Passing through Anchorage, Jed went shopping for supplies and equipment, while Jenny contacted an old school friend who happened to be the manager of counter employees of Wien Airlines. Her company had just installed a mainframe computer and she was happy to show Jenny just how easy it was to retrieve the information that Colonel MacPherson had taken flight 41/MGR. This meant that the curious half cargo, half passenger, turbo-prop plane, after landing at Unalakleet, on a gravel strip, had continued on in a round-about-manner to arrive at McGrath, the air hub of the Kuskokwim Basin.

Anchorage disappointed Jed. Instead of the frontier settlement pictured in his mind, he had found a middle sized city that might as well have been Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. At the supermarket he looked for pilot bread, a large hardtack cracker which his background reading suggested to be the bread of the bush —not sourdough. The clerks had never heard of the backwoods staple, or any of the other light, portable trail foods Jed was accustomed to packing.

He finally found a supply at the Alaska branch of the Seattle based R.E.I., an outdoor equipment co-op. Here, however, the clerk, finding out that Jed was from Mount Cascade Wilderness wanted to ask him questions about climbing routes on Oregon's premier mountain, instead of answering Jed's queries on the Alaskan bush.

The possibility of problems with bears was Jed's major concern. He was familiar with 200 to 400 pound black bears. At the pack station he had an old sow who showed up every summer —with her new cubs— to steal apples from the old trees Grandfather Smith had planted. He was aware that the Polar Bear, far to the north of where they were going, was the only species known to stalk man. What Jed wanted an answer to was, "just how dangerous is the mainland Alaska Brown, or Toklat Grizzly?"

After listening to a number of "griz" scare stories from clerks and taxi drivers, Jed concluded he had heard them all before —just substitute mad dog, wolf, cougar— and that his and Jenny's best precaution was a whistle, or tying a bell to their packs. Anything to make noise when hiking through brush to let Ursus Horribillis know they were in the area, and meant no harm.

The suspicion that packing a .44 magnum handgun, or .308 Weatherby, or machine gun, was a waste of energy was confirmed by a meeting with a drunk Tanana Indian staggering down Fourth Avenue. This fellow begged for a dollar to buy, supposedly, something to eat. Instead, to his surprise, he received a handout of pilot bread, and a lecture on the evils of white man's drink.