Hig’s flight to Grand Junction breaks the routine of the airport perimeter: a transmission from the city’s tower draws him away from the defended place he shares with Bangley and into danger. The journey’s first decisive turn comes before he reaches his destination, when an armed man fires at The Beast and Hig discovers that, beneath the mission’s uncertainty, he wants most urgently to be alive.

Transmission and Departure

The departure begins with Bangley asking whether Hig is thinking about another fishing vacation. Hig answers that he is flying; when Bangley asks where, he names Grand Junction and explains that a transmission came from there a little while earlier. The report gives Hig a reason to leave the airport’s familiar defenses, but the exchange offers no assurance about what awaits him. Bangley’s hands stop working: he releases his pipe, sets down his file, and looks at Hig from beneath the gun rack Hig had built for him. Even this moment of attention is framed by Bangley’s habit of keeping abundant firepower within reach.

Hig takes The Beast across the ramp, threading past wrecked and deteriorating airplanes, turns across the taxiway, and lifts off from the middle of the strip. Bangley is pushing into the doorway of his workshop as the plane departs, but does not look up. In the empty right seat, Hig sees Bangley’s egg basket and Jasper’s bird-hunting quilt, crumpled against the door. The quilt’s repeated image of a hunter aiming at a rising pheasant holds a frozen promise of the shot that never misses and the dog that never dies; beside it, the absent living companion is unmistakable. Hig remembers Jasper as a better copilot than most men, making the flight’s solitude present from its first moments.

The Canyon Gunfire

During the flight, Hig sees a tall, lanky woman standing outside a house-like structure, shielding her face and yelling. An old man with a gun emerges and raises it toward the plane. Hig does not hear the shot’s concussion, but birdshot tears the aluminum and air begins hissing from The Beast. A burst of pain and heat spreads across the left side of his face; shattered glass scatters into his collar, and the cockpit window is reduced to a mosaic still clinging to its frame.

Hig grips the yoke, pulls into a hard climb, and rolls the right wing back over the canyon rim, skimming above low junipers before the people disappear from view. The cockpit roof is peppered with holes, though the shot has not penetrated the metal. Touching his bloody face, he finds four splinters of glass and no vital injury; the engine still purrs and the controls remain tight. The danger makes the purpose of the journey suddenly clear to him: beyond whatever he had expected to find, he had come to feel glad to be alive. He begins to laugh at the narrowness of the escape.

Emergency Landing and Decision to Continue

With the aircraft still airborne, Hig circles once more to make his approach, raises the flap bar halfway, lowers the nose, and uses a hard rudder slip to drift sideways into a field. The bush landing is a second test of whether The Beast will hold together. He cuts the engine back to idle, straightens the plane just before touchdown, and sets the left wing low into the wind. The left landing gear strikes brush; gusts threaten to push the nose into a ditch, and the right main wheel hits a mound between old wheel tracks, jerking the plane left toward a rut. Sage scrapes and thumps against the aircraft as Hig fights to keep it straight. A clear stretch of low rocks and chewed-down grass lets him stop just short of the piñons without feeling anything break.

After the landing, Hig registers the damage in a telling order: the beautiful paint job is scored with stick marks, and the whole maneuver was too close. He judges the flight reckless, especially because the smoke bomb had been necessary to avoid crashing. The fuel gauge makes the danger concrete: The Beast has only a little more than twelve gallons, less than an hour’s flying time, and the two jugs together hold less than an hour as well. That is nowhere near enough to return. Yet Hig calculates that Grand Junction may still be reachable if he can take off as successfully as he landed. Rather than abandon the destination, he turns the limited fuel into a narrower, more immediate problem: getting the plane ready for another departure.

Before leaving the aircraft, Hig drives in three stakes and ties it down facing the direction of takeoff. He puts two of Bangley’s Eggs of Death in his jacket pockets, slings the AR over his shoulder, and climbs over the wing on the strut to pour the fuel from the jugs into the wing tanks. He also takes the key, deliberately noting that it is in his right jeans pocket in case he later has to move in a hurry. The sequence changes the flight from an impulsive escape into a hazardous onward attempt: wounded and short on fuel, Hig secures the plane, arms himself, refuels it, and keeps Grand Junction as his objective.

Narrative Function and Unresolved Destination

The flight turns an uncertain radio report into a chain of immediate, physical tests, but this episode ends before Hig reaches Grand Junction. Its movement is therefore not a completed journey so much as a recalibration: the departure begins with an outside signal, while the gunfire strips away any abstraction about the cost of answering it. Hig’s recognition of his own desire to be alive does not make him retreat; after confronting the fuel shortage and securing the aircraft, he prepares to continue. The ending holds these impulses together—newly sharpened awareness of mortal danger and a still-active purpose—leaving the city’s promise unresolved.