Dagfinn Grant, the owner and operator of Bristol Bay Air Freight and Wy’s direct competitor, had been her nemesis ever since the United States Postal Service had decided to spread governmental largesse around and carved off a slice of Grant’s mail route to award to Wy. It was only ten villages, with mail service once a week year-round, but to Wy’s one-woman operation it meant the difference between paying attorney fees for Tim’s adoption or letting Tim be remanded to the custody of his mother, who had nearly killed him the last time he was in her care.

To Finn Grant, it meant war. When Wy was approached by potential passengers on a day that was booked solid, she directed them to Bristol Bay Air Freight. When Grant was approached by potential passengers on a day that was booked solid, they were told that there were no other air taxis in Newenham and that he’d try to squeeze them in sometime later in the week. Grant’s pilots were forbidden, on pain of instant dismissal, to give Wy any information about weather or strip conditions anywhere in their mutual flying area, and Grant’s mechanic had been docked a day’s pay when he sold Wy an oil filter at cost.

Mechanics by nature being contrary, cantankerous and fiercely independent creatures, this one had told Grant to take his job and put it where the sun don’t shine and marched across the primary Newenham runway beneath the nose of a taxiing Alaska Airlines 737, there to offer his services to Wy, at a discount. She couldn’t afford to hire him on full-time, but she was grateful for the offer, and when he set up his own shop she’d directed pilots his way. Troy Gillis had been servicing her Piper Super Cub and her Cessna 180 for a year now. The engines on both planes had never sounded better, and when a boat skipper with more malice than brains had ripped up the fabric of the wings on her Cub that spring, Troy had had them recovered in two weeks.