“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Liam said, his head still between his knees. “Where are we?”

“Bulge. The village across the river. Their front street.”

“Oh.” He peered around, and now that the terror had cleared from his eyes he saw the three little houses, shacks, really, clustered at one end of the airstrip. “Where is everybody?”

Wy let her head fall back and closed her eyes against the glare of the moon. “Nobody lives here during the winter.”

“Yeah? Summer cottages.”

“One room, river view.”

He turned his head, still keeping it low. “You sound almost cheerful.” She looked it, too, as near as he could make out her expression in the moonlight.

“I am,” she said, and laughed out loud and opened her eyes.

He sat up with caution. “What’s so damn funny?”

She laughed again, a joyous sound. “I didn’t know it was coming!”

“What?”

“I didn’t know anybody was going to shoot at us!”

He stared at her. “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t, either, which goes without saying, as I’d much rather shoot it out on the ground, although I’d rather never shoot it out at all. What the hell are you talking about?”

“I didn’t know anybody was going to shoot at us, and I didn’t know we’d have to make an emergency landing! I didn’t know anything about it! I didn’t hear any voices, or feel any feelings! I didn’t have any visions!”

“Wy, honey,” Liam said, “you’ve got a first-aid kit in the plane, don’t you? Is there any, well, you know, Valium in it?”

“I’m fine, Liam,” she said, and got up to do a neat dance step, of necessity shuffling a bit because of the snow, but still… “Listen,” she said, coming to sit back next to him. She seized his hands in both of hers and kissed him soundly, a loud smack that echoed off the sides of the plane and back at them, and made her laugh again.

“Wy-”

“Moses came to see me last night,” she said.

“Wy, let me get the first-aid kit. You’ve got some whiskey in it, don’t you? I think you could use a drink, and I know I could.”

He tried to stand up and she wouldn’t let him. “Wait a minute, Liam. I know I sound crazy, but listen. Moses came to see me last night, and he told me he was my grandfather.”

“Oh.” All that meant to Liam was that the little martinet was going to be his grandfather-in-law. He could only imagine how much Moses was going to be beat up on him now. There were probably one hundred additional movements in tai chi that Moses had been saving up to torture him with, and he’d have to learn them all. “Maybe I don’t want to marry you after all.”

She laughed again, a clear, full-throated sound that rang down the airstrip like a bell. “He’s a shaman.”

“I’ve noticed,” Liam said dryly.

“No, no, listen.” She shook his hands. “Listen, Liam. I’m his granddaughter, and he hears voices.”

“Wy, I don’t-”

“He told me I was going to hear them, too.”

“-think- What? What do you mean?”

“I mean just what you think I mean. He told me that hearing the voices is hereditary in our family, that sometimes it takes a while for them to kick in. He told me the reason I made us come to the fish camp last month is because I knew Gheen was coming and that Tim was in danger.”

He looked at her and remembered how determined, how in fact implacable she had been to fly into the teeth of thirty-five-knot winds, blowing snow and fog and the year’s first winter storm. She was going to go; nothing anyone could say or do short of busting up the plane with a crowbar was going to stop her. He had been angry with her, and terrified, because he knew he’d have to go with her. “Did you?”

She rounded on him. “Of course not! I told Moses last night that all I did was follow the trail of dead bodies that crazy bastard left. It was pointing right toward Old Man Creek. It didn’t take any voices to see that; it was right there on the map!”

She looked as fierce as she sounded; there was plenty of moonlight to show him that. “That’s why you were nervous about the flights,” he said.

“What flights?”

“The one to the glacier this morning and the one to Anchorage tonight. You were looking for advice from the voices if you should fly or not.”

“Voices,” she said with scorn. “Imagine. I’m a pilot, Liam. I’m not a shaman. Besides, a shaman is a man. All the shamans I’ve known are men.”

“How many have you known?”

“That’s not the point. Okay, one, all right, Moses! But I’ve never read about a woman shaman, or heard about one, and besides, I don’t believe in any of that stuff anyway. He’s my friend, and my tai chi teacher, and it turns out he happens to be my grandfather, too.” She made a visible effort to calm down. “He’s also a drunk, and he was drunk on his ass last night. He probably didn’t have a clue what he was saying.”

He always had before. Liam kept that thought to himself.

“And besides,” Wy added, “if any voices were going to kick in they would have kicked in before this flight. They would at the very least have kicked in before we left Anchorage. I haven’t got any; I don’t care whose granddaughter I am.”

Suddenly, right over their heads, a raven cawed loudly. They both jumped. Wy leapt to her feet and shouted, “Yeah, your mother, you little black bastard!”

She marched off.

Liam stood up and brushed at the seat of his pants, searching out the cawer in the tree above. He’d been there the month before, or someone very like him, and had followed them down the river in the skiff. They would have missed the mouth of Old Man Creek if it hadn’t been for the raven.

Although it wasn’t necessarily a he. It was impossible to tell a male raven from a female raven from a distance. Liam had been making it his business to read up on ravens. As a practicing law-enforcement professional, he preferred his science straight, unencumbered by myth or legend, but it was hard to get away from either in this country. He read Bernd Heinrich and Richard K. Nelson, and he learned that Alaska Natives regarded the raven as a trickster, not a helper. You had to watch Raven or he’d steal you blind, food, home, woman, children, the sun, the moon and the stars, for that matter.

All Liam knew was that something big and black and winged had come between him and disaster three times in the last six months, and he was grateful. There was a series of soft croaks from a branch above him. He thought he caught a blue-black gleam of raven wing, a glimpse of a beady eye.

He also thought he might be going a little insane. Disney-ham was finally getting to him. He followed Wy to the plane.

She had the toolbox out of the plane and was rooting through it. She stood up as he approached, hacksaw in hand. “What are you doing with that?”

She got a plastic crate out of the back of the plane and went to the front, upended it, and climbed on top.

“Wy?”

She put one hand on the prop and rested the hacksaw on the end, to just before the bullet nonhole.

“Wy!”

She started to saw. She might even have been whistling.

“Wy!”