Guts Read Free Page A

magnified by the wind so that the sound was truly deafening. To those dogs the inside of that plane was the most dangerous place in the world. They turned and ran away from the noise as fast as they could, into the tail of the plane.
    Fourteen dogs, about fifty pounds each, meant that suddenly seven hundred pounds was jammed back in the tail, in a plane that was essentially already flying. The tail dropped like a stone and the plane seemed to hop about a hundred feet in the air. I had a tight grip on the handle by the door and had one leg inside when the plane jumped, and for what seemed an eternity I hung there, half out of the plane, before it snapped a little on a gust and tipped me up and in.
    Thanks to the angle of climb caused by the weight in the tail, I tumbled back on top of the dogs, adding another two hundred pounds to the problem. I was upside down in a pile of dogs, all howling over the roar of the engine, when I heard the pilot scream, “There’s too much weight in the tail! Throw the dogs forward or we’re going down!”
    I lunged to my feet, grabbed a dog and threw him to the front of the plane so hard that he hit the pilot.
    And he immediately ran back to me.
    I threw another, then another, then another, every time hitting the pilot, who was swearing at me and screaming at the dogs as we took off. I would keep throwing frantically, and I’d gain a little, with three or four dogs in the front. But they would always run back.
    By now we were over open water in the Bering Sea and I had visions of the plane— which seemed to be barely wallowing through the sky—stalling and sinking into the waves and taking us all with it. I renewed my efforts, throwing dog after dog on top of dog beneath dog over dog, and they would run back, and I would imagine the plane settling into the water and would throw harder still.
    I was still wearing my full winter gear, which included a down parka, and the dogs bit me and the pilot and ripped my parka so that soon the plane was filled with small white feathers and flying dogs and swear words and blood.
    It took just twenty minutes to fly to Nome, and every one of those minutes I was sure we were going down into the water. I kept throwing dogs. Later I figured I threw a dog every five seconds, which is twelve a minute, so that in twenty minutes I threw 240 fiftypound sled dogs fifteen feet—the length of the plane. When we landed at last in Nome, the pilot had two men put a cart under the tail, because it dropped to the ground and dragged as soon as our airspeed decreased.
    He charged me eight hundred dollars for a twenty-minute flight and I started to complain until I looked at him and the inside of his plane and decided I was lucky it wasn’t more.
    I learned to fly when I got out of the army.
    I was honorably discharged in May of 1962, my term having been extended to fight a war with Cuba, which never happened. While I didn’t like the army at all, I did fall in love with flying while I was in uniform. Before I enlisted I had been on only one airplane ride in my life, when I was nine and a half and returning from the Philippines. When I enlisted in the army I went to basic training in Colorado by troop train and didn’t get to fly then. But after I attended demonstrations of small fixed-wing aircraft at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Fort Bliss, Texas, I knew I wanted to learn to fly. I probably would have pursued it in the army—in fact, I took the physical and written tests for helicopter school—but I disliked the military so much that I waited until I was out.
    When I was discharged I went to work in California in the aerospace field, at a lab at the China Lake Naval Ordnance Test Station. Within a week I’d signed up for lessons at a nearby airport.
    I started out in a small Aeronca Champ, a two-seater with one seat behind the other. The instructor’s name was Joe and he sat in back and we took off and I will never forget