Drop City

till it was brighter than it had been all day. You could see everything against the snow, clearings, bogs, even a line of animal tracks. Joe banked and came in lower still, no more than three hundred feet above the ground, his eyes trained on the shapes and shadows there as if he was looking for something.
    “Hey, Joe,” Ronnie shouted. “Hey, man, what's up? Aren't we going home?”
    Joe rotated the heavy ball of his head to give him a look, then turned back to the window. “Hand me the rifle, will you?” he said.
    Despite himself, despite the cold and the misery and his essential _needs,__ Pan found himself smiling. “You going to tag a couple wolves?”
    The engine pulled them through the night, past the swoop of the trees and the leaping hills and falling declivities. “Check the bolt on that thing for me,” Joe shouted.
    _No complaints,__ Ronnie was thinking. He was thinking, _All right, why not?__ The wolves were there, money on the hoof, or the paw, actually, greenback dollars gifted up by nature, as Joe put it. They'd been out three days ago, on the way back from Fairbanks with the booze--they'd meant to fly directly up to Ambler but Joe saw wolf sign below and got distracted. It was a kill, a moose laid out in the snow in a Rorschach blot of blood-reddened loops and spiraling paw prints. The wolves were on it, six or seven of them, soapstone gray quickening to black, their eyes feasting, heads twisted round to assess this ratcheting threat from the sky, and then suddenly they were running and Joe buzzed them and banked to come at them again. Once he'd leveled the plane and angled in behind the straining dark forms below, he shouted, “Take the yoke,” and Pan held them steady as he hung out the window and took aim.
    The snow leapt where he missed, white blooms flowering in a bed of shadow, and Pan could see it all though he was concentrating everything he had on keeping them level. _Crack! Crack! Crack!__ The wolves flowed like water. A long minute, and they fell away beneath them till Joe took the controls, came round again and again had Pan take the yoke. This time, when he leaned out, sighted through the scope and fired, one of the dark streaks suddenly compressed as if it had been ground down by an iron heel, and it was a streak no longer, but a wolf, writhing. They chased on after the pack and shot a second one a mile away, then circled back and found a place to land. The snow was knee-deep. The first wolf's spine had been broken. It lay there in the snow, staring up at them in incomprehension, bred and whelped in hidden places, fed on moose, on rabbit and vole and caribou, helpless now, and staring. “Go ahead,” Joe said, “but don't mark the fur. Aim for the eye.”
    Now Pan strained to see what Joe had picked out below even as he lifted the rifle out of the back, bought new out of the display case at Big Ray's Sporting Goods in Fairbanks with Eskimo dollars--a .375 Holland & Holland with a 4X Weaver scope--pulled back the bolt and handed it to him. There were tracks in the snow below them, he saw that now, a beaten trail that might have been made by a full-on congress of wolves, and it looped in and out of the clumps of trees, disappeared for whole seconds at a time and then reappeared heading south along the banks of the river. The moon had never been brighter, never in all Pan's experience, and he'd seen it hanging in the sky too many times to count, in the back alleys behind the clubs, through the windshield of his car, big and luminous and enhanced by the full range of the pharmacopoeia that lit his perceiving eyes. Tonight, though, tonight it ran back at them, everything silvered with it, Joe's parka, his face, the hands on the controls, but where were the wolves?
    And then suddenly, out from under the trees, there they were, a pack running in formation, and Joe was hollering “Take the yoke, take it!” The air inside the cockpit went from frigid to terminal as Joe pushed open the window and the flash-frozen breeze hit them. Pan had the yoke, the plane in a bank left, Joe aiming, but wait--these weren't wolves, were they? No, no, they weren't--they were dogs, and that was a sled, and two figures separating themselves from the flowing script of the page below, people, men, and what was Joe thinking, had he gone blind or what? “Joe!” Ronnie shouted. “Joe, those aren't wolves!”
    No matter. Because Ronnie was holding the plane in a steep bank and Joe was firing, once, twice,