Thermal
Every February I count elk from a helicopter over the Clearwater country in north-central Idaho. It’s the best part of my job. You fly low over the ridges at first light in a little Bell with the doors off, strapped into a harness, with a thermal camera on a gimbal under the nose and a screen on your knee. On the screen the world is black and gray, cold snow and colder rock, and anything alive shows up white. Elk are big, warm, blocky white shapes. You can count a herd of eighty in thirty seconds, even in timber. You can tell cows from calves by the size of the glow.
I’ve done it for nine years with the same pilot, Benny Szabo, who’s flown in these mountains since the eighties and is the most unflappable person I know. He’d fly through a hailstorm reading a crossword.
On February 11th, over a ridge above the Lochsa River, Benny banked us around a saddle and I saw twenty-three white shapes standing in a circle in the snow, and I said, “Benny, hold up,” and he heard something in my voice, because he brought us into a hover.
They were human.
I want to explain how I know, because I’ve been asked. Elk are horizontal. You see the long glow of the body and four legs under it. These were vertical. Upright. Narrow at the bottom, wider at the shoulders, with a smaller bright round shape on top. Some were shorter than others. They stood on an open bench of snow below the ridgeline, maybe forty feet across, in a ring, evenly spaced, perhaps six feet apart, all facing in. Toward the center. Nothing was in the center. On the screen the center was black, the deep flat black of cold snow.
They weren’t moving. Living things on thermal always shimmer a little. These were steady as lamps.
I looked up from the screen with my own eyes. The bench was right there, maybe three hundred yards out, flat white snow under a gray dawn sky. Nothing on it. No figures. Not even tracks. Just smooth unbroken snow, a fresh foot of it from the night before.
I looked back down at the screen. Twenty-three.
Benny looked over my shoulder at the screen for a long time. Then he looked out at the bench. He said, “Huh,” and then, “Want me to go lower?” and I said yes, and he took us down, slow, toward the bench, and when we were a hundred yards out, every one of the white shapes turned.
Together. Like a flock of birds turning. They didn’t move their feet. They just turned in place, from facing the center to facing us.
Benny pulled up so hard I hit my head on the door frame.
We didn’t talk about it on the way back to Grangeville. We finished the survey, two more units, in silence. When we landed Benny shut down and sat with his hands in his lap until the blades stopped and then said, “Send me the footage.” I did.
That night I pulled up the file on my laptop and went frame by frame. Twenty-three upright shapes, standing in a ring. When we descend, they turn to face the aircraft, all in one frame. Between one frame and the next.
I sent a still to a friend at the university who works on thermal imaging. I didn’t tell him what I thought. I asked if there was any explanation. Hot spring vents, sun-warmed rock, an artifact of the sensor. He wrote back the next morning: Where did you get this? Then a second email, an hour later: Those are 36-37 degrees C at the surface. That’s body temperature. That’s the temperature of a person.
Benny called on the 14th. He’d been looking into something. He’d flown search and rescue for the county for twenty years and still had friends in the sheriff’s office.
“How many’d you count?” he said.
“Twenty-three.”
“Clearwater and Lochsa ranger districts,” he said, “since 1962. Unresolved missing persons. Hunters, mostly. A couple of hikers. A trapper. A kid who wandered off from a campground in ‘78.” He paused. “Twenty-three.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said, “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Nope,” Benny said.
We flew the next unit on the 18th, a different drainage, ten miles east. Benny didn’t say anything about the ridge and I didn’t either. We counted elk. At 7:40 we came over a timbered spur and there they were on the screen, on an open slope below us. Twenty-three white shapes in a ring. Facing in.
Ten miles from where they’d been.
On the 22nd they were in a meadow above a trailhead on Highway 12, three miles from the road. On the 25th they were in a clearcut overlooking the Fish Creek campground, where the snow plows turn around. We flew over at three hundred feet and they turned to face us, and my screen showed something new. In the ring, on the side nearest the aircraft, there was a gap. Two of the shapes had stepped apart. There was an empty space between them, black on the screen, about the width of one more person.
They were coming down out of the mountains. And they’d left room.
I wanted to stop flying. My supervisor wanted the survey finished, and I couldn’t tell him why I wanted to stop. Benny said he’d do it either way. He said, “They aren’t coming for the helicopter. They’re coming for whoever’s on the ground.”
He was the one who said we should go in. On foot, or on snowmachines, to the last place we’d seen them. He said they were somebody’s kids and husbands, and at least one of them was a little boy, and he wanted to know. He said he’d spent twenty years looking for people in those mountains and not finding them and now somebody had found them for him.
I said no. I said absolutely not.
On March 2nd he went by himself.
He took his snowmachine up the Fish Creek road before dawn. He left a note for his wife saying he’d be back by noon and he’d taken the thermal handheld from my office, which I hadn’t noticed was missing. His wife called me at three in the afternoon. By then the weather was coming in.
The county sent a ground team. They found his snowmachine at the top of the clearcut, parked neatly, the key in it. His tracks went out onto the open snow, a straight line, about two hundred yards, and stopped in the middle of the slope. No tracks back. No tracks beyond. Just a straight line of boot prints walking out into the middle of a clean white field, and ending.
They found the thermal handheld beside the last print, face down in the snow, still recording. The battery was dead. I have the file.
It’s four minutes long. It’s shaky, the way handheld footage is. You can hear Benny breathing, and his boots squeaking on the snow, and the wind. On the screen there’s a ring of white shapes, and he’s walking toward the gap. As he walks you can hear him talking, low, the way he talked on the radio to lost hunters. “It’s all right,” he says. “I’m with the county. I’ve come to take you home. It’s all right.” He says names. I don’t know how he knew them. The last thirty seconds the camera is pointed at the ground, and the snow at the bottom of the screen goes from black to white. Warm. As if someone were standing next to him. On both sides.
Then the camera falls.
I flew the rest of the survey with a new pilot from Lewiston, a young woman who doesn’t talk much, which suits me. We finished on March 20th. I made her fly the Fish Creek drainage first, before anything else, and I sat with the screen on my knee and my hands shaking.
They were there, on the slope above the clearcut. Facing in. I counted twice.
Twenty-four.
The ring was closed. There’s no gap anymore. One of the shapes is taller than the others and stands with a little stoop at the shoulders that I’d know anywhere, because I’ve sat beside it in a helicopter at dawn for nine winters.
We came in low. They turned to face us, all together, the way they do. All but one. The tall one with the stoop kept facing the center for a moment longer, and then, slowly, by himself, he turned and lifted one bright arm, the way you’d wave somebody off. The way you’d tell somebody not to land.
I haven’t been back. It’s summer now, and the snow’s gone, and the camera won’t see anything against the warm ground anyway. I don’t know if they’re still up there, or where they’ll be in February.
The survey starts again in seven months. I’ve asked to be reassigned. I haven’t heard back. I keep thinking about the center of that ring, the black empty middle all of them were facing. I keep wondering what’s in it that’s so cold, and what they’re all waiting for it to do.