their farms, so low that the angry farmers were unable to photograph our identification numerals, engines so loud that the frantic beasts tore down their cages and scattered to the safety of the snow.

However illicit, these air games helped to sustain us. The Frenchmen swung away to the southwest, heading towards Medicine Hat, and the Canadian instructor set off after me. I took for granted that he was shouting at me over the R/T, but my tanks were lighter by fifty gallons and I soon pulled away from him. Gradually he fell behind, then gave up and returned to Moose Jaw.

Scanning the snow-covered wilderness, I searched for a railroad line or highway that would give me my bearings. I was now some seventy miles to the northwest of Moose Jaw, above a featureless terrain of snow-covered lakes. Under the needle-like sunlight the snow had begun to melt, and the pools of darker water resembled bowls of black sherbet. A mile to starboard a grain silo rose from the white plain, like a silver sculpture erected beside the embankment of a railway line. I turned towards it, one eye on my fuel gauge, following the Harvard’s shadow across a curious turtle-shaped lake. In one of its arms I saw a submerged structure that resembled a sunken cabin with a flat yellow roof.

Or a Harvard trainer lying inverted in fifteen feet of water? Too short of fuel to make another circuit of the lake, I followed the railroad spur towards Swift Current and set course for Moose Jaw. But as I faked the navigation course on my knee I was thinking of the Turkish pilot, Captain Artvin, who had disappeared two months after our arrival.