The Heaths have tried to ignore the contrail of their daughter’s political comet, the soaring upsweep from unknown governor to national celebrity, fashion heroine and triumphant stump speaker, followed by a swoon in popularity resulting from uncertain answers under hard questioning. On the evening Chuck Sr. quizzed his grandson about whether he had earned a soft drink, Palin was faltering badly in an interview with CBS News’s Katie Couric, in which she was less the huntress than easy prey.

“I can take anything but the blogs,” her father says uneasily.

But Chuck has seen his daughter handle herself in other perilous situations and come out all right. A few years ago, he watched her pilot husband Todd Palin’s commercial fishing boat in a storm. Todd was working at his oil-field job on the North Slope, and Palin and her father had been fishing on Bristol Bay. “It was the toughest work I’ve ever done, and it wasn’t only hard, it was dangerous,” Chuck says. At the end of the run, they had to get the boat on a trailer amid crashing surf. As cold, metallic-sheened waves tossed the trawler around, Chuck quailed.

“I’m not doing that,” he said.

“Get out of the way,” Palin said. “I’ll do it.”