Green Mountain Academy, page 8
Most smaller planes had fixed landing gear, unlike the jets that only dropped it to land. I learned this from watching the aircraft at the Penticton Airport with Dad. When we drove to the south end of town to watch the landings and takeoffs, we sat in the truck and watched the small planes, helicopters and jets fly in over the valley, bucking the strong winds that funneled north and south. We had watched many small planes struggle to keep their wings level as they dropped in altitude over the runway.
Now an awareness of the cold seeped back into my mind. I stomped my feet to get the blood flowing and clapped my hands together. Then I picked my way back over the crisscrossing deadfall to Secret Trail. I had to find out what had happened to the airplane.
Only a couple hundred feet along the path lay another piece of metal about the size of a lawn chair. It was torn along one side, as if by a giant can opener. Some black substance streaked the white paint in long lines.
The cliff wasn’t far now. That’s where our path ended. The boulders below the cliff would be slippery with snow. I might be able to get across them, but it would be even more dangerous than usual in the dark. And I didn’t know what the terrain was like on the other side of them. I’d be marching into an unknown wilderness in the middle of the night, in the middle of the worst snowstorm of the year. To go anywhere else, east or west, would mean leaving the path.
The debris from the plane had fallen more or less in a north–south line. And where I was now was only about a mile east of the road. They could have been trying to line up with it. If, instead of backtracking to Secret Trail, I had kept going on Smoky Creek Trail, then left the trail to cross the creek, I’d eventually have ended up at an embankment I could have climbed up to the road. The plane could have landed there.
Walking more slowly now, I watched for the gap that would signal the cliff edge. I tried the flashlight again, swept it in a broad circle around me. Something glinted in the beam of light. A pair of yellow eyes blinked calmly at me from the broken limb of a dead tree. A great horned owl turned its head away and then back to me, watching with what seemed like patience to see what I would do. Well, what would I do?
His soft feathers fluttered in the wind. He wasn’t afraid of me and I felt the same about him. In fact, I was glad to have some company on this crazy, lonely night. But I wished Danny were here. It always helped to talk ideas out with her—whether to turn back and head for the road, or keep going down to the Sasquatch Caves.
In spite of the cold, I’d begun to sweat under my jacket and sweater, and I knew it was fear. I recognized the tingling, heart-racing feeling, like I had a steadily inflating balloon in my chest that was on the verge of bursting. The owl called out his series of whoos, twice, a gentle warning as I walked on. Then the balloon did burst.
Looming in front of me, right where the cliff edge began, one wing of the airplane was wedged upright, leaning like a slide between two trees. The red and blue stripes stood out distinctly on the top edge. At the same moment, an overwhelming smell of fuel met my nostrils.
A rush of wings beat the air overhead, and the owl’s body, like a cat with wings, soared out of the blur of falling snow. Then I was on the ground.
* * *
I couldn’t have lay there long. I sat up slowly. My flashlight had rolled away, still lit, shining a puddle of yellow light into the snow. The storm still swirled around me, but I felt as if a heavy calm had settled like a thick fog over the forest and the jutting white airplane wing, so out of place between the tall gray trunks and feathery cedar fronds.
I stood and brushed the snow from my pants. My pack had slipped from my shoulders and I hitched it back on, pulling the straps tight. Then I picked up the flashlight and shone it in the direction of the cliff edge.
My feet moved like I was slogging through deep mud. A sharp oily smell like the lamp oil Grandma used at the cabin filled the air. Down below the boulders, the curtain of snow parted and closed, parted and closed, on a scene I never could have imagined. The plane, what was left of it, had snapped in half over a broken tree. One half, the tail, lay across the boulders; the other, the nose, facedown in some young cedars.
I climbed down the rocks carefully. Strewn across the ground were suitcases, two of them burst open with clothes spilling out and dusted with snow. Two others were still closed. A few feet from them, a black hard-shelled guitar case, still in one piece as far as I could tell. At my feet lay a man’s wristwatch with a silver strap. I picked it up. Its face was broken and I dropped it again, a chill scurrying up my spine.
I wanted to run, but I couldn’t run. My heartbeat roared in my ears and I stood rooted, blinking in the dark. Slowly, that noise began to settle and I strained to hear other sounds—voices, movement, anything. Snow tapped the metal of the plane, wind swished, trees creaked. Nothing more.
I had to go closer to the wreck. I had to see if anyone was alive in there. An odor of fresh crushed cedar met my nostrils as I edged closer to the wreckage. Fuel smell again. The plane hung upside down over the broken tree. One side had been ripped open, and as I approached, I could see, through the tangle of branches, the place where the passenger seats should be. One was still there, but the other was gone. The tension in my jaw tightened. To see the pilot and co-pilot’s seats, which were covered with cedar branches, I’d have to get closer.
I climbed onto a rock and parted the branches, then I shone my flashlight inside. The first thing I saw was denim. A stitched seam. I followed the stitching and saw a man’s hand, a wedding ring on one finger.
“Hello!” I called. “Are you all right?”
No answer. No movement. But I knew the answer.
I reached in and found his wrist, cool to the touch. There was no pulse.
“Are you all right?” I called again. “I’m here. I can help you.”
But it was quiet. I knew what it meant. The pilot was dead. It didn’t feel real. I felt strangely numb.
“The pilot is dead,” I said out loud. Where was the shock, the tears? I didn’t feel anything. It was just a fact I had to deal with. There was no way to see any more of the man, because the wreckage blocked my view. But I could see that where a seat would have been, beside him, there was no seat anymore. Where had it gone? Where were the two other passengers? The radio report had said there were three people on board. There must be more wreckage somewhere, and if I could find it, maybe I’d find the other passengers.
In spite of the raging storm, the scene around me felt eerily still. I knew if I was going to find anyone, it had better be soon. But still I stood there, listening, waiting for something to happen. I should have tried harder to convince Danny to come with me. Why hadn’t I? Just because she hurt my feelings. Danny was the only person who never thought my ideas were crazy. But this time I hadn’t convinced her. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t like her.
I thought of all the sleeping girls in front of the fire. I’d broken pretty much every rule in the book coming out here. No one knew where I was. Should I go back? But since I’d come this far, there was no point turning back. If I did that, the passengers would probably be dead by the time anyone could get back to them. If they weren’t already.
Reluctantly, I beamed my flashlight around the area, half afraid of what I might see. As I did, I strained my ears for any sound. And then I did think I could hear something—a low singsong sound below the roar of the wind. As sure as I was that I’d heard something, the next moment I was just as sure there was nothing. I felt like I was in a dream, not quite certain what was real anymore: an airplane in a cedar tree, a guitar case in the snow, the haunting voices of wind whispering around rocks, scolding from branches, whistling from the cliff.
And then, there it was again—two notes, and I was sure this time that it was not the wind or my imagination. But was it human? Animal? It sounded like—it sounded like what it could not possibly be. I stomped my feet to get my blood moving and shook my head clear. It was not Mom calling my name. Mom lay in a hospital bed in Vancouver, four hundred kilometers away. She had been there for months—six months, eleven days to be exact.
The call came again, and this time I recognized it as human. Someone was calling out. A surge of adrenaline mobilized me.
“I hear you!” I shouted. “Where are you?”
The rocks were slippery as I scrambled over them in what I thought was the direction of the voice. The flashlight was not really helping. When I shone it in front of me, the wind drove the snow into a spinning galaxy of flakes that almost blinded me. But whoever was out there would see the light and come toward it. That’s what mattered. I struggled to avoid tripping. One of my feet crammed into a crack between rocks and my ankle twisted and sent me sideways. My right hand flew out and braced my fall against the slippery rocks. Somehow I managed to keep a grip on the flashlight in my left hand. I sat on the cold rocks.
“Well, that was stupid,” I said out loud. My ankle burned from the twist and my foot was still wedged in the crevice. I wriggled it back and forth, but it wouldn’t come out.
“Fran—cie!” the voice came on the wind.
No. It wasn’t that. There was no one out here who knew my name. I felt tears welling up as I fought to free my foot.
I threw the beam of light out into the night.
“I’m here!” I called back.
Then I realized what I needed to do. I took off my gloves and pried at the laces of my left boot. Ice and snow encrusted them and it was hard to work them loose. Also, as soon as I’d stopped moving, I felt the cold creep deeper into my bones. My fingers moved stiffly, clumsily, but finally I managed to untie my boot. My foot was in an awkward position and I had to half-stand. Then I pulled my foot free of the boot. Now the challenge was to keep it out of the snow. If my feet got wet, there was a real danger of hypothermia. I had to put the flashlight down.
Leaving it turned on, I laid it on a flattish part of a rock. Then I pulled my left leg close against my right and bent down in a one-legged runner’s lunge, both hands on the rocks to brace myself. Balancing carefully, I moved one hand to pull on the boot. It wouldn’t budge. I tucked my foot under my hips, and kneeling, pushed against the rock while tugging on the boot. But it was really stuck. No amount of wrenching and shaking could dislodge it. What would I do if I really couldn’t get it out? I couldn’t walk through the snowy forest with one boot on.
The voice had stopped.
“Hello? Hello? I’m still here. Hello!” I shouted into the whirling snow.
I sat back on the rocks and thought about my situation. I could try to find a branch to jam between the rocks and lever one loose. But how long had these rocks been here? It wasn’t likely I’d be able to make them budge. I could wrap something around my foot to use as a makeshift boot. But what? I needed all the clothes I was wearing.
Where was the voice now? Had I imagined it? Maybe it had been a bird or some other animal. I’d been so sure. But sounds can play tricks on you, especially at night. Grandpa had a fridge at his house that made a knock like someone was at the door, which I never noticed in the daytime, but only in the middle of the night, when Grandpa had gone to bed and the house fell dark and quiet.
I gave another tug at the boot. Nothing. I was wasting time. This boot was not going to move. I had to try something else. Then it occurred to me that if I had heard a human, he or she could have fallen or lost sight of my light. He or she could be wandering deeper into the woods, and if I didn’t do something soon, I might never find them.
I had an idea. Although the boot was twisted, I was able to get my hand far enough into it to grab hold of the insole and pull it out. Then I took out the laces. With my flashlight turned toward my foot, I held the insole against it, then took Dad’s Canada Post toque off and slipped it over my foot. I wrapped the lace around my ankle twice and knotted it. Then I cinched my hood tighter and got to my feet.
This was only temporary. I had to make my way carefully back to the plane wreck. Luckily, I hadn’t got far away from it yet. I picked my way along, paying attention to the pressure on my ankle. It throbbed a little, but I didn’t think it was broken. Every once in a while I shone the flashlight beam out to where I’d heard the voice and called out, “Hello! I’m here!” But no answer came back.
The weird picture of the airplane in the cedar tree shocked me again with a sense of impossibility as I neared it. It wasn’t real, snow sifting in the space where the passenger seat had been, the pilot upside down in the cockpit. But it was real and I couldn’t change it. I could only move step by step forward from right now. I remembered something Grandma used to say: “Give up all hope of a better past.” It was one of her favorite sayings. I never understood it. Funny I remembered it now.
In my better past, Danny would have been the old Danny, hearing my idea to go on a search for the missing airplane with a twinkle in her eyes. She would have added her plans. She’d have helped me get my boot unstuck and she’d have let me use her shoulder as a crutch.
I swept the light over the scene. Men’s clothes spilled from the burst suitcases—jeans, some T-shirts and dress shirts. There was nothing there that I could use. The two others, one red, one black, lay on the ground undamaged, as if someone had left them to come back for later. I chose the red one. I crouched beside it.
This seemed wrong. I was about to go through someone else’s suitcase, someone who’d been a victim in a plane crash, who could be dead for all I knew. The case wasn’t big but it was packed to its limit and I had to put my weight on it to get the zipper open. The top sprang up when it opened. A scent of clean clothes and perfume wafted out. A hair dryer lay on top. But I only had to move that aside to find what I was hoping I’d find, tucked into one side: a pair of running shoes. I pulled them out—lime green, too big for me, but better than nothing. In one of the pockets, I found two pairs of socks. I took the toque off my foot and put both of one pair on my left foot and stuffed one of the other pair into the toe of the left shoe.
A crawly feeling crept over me. Was I putting on the shoe of a dead woman? I shoved everything back in, including the right shoe, and zipped the case closed with a shudder. I shook the snow out of my toque and put it back on. And I stuffed the boot lace into my pocket in case I found a use for it later.
This time, I’d take it more cautiously. I couldn’t afford to make another mistake. Easy to say, but in a boulder-strewn wilderness in the dark, in a snowstorm, maybe I should have expected what happened next.
chapter eleven
Pointless, I thought. I was heading farther away from the school, farther from safety and rescue if I needed it, and I’d heard and seen no sign of any passenger for nearly twenty minutes. Yet even as snow pellets pummeled my face and clothes, and trees creaked and groaned in the wind, the beauty of the night filled me. I was glad to be alive, glad to be out here taking in gulps of fresh, cold air.
Blood coursed through my veins, muscles pumped. I was here in this universe of hidden stars and spinning planets, an animal, surviving. I stopped to look up into the dizzying sky.
And then I heard the call again, nearer this time. I called back, flashed the light three times, then crouched down and scurried crab-like over the rocks as carefully as I could. What was it we learned in first aid? We’d learned to meet a victim with a little warning: “Hi, my name is Francie. I know first aid. Can I help you?” But that would sound too weird, coming out of the blue in this wild place.
I tried it out: “Hi, my name is Francie. Can I help you?”
That sounded like a server at a restaurant.
“Can I help you?”
No, it had to be confident.
“I can help you. I know first aid.”
The call came again. I could tell it was a woman’s voice, and it sounded like she was calling John-y. Suddenly her voice was right in front of me. I stood and cast the light in a wide arc. Maybe ten feet away stood a woman in a red leather jacket, high-heeled boots and jeans, her hair an Afro halo, rimmed with frost.
“John-Lee?” she said.
“No, I’m Francie. I’m…I’m…I came looking for you. I heard about—” I took two steps forward and felt my right foot slide. It just kept going. The flashlight flew out of my hand as I tried to grab at something. My fingers met wet cold rock and then I was falling through space.
* * *
The taste of dirt was in my mouth. Around me, cold and dark. But the wind sounded far away, moaning and scrabbling at something. Or was that an animal? Where was I? I sat up. I was on the ground, that much I could tell.
My flashlight was gone, but I still had my backpack on. In fact, I’d landed on it. Lucky. The woman had been coming toward me in the snow, and then this darkness. I shrugged off my pack and dug around in the front pocket. My fingers closed around one of the pine cones dipped in wax. I pulled it out and then a packet of matches. I struck one. In the flare I saw I was in a cave. I looked up. I had fallen down a crack and into one of the Sasquatch Caves formed by the big boulders piled here.
I dropped the match just before the flame reached my fingers. My shoulder ached a bit where I assumed I’d fallen on it, but other than that it didn’t seem that the fall had harmed me. As my eyes adjusted, I could see a patch that wasn’t so dark—the opening. I stood up and stretched my arms toward it. It was about four feet above me, but I couldn’t see how to reach it.
With another lit match, I looked for a spot to place the wax pine cone. Partway up the slick rockface was a little indent. I set the pine cone there, then touched a flame to it. It caught and whooshed to life, throwing some light around the cave. One thing I could tell right away was that there was no way I could climb back up to the crack I’d fallen through. The walls were completely vertical and slick with trickling, ice-crusted water. Also, the crevice was over my head, in the middle of the cave and not close to the walls.
