'The war over there may have subsided into what they humorously call the Sitzkrieg, with each side trying to outwait the other. But believe me, it's going to explode soon enough, and if past history is any guide, we'll be drawn into it.
'I cannot predict when or how our participation will come, but in one way or another it will have to involve Soviet Russia. The Communists are at present allies of Nazi Germany. This can't last long, but whether it does or not, can't you see how whatever Russia does will involve Alaska? Here at the Diomede Islands, the Soviet Union is a mile and a half from Alaska. All right, they're tiny islands and they don't matter.
But across the Bering Sea from Russia to Alaska is trivial for a modern airplane.
Contact is almost inescapable, and when that contact comes, your Alaska will be right in the middle of the war.'
A flier who had spent time in the Air Corps asked: 'Are you speaking of Russia as our enemy or our ally,' and Shafter snapped: 'I haven't said because I can't guess.
The way things stand tonight, she's our enemy. But things won't continue as they are, and then she could become our ally.'
'Then how can you make plans?'
'In a case like this you plan for every contingency, and I'm certain that whatever happens, you good people will adjust to it.' To emphasize his point, he slapped the area where the Soviet and American frontiers met, and with that, he moved into the heart of his surprising talk:
'Look, please, at this map of North America and the eastern part of Siberia. Let's suppose that the Soviet Union continues to be our enemy. How can they most effectively strike at cities like Seattle, Minneapolis and Chicago? By streaming right across Alaska and Canada, a straight line to their industrial targets. The first battles, the ones that could decide everything, would be fought in places like Nome and Fairbanks and over the airfield on which we're sitting right now.
'But let's suppose that the Soviets turn on Hitler, as they should, and become our allies. How will we help supply them? How will airplanes built in Detroit get to Moscow? I think they'll fly a modified great circle route, across Wisconsin and Minnesota to Winnipeg, then, within six months, maybe over to Edmonton, Dawson, Fairbanks, Nome and into Siberia.
Gentlemen, you could very well be using this gravel strip as an emergency landing field for huge bombers.'
While the men stared at one another in amazement, he showed a beautifully drawn map of the region between Edmonton and Fairbanks, and said: 'Whether the Soviet Union turns out to be enemy or friend, what we ought to do right now is build a highway capable of handling military equipment from here and he pointed to Dawson Creek, northwest of Edmonton where the railroad ends, right through this morass to here.'
And, ignoring the terrible terrain, he marked a sweeping line across Canada and into the heartland of Alaska at Fairbanks. 'Don't tell me such a road has been tried before.
Don't tell me it would impose all sorts of difficulties. Listen to me when I tell you it must be built.'
When a pilot asked 'Why?' Shatter grew impatient: 'Because the life and death of a great republic is at stake. Two great republics, the United States and Canada.
We have got to move war equipment from Detroit and Pittsburgh to the shores of the Bering Sea.' And then he said something strange and prophetic, a stray idea that would always be remembered by the men who heard it. 'We've got to be prepared to drive off anyone who comes at us from Asia.' When this challenge was greeted by silence, he laughed at himself, slapped his right leg, and said jovially: 'They tell me the original Americans, Eskimos, everyone up here, they all came across the Bering Sea when it wasn't a sea any longer. Just walked across. Maybe the seas will drop again.
Maybe they'll be coming at us across some land bridge. But they'll come, gentlemen, they will come.'
IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, LeROY FLATCH Ignored the progress of the war in Europe and the frightening predictions of Captain Shafter, because he now had two planes to look after, the old two-seater Cub and the relatively new four-seater Waco. He kept pontoons on the former and berthed it at a nearby lake, and perfected a speedy way for switching the four-seater first to wheels and then to skis. With this two-pronged attack, which he used creatively, he was able to probe the center of Alaska about as effectively as any bush pilot then operating, for despite his youth, he had acquired a mature appreciation of what his airplanes would do if he kept them in good shape and filled with gas.
In any twelve-month period he would certainly land one of his planes on the following surfaces: wide macadam at an official airport like Anchorage, narrow bumpy macadam at a rural port like Palmer, gravel at one mining camp, loose gravel and dust at the next, grass at some strip beside a hunting lodge, gravel bank beside a river, mud and gravel beside some stream, ice, snow and very dangerously ice covered by a thin layer of snow, grass covered with sleet or grass covered with snow, sleet and light rainfall. He would also alight on lakes, rivers, ponds and other bodies of water too limited in length to permit a subsequent takeoff; then he would haul his plane onto dry land, walk out, and get some other daring aviator to fly him back in with a pair of wheels to replace the pontoons and some tools with which to chop down small trees and smooth out a runway.
And sooner or later he would also land in the branches of some tree; then he would scramble down, wait for a replacement wing to be flown in, bolt it carefully to the undamaged stub, and be off again. He was constantly in danger, considering the routes he flew, but with remarkable foresight he saw to it that any of the unavoidable accidents occurred with his old two-seater and not his new four-seat job.
His most enjoyable assignment came whenever he received a telegram asking him to meet one or another of the Venns at the Anchorage airport, for this always meant renewing acquaintance with this exciting family. He liked all of them: the cool, reserved father who ran an empire; the spirited mother who seemed to make many of the decisions; the young man who would one day inherit that empire; and especially the young wife, so pretty and secure in what she wanted to do. 'She's certainly not like any of the half-breeds you read about,' LeRoy said to his fellow pilots. 'Any man would be proud to have such a wife.'
'Not me,' an old-timer growled. 'Half-breeds, native women, sooner or later they all lead a man to hell.'
On pickup trips like the ones to Anchorage, LeRoy could never be sure just when the incoming plane would arrive; schedules in Alaska were subject to instant change, sometimes involving whole days. For example, when Bob Reeve flew his crazy planes out to the far end of the Aleutians, you were never certain when he would land on his return trip, because the weather out there was so unpredictable. One Reeve pilot told LeRoy: 'I kid you not, we were flying a normal route over Atka when a williwaw come up off the Bering Sea, calm one minute, tempest another, and turned us exactly upside down. Dishes, stewardesses, customers, all up in the air and me too, if I hadn't been strapped in.'
'How long you fly that way?'
'About half a minute. Seemed like two hours, but the next blast of arctic air straightened us out."
'I'd like to fly those islands with you someday.'
'Be my guest.'
On the long layovers, LeRoy liked to read accounts of the old bush pilots, the ones who had pioneered the routes he covered, and while the best stories dealt with the young men who flew out of the settled places like Sitka and Juneau, the most fascinating, it seemed to him, were about the men who brought aviation to the center of the country Fairbanks, Eagle, the little settlements along the Yukon like Nulato and Ruby and especially those intrepid pilots who carried the mail to the really minute villages on the southern and northern flanks of the great, forbidding Brooks Range Beetles, Wiseman, Anaktuvuk and the camps along the Colville River.
Those guys really had guts, LeRoy thought repeatedly as he read of their exploits, but the tales had a mournful similarity. Harry Kane was about the best of the bush pilots. First man to land at a dozen different sites, field or no field. Loved riverbanks if the sand and gravel wer
e not rippled. But if they were rippled, he landed anyway.
Helped three different women have their babies at nine thousand feet. Never took chances. Always a bearcat for safety. You'd fly anywhere with good old Harry Kane, the best of the lot.
And then in the last two pages of the chapter you learned that one night, in a blinding snowstorm, good old Harry, best of the lot... kerplooie. Just once, LeRoy reflected, I'd like to read about someone who was the greatest of the bush pilots and who died in bed at the age of seventy-three.
With help from Tom Venn, LeRoy had rearranged the interior of his Waco so that an extra seat was provided back amidst the luggage, which meant that he could now meet the commercial planes flying up from Seattle and carry all four Venns out to their lodge, and once when the Seattle plane was late and he was delayed in reaching Venn's Lode he slept over, and in the morning Tom Venn said: 'You know, LeRoy, it's very gloomy to listen to the eight-o'clock news in Alaska.'
'Why? Just like the Lower Forty-eight, isn't it?'
'Not at all. Every morning there's this unbroken litany as to where the small planes have crashed the night before. "Harry Janssen's two-seater, at Lake This-or-That, west of Fairbanks. Twenty-eight hundred feet in snow. Signals indicate survivors."Or like the one they just broadcast. Some fellow named Livingston. "Four-seater at a lodge five miles west of Ruby. Snow. No signals. Plane looks to be severely damaged and on side."'
'Could that be Phil Livingston?' LeRoy asked. 'He's one of the best. He doesn't crash in a snowstorm. He doesn't even go out in a snowstorm.'
'He seems to have gone yesterday,' and when Flatch flew back to Palmer he learned that it was Phil Livingston, one of the best, and he began to listen to the eight-o'clock news with more attention, and the almost daily notice of which airplanes had crashed, where and at what altitudes, with or without visible survivors, brought home to him just how perilous it was to fly small planes in Alaska. 'Perilous but inescapable,' a veteran said in the pilots' room at Palmer as LeRoy was waiting for a passenger who wanted to explore the wonderful valleys that nestled among the glaciers streaming down from Denali.
But dangerous or not, bush flying in central Alaska was one of the world's most exciting occupations. The weather systems were monumental in extent, whole continents of air rushing madly out of Siberia. The mountains were endless, great armies of peaks many of them not even named, stretching to the horizons. The glaciers were, as one pilot trained in Texas said, 'not much like what you see on a flight out of Tulsa.' And the diversity of the people who populated the little villages or labored in the mining camps was endless and rewarding.
'Some of the craziest people in civilization,' the Texas pilot said, 'if you care to call this civilization, are up here in Alaska.'
LeRoy met some of them when he was commissioned to fly heavy replacement gear into a hopeless mining camp lost in a back corner of the Talkeetna Mountains north of Matanuska. He had never serviced this outfit before, but with the aid of a penciled map drawn hastily by a fellow pilot who had been there once, he found the place, and when he landed in the snow he saw three typical Alaska mountain men waiting at the edge of their improvised airstrip: an old-timer from Oregon, a relative newcomer from Oklahoma and a young half-breed fellow with jet-black bangs hanging over his eyes. He had been born, LeRoy learned, in another mining camp well to the north, where his grandfather, a 1902 drifter from New Mexico, had married an Athapascan woman who could neither read nor write. Their son had hooked up with another Athapascan, so that their son, this Nathanael Coop, was really only one-quarter white, three-quarters Indian, but it was customary to call such a person a half-breed. His name was an oddity, for his New Mexico grandfather had arrived in Alaska with a name like Coopersmith or Cooper by, but his son was called by all his friends plain Coop, and it was thus that the name appeared on lists when the various head counts were made.
Certainly his grandson was Nate Coop and had never been anything else.
Nate was in his late teens, a silent lad who seemed unrelated to his two older companions; his only friend was a big, surly brown dog named Killer, who had been trained to attack any stranger who trespassed on the mining property. He took an instant dislike to LeRoy, whom he attacked twice before Nate growled 'Down!' whereupon he leaped savagely at the snow skis, trying to grasp first one, then the other in his strong jaws before Nate growled a second 'Down!' Killer obviously loved his master, for at Nate's command he left the plane but positioned himself so that he could keep a bloodshot eye on both LeRoy and the Cub.
After the cargo was unloaded, LeRoy was informed that on the return trip he was expected to drop Nate off at a parent mine farther into the Talkeetnas: 'Nobody told me.'
'Nobody needed to. Ten bucks extra, you make the stop.'
'I have no idea where it is.'
'Nate'll show you,' and with the stub of a pencil the Oregon man added a few squirms and squiggles to the map and asked: 'Nate, you think you can figure it out?' and the young fellow said: 'I guess so.' With such preparation LeRoy prepared to fly deep into mountains he had never negotiated before.
'Hop in, Nate. If you know the landmarks, I'm sure we'll make it,' and Nate said with no concern: 'Never seen 'em from the air, but I guess they can't be much different,' and then to LeRoy's astonishment, Killer jumped in too.
'Now wait! I can't have a dog ...'
'Stays on my lap, no trouble ..."
Apprehensively, LeRoy allowed the dog to stay even though he could see that the hostility between them had not abated. As the plane climbed up off the snow, he happened to look sideways, and noticed how similar the dog and his master appeared, each with hair in his eyes: Nate and Killer, boy, they're a pair! When the plane achieved altitude, he warned the young miner: 'That dog still has it in for me. We could be in trouble if he tried to bite me,' but Nate said reassuringly: 'He's just protective.' But how Killer interpreted this commission, LeRoy could not guess, for although the evil-looking beast did stay on his side of the cockpit, secured in Nate's arms, he also kept his nose close to LeRoy's right wrist that he could clamp down at the first false move.
Killer was not a good passenger, and when the plane flew into rough mountain air which tossed it about, he started to whimper.
With two sharp taps on the dog's forehead, Nate said: 'Shut up, Killer,' and the complaints stopped.
In this uneasy posture Flatch flew deep into the mountains, his attention diverted by the snarling manner in which Killer maintained watch on him, and after some minutes of purposeful flight he told Nate: 'I'm lost. Where's the camp we're looking for?'
Nate, no more worried than his pilot about being astray among great mountains in snowy weather, for that was an ordinary Alaskan experience, said blithely: 'It's got to be over here somewheres,' and, seeking to aid LeRoy, he opened his right-hand-door window to look down as they flew extremely low over a pass. But as he did, Killer saw the kind of chance he often leaped at when on the ground, an opportunity to escape from wherever he was being held, and with a powerful thrust of his legs he turned his back on the pilot he despised, left Nate's arms, uttered a triumphant bark, and jumped right out the open window.
LeRoy, on the left-hand side of the plane, did not see him go but he did hear the bark and Nate's anguished shout 'My God! There he goes!' and as the plane twisted in its course, the two occupants watched as big Killer, afloat in the cold air, intuitively spread out his legs to slow his fall and bring it under control.
'He'll be kilt!' Nate screamed. 'Do somethin'!' but there was nothing LeRoy could do except circle the plane and watch Killer smash onto the rocks below. However, the dog seemed to have some miraculous guidance system, for, with the bulk of his body parallel to the ground, and the fierce pull of gravity somewhat abated, he drifted and glided toward a snow-filled crevice, a kind of enclosed valley, high in the hills.
When the men saw him land, lie stunned for a moment, then rise and start to snarl, Nate said weakly: 'It's a miracle.' But now the problem became: 'How we
gonna get that dog outta there?'
Even a moment's study convinced the two men that landing in that tight valley was an impossibility, for even though the plane did have its skis on, there was not nearly enough space for an approach or takeoff. Killer was marooned high in the Talkeetnas, and for the time being, there was no way to rescue him.
But they stayed over him for some minutes, loath to leave a pet, even an ugly-spirited one, in such a forlorn condition, and during one flyover LeRoy remembered the packet of sandwiches Flossie customarily put in the back of the plane whenever she knew her brother was off on one of his expeditions where food might be scarce, and now he directed Nate: 'Find that bundle. Paper tied with string. Break it loose.' And on their last flight over the bewildered animal, who had apparently landed uninjured, for he was thrashing about, Nate adroitly dropped the package not far from where the dog stood in the snow, his ugly face turned up toward the plane.
'I told you Killer had the brains of a man,' Nate exulted when the dog spotted the descending object, took note of its landing area, and ran to retrieve it. This was an act of such intelligence that LeRoy shouted: 'That dog's gonna live!' With Nate's guidance he turned the plane toward the camp.
By that evening all Alaska had been alerted to the drama of the 'parachuting' dog, and by the next day several determined outdoorsmen resolved to make a rescue effort, but the valley in which the dog was penned was so inaccessible that he could be kept alive only by food drops delivered from the Cub. Though overland hikes were clearly not feasible, suggestions poured into the camp from all parts of the territory.
The person who became most deeply concerned about Killer's fate was not his owner, Nate, but LeRoy's sister, Flossie, who had lost her tame moose so cruelly but whose considerable affection for animals was undiminished. So it was natural that the next day, when her brother and Nate were going out to feed the prisoner, she asked to go along, and they rigged a seat for her.