The weather was wonderfully calm and each day Betula took her craft ever farther over the ice for not much more than indulging her increasing fascination with the alien landscape of the immense fields of sastruggis, those parallel, curving furrows the prevailing winds made in the snow in a generally west-to-east pattern.  They could be useful in helping her to maintain her heading across the continent should the flight conditions deteriorate, she thought.  In the crepuscular hours of cloudy days when the dark of the sky begins to blend with the obscuring ground, even the best could doubt their instruments readings.  Betula knew stories of pilots struggling with their better judgment and making a fatal choice.  Noting the sweep of a fog bank below, Betula dived into it near its edge to determine how low she would have to fly to be able to follow the sastruggi's orientation in poor visibility.  The answer was quick in coming.  That would be much too low for minimally safe flight.

     Taking a fast turn and heading up and out of the fog bank, she was surprised by the length of time it took her to return to the clear skies she had left a moment ago.  Banking across the sastruggi rows she could now see that there was a strong airflow making her drift to the east. She realized that in her previous westerly heading at higher altitude she had been bucking a head wind and probably flying in a nearly stationary position in a flyglider happily doing what it was designed for, simply balancing its power output and the shaping of its wings to maintain air speed.  The instruction manual called that 'Seagull Mode,' quoting Fly who described it as a bird idling time over a school of sardines circling just a bit too deep to dive for.  It certainly was the right mode for a pilot nearly asleep at the stick and lost in the magic of the sastruggis' mellow curvings.

     The wind explained the fog bank and that was a problem given the thin, dark ribbon rising over the western horizon and the first minute ice crystals flashing in the brightness of the afternoon sun and bouncing off the windshied.  It was a cold front, thought Betula, the approaching edge of a possibly massive blast of arctic air sinking fast and stripping the lower layers of their minute amount of moisture to turn that into ice, soon to be snow crystals.

     A problem indeed, those westerly headwinds could turn to southwesterlies bringing even more moisture from the south.  A full-fledged gale was rising in her path.  She thought of Liriodendron's flight instructor commenting about his student's fantasy of finding the perfect thermals off Mount Washington.  He had said Greenland would be next, or something like that. Given Betula's more northerly starting position and no need for thermals, her destination would likely be the same, though some 500 miles further North, unless she was lucky enough to come down on Baffin Island, a location not known for smooth landing sites in the best of the Ancients' days.  She had to come down and anchor.  Certainly not in a sastruggi field.  She had to find shelter.  She had to find a nunatak.  Betula maxed up the flyglider power and set her heading to southwest, just off the headwinds to minimize her easterly drift toward the ocean while gaining latitude southward.  The seagull better do some real work, the boss' hand was firm on the stick.

     When flygliders were put back in service in Camp Galaxy days, their navigation was controlled by the magic of the Global Positioning System, an universal service that determined a craft's or a vehicle's position by triangulating signals from several satellites to an accuracy of a few inches, it was said.  The cataclysm put an end to that.  The targeting of some satellites and the collapse of the electronic communications that kept the rest on station had made the system quite unreliable by the time Fly and his pals happily resumed their flying and found you couldn't count on the GPS if you were trying to make it home in time for dinner.  So Fixit, Mona and Fly tore off the crafts that useless technology and teamed up to design a new navigation system based on the time-honored techniques of timekeeping and midday observation of the sun position once used aboard old times sailing vessels.  The ability of the flyglider to hover in place allowed a mounted sextant to take sun elevation readings when the best onboard quartz clock they could fabricate told a pilot it was noontime.  A readout gave the craft's position and a dashboard mounted compass showed the way.  The rest was just a matter of relearning the venerable skills of dead reckoning.

     On most flyglider trips pilots relied on visual clues and did not bother to observe the sun at noon.  On the ice, Betula was more conscientious, but she had not even thought of it on that beautiful, clear day.  When the minute ice crystals gave way to periodic onslaughts of thick curtains of snow she knew that her dead reckoning would be most imperfect.  Her altimeter blanked out at times, she struggled to maintain her heading, she had no precise idea of the drifting of her craft and the gale appeared to be strengthening, sometimes gusting into crosswinds that threw her craft into stalls.  Recovery was nerve wracking and a search for more altitude only brought her into stronger winds.  She was thrown about in her harness, but moonlight dimmed by clouds kept the forthcoming darkness from affecting her equilibrium.  The autopilot did a better job at keeping the craft more or less level, but it went into beeping distress on its first stall episode.  The flyglider was twirling down when she took back control and it was a long, harrowing time before she could return to a semblance of level flight.  She had to manhandle the stick as the hours passed and in spite of mounting exhaustion she found her calm in slowly, methodically repeating the necessary maneuvers that would keep her aloft.

     She wasn't thinking much, just taking care of things and suddenly there was an expanse of light gray below.  The rest happened quite rapidly.  A shape appeared ahead of her left wing, she banked steeply around it, the storm threw her down and well past it, she leveled and turned back at full power fighting the blow, heading for a rock face.  She cut power and dropped down to stall on a slope, yards from the cliff.  At once she loosened her harness, reached for straps, drill and ice anchors, jumped out and had her craft tied down in record time before she straightened up and realized that while the gale was still howling it was relatively calm where she stood, with just a few gusts now and then sweeping snow about.  Betula had found her nunatak, she was in its lee.  "You are one lucky seagull," she thought, looking at her craft.  An icicle was drooping from a rock shelf.  She broke it off.  That would do for a celebratory drink.

     Aboard she treated herself to half a protein ribbon, put on her warmest gear, set her cabin heater just above frost level and turned in.  Her sleep was deep, only briefly interrupted by her craft rocking and pulling at its anchors at times.  Perhaps the winds were backing to the South, she thought, perhaps diminishing.  So far, so good.

     The morning was glorious for awhile, the batteries charging steadily.  The winds had gone back to the west, the temperature was dropping.  Looking East Betula could see the ground sloping fast to the roughly horizontal level of the ice sheet which was making what appeared to be a break above a confusion of ice shapes splitting off into great geysers of water fronting a seascape crowded with floating icebergs as far as the eye could see.  A darn lucky seagull indeed, sitting in the lee of a nunatak only a few miles from the ocean.  But where could that possibly be?

     After his instructor had appropriately thrown icy cold water over his student's dreaming of a Mount Washington thermals adventure, Liriodendron had not given up and he once sat with Betula peering at the musty pages of the library's Atlas, seeking possible escapes of emergency situations east and northeast of Mount Washington.  A hairbrained notion, said Betula, but Liriodendron insisted, for the sake of argument he said, and they came up with the concept of the nunatak lee option.  Yet, the probability of a calm in a nunatak lee would depend on so many physical variables that chances for a safe landing would be near zero, she thought , but he took her outside and they shared a mocha bar in the lee of a poster stand while passing students were hanging on to their berets.  She was not entirely convinced.  How many nunataks look like poster stands after all, but she let herself be humored back to the library and its musty Atlas.  It showed that the region, the grounds north and east of the northern Appalachians, had only a few summits high enough to surge as nunataks above the ice sheet and only one rose near a seashore.  Betula had miraculously found it.  The Atlas showed her that the seagull was roosting on Mont d'Iberville in the Torngat mountains of northern Labrador, a bit below 60 degrees of latitude North, some 30 miles from the Labrador Sea, 600 miles across from the southern tip of Greenland.

     The wind veered to the southwest and the clouds renewed their spitting of icy snow.  Betula realized that she was stuck on Mont d'Iberville, stuck on her ice anchors, stuck with only a few miles of allowable easterly drift in a region where westerlies strong enough to carve sastruggis in frozen snow were again blowing a gale.  She had only one option, wait and hope.  Hope that the calm, beautiful weather she had enjoyed over the preceding few days was not an aberration and wait until it would return.

Next, I AM ALONE IN THIS WORLD