Chapter 6: Nome

I took the paper out of his hand.

"What time's the show?"

"Five a.m."

"Then I'll see you at four-fifty."

He grunted, which I was learning meant several different things.

Bethel was flat and white and so cold the fuel truck's hose steamed.

We dropped mail, diapers, two snow machines and a pallet of frozen chicken, and took on a load of empty fish totes.

Ryder didn't say ten words to me on the ground.

He said a lot more in the air. All of them questions.

What's our alternate. What's our fuel at Nome if we hold for thirty minutes. What do you do if the brakes are fair to poor.

I answered every one.

Over Norton Sound the clouds broke and Nome came up on the coast, a little gray town on the edge of the white sea.

The ATIS said the wind was 360 at 22, gusting 33.

Runway 28.

Straight across.

Ryder looked at the numbers. Then he looked at me.

"Your leg."

"You're giving it to me?"

"I'm giving you the chance to embarrass yourself. Big difference."

I took the controls.

The freighter shook in the gusts.

I crabbed into the wind all the way down final, nose pointed off toward the hills, the runway sliding sideways in the windshield.

"Gust," Ryder said quietly.

"I see it."

At fifty feet I kicked her straight.

Left wing down into the wind. Right rudder.

The upwind main touched first, then the other, then the nose, right on the centerline paint.

Ryder sat back in his seat.

"Not bad," he said.

It was the nicest thing he'd said to me in nineteen days.

I kept my face straight all the way to the ramp.

By the time we'd unloaded, the weather had come in behind us. Snow sideways off the sea, the visibility gone to nothing.

Dispatch called it. We were staying the night.

The roadhouse was the only place open. A long low building with a moose rack over the door and a woodstove going.

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