“Baker Lake is 375 miles from Churchill, and that was the next stop. Just three and a quarter hours after they’d left Churchill Harbor, they got into Baker Lake. Everybody was waiting for them, and everybody in this case was made up of Eskimos. There are only about six white people in the whole place, but they were out, too, and took charge of the Lindberghs when they landed that night. So far so good.
“The Lockheed up to now was working perfectly—the trip was going off as scheduled—just as all of Slim’s trips go off as scheduled. From Baker Lake the going was to be harder. The next stop was Aklavik, on the MacKenzie River. Aklavik is pretty far north, just about 130 miles within the Arctic Circle, and the route called for a jump of over 1,000 miles across this cold country. But Slim and Anne made it. They did that 1,000 miles in eleven and a half hours, which was some going. They had the Aurora Borealis with them, because the farther north they went, the brighter the lights grew, and flying at night was as easy as flying by day.
“Aklavik may be cold, but it was warm to the Lindberghs. Slim and Anne saw a lot of things they’d never seen before, and they had what you’d call their first real taste of the arctic. There were all the people you read about up there—Mounties, and Eskimos and fur trappers, who’d trekked in from miles around to see the Lindberghs land. Eskimo kids trailed them around and grinned when they were spoken to.
“They had a lot of time to look around, too, because they had to stay at Aklavik for three days. The weather grounded them, but on August 7th, the sky cleared, and they were off again, now for Point Barrow. Nome was next. But before they got to Nome there was trouble.
“They’d started out from the Point in the morning, and flew all day. All they saw was packed ice for miles around. A thick fog was raising. Finally at 11 o’clock that night the fog grew so thick that the Colonel and his wife thought it would be best just to sit down and wait for the fog to clear. So that’s what they did. They sat down in Shismaref Bay, on Kotzebue Sound.”
At this point Bob paused significantly, and waited. He had pronounced both words without hesitation of any kind, and he was waiting for the praise that he felt was due him. There was a strange silence. So Bob said again: “They sat down on Shismaref Bay, on Kotzebue Sound.”
This time Captain Bill realized what was required of him. “Good work,” he said “You got them both without a slip.”
Now Bob could go on. “They sat down,” he began.
“That they did,” interrupted Pat. “They sat down on Shismaref Bay on Kotzebue Sound. What heathen names. But we’ve heard them, and get on with you, lad.”
“I am,” said Bob, and got on. “They had to wait for ten hours for the fog to lift, and it must have been mighty uncomfortable in the cockpits of their planes. When they finally did get started, they found that they couldn’t get to Nome after all. The fog drifted up again, and they had to come down—”