Chapter One: Fly
Airspace above the Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming
Thursday, August 11, 1977, 9:00 a.m.
Patrick
The jagged outline of Black Tooth Mountain loomed outside the Piper Tri-Pacer, so close that Patrick Flint felt like if he opened the window and reached out, he’d be able to touch the cold, unforgiving rock with his fingertips. His pulse accelerated. The peaks exuded a powerful magic. If Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains were his church, the place he felt his strongest connection to God, then Black Tooth was its steeple. If he weren’t flying the airplane, he would have closed his eyes for a moment of reverence.
A hideous sound inside the plane broke the spell, loud enough that he heard it through his headphones. He banked into a turn that would align the plane to skirt the peaks, on course for a landing strip at the Dubois Municipal Airport, one hundred and fifty miles away. When the Tri-Pacer had leveled out, he looked over at his sixteen-year-old daughter and unwilling co-pilot for the day. Her face was buried in a brown paper bag with only her blonde hair showing. A book lay face down in her lap. Julie of the Wolves.
“Mind over matter, Trish.”
Her blue eyes lifted and met his. “I’ve never even understood what that means.”
Patrick had been dealing with Trish’s motion sickness since she was a small child. She used to throw up before he even put the car in gear. He knew the fluid in her inner ear was not her friend, but she made it far worse for herself by looking down at a book. “Eyes on the horizon. You know better than to read in a plane. It makes it worse.”
“Can we just go home? I have plans.” She retched again, but it only resulted in dry heaves.
“Drink some water.” He gestured at the canteen he’d brought with them. It was wedged between the seats. “We’ll go home after we fuel up in Dubois and drop off the supplies for the Fort Washakie Medical Center.” While the Riverton Regional Airport was closer to the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Wind River Reservation clinic, he didn’t like competing with the commercial airliners, and Fort Washakie nurse Constance Teton had agreed to meet him at the smaller airfield in Dubois.
“How much longer until we land?”
“An hour.”
She rolled the top of her sloshing bag. It looked dangerously close to bursting, and he was relieved when she set it on the floor. She picked up the canteen and gulped.
“Little sips. Come on, you know this.”
She rolled her big eyes. He remembered wistfully the days before she’d mastered the eye roll. Those eyes had gazed at him like he was her hero. It had been a while since he’d seen that expression on her face, at least directed at him. But she took a smaller sip and capped the water. “Next time bring Perry. He loves to fly.”
“I never get any time with my best girl anymore. And you’ll be leaving us soon.”
“Dad, it’s 1977. I haven’t even started my junior year of high school. I’m not leaving until August of 1979. That’s like forever, you know?”
“Two years. A blink.” She wouldn’t understand how fast time flew until she was a parent herself.
She sighed and stared out the window.
He admired the heavily treed terrain as it flashed beneath them. He’d had a dual purpose for this flight today. The first was to log hours in the Tri-Pacer while doing something useful—delivering an old portable x-ray machine that the hospital in Buffalo was retiring and donating to the Indian Health Service clinic. He’d finalized the purchase of the Tri-Pacer only a week ago, after leasing it for the last two years. He needed to know the aircraft like he knew the human anatomy. It had taken him four years of medical school, several of residency, and nearly three of practicing medicine to get to that level of expertise. He’d been a licensed pilot for only four years, and he wanted to move on to studying for his instrument rating, as soon as he felt he was an expert on everything about his machine.
The other reason for the flight was to get a bird’s eye view of Highland Park. In mountain parlance, a park was basically a meadow, although usually a large one. In this case, it was an immense treeless expanse, a last gasp of breath before the ebony rocks of Black Tooth jutted toward the sky in dramatic angles and jumbles. He planned to trail ride up to the park that weekend for a campout with his kids and his buddy Henry Sibley.
The timing was right. His family had just concluded their highly stressful testimony in the trial of Barbara Lamkin, Trish’s former basketball coach. The woman had murdered the rival for her affections, Jeannie Renkin, the wife of her lover, the then-sitting District Court Judge in Johnson County, Wyoming, Harold Renkin. Unfortunately, the Flints’ son, Perry, had been the sole witness to Lamkin’s crime, and Lamkin had tried to snuff him out, along with Trish and Patrick’s wife Susanne. A truck wreck on the way to Lamkin’s hideaway, combined with Perry’s heroism, had saved their lives. The trial had been delayed until Lamkin delivered the judge’s son. Johnson County Deputy Ronnie Harcourt and her husband Jeff were fostering the infant boy, and they would be allowed to adopt if Lamkin was convicted. Patrick couldn’t see any scenario under which a jury wouldn’t put Lamkin in jail for life, at a minimum. She was eligible for the death penalty, which had been reinstated the year before, but he didn’t hold out hope that a jury would impose it. For a hang ‘em high Western state, Wyoming was notoriously averse to the death penalty.
The trial wasn’t over yet, but the last Flint to testify had been Patrick the day before, and now he had a three-day weekend away from it and from work. A trail ride and campout on Highland Park would be the second-best thing to climbing Black Tooth itself. He’d have to save that climb for another time. It required technical rock-and-ice climbing skills his teenagers didn’t have. That he didn’t have. To do that, he’d hitch his wagon to someone who’d already made the climb successfully.
Susanne hadn’t even pretended to be disappointed to miss out on the excursion. She did have a good excuse, though. Two in fact. Patrick’s sister Patricia was in town, and Susanne had committed to throwing a party-not-to-be-called-a-baby-shower for Ronnie Harcourt. He didn’t quite get it. The Harcourts’ adoption of little Will wasn’t official yet. He’d always thought it best not to jinx things by counting chickens before they hatched. But Susanne assured him that optimism didn’t hurt and that the Harcourts were in sore need of all-things-baby and a heaping dose of encouragement. Just as long as they didn’t call it a shower. He’d miss his wife, but her absence was for the best. She wasn’t a big fan of horses, and, after their June canoeing trip into the Gros Ventre Wilderness had gone wildly off track, it would be wise to give her some space before he roped her into another mountain adventure.
He glanced at his daughter’s wan face and sour expression. Maybe talking about the weekend would distract her from how she felt. He pointed out her window. “See that park?”
He snuck a quick look over his shoulder, trying for a last look at the ten Sawtooth lakes that stairstepped between the sheer western wall and the monolithic sawtooth ridge on the east side at the peak. The lakes were just a glint in the distance more than a thousand feet above him. But even from that distance, he was stunned to see a crumbling wall of rock, falling in slow motion. He could almost imagine he felt the debris cutting into his face, that he could smell the dust, that he could hear its roar, but of course, he couldn’t.
He shouldn’t have been that surprised to see a rockslide, though. People liked to imagine mountains were stable. Solid as a rock. Not so. From avalanches to rockslides to mud slides, gravity had its impressive way. Even the inception of the mountains themselves was about brutal movement. Volcanos. Earthquakes. Plates of the Earth's crust smashing against each other and buckling up like the hood of a car in a head-on collision. In the case of the Bighorn Mountains, thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks on top of an even older base layer of igneous and metamorphic rocks were uplifted by these tectonic shifts to form the range. The granite in that base was what was now exposed on its crest. And the lakes, U-shaped valleys, and cirques—like the steep-sided hollow he could see at the base of Black Tooth and its adjacent peak, Penrose? They were the remnants of huge, powerful, moving glaciers, long since gone.
The mountains provided a harsh and constant reminder that nature was all powerful and ever mercurial, and Patrick loved it. Maybe I should have been a geologist instead of a doctor.
Trish grunted, and he tore his attention away from the rockslide.
He tried again to lure her into conversation. “Highland Park is at ten-thousand five-hundred feet, at the base of Black Tooth Mountain. That’s where we’re taking the horses.”
“Yeah. Cool. But about that . . .”
Patrick’s chest tightened. He knew where that tone was taking them. “Yes?”
“I was thinking you should make this a guys’ trip. You know, just you, Perry, and Henry.”
“I thought you wanted to spend time with Goldie.” Goldie was her Palomino horse, a beautiful mare who hadn’t gotten much attention since Trish had discovered boys.
“I could still ride her. And if I stayed in town, I could help Mom and Aunt Patricia with Ronnie’s party.”
Not that he was dumb enough to say it to his daughter, but the reason Trish was in the plane today and would be going on the ride that weekend was her mother. With the kids home for the summer, Susanne needed a break from Trish’s mouth and attitude. Perry at thirteen was still sweet and not afraid to show his mother that he loved her. Not so, Trish. In Susanne’s opinion, it was past time for Patrick to take a turn bearing the brunt of their daughter’s teenage ways.
Patrick rubbed his temple. “Nice try. But we’re going to have a great time.”
A gust of wind tipped the wings of the plane. He tightened his grip on the stick and scanned his instrument panel. Patrick left nothing to chance, from his pre-flight check to constantly monitoring the health of the aircraft, the weather, and his surroundings. All was well, so he relaxed and glanced at Trish.
Her bottom lip jutted out like it had been busted. “Marcy’s dad is taking a group of kids out to the lake on his boat on Saturday.”
“And it won’t be the last time he does it.” To cut off further debate, he dipped the left wing. “Look at that. A herd of elk.” Twenty or more of the majestic creatures were loping across a high mountain ridge.
“Dad!” Trish’s voice was a screech. She clutched his arm, which jerked the stick to the right. The plane wobbled in the air. Her screech gave way to a full scream.
He righted the plane with his left foot pedal and gentle left pressure on the stick. “If you don’t like the excitement, don’t be pulling on my arm. It’s attached to the steering.”
“Fine.”
He pushed the stick forward a bit, causing the plane to lose some altitude. The elk sped up. For a few seconds, he followed them with the nose of the plane, watching them flow like a school of fish, parting around a rock outcropping, then rejoining on the other side. Then he leveled out for his descent down the western side of the mountains. No use stressing the animals out. They had enough to worry about with predators on the ground and bow hunting season opening soon.
***
An hour later, give or take, Patrick dropped in for a landing in Dubois. The airstrip was at 7,300 feet elevation, with spectacular views of red rock formations and the rocky spires of the Wind River Range. The Flints had driven through this area the month before on their way to the Gros Ventre Wilderness, and, despite how poorly their canoe trip had gone, Patrick was glad to be back.
He tore his eyes away from the natural wonders and forced himself to focus on the landing.
He keyed his transmitter. “Dubois, this is Tri-Pacer Niner-Seven-Eight-Charlie-Papa, requesting permission to land.”
A few seconds passed, then he heard a staticky reply. “Tri-Pacer Niner-Seven-Eight-Charlie-Papa, this is Dubois. Cleared to land.” The voice read off the altimeter setting. “See you on the ground.”
“Roger that.”
Patrick lined up the plane. When he was parallel with the end of the runway, he cut the throttle all the way back, pushed the stick slightly forward, turned on the carburetor heat, and started his glide. He made a ninety-degree banking turn to the left, recovered, then made another to line the Tri-Pacer up with the runway. Airspeed looking good. He kept his neck loose, checking for other aircraft and birds. When he was fifteen feet off the ground, he applied slow back pressure on the stick to break the glide, until, when the plane was about two feet off the runway, the stick was all the way back. The aircraft settled onto its tricycle wheels, and he moved the stick forward. Slowly, he began to bleed off speed. Perfect.
A few hundred feet ahead, he saw a dark splotch on the asphalt. At first, he thought it was a shadow, but as he drew closer, he could tell it was three dimensional. An animal? He couldn’t choose a course around it until he knew whether it would move, and in what direction. The propeller on the Tri-Pacer’s nose was lethal, of course, but impact with a critter could result in a dangerous broken windshield, or, worse, flip the small aircraft. He stepped on the brakes as hard as he dared, not wanting to send the plane cartwheeling from its own momentum. The Tri-Pacer shuddered and shimmied, and he fought to maintain control. Dear God, don’t let me wreck this thing. It’s not even paid for yet, and I’ve got precious cargo.
Trish had been sleeping, thankfully, but she woke up with a start, her voice panicked. “What’s going on?”
“Hold on,” Patrick said through gritted teeth.
Ahead, the figure loomed closer. It was low to the ground and completely stationary. Had another plane already hit it? A dead bison? Or moose? A small bear, perhaps? What had seemed dark from hundreds of feet away now revealed itself as blue, red, and black. The blue perplexed him. It wasn’t the color of an animal, except for maybe a blue roan horse. Maybe the blue was a tarp or bag? He gauged the distance on either side. There was no room to pass without veering one wheel off the pavement. Too dangerous at this speed. He considered opening the throttle, pulling back on the stick, and hopping over it, but decided not to risk it. He was out of room. There was no longer any reason to focus on whether it was moving. He had to double down on stopping.
Thank God he was piloting a Tri-Pacer. The little plane was the next best thing to a helicopter when it came to short strips. And this strip had suddenly become very, very short. With only feet to spare, the Tri-Pacer jerked to a standstill, nose tilted down. Patrick wiped sweat from his brow and exhaled. He had been so focused on stopping that he had almost forgotten about the figure that had made it necessary. Now he couldn’t see it.
“Dad . . .” Trish’s voice was taut.
Patrick glanced over at her. Her eyes were huge. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“You saw that, right? You saw the man in the runway?”
“The man?”
She nodded. “He looked . . . dead.”
A dead man—on a runway? It was hard to believe. Maybe she thought she saw a man, but it was probably a deer. But he had to check it out. “Stay in the plane.”
Patrick turned off the switch, advanced the throttle to full forward, then closed it. He opened the lightweight door, not waiting for the propeller to stop spinning, something he would not normally ever have done. He climbed out and jumped to the ground, peering through the distortion caused by the blades. He still couldn’t identify the figure. Giving the propeller a wide berth, he ran around his aircraft until he could see the figure in front of it.
And, to his surprise, he saw that Trish was right. It was a man, with an emphasis on “was.” An American Indian. And what was left of him wasn’t a pretty sight.
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