Wy grinned and drifted west, the throttle up just enough to keep her from falling out of the sky, giving her time to peer up every nick and notch big enough to admit a tide. The mountain peaks held up almost to the very end of the peninsula but there was no level ground to be seen afterward, just multiple rough granite slabs off the vertical by only a few degrees. Two different collections of islands, one close in about five miles offshore and another about ten miles further south and sixty degrees more to the west, looked just as horizontally challenged. There wasn’t a cove big enough to spread a beach towel on or a place flat enough to land even a Super Cub. Maybe there was somewhere to land on floats but she wasn’t on floats today. She circled and headed back up the south coast of Chungasqak Bay.

The nineteen-hundred-foot airstrip at Blueberry Bay was built on a gravel spit that separated a lagoon from the Bay, attended by a few dozen houses and cabins scattered between the water’s edge and halfway up the nearly vertical hillside the airstrip dead-ended in. Not a strip she would take for granted, not without multiple touch-and-goes for practice first. The community consisted of 103 people and was according to the last census a hundred percent Sugpiaq, although it had originally been a Russian fort under Alexander Baranov’s tenure as Catherine the Great’s Alaska exploiter-in-chief. Recently the citizens of Blueberry Bay had unilaterally reclaimed the settlement’s original Sugpiaq name of Chuwawet, and were now in the process of convincing the US Postal Service they had the right to call themselves what they wanted to and still have their mail delivered.

Deeper into Blueberry Bay, Engaqutaq had a two-thousand-foot airstrip on a hill the top of which had been sliced off specifically for the purpose. Black spruce clustering menacingly on three edges as if just waiting for the starter’s pistol to sound before they reclaimed their territory from its two hundred residents. The edge closest to the water was lined with—she dropped down for a look, and then circled back for another look. Yes, those were headstones. Engaqutaq had a cemetery off the edge of its airstrip.

Most of the houses in Engaqutaq paralleled the strip, the way Alaska villages had been built in the old, more sensible days, when all you had to do was hop out of your plane and walk across the strip to get to your front door. After statehood the FAA had brought in a bunch of federal money and most of the airstrips had been relocated to five or ten miles out of town, among other things introducing allegedly better aids to navigation, along with the unintended consequence of wheeled vehicles, not to mention driver’s licenses, to the Alaskan Bush. Engaqutaq had originally been a US military fort of much more recent origin than neighboring Chuwawet’s Russian fort, rapidly succeeded by a herring cannery and then, when the herring were fished out, a salmon cannery, astonishingly still in operation. Wy had thought that all salmon were fresh frozen nowadays.