My hand is on the door to the mailbox when I spot a new sign mounted on a tree just below the bright yellow No Trespassing warning—a large rectangular piece of plywood with fluorescent orange spray-painted letters that reads, “No Crusaders.”
“Oh, you child.” My cheeks burn as I march back to my truck, the note crumpled in my fist. I toss it to the floor of my passenger seat, throw my truck in drive, and pull away.
CHAPTER FOUR
March
The evergreen branches sag beneath the layer of freshly fallen snow as I coast up the driveway. Jonah’s hangar looms on my left, but Archie, his orange-and-white Piper, is already on the private airstrip, waiting for takeoff.
Jonah crouches in front, inspecting one of the skis. He’s wearing navy arctic overalls to keep his lower half warm while his parka hangs over the open cockpit door.
My heart squeezes as it does every time I see him, in that split second before I take a deep breath and remind myself that it wasn’t meant to be, that I’m happy for him.
Thankfully, as the months go by and reality settles in, the sadness isn’t so much a deep ache as a dull and lingering disappointment. I’m waiting for the day that fades, too. That’s when I’ll feel like I’ve truly moved on.
I hop out of my truck and holler, “Wishing you were back in Hawaii yet?” I’ve only seen him once and briefly, right when he and Calla returned a month ago. The deep golden tan he was sporting is long gone, leaving him with his typical olive complexion.
“When I can be flying bales of straw and pork belly around Alaska instead? You kidding me?”
I laugh as my boots sink into the snow. He meets me halfway, enveloping me against his broad, warm chest and a soft flannel shirt that smells like Irish Spring soap. His stylish beard could use a trim, but it’s nowhere near the blond bush of pre-Calla days. Sometimes I miss it.
“How the hell did you rope me into doing this again, Marie?”
I savor his warmth for only a second—he runs hotter than the average human—and then I pull away, hyperaware that anything longer might be construed as beyond friendly on my part. “Because it’s winter, you’re bored, and frankly, it’s really easy to rope you into anything to do with flying.”
And the Iditarod needs volunteer pilots as much as they need veterinarians. Every year, at least thirty pilots step up to join the Iditarod Air Force, otherwise known as the IAF. They’re the ones hauling supplies and volunteers into the twenty-six—give or take, depending on the year—checkpoints, most of those locations only accessible by air. They also fly media around and take the dogs dropped along the trail back to Anchorage.
Jonah may be volunteering, but there is long-term opportunity, which is how I hooked him. Fans and tourists come from all over the world, eager to witness the race. They pay pilots a lot of money to fly them around, and as a flight charter company owner always looking for business, it’s an opportunity for Jonah to get involved, make himself known.
“Yeah, yeah.” Jonah grins sheepishly. “It’s been a few years, though. I forgot how much work it is.” He stretches his left arm out in front of him. “I’ve been hauling fifty-pound drop bags for two weeks.”
“Is it bothering you?” He shattered that arm in a plane crash last summer, the second time Jonah went down in two years. That was one of the scariest nights of my life, waiting for a phone call from the rescue team, fearing we’d lost him for good.
“Nah. Just whining for the sake of it. Did you go down to Anchorage to watch the big dog-and-pony show?”
“Don’t you mean the dog-and-reindeer show?” The weekend before the Iditarod is always a big one, with a ceremonial start for the teams in downtown Anchorage before the mushers and their dogs are shuttled up to the official race start in Willow. The days are filled with media interviews and spectators cheering for their favorites as they set off along the eleven-mile urban stretch. It’s such an important event for the sport, the city, and the entire state that they’ll do anything to make sure it happens. One March, due to an especially mild winter, organizers hauled in a train’s worth of snow from Fairbanks to build up the track so the teams had something to slide across.
The ceremonial start is capped off with a herd of domestic reindeer running down the streets.
I shake my head. “Too busy. Prerace checks and all that.” The last step in a month-long process ahead of the Iditarod, where mushers are required to prove their dogs are fit to race, undergoing a battery of tests, deworming treatments, and veterinarian approvals. “Plus, I didn’t want to see Skip’s smug face as he waved at his adoring fans.” One of whom I suspect left a scathing review of my clinic online. I don’t have anyone named Shanna on my client roster, and her accusations about the service were vague. They seemed a personal attack on me, even going so far as to mention the Iditarod in her comments.