In the late summer of 1953, a bush pilot named Roric Howerin was flying a return leg from a mining claim above Canwell, coming south along the eastern flank of the Alaska Range. He was 47 years old, flying a used Norseman, and had been working the territory for seven years without incident.
At roughly 9,000 feet, out at the edge of his vision above the top of Denali, something moved. He did not turn his head. He kept his eyes forward, watched his instruments, and landed at Talkeetna in the ordinary way. Under remarks on his flight log, he wrote nothing.
That night, he could not eat. He sat on the edge of his bunk with a plate of moose stew going cold in his hand, trying to put a name on what he had seen. He had registered only a shape, moving in a slow, deliberate circle above the peak. It had not been weather. It had been something in motion.
He convinced himself it was a trick of the eye. Snow blindness, fatigue, an old cataract catching the sun. He flew for two more weeks and saw nothing.
Then a passenger asked a strange question. A school teacher named Varity Ostmark was flying with him to a homestead north of Canwell. She had been looking out the window and went quiet. She asked if the top of the mountain looked right to her. She said it looked like the top of the mountain was farther away than the bottom, like the mountain went up into a place that was not exactly the same as the rest of the sky.
He told her it was altitude playing tricks. She agreed. He did not think about the exchange for another six weeks.
In the third week of August, he was flying a doctor named Ellsworth Riddenauer up to a settlement called Kantishna on the north side of the range. It was clear weather, midday. The doctor was watching the mountain and said it did not look like a mountain to him. It looked like the top of something, with the rest of it underneath.
Howerin was watching the same thing. Above the peak, in a sky with no cloud in it, something was turning. It was not a bird. It was not a plane. It was longer than it should have been, thinner, and it was moving in a slow, level circle. The circle was too smooth. There was no correction for wind. It was riding a track that did not exist in the air he knew.
The doctor did not see it. But the cabin got cold for about ten seconds, like passing through the shadow of something. He landed at Kantishna, unloaded the medicine, drank coffee, and flew home. That night, for the first time in his adult life, he locked the door of his cabin.
The next thing that happened was smaller and worse. He was flying a mail run down to McGrath west of the range. About twenty miles northwest of the peak, his radio quit. Not a fade, not a hiss. Full silence.
After about forty seconds, the radio came back on. What came out of it was his own voice. He had called in his fuel state to a relay operator at Talkeetna an hour earlier. The radio played that same call back to him, word for word. He said hello into the mic. He asked if it was a relay. The recording kept playing. It played the whole call through, then started again from the beginning. He listened to himself say the same thing three times. Then the radio went dead again, and a few minutes later clicked back into normal traffic.
That night, he went to a pilot’s bar at the end of the strip. He sat down next to an old man named Wendell Sigfusen, who had been flying the range since 1932. He asked quietly if anyone had ever told him they saw something over Denali.
Sigfusen looked at him for a long time. Then he said, “Meet me here tomorrow when the sun’s low.” He got up and walked out of his own bar.
The next evening, Sigfusen brought a canvas satchel. Inside was a stack of paper the color of old butter. He said there had been pilots flying the Alaska range since before the first war, and they had built up a body of stories that never got written down anywhere a person could find them. The stories always came from men who had been over the north side of the massif at odd hours, late summer mostly. The details were different. But there was one thing in all of them. There was a shape in the sky above the mountain. It circled.
Sigfusen had seen it himself once in 1941. He had done what Howerin had done. He had not turned his head. He had flown on.
He opened the satchel. Inside were handwritten copies of loss reports from a time when losses in the territory were not always reported to anyone that mattered. He read out a list.
Ozas Vansant, 1951, mail run out of Talkeetna. No wreckage found. A pilot named Delwin, 1949, solo run north side of the massif. No wreckage. An Army Air Forces flight in the last month of the war, two crew north of the peak. No wreckage. A commercial pilot from Anchorage named Janette Asenov, 1938, routine cargo run. No wreckage.
The oldest entry was from 1923, a pilot named Co Pepper Ays, an ex-mail flyer from California who had lasted eleven months in the territory.
There was one entry Sigfusen read out twice. A man named Bartholomew Renfruit had been carrying a load of tinned goods and a single passenger in the late summer of 1934. The passenger was a mining engineer from Nome named Ephraim Kolkahon. Before he got on the plane, he had written a letter to his wife. In the letter, he said he did not like the run they were about to make. He had a bad feeling about it. He asked that if she did not hear from him within two days, she should not, under any circumstances, ask the territory to send anyone up the north side to look for him.
She received the letter. She waited two days. She heard nothing. She did what her husband asked. The plane was never found.
Sigfusen said what struck him about that one was not the disappearance. Disappearances in that country were not rare. What struck him was that Ephraim Kolkahon had already known before he ever got on the airplane.
There was also the case of Corwin Thrrell. Thrrell was 71 years old and lived alone in a one-room cabin above Canwell. He kept a journal. Sigfusen had seen it once in the winter of 1948. The pages described a shape that Thrrell and his partner had watched turning above the peak of the mountain over the course of a summer. They watched it for whole afternoons from a distance of many miles.
In the last week of that summer, Thrrell’s partner, a young man from Ohio whose name in the journal was only ever given as Jay, said he thought he would like to walk closer to the mountain and see what the shape was. Thrrell told him not to. The next morning, Jay was gone. His pack was gone. His rifle was gone. His prospecting hammer was still on the table. A man in that country did not leave his hammer behind for any reason.
Thrrell never saw his partner again. He also never saw the shape above the mountain again. It had turned there all summer, and after the morning Jay walked out of the shack, it was gone from the sky. Thrrell spent the rest of his life waiting to see it come back.
Sigfusen said every one of the cases had been over the north side of the range. Every one had gone in good weather. Every one was still up there.
Howerin asked what the shape was. Sigfusen said he didn’t know. He said in the oldest stories, the ones from the men who trapped and mined that country before there were airplanes, there had been talk of a thing above the peak. A thing that had lived up there before anyone was there to see it, that regarded the mountain as its own, and that once in a while took a person who had gone up too near it.
Howerin did not fly for four days. He sat in his cabin and cleaned his rifle. But a bush pilot who does not fly does not eat. On the fifth day, he took a job.
The job was a supply run to a camp of geologists working the north side of the range. He took the Norseman up in the early afternoon. He flew it the way he always flew it until he came around to the north face.
The shape was already there. It was not circling. That was the first thing that was different. The circle had stopped. The shape was hanging in the sky above the peak, still, oriented. It was pointed at him.
The temperature in the cockpit dropped. Not a little. A steady, real drop. He could see his breath. The radio filled with a low sound underneath the normal band. Not static, not a voice. Something more like the sound a large room makes when it is very old and empty and someone very far away has just stopped speaking in it.
The shape did not move toward him. But he could feel that it was aware of him. Not looking at him the way a person looks. Something more like the way a house you shouldn’t be in becomes aware that you are in it.
He held his line. He held his instruments. He watched his fuel. He made himself not look up. He was past it in a minute and a half.
When he was clear of the peak, the cold went out of the cockpit as quickly as it had come. The sound in the radio faded. His hands on the yoke hurt like a man’s hands hurt when he has been holding a stove poker.
He landed at the geologist camp. He unloaded the crates and the mail sack and the coffee. He drank a cup of coffee sitting on an empty crate, watching the mountain in the distance. He could not tell from that angle whether there was still anything above the peak.
He flew back to Talkeetna the long way, around the west end of the range. He added an hour to his flight and burned fuel he could not really afford.
That night, he wrote a letter to himself. He wrote down everything that had happened, from the first shape at the edge of his sight in July, through Sigfusen and the satchel and the pilots on the list, through the radio and the cold and the sound. He put dates, weather, altitudes. He wrote it the way he wrote a flight log.
When he was done, he folded the pages and put them in a tin box with his mother’s rosary and his discharge papers. He put the box under a floorboard in the cabin. He did not look at it again for 26 years.
He kept flying. Through the winter of 1953 into 1954, straight through statehood in 1959, and on into the mid-1960s before he finally hung it up and moved down to a small place outside Palmer.
There is one more thing from that winter. In the middle of February 1954, six months after the flight to the geologists, he was flying a return leg in the deep dark of an Alaska winter afternoon. He had gone around the west end of the range, the way he now always went. He was well clear of the mountain.
The cabin got cold anyway. Not the flight cold. He knew all the shapes of cold that airplane had. This was the other cold. Over the course of perhaps forty seconds, he watched the thermometer go down. His breath began to show.
The radio stayed on. Chatter came and went. But underneath the ordinary sound of the ordinary night traffic, so quiet he could only pick it out because he now knew to listen for it, there was that other sound. The sound of a large old room very far away, in which someone had just stopped speaking.
He did not look up. He held his line. He held his altitude, which was under 10,000 feet, well below where the shape had ever been. He flew for perhaps three minutes from the moment the cold started to the moment it left.
In those three minutes, he thought about his mother and the lamp she lit every evening in the mining camp. He thought about the friend he had watched go down through the monsoon in China. He thought that the mountain was not in fact only a mountain, and that what turned above it did not have to be above it in order to notice him.
He landed at Talkeetna. He tied the Norseman down. He walked into the little office by the strip and stood in the light of the electric bulb. His hands were shaking. He did not want them to stop, because as long as they were shaking, he had something to look at that was ordinary.
He never told anyone about that flight until he told me on the second afternoon of the interviews. He said he thought whatever it was, once it had noticed a person, was not particularly bound to the mountain. The mountain was where it lived, if lived was a word for what it did. But the noticing traveled.
He said he had come to think of it as being like a landlord who had noted your face at the door of the building, but who was not at present coming after you. You were on the list of faces the landlord knew. You were not being pursued. You were only someone the landlord could find if the landlord ever wanted to.
He said that was the arrangement. Once he had understood the arrangement, he could keep flying.
He flew mail. He flew doctors. He flew mining crews. He never went over the north side of Denali again. Not once. He would add an hour to a flight to go around. He would burn extra fuel. But he never once put the Norseman over that face again.
He said once or twice a season all through those years, some other pilot he knew would go quiet in the pilot’s bar. Howerin would know from the way that pilot went quiet that they had seen it too. None of them ever said the words out loud. They would just put down whatever they were drinking and look at the wall for a while. After a certain length of time, they would pick their drink back up again. That was the whole conversation.
Howerin said the worst thing was not the shape. He was very clear about this. The worst thing was the sound in the radio. Not because it was loud. Because it was not.
He said in all the years since, there had been perhaps eleven or twelve times when he had heard that sound again in some ordinary moment. Once in a hotel in Portland at the end of a hallway. Once in a friend’s kitchen in Boise. Once in the cab of a truck at a rest stop between Great Falls and Havre at 4 in the morning with the radio off and the engine off. Once in a public library in Salem, Oregon, on a Wednesday afternoon in the spring of 1972, when he had come across the name of one of the pilots on Sigfusen’s list in an ordinary history book. Once in a diner in Bellingham, Washington in the middle of the day, with the sun coming in through the front glass and the smell of frying onions everywhere.
Every time, the sound was the same. A low, hollow presence underneath the ordinary noise of the world. Not a hum, not a hiss. The sound of a very large room very far away in which something has just stopped speaking.
And every time, for a few seconds, he would know without turning his head that he was being regarded.
He said he had learned to keep his eyes forward. He said a person faced with a thing like that had two choices. He could turn around and try to see it, in which case he was probably going to be told that his story was going to end. Or he could not turn around and go on with the rest of his life, and let the thing look at him from wherever it was looking until it was done looking.
He said he had made the second choice every time. He said he had made it out of a certain kind of cowardice, which he did not defend, and which he thought had been the only reason he was at 79 years old still sitting there telling the story at all.
I asked him whether he thought the shape had followed him. He thought about it for a long time. He said no. He said he thought it had never left the mountain. It was up there right now, he said, in the same slow circle above the peak, and it had been up there since before there were any of us.
He said what he had brought back with him was not the shape. What he had brought back was an awareness of it. He said the sound in the radio was the sound of being remembered by it. That was his word. Remembered.
He said once you had come near enough to it for it to notice you, you stayed noticed. Not watched, not followed, just remembered. Like a name someone had written down in a book they did not open very often, but had also never thrown away.
I asked him what he thought would happen when he died. He said he didn’t know, but he had a guess. He said he thought when the moment came for him, wherever he was, the sound would come back one last time. Not a radio, just the sound itself. And he thought he would recognize it, and he thought he would understand then what it had wanted with him all these years.
Which was, he said, nothing. He said he did not think it had ever wanted anything from him. He said of all the pilots on Sigfusen’s list, only some of them had ever been wanted. The rest, most of them, had simply gotten too close to a country that had not been paying attention to them yet, and had then, in the moment of getting close enough, been noticed, and then been recorded, and then, because that was what noticing was up there, been kept.
He said keeping was the word he ended up on. What the mountain keeps.
The last time he flew was in 1966. He had a Piper he bought after the Norseman finally gave out. He was doing a short hop from Palmer up to a friend’s cabin on the Susitna. Nothing over the range, nothing near it. He was 60 years old.
He came down at the friend’s strip, tied the Piper off, walked up to the cabin. He never got in the plane again.
The friend told me in a phone call that Howerin had sat down at the kitchen table that afternoon and had gone very still. He asked very quietly if the friend had heard something. The friend said no. Howerin said listen. The friend listened. There was nothing.
Howerin said all right. Then he stood up and said he was going to take the bus back to Palmer. He left the Piper at that strip. He paid the friend later to have it flown back by somebody else.
He never told the friend what he had heard. He never went up in an airplane again in his life. Not as pilot, not as passenger. Not once in all the years between then and the night we sat down together in a small room in a care home outside Wasilla.
He said he did not know if the sound had come for him that day at the friend’s cabin, or if it had just been a warning the way an old friend clears his throat before he says something he does not want to say. He said either way, he had listened.
He said the mountain up there had a long memory, and it had put him in its book a long time ago. He was fine to let the rest of his life go by without giving it any new pages.
I have his handwritten log, the one from the tin box. The dates and the fuel numbers check out against the records I could find. I have the phone call with the friend. I have the names on Wendell Sigfusen’s list. Sigfusen is gone now, and most of the men on that list were gone before I ever heard of any of this.
I don’t know what he saw above Denali in the summer of 1953. I don’t know whether the mountain keeps anything, or whether the mountain is only a mountain and the shape was a trick of light on a scared man’s eye after seven years into a job that would wear anyone down.
But I know that at the end of the interview, when I was gathering the tapes and getting ready to drive back to Anchorage in the dark, Howerin stopped me at the door of his room. He asked me one favor. He asked me to tell it right.
He said he had carried it 47 years, and he did not want it turned into a monster story. He did not want it turned into a joke.
He said the country up there was a real country, and the thing in the sky above it was, in whatever way it was real, a real thing. If I was going to tell it, he wanted me to tell it the way he had lived it. Not as a horror. As a fact.
The fact that above the peak of a certain mountain, in a certain kind of light, in a certain kind of quiet, there is something that turns in a slow circle. It has been turning in that slow circle for longer than any of us have been down here counting.
Every once in a while, someone flies close enough to it to be noticed. Most of them come back. The ones that come back do not talk about it. The ones that talk about it, most of them do not fly again.
He asked me at the door if I had ever felt watched in a place I could not name why. I said I had. He nodded. He said then you know some of it.
He said the rest I would only ever know if I flew that country myself, and he did not recommend it.
He said the sky up there is very old. Older than the ground under it. He said, “Don’t go looking for what’s in it.”
I left. I drove to Anchorage. I did not fly home the way I had planned. I took a bus down through British Columbia, and I sat by the window and watched the mountains on the other side of the glass for two days.
I have not been back to Alaska since.