Chapter 7: First Sight, Second Time

The plane was a nine-seater Cessna Caravan that smelled of aviation fuel and someone's previous lunch, and it crossed the last hundred miles of coast in the kind of turbulence that is not quite alarming but keeps you from reading. I had given up on the journal I'd brought and spent the final forty minutes watching the shoreline below resolve from abstraction into detail — the dark water, the pale rim of ice at the bay edges, the occasional punctuation of a light that meant habitation and then didn't. October had arrived here before me. It had been thorough about it.

The landing strip at Naktok was a gravel leveling of what had previously been tundra, and the pilot brought us down with the particular combination of competence and aggression that small-aircraft pilots seem to develop in places where the weather is always making counterarguments. We taxied toward a low metal building with the word NAKTOK stenciled above its door in letters that had faded to the color of the surrounding landscape. Intentional camouflage or simple entropy — in my experience, those two things are harder to tell apart than people admit.

The four other passengers — a hydrologist from Fairbanks, a equipment delivery courier, a woman who had not explained herself to anyone, and an older man in a Parks Service jacket who'd slept the entire flight — gathered their things with the practiced efficiency of people accustomed to moving in and out of remote postings. I took my duffel from the overhead and followed them out into the cold.