The hunters had seen the Cessna circle behind the ridge once again, but it didn’t reappear. They dialed the Yakama Tribal Police and told them a plane had gone down. The police chief himself, Jimmy Shike, jumped into his SUV and raced for the road that led up into the mountains.

They say “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.” Colt ran away from his first solo landing. He headed for the trees and had barely gotten out of sight before Chief Shike drove up to the clearing.

The chief braced himself against the wind and strode up to the Cessna, which lay nose down, ass in the air, like a paper airplane stuck in the grass. The damage didn’t look too extensive at first glance, certainly survivable, but when he didn’t see a forlorn pilot sitting beside the pranged plane, Shike expected to find someone inside the cockpit, unconscious or worse.

He peered in… no body, no blood. The chief’s first thought was that the pilot was injured and either stumbling around incoherent or trying to walk his way off the ridge to find help. The idea that this was a stolen plane never entered his mind. He got on the radio and ordered a search-and-rescue mission, calling in tracking dogs and teams from his force and the Yakima County Sheriff’s Office, along with volunteers. Then he called in the tail number of the plane to the Washington State Patrol so they could pull up the registration and find out whom he was searching for.

Bob Rivers had just gotten off the air at 10 a.m. after a typically entertaining four hours of commentary, interviews, and repartee with his radio team when his boss walked into the studio holding a cordless phone. He said there was a state policeman from Yakima who wanted to speak to Bob… because his plane had just crashed on the Indian reservation.