The Year the Cloud Fell

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  As they left the forested rim of the Kansa coast behind them, George took a deep breath, anticipating the mission ahead of them.

  “Welcome to the ‘Unorganized Territory,’” he said.

  Elisha looked up from his navigation charts. “It does look rather disheveled,” he said jokingly.

  To George’s eyes, it was beautiful. A few miles inland and over the heads of the coastal hills, the land presented itself slowly. The low folds of the Sand Hills gave way to a vast prairie that stretched on forever. The horizon was flat and unmarred, but as George sailed the A. Lincoln onward, the land developed features. Rises—they were too subtle to be called hills—lifted and fell beneath the ship. Rivers laced the landscape with silver ribbons. Forests of cottonwood and box elder lifted green-feathered branches above fern-lined creekbeds. Beyond, ahead of them like a placid sea, lay league after league of prairie grass at least knee-high and pale green with springtime growth. The rivers and even the woods wound and twisted lazily until they blended into the low curve of the land, but the prairie itself continued onward, onward to the horizon, where the green of the grass met the blue of the sky in a turquoise melding of heaven and earth.

  George marveled at the sheer expanse of land. He picked a metal wedge out of the rack and snugged it in place against the spokes of the pilot’s wheel. He let down a window and leaned out on the sill. The air was still cool but was no longer fresh from the sea. He took a slow chestful. This was old air. It smelled of sweet grass, a touch of rain, and miles and miles of land.

  In the forest below he caught sight of movement. The whole ship grumbled with the vibration from the boiler and pistons and chains, and the wind sighed through the wires and through the whirling propellers. Even above such noise, however, he heard the call of the animals that ran through the trees.

  “Whistlers!”

  “Where?” asked Elisha, crowding up along the sill. George pointed down to the forest edge.

  On strong hind legs the large, lizard-like whistlers ran, fleeing the approaching noise and shadow of the airship. They ran from the trees and onto the freedom of the prairie. Tails held straight out behind them, front arms tucked in close, the whistlers ran with great speed. Their skin paled as George watched, shifting from shadowy grey to a brindled green that turned the running lizards into phantoms fleeing through the tall grass.

  They ran away from the ship, outdistancing it easily with a mile-eating gait. He saw them roll an occasional eye backward to check on the threat. Their calls of warning trumpeted through the air, amplified by the long, bony crests that curved back from their heads and over their necks.

  Then they disappeared. George and Elisha gaped.

  “Where did they go?”

  George went to the wheel, undogged it, and steered the ship in the direction they had last seen the flock. The ship turned and settled into its new course. He rejoined Elisha at the window.

  As they neared the place where the flock had last been seen, George noticed something irregular in the grass far below.

  “There,” he said, pointing.

  The flock, skin tone now a perfect match to the prairie grass, had stopped in their flight en masse and hunkered down to hide in plain sight. From above, the two men could see the slight splaying of grass, but from the ground they would have simply vanished.

  “In all the world,” George wondered aloud, “why do we only find these creatures here?”

  Elisha bit off the end of a hard biscuit. “You only found horses in Europe,” he said while he chewed. “Or in Asia. Weren’t any horses here until the Spanish brought them.”

  “That’s not what I asked,” George said.

  “No,” Elisha agreed. “But no horses here. No giant lizards there. Answer one, and I bet you’ll answer the other. “

  George shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”

  As the ship came over the beasts once more, turf flew as they bounded off. George let them go and returned the dirigible to its original course.

  The door to the boiler room opened and Lescault entered the pilot car. He smelled of smoke and oil and sweat and was already sooty up to his elbows.

  “You missed our first whistlers,” Elisha said as the fireman opened the opposite window and leaned out into the cool breeze.

  “Bah,” said the private. He wiped his dirty face with a slightly less dirty kerchief. “I hate the beasts.”

  Elisha took a jug of water out of stores. “You’ve seen them before, then?” he asked, pouring a cup.

  “Thank you, sir,” Lescault said as he took the cup and drank it off. “And, yes, sir. Seen ‘em plenty. My grandfather was a trapper up north in Assiniboine territory. My mother and father ran a trading post of sorts just the far side of the Dakota border. I’ve seen more than my fill of hardbacks and whistlers. Hardbacks can at least be put to a little use, but even they’re a stupid, foul-smelling breed. Give me a good Penn’s Sylvania dray anytime.”

  “And whistlers?” George asked, taking a drink himself.

  “Worse than useless,” Lescault answered. “Smart, to be sure. Too smart. And bad-tempered, too. Untrainable. Good for nothing, if you were to ask me. Not for eating. Not even for tanning their delicate hides.”

  “You’ve eaten whistler meat?” Elisha asked with a laugh of surprise.

  Lescault nodded. “Once, sir. I was a boy and it was a terrible winter night. My pa heard one calling. Got separated from its flock in the storm, we figured. Stringiest, most rancid-tasting meat I’ve ever had.” He took another drink. “No, I’ve seen enough of whistlers. Got to give the Indian credit, though, for getting any use out of them at all.”

  “Too much use,” George said, looking back out the window. “The Indians control this entire territory, primarily because of their use of whistlers. My father used to say that, were it not for the whistlers and the walkers, he would have taken the territory in ‘76.”

  “Did you ever see a walker?” Elisha asked the private.

  “No sir, but I’ve seen what they can do. One night we woke up to a terrible racket coming from out in the barn. Pa went out with his rifle. We heard a howl and a shot and then Pa came back inside, wide-eyed and white as a new cotton sheet. Wouldn’t let us open the door ‘til morning. We lost a horse and the milk-cow that night. A few weeks later we were heading for Penn’s Sylvania. Pa never went back to the prairie.”

  “What about you, Captain? Ever seen a walker?”

  “Once,” he said, a bit surprised at the terse tone of his own reply. The men across the cabin remained expectantly silent but, “Just once,” was all he offered them. He turned his gaze back out the window. The others replaced the water jug and returned to their duties.

  “We’ve picked up a tailwind, Captain. We’re making good time.”

  George turned but Elisha had anticipated his question. His calipers were already walking across the map.

  “We should reach our first waypoint in about eighteen hours.” The lieutenant looked up from his calculations. “If the information we have can be trusted, of course.”

  George nodded. “How long until we reach the edge of our charts?”

  “Ten hours. Around dawn.”

  “Well, we couldn’t have planned that better. We’ll have the whole day for charting. Let’s take the speed down a notch. I don’t want us to overshoot our maps before daylight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  George pulled out the telescope. Feeling more like a privateer than an officer in the U.S. Army, he scanned the vista.

  There was no sign of habitation. No homesteads, no Indian camps, not even a lone rider. They were alone on a hostile sea and sailing toward the limits of their knowledge. For four years, it had been the only subject of George’s dreams.

  The reality made him queasy.

  Beyond the warm lamplight of the lanterns, the night was a void roofed with a million pinprick diamonds. The light of the waning moon lit the dark land like pale gossamer; a dream laid out beneath them.
r />   The crew were to spell one another throughout the night. At such a lazy cruise and with the weather retaining its mild countenance, the Abraham Lincoln required little attention. Only the occasional shovel of coal or adjusting touch to the trim was needed. Elisha and Private Lescault got their rest. As George’s turn to sleep came, he let it go. Uneventful though the evening had been, he knew that sleep would be a vain endeavor.

  Instead, he watched the jeweled sky for shooting stars. He judged the ship’s land speed by clocking the passage of ribbons of reflected starlight in the land below. He marked their progress on Elisha’s maps. He nibbled on hard biscuits and dropped morsels out the window, watching them disappear into the depth of darkness like an ember into a nighttime pond. It was quiet and unexciting activity, but it kept him busy. Still, his heart leapt at the airship’s every creak, and his breath grew light whenever he adjusted their course or checked the boiler, for it was at such moments that the magnitude of his responsibility was clearest: the first powered-aircraft on its maiden voyage. His first real command.

  As dawn approached, George became aware of an odd, recurrent sound. It would begin as a faint and infrequent groan—barely realized before it ceased—and he could not locate the source. Soon, however, the frequency increased and it grew into a consistent grumble of varying pitch. It was still faint, but it was definitely not his own tired imagination.

  He nudged Elisha and Lescault awake and told them of the sound. “I’m going up to the bags,” he said. “You poke around down here.” He left them rubbing the sleep from their eyes and climbed the ladder up into the body of the craft.

  The sound was less obvious up above. The chains rattled through their traces, the guys were all taut, and none of the gas bags showed any sign of damage. Even the ballast levels were consistent. All was as it should have been, and that did nothing but increase his trepidation.

  “What else can it be?” he wondered aloud. If it was more pronounced in the cars, that would most likely indicate the boiler, but all the readings were fine when he had checked it.

  He stepped down to the engine car. The sound was definitely louder here and, he believed, louder than it had been before. He walked forward to the pilot car and found Elisha and Lescault leaning against opposite walls, arms crossed, faces dour.

  “What is it?” he asked them. “Do you know the cause of it?”

  Elisha nodded. Lescault looked distraught.

  “Well?”

  “Over here,” Elisha said. George moved closer as the lieutenant opened the window. The sound increased. It was coming from outside the car.

  The day had dawned grey and cloudy. The sky—so clear at midnight—was a dark pall. Groans filled the air, even above the whir and chop of wind and propellers. He looked down.

  And saw buffalo.

  What he had thought was the lingering shadow of night was instead an immense herd of shaggy, humpbacked bison. They stood so thick in spots that he could not see the earth between them. The dirigible passed over them, creating a swath of panicked beasts, and it was their lowing that he had heard—even at such a height and above the sound of the engine. He had taken their calls of animal fear for a groan of mechanical doom.

  George closed the window. He saw that the dour faces and even Lescault’s teary eyes were not the signs of imminent disaster, but of laughter held in too long. With a shrug and the shake of his head, he released them. Their humor came out in gales.

  “There,” Elisha said, looking through the telescope.

  George squinted into the gloom beyond the windows. The day had grown darker instead of more bright as the southwest wind brought heavy weather in on their rear quarter. This terrain was much different from the flat Kansa plain where they had tested their skills. Here it was a grey, folded landscape that hid its features from the unaccustomed eye. He could make no sense of it.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “There,” Elisha said again and pointed. “The line of cottonwoods that runs out to the left. That’s must be where the White meets the Missouri.”

  George squinted again but his attention was taken by another gust that rocked the dirigible. He pulled the wheel to counter the wind and shook his head. “As you say, navigator. I’ll just be glad to have our nose into this wind. We’re scudding like a crab with it on our backside. Give me some speed, Lescault. We’re going to head into it.”

  The private shouted his acknowledgement and the boiler roared as the firebox drafts clanged open. George pushed the throttle lever open to increase the pitch of the propellers. The ship shuddered again as another gust rolled around her girth.

  The pilot’s wheel was stiff, then loose, then stiff, all in a matter of seconds. George cursed as he pulled the wheel to port and reset the trim. The wind rippled across the grassland. Ahead, the line of cottonwood trees lashed and bent. Finally, he saw with his eyes what the lieutenant had been pointing to. Past the trees was a pale band of water. The White River, thick with chalk from the hills beyond, poured its milky contents into the larger, wider, stately Missouri.

  The rolling of the ship eased off as the A. Lincoln put her nose into the wind. George relaxed his grip on the wheel. He checked the ground, some five hundred feet below. The trees slipped by beneath them, but in the wrong direction. The ship was pointing westward, but was traveling east, pushed back by the strong prairie wind.

  “I need that speed,” he shouted over his shoulder to the engine car.

  “It’s coming, Captain. Pressure is building now.”

  The tone of the engine changed, its regular thrum becoming more insistent, more urgent. The hiss and pop of the pistons merged into a long sibilant exhalation. The ship rang with the vibration. George felt it in his feet and through the wheel in his hands. Slowly, their backward progress reversed itself. The landscape crawled toward the rear and they were again underway, heading west toward the White River.

  The weather ahead of them did not look any friendlier. The sky was dark and low. Rain hung like veils from cloudy ramparts. Lightning winked and flashed across the belly of the storm.

  “Damn,” muttered George.

  Elisha noticed, too. “What shall we do? We’re barely making headway.”

  George did not like his options. It was a roll of the dice, no matter how he decided. Higher, lower, ahead or back; there was no correct choice. He could only hope to give them the best odds.

  “We surely can’t get above it. If we anchor, we’re a sitting duck for that lightning. The winds make it too dangerous to go any lower, anyway. If we run before it, we’ll be back in the States before we can turn around again. I say we ride through it from here, beneath the clouds but high enough to give us some breathing room.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  The men moved quickly to prepare the ship for rough weather. Loose items were stowed, cabinets were locked, and all doors and windows were secured. Then they were ready. Riding at full speed, the airship crept toward the onrushing stormfront.

  The wind gusted. It wailed through the cabling and rattled the windows like a ghostly siren. Thunder rolled across the plain. Rivulets of water began to stream down the airship’s sides. George looked at his gauges and saw them changing.

  “Downdraft! Get to the winch. Pitch up, fifteen degrees. We’ve got to keep our altitude.” He opened two toggles and pulled the ballast release. More water streamed downward as four petcocks opened in the ship’s sides. The ship reacted slowly, but it did respond. He saw the nose lift. He held the ballast lever open a few seconds more and then pushed it shut.

  Lightning blistered the air and thunder shook their bones. The ship had started to regain some altitude, but not fast enough.

  “Increase pitch to twenty degrees. Lescault, I need more power for the props.”

  Again the sky flared. The storm was atop them, battering down. Fat raindrops turned to hailstones the size of a man’s fist.

  Oh, Lord, George prayed. Help us. She wasn’t designed for the likes of this.


  They climbed up toward the belly of the clouds. George held the wheel against the gust. They rose quickly now. The ship groaned. He looked up the slope of their ascent.

  The clouds above were streaking across their path. The ship was still sailing west, into the wind, but the clouds were moving to the south. The ship was climbing up into a broadside blast.

  “Pitch down!”

  “Captain?”

  “Down! Now!” He slammed the steering vanes into a dive. “There’s a crosswind above. If we hit it we’ll be torn apart.”

  The ship gave a second groan. This one ended in a sharp report and the whistle of a snapped cable.

  “Oh, God,” Elisha said as the floor slewed beneath their feet.

  The forward half of the ship twisted as it was hit by the sudden air above. It rolled and the floor now slanted to the rear and the left. Two more shots shook the airship. The nose deformed visibly as George watched and the ship rolled another eighth-turn.

  “Hold on!”

  George grabbed the wheel. Elisha hung onto the winch pedestal. Lescault shouted blasphemy from the engine car and then the ship rolled some more. Metal wedges slipped from their coves and cracked the windows below. A cabinet door burst open and a water jug fell down and smashed against the portside wall. The windows looked down on the dark river and up into the darker clouds. To the fore, George saw the nose bend a third of the way down its length. The wind finally caught the tail and pushed the ship up on her head. The men cried out as everything twisted and pitched down to point at the ground. Lescault fell through the cabin, screaming. He burst headfirst through the windows and was silent as he fell in a squall of shattered glass down to the cold water nearly 500 feet below.

  George gritted his teeth and held on all the tighter to the wheel.