The Top of the World

The Little Plane taxied down the field through the dense fog, its tail wheel bouncing stiffly over the clumps of grass. The fog was so heavy it was almost palpable, moved in lethargic billows like slowly exhaled cigar smoke. The limp wind sock at midfield was tattered, the high-identification orange color faded and streaked to a light pink. The fog seemed to muffle the buzz of the motor, cloaked everything, sound and substance alike, in a gray like dead teeth or wet concrete.

Williams, the pilot, was mildly apprehensive, faintly tight through his chest. The plane was a Piper Super Cub: It had no artificial horizon or gyroscopic compass and this would be a full instrument take-off. They would lose all outside visual reference almost as soon as they started rolling. Williams reviewed again the compass heading he would hold after lift-off, the time he had before he would near the mountains and have to begin a turn if they had not broken out yet. The strip was in a valley bottom and in every direction were mountains. He knew there would be no turbulence in the fog, or he would never be attempting this, but he did not know how deep the fog was, how long it would take to climb through it, and from his seat, behind the passenger, he could not see even the minimal instruments he had very clearly. The propeller scooping ahead was almost like an egg beater biting into stale whipped cream. He wished he had brought along gloves. The prop blast squirming through the imperfectly sealed door was already numbing his stick hand.

In the front seat, Mondragon was toying with his shotgun, a five-shot Winchester automatic he had bought in San Antonio on his last trip to the United States. He was a young man, very rich, his looks marred by a certain weakness of mouth and thick glasses. He wore a smartly tailored buckskin jacket, 1000-peso riding boots from Jalisco, fleece-lined gloves. He looked off to the side of the field, trying to penetrate the fog, see down into the hollow where the hacienda was. He could hardly see the wind sock, which was only 55 yards away. What had seemed like a fine idea last night was becoming more foolish at each bounce.

The plane wheeled abruptly and the motor roared as Williams ran a magneto and carburetor heat check. Mondragon twisted around to look at the pilot.

"Everything is all right?"

"What?" Williams, studying the tachometer and other engine instruments, pretended he could not hear above the noise.

"We should wait, maybe." Mondragon had been educated in the States, spoke good English.

"No sweat."

"The fog."

"No problem, I told you."

"How do we return?"

"What?"

"The fog. How do we land?"

"It'll burn off. It's only ground fog."

"Sometimes it does not before noon."

"No sweat. We have three and a half hours' fuel. We'll go over to Matehuala."

Mondragon started to say, What if Matehuala has fog also?, but checked himself, turned back to face the instrument panel. Either he must stop this, say he had changed his mind, wanted to wait until later, or else trust this man.

But why should he trust him? He knew nothing of him, only that he was a gringo with an airplane, an aviator gypsy hopping around his country aimlessly, perhaps a contrabandista He said he was a fumigador, a crop duster. He was not like most Americans here--not that many ever got to Mondragon's valley in the first place--not like the tourists, the hippies who came down in caravans of Volkswagen buses with paper flowers pasted all over them, some with the windows painted to look like stained glass, like a church, or the middle-class ones in their Pontiacs and Fords, models with air conditioning and automatic transmissions and bigger engines than you could buy in Mexico, in quest of Mexican food that tasted as if it were made by McDonald's, bargain bracelets, picturesque hotels with the latest plumbing. Nor even like the few pilot tourists, whose planes cost many thousands of pesos, were covered with skin of aluminum rather than linen, were machines of obvious substance and luxury.

He could say he remembered something, some chore, some negocio that would not wait, and they would go this afternoon. He wondered briefly if his wife would think less of him but decided not. He could tell her the machine was clearly unsafe. He started to turn around again, but the engine roared more loudly even than before and they were rolling, the acceleration pressing him against the seat, the fog blurring past the wings, the wind sock rushing by the barrel of his Winchester, the tail rising, and he clutched at the overhead bracing, thinking they were about to nose over.

"Get your hand down," Williams shouted. The idiot was blocking his view of the turn-and-bank indicator. "Relax."

They were airborne, boring into the thick gray. Williams was concentrating on the turn and bank, holding the black ball dead center in its liquid-filled tube, keeping the needle absolutely vertical. All of his tension was gone now, transformed into a total and rapt attention. He liked the difficult moments like these. This was like diving upward into tepid water. It was dead calm. The motor seemed to be running with perfect smoothness, the fog dampened the usual vibrations. Williams had a sensation of gentle swaying, as in a hammock.

Most flying, after you had mastered the type of plane, was uneventful, not dull exactly, but not dissimilar from driving a car on a long, uncrowded freeway at far less than maximum performance, a continuing series of minor adjustments and monitoring a set of instruments. But there were two sorts of flying that were never even faintly tainted with routine, that remained, no matter how many times he practiced them, as exciting and satisfying as anything he had found in life. Sometimes he tried to explain to people how they affected him, why he kept doing them, but he always had to fall back on cliché metaphors, sounding, to himself, like something out of a World War One adventure book.

Serious instrument flying--and this particular take-off was serious enough because of the paucity of instruments in this particular airplane--was the most totally demanding activity he knew. You might spend hours in a state of utter concentration. If things were really tight, if you encountered severe turbulence, as in the sometimes inevitable penetration of a thunderstorm, or the accumulation of ice, the simple matter of controlling the aircraft became a task of paramount difficulty, but of course even then you always had the other elements to contend with; the radio work, the voice of the controller intruding on your attention at the most crucial of times and the needles and gauges, the devices by which you maneuvered precisely along localizers and electronic radials and invisible vectors and the intangible tilted plane of the glide slope. You could explain everything that happened concisely enough in terms of air masses and moisture content and cloud types, Coriolis force and isobars, of radio signals and radar impulses. In fact, instrument flying was the most scientific of aeronautical undertakings, if you cared to think of it in theoretical terms, but to him it was always a game, played under an elaborate and demanding set of man-made rules, that challenged the fringes of the mysterious.

The other sort of flying that captivated him utterly, that he liked best of all, was agricultural flying. He had passed five seasons now on wheat and one with cotton, low work where you lived by the seat of your pants and the tips of your fingers, and neither the oily chemical smells nor the heat and bugs nor the succession of small towns had daunted his enthusiasm. He loved the planes, modified old biplanes and Pawnees and Agwagons and even the dangerous ill-suited Super Cubs and Champs that they started you on, and especially the big Snows and Callairs and Grummans, machines of the most modern manufacture that managed to embody the ethos of other times, that were graceful in the manner of a Da Vinci drawing rather than a McDonnell Douglas drawing board, that emanated octane and dope and leather and sweat instead of the kerosene reek of jet fuel....Early morning on Midwestern strips of turf or clay, the grass heavy with dew, ponderous downswing of a blade on an R-1340 Pratt & Whitney or a pilot-mechanic in bug- and grease-spattered surplus coveralls yelling "Brakes and switches" and propping a Stearman. Coughing catching grunts like some African Gargantua prodded from a sound sleep settling into the wonderful irregular earth-shaking rumble of a big radial (in the profession, you called yourself a round-engine man). The feeling of an open cockpit and the helmet snug against your temples and the music of the wind in the wires, skimming over the rows of wheat in the still cool morning trailing chemical mists, heading for the flagman at the end of the field on a course and altitude certain to decapitate him, at the last instant pulling up and up, feeling the gs press you into the seat and the speed playing off until the controls became mushy and you let her fall off on a wing and back down toward the uprushing ground gathering speed and flattening out for the next run. (continued on page 238) Top of the World (continued from page 156) Mondragon twisted his head from side to side, was experiencing difficulty in breathing. The fog was so thick. He could see it swirling past the wing braces; the propeller threw little pats of it at the windscreen, where they smashed silently. He felt slightly nauseated, dizzy, felt as though the plane were flying on its side. He wondered why the big jets never affected him this way. He could not see the ground at all. Only the murky claustrophobic gray. He was holding his shotgun so tightly that his fingers trembled.

Williams was reaching the end of the time span he had calculated would keep them in the safety of Mondragon's valley, but ahead he could detect a thinness in the fog, a bright spot, and he steered for it. The spot grew rapidly to immense proportions, filled the cockpit with an explosion of white sunlight that caused Mondragon to throw a protective arm in front of his eyes. Streamers of surgical white gauze tore past. Then they broke out on top.

"Relax," Williams shouted. "We're out of it."

The world below was almost pure white, hill country bathed in sparkling new snow, tight-packed fluff balls of finest cotton. Ahead and on either side, a few mountain peaks jabbed through like granite waits. The sky was dark and deep, ultramarine, perfect and implacable, blue as the sky in outer space must be blue, a sky whose only mundane reference was the molten orb of the sun creeping up its eastern rim. It was very cold. Williams trimmed the plane and slid his numbed stick hand into the warmth of his armpit.

Mondragon laughed with nervous relief. They might not be able to get back down, but for now he felt acute relief and slight embarrassment that he had been so unsure of the American. When it was over he would apologize, explain that, not being an aviator himself, he had naturally been worried, but he had intended no lack of confidence. He looked around, trying to identify the various peaks pushing through the fog. They marked the boundaries of his estate, but it was as if he had never seen them before, this perspective was so different. Far ahead were layer upon layer of mountains, much higher than those beneath them. That would be Real de Catorce. He pointed, turned to Williams. "There. It is those mountains there."

They crossed the mountains forming the walls of the valley and found that they contained the fog as if it were water pressing at a giant dam: A few streams of cotton feather squeezed through the spillways of the passes but did not threaten flood. The unfogged mountainsides, except where too sheer, were cultivated. There was no wind. Smoke from cook fires rose straight in lines that might have been drawn by charcoal pencil, funneling slightly and dissolving. The slanting sunlight livened the crimson of the tile roofs of the farmhouses. The stubbly row tops in the fields, some curving to follow the contours of the hillsides, were luminous gold, clearly delineated draftsman's strokes, but the furrows were filled yet with shadows of liquid ink. Far down a valley to their right was a hacienda, surrounded by green winter wheat.

They kept climbing and every 1000 feet Williams leaned forward across Mondragon's shoulder to play with the mixture control. They were already through 10,000 feet and the country ahead was higher still. He had studied the map carefully the night before and the highest peaks were listed at 12,000 plus or minus. He knew from actual observation that the maps were not very accurate. The rail lines were Ok, but not much else. Which was one of the things he liked about it down here. You were really on your own. It was almost like exploring an undiscovered country, like barnstorming in the States must have been, like flying the mails in Lindbergh's day, like all flying before the FAA and sophistication and regulation.

They leveled off at 12,000. Williams was short of breath, though a sea-level pilot had no business at altitudes like this without oxygen. He took several deep breaths. He could not remember whether hyperventilation increased or decreased your altitude tolerance. The mountains ahead were cone-shaped and bare, great stone tepees. He was glad it was morning still, cool, as he imagined there were some ferocious drafts around here when things warmed up.

Mondragon picked out the pass that led to Real de Catorce, the old mining town. During the last century, it had been the richest silver lode in the world, wellspring of much of Mexico's wealth, a city of 100,000 sandwiched into a valley that was more like a crevice at 11,000 feet. His family had owned a number of the mines and, in fact, Porfirio Diaz, the old dictator, had gone up there in his special train for the wedding of his, Mondragon's, grandparents, a very considerable tribute to the family's position and prestige. The clippings from the Mexico City papers and some old photos, yellowed and brittle, were in an album that his wife showed to visitors. Walrus mustaches and bustles, stiff backs and striped pants, boiled shirts and heavy medals, pearl-studded combs in high-piled hair. His grandfather had owned, in addition to the mines, over 1,000,000 hectares. The mountain land over which they were going to hunt had been a part of it.

Of course, none of it had survived the revolution. The insurgents had torn up the rail line, heated lengths of iron and twisted them into grotesque forms and pushed the rolling stock over the precipices and dynamited the roadbed, and the mines had closed down, never to reopen. Now you needed a jeep or a burro to get to Catorce at all. About 200 people still lived there, subsisted on pick mining and dreams of rejuvenation.

Diaz had fled to France with half the country's gold reserve and they had executed his grandfather, stood him against the wall of the municipal building and shot him. Mondragon had seen the bullet pocks. In a way, that had been just. It was, after all, people like his grandfather who had created and nurtured the conditions that had made the revolution inevitable. Mondragon, ancestry to the contrary, liked to think of himself as a liberal man, had been a political-science major in college.

Williams was flying semiautomatically. He had the plane perfectly trimmed and the air was smooth. He kept his hands under his armpits, nudged the stick with his knees to make minor corrections, let his mind drift. He wondered if it would be possible to make a living flying around here. Maybe a combination agricultural and charter service. Probably not. He knew there were a lot of problems licensing planes in Mexico, getting yourself licensed. They liked Americans as tourists but not as competition. But if it went well today, he might be able to cultivate this Mondragon. He clearly had plenty of money and money was drag.

Williams had lost his license in the States, and even though the revocation was not permanent, had been for only 90 days, fewer than 60 now, it would make getting a job difficult when he got back. He had lost the license for looping a bridge near Hannibal, Missouri. Some asshole motorist had got his registration number, filed a complaint. Reckless flying, the FAA had accused him of. No person may operate an aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another. FAR 91, part ten.

There had been a hearing, his day in court, but he had not had much to say, no defense other than a fresh haircut and shave and his best and only suit, declarations of remorse and promises of contrition. The board had been especially disturbed that a pilot of his relatively many hours, a professional, would indulge in such show-off ill conduct. Secretly, he supposed, the examiners had sympathized. They were all pilots, one of them a hoary old-timer with a wispy early-birdman mustache, and Williams thought they had imagined themselves in his place, a member of the fraternity indulging himself in a little extracurricular relaxation who got caught in a web of chance, a snare sprung by the nastiness of some alarmed and envious Oldsmobile jockey.

Which had not been the case at all: Williams' wife had just left him. Her departure had been a long time coming, had been threatened on innumerable occasions, was in no way a surprise, but nonetheless, it had been an event of some portent and he had felt the need to mark it. They had married young and the life he led, his flying, his type of flying, had worn what they had together down and finally had worn it out. He could not change. Or had not wanted to change, which amounted to the same thing, and he had seen her freshness and enthusiasm, her early pride and delight in him, sandpapered into hard resentment by Texas heat and Dakota cold, by the emery sifting of red Oklahoma dust, by twoscore moves and a succession of frame houses in neon hamburger towns that shared the traits of unreliable plumbing, total gracelessness, either an absence or an excess of ventilation.

He had forever been about to apply for an airline job, had obtained for a long time a measure of domestic tranquillity with that bribery. The airlines meant money and status and living in one place, furniture and children, order and a future, normalcy. But he had never been able to bring himself to make the move. She had said at the end, with considerable bitterness, that his reluctance was because he was afraid no line would have him, was cowardice, false pride, and she had been partly right, but the other part was that he liked what he was doing--following the crops and flying charter and the mails in Beech 18s and Lockheeds in the winter, being a round-engine man in the era of the turbine. Most of their trouble had been his fault and, to make the trouble worse, that had never bothered him enough to make him change. Yet he had loved her and had not wanted her to leave and when she did, he had gone flying, rolled a Stearman around not in joy or triumph or flirtation with self-destruction but because it seemed the proper thing to do, a sort of ceremony to note an important passage in his life.

They were in the pass to Catorce now. The spiraling road, which looked more like a goat trail, the whole valley was still in deep shadow. Williams doubted if they ever got more than a few hours' sunlight on any day. It was strange that a place so high should be so dark. The mountainsides were scarred by slag heaps. They came over the remains of the city, massive stone walls, a few roofs, cobbled streets running at impossible angles, piles of crumbling adobe, the black eyeholes of the mine entrances, the awnings of the market forming tiny improbable blots of bright color.

Mondragon picked out his grandfather's house, an enormous structure near the center of the city. Like everything else in Catorce, it had been carved from the rock mountainside. Some of the rooms were 100 feet higher than others. The doors, roofs, window frames were all missing, torn out for fuel, but the walls were perfectly intact, composed of beautifully fitted blocks of granite two meters thick. His great-grandfather had imported stonemasons from Italy. A tent was pitched in the center of the ballroom, some squatter or perhaps a hunter.

He had camped in the ruins himself many times, had come up here as a boy with his father on hunts for mountain lion. They brought hounds and he remembered curling next to them for warmth, not minding the kennel smell, after the fires had died. Wood was very scarce in Catorce and usually they packed in only what they needed for cooking.

He had loved climbing around the ruins, reconstructing the grandeur, the walls whitewashed and hung with dark portraits and rich tapestries, a castle out of one of his boys' books, imagining that he had lived there, would someday be master of it all. He had asked innumerable questions of his father--What was this room? Where was your room? What was my grandmother like? And he had explored the mine shafts, scared at first of the damp and dark, climbed into rusty gondolas, brought back hand picks and ancient lanterns, lumps of ore, once some primitive blasting caps. His father had answered the questions patiently enough, although after the blasting caps, he had forbidden him to play in the shafts anymore, but his father had been interested mainly in the lions. He had been a hard and remote man, even with his son, treated him from the time he was a little boy with adult gravity and a certain distance. They had never been friends; it was as if his father were waiting, somewhat skeptically, for him to come of age, achieve a dignity, accomplish something that would allow them to be equal.

His father had grown up during the years of upheaval, survived, even prospered, when most young men of his background were dead or in exile. He had run guns into Sonora, commanded a regiment for Obregón, been an ambassador for Camacho, unfailingly anticipated the delicate but lethal wind shifts of political change and military fortune, all the while accruing a fortune of his own. By the time Mondragon was born, the country had stabilized and his father, revered as one of the minor heroes of the revolution, the place of his birth and the former position of his family no longer a stigma (in fact, in certain circles, those attributes had a definite snob value), spent all of his energies, except those reserved for hunting, consolidating and increasing his own wealth.

It was on those expeditions of his boyhood that Mondragon had first seen the mountain eagles, watched them soar and glide and wheel so calmly, silently, so without effort, as he and his father and the men, the horses and hounds and pack burros, had struggled along the trails, testing each foothold, men and animals alike lung-searingly short of breath at the smallest exertion. After ten minutes' hard climbing at this altitude, your mouth tasted like copper. In the days of Mondragon's great-grandfather, he of the imported stonemasons, they had used West Indian slaves in the mines and they averaged only ten years before their lungs were clogged or burned out.

Mondragon had shot at several eagles with high-powered rifles but never hit one. They moved with deceptive speed, seemed, like an airplane, to be floating almost stationary when actually they were traveling rapidly. His father had told him the best way to kill one was with bait, a live rabbit or rat, and a blind, though the eagles had such acute vision it was difficult to build or find a blind they could not detect. Ever since boyhood he had wanted one.

Mondragon did not usually like hunting all that well. He had been brought up hunting and all the men of his station hunted--it was often an accessory to business dealings--and his father had been a great hunter, had even made a safari to Africa. Mondragon shot well enough--his father had insisted on that--but hunting had never assumed the proportions of a passion with him, was something he did in the natural course of things because it was expected of him.

Also, he mildly disapproved of the connotations. A peon shooting rabbits for meat was one thing, but he had friends in Mexico City who made a trip to Chiapas every year to kill jaguar. Such expeditions were always complete with tents and cots and ice and the actual killing was done from a safe blind by torchlight, which hypnotized the cats, and afterward the entire hunting party repaired to Acapulco to recuperate from the trials of the bush.

The only thing Mondragon could remember really wanting was an eagle, and he had not thought about that seriously for years, since before he went away to school. Had not thought about it until this American had chanced into his valley and they had sat talking over beer about the mountains and flying, though the idea to hire the American and his airplane to shoot an eagle had struck him with such force that it seemed he had been carrying it in the back of his mind for a long time, that when the opportunity presented itself, the plan was there, completely formed, as it he had been preparing it for years.

Williams turned away from the city, skimmed along the surface of a peak. The slopes were a jungle of precariously balanced boulders, stretches of sheer cliff, jagged outcroppings. They were hedgehopping, no, boulder jumping, at nearly 13,000 feet. Trust in God and Lycoming. They had no other choice. For almost the first time in all his flying, Williams could not imagine a successful forced landing. These had to be the most barren mountains in the world, almost entirely devoid of vegetation. Maybe they had once been forested, like the Colorado or Wyoming Rockies, and, over the centuries, the peons had cut the trees for wood, but he did not think so, there was too much bare rock for there ever to have been even shrubbery.

He just hoped they could find an eagle now. He knew pilots in the Big Bend in Texas who hunted eagles for bounty and remembered they had told him that you patrolled near the nesting areas and the birds came to you, were curious. They were not afraid of aircraft, were not afraid of anything, could not conceive that another creature of flight might cause them harm, and you had to watch out for collisions. They saw you long before you saw them, liked to play chicken with you.

He leaned across Mondragon's shoulder, the plane tilting, and opened the top half of the door. The rush of wind was awesome, a turbulent force that enveloped and pummeled them like heavy surf.

Mondragon was pleasantly excited. He cocked his shotgun and studied the crags and sky ahead. He was enjoying the flying, wandering at will above this impossible country of his boyhood, his heritage. Far to the north, toward Monterrey, was a giant cloud bank, but otherwise the sky was vacant, softer now that the sun was higher.

They flew for an hour, banked around peaks and made shallow darting dives into the canyons; they saw nothing but rock below and sky above. The mountains warmed in the sun, thermals began. The plane bumped like a speedboat on riffled water. The mountains seemed utterly deserted, no burros or cattle or goats nor even game, a landscape never intended to support life.

The eagle materialized at the limit of sight, a distant dot that might have been a bug speck on the windscreen. It came toward them quickly, almost before either of them realized what was happening, arced at them like a tracer round in a sort of lazy ultraquick slow motion, and rifled by high on the side away from the open door. Mondragon had no chance to shoot. The men had time to register impressions of curved beak, glint of eye, a spread of sleek wing that seemed as wide as their own arm span.

Williams bent the plane around to the right. He banked so hard the ship shuddered through the air on the edge of a stall. He twisted and craned his neck, trying to see around ahead of the turn, pick up the bird, maneuver for position. The eagle was rising away from them in a graceful chandelle, rising without visible movement of its wings, with no struggle. Williams had a moment to admire and appreciate the precision of its flight, wish that they could just circle around with it, play aerial promenade. In the Midwest, he had played such games with hawks, chased them and turned with them and ridden the thermals.

Almost reluctantly, he fire-walled the throttle. The only discernible response was a sluggish pitch change in the engine growl. Mondragon was leaning out into the blast, holding his glasses in place with one hand. Williams hoped he knew what he was doing, would not shoot the prop or one of the wing struts.

The eagle hung virtually motionless at the apex of its zoom, balancing with slight movements of its wings, a delicate treading of the air. It might have been a life-scale model suspended by an invisible string from the roof of heaven. Then it rolled toward them, poised for an instant on the knife edge, and dropped straight at them like a fighter-bomber beginning a run. Instinctively, Williams snapped the Cub almost vertical, pirouetted off to one side on a wing tip. He heard the shotgun slam twice and a spent shell with a cardboard case of kelly green dropped into his lap, smoke wisping from its open end. He flopped the plane level and a mountain, big as all the world, was rushing at his windscreen, and he stood the plane on its wing tip again, fear causing a throbbing of the blood in his temples.

Mondragon was turned around in the seat, pointing excitedly behind them. His face was wind flushed and his hair was tousled crazily. Williams checked the wing on the open side, looking for pellet tatters, hoping the Mexican had not shot them in the gas tank. The plane seemed to be intact.

"I hit him," Mondragon yelled.

"Just so you didn't hit us."

"Turn. He is behind us. Turn that way."

They came around and Williams could not see the bird, scanned the empty sky. He did not believe Mondragon had really hit it.

"Down there."

Mondragon was pointing at a ledge to their right. The ledge dropped away into a canyon that appeared bottomless, deep and dark and narrow as a well.

"We can't go down there," Williams said.

Then he saw the eagle perched on a gray boulder, one wing partially extended. He banked toward it, made a close pass on the side where Mondragon could not shoot. The eagle flapped its good wing awkwardly. Blood was dripping from its beak and its eye was shot out. It reminded Williams of a robin he had shot as a little boy. He had had a new pump BB gun and had been showing off for his younger brother, shot the robin out of the cherry tree in their front yard. The shot had not killed it, had broken a wing, and it stood dazed on the ground as they came up to it. He had known he had to kill it, put it out of its pain, and he had fired five or six more times with no apparent effect. The bird had tried to hop away, making piteous little chirping sounds, and finally had remained still, staring at them dumbly and hopelessly. His brother had been crying. He had smashed its head with the stock, causing the same weakness and tumbling sensation in his chest and stomach that he felt now.

They came around again, from the other direction, and Mondragon's shotgun slammed. The great bird crumpled, slipped off the boulder and over the ledge, fell into the dark like a dead weight, a stone or a lump of earth, merely an object in space. Mondragon turned around, smiling.

They flew back to the valley, passing over Catorce on their way. The ruined city was still locked in shade so dark it might have been a starless midnight. The fog had burned off Mondragon's valley and Williams remembered how the place had affected him yesterday. He had found it by accident--the map did not show a strip--seen the tattered sock. The fields of alfalfa had appeared incredibly green in contrast to the mountains. There were stone walls, deep wells pumping ditchloads of bright irrigation water, the sun on rows of aluminum siphons, even whitewashed fences near the hacienda. He had made a low pass at the hacienda and there was a fountain in the patio surrounded by potted geraniums. Behind the big house were corrals and horses and shiny black Angus and rows of neat cottages. Children had waved at him. That seemed like a very long time ago. They landed and shut down and the silence, the absence of wind and engine, was strange. They got out, stretched and Mondragon cleared his shotgun. Williams wanted to get his money and be gone.

"We must have a drink," Mondragon said. He felt tired and yet elated, wanted to tell his wife, wanted the American there to verify the story, regretted only that they had not been able to recover the bird. He would like to have had it stuffed. It would have made a magnificent trophy. He thought this was how his father must have felt about hunting. He felt closer to his father than he had in years. His father had died soon after he had finished college and Mondragon had felt relief as much as loss. Mondragon and his father had both understood that Mondragon was not like his father, was not what his father had hoped he would be, though his father had never accused nor even chided. But his father would have approved of this today, he was sure. There had been the wonderful moment when the eagle came at them, an instant that he knew would seem much longer than an instant in memory. He had had time to think how clear it all was, the sky and the mountains tilting away and the bird dropping--it was as if someone else were there inside his head, watching and recording--and then tracking with the gun and the recoil bump against his shoulder, knowing even as he shot that the pellets were striking home. It was like no shooting he had ever done before. "That was--how do you say?--marvelous."

"Thank you," Williams said. "But I don't think so. I want to get to San Luis Potosi today."

"But you must stay."

"No. I can't. I've got to get going." Williams paused, wanting to bring up money but not sure how to go about it diplomatically.

"Well," Mondragon said. "I am sorry." This gringo was truly a strange one. Mondragon could not think why he was upset. But he was a magnificent piloto. Mondragon thought that he would have to learn to fly. His father had suggested it to him several times while he was in the United States in school, but he had never been interested. He wished the American would not leave but sensed that he was going, no matter what entreaties were offered. "We agreed on two hundred pesos an hour, I believe."

"That's right." Williams checked his watch. "We were up about two hours and a half."

Mondragon paid him out of pocket and Williams figured it into dollars, 40. Mondragon's wife, a handsome woman with a strong nose who did not look as if she would run to fat like most of them, and several of his men came up from the hacienda. They were talking fast in Spanish, Mondragon smiling and gesturing. Some children were exploring around the plane. Mondragon, seeing that Williams was about to climb in, went over to him, clapped him on the back, squeezed his shoulder.

"I thank you again. And please return. I would perhaps like to take some lessons."

"Ok," Williams said.

He fired up and took off, flew directly out of the valley without circling or dipping his wings. When he had enough altitude, he trimmed and leaned and sat back. It was getting pretty bumpy. He felt flat, washed out and he had a headache. Nevertheless, he also felt at ease. This was what he liked best, being in an airplane alone. That was what he liked about agricultural work. There was no room in an ag plane for passengers, for anyone or anything but the business of flying. He thought of the eagle, not of the crippled wounded creature perched on the boulder but of the way it had climbed away from them. It reminded him of soaring. He had a few hours in sailplanes, had worked at an airport one winter where he did some gliding instructing as part of his job. The times he had been able to go solo had been incomparable, but it cost money to tow the sailplane aloft, so usually he had flown with students. He disliked instructing, loathed the necessity of trying to articulate things that were intensely private. The trouble was that no matter what kind of flying you did, you had to come down from time to time and, unless you were immensely rich, flying inevitably involved complications of finance, people, earthly enterprise.

He passed over the mountains of Catorce and picked up the rail line into San Luis Potosi. Far below, along the tracks, was a town, a collection of squatting adobe, dust, a few trees, an aluminum water tower that reflected the sun like a ball of quicksilver. A truck of some sort was crawling in from the west, though Williams could see no road. The truck trailed a long streamer of dust.

Williams put the nose down and opened the throttle until the wind was screaming and the altimeter unwinding quickly and then he pulled back smoothly and hard, felt the gs press him down, a three-fisted giant palming his head and shoulders, and the windscreen was filled with revolving blue sky, and then the gs slackened away to nothing and the horizon slipped into view, the saw teeth of the mountains, only they were inverted. He pushed the stick forward and was thrust away from the seat against the belt. Pebbles spattered against the roof and dust stung his eyes. A scrap of paper floated past his face. The engine quit abruptly of fuel starvation. The mountains were weird seen upside down. Plumes of oil smoke streamed behind. The only sound was the hiss of air rushing past. He was sinking very fast toward the terrain; the mountains, the town, the tower, the sun-gleaming thread of the rail line were all coming at him like a zoom lens focusing in. At the last safe moment, he let the nose fall through and the motor caught and he pulled up and leveled off.