 
# About this Ebook

Alaska Sampler 2014 is an uncommon collection of short prose pieces and excerpts of longer works by ten of Alaska's finest contemporary authors. Some of it is brand new, some reprinted, but all of it takes you beyond the media hype to the unscripted, everyday Alaska that we cherish. Be forewarned: our selections range all over the literary landscape, and as we swerve from Adventure to Opinion and Biography to Humor, you'd best keep both hands on the wheel.

When you look for more books by our authors, we encourage you to seek out Alaska's independent booksellers, several of whom partnered with us on this project.

Deb Vanasse

David Marusek

Editors, Alaska Sampler 2014

# Inside this Volume

A Time Machine Called the Chilkoot Trail

by Dana Stabenow

Dana Stabenow knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere. Here is an excerpt from her book of essays Alaska Traveler: Dispatches from the Last Frontier.

She Was Good — She Was Funny

by David Marusek

In a short story that first appeared in Playboy magazine, a young anthropologist in Interior Alaska struggles in a last-ditch effort to be a good neighbor to a jealous man.

From Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

As child, the author learned to fish, hunt, curl up and play dead in the case of curious black bears, and throw up artfully in the hood of parka while flying in a single prop plane. These chapters come from Still Points North: An Alaskan Memoir.

Storm Out of Paradise

by Howard C. Weaver

This essay comprises the essence of a work in progress that seeks to understand changes in Alaska's culture and character from the pioneering days of the author's birth to the oil-financed society of today.

On Ice

by Deb Vanasse

In this excerpt of the novel Cold Spell, Vanasse tells the parallel stories of a mother who risks everything to start over in Alaska and a daughter whose longings threaten to undo them both.

Digging Robert's Grave

by Don Rearden

This is a short story about a young man dealing with the tragic death of a father figure.

Landscape of Anguish

by Kaylene Johnson

This excerpt from Canyons and Ice: The Wilderness Travels of Dick Griffith recounts the remarkable journeys of Alaska legend Dick Griffith. Canyons and Ice offers a rare look at the man behind the soaring achievements and occasionally death-defying moments.

Wildwood

by Tanyo Ravicz

In Wildwood, the novel-in-progress from which this excerpt comes, Jason and Brenda Everblue, a couple since their student days, grapple with their troubled marriage by moving with their two young children into the wilderness of Alaska's Kodiak Island.

From Cold River Spirits

by Jan Harper-Haines

Cold River Spirits is a biography of Jan's Athabascan mother and grandmother and their lives on the Yukon. It explores their rich cultural heritage and their heartrending, and often humorous, struggles to transition from a life intertwined with nature to a more fast-paced world.

Raven's Letter to Edgar

by Ned Rozell

Here's a personal letter to the dead poet by an unusual Alaskan fan.

Alaska's Independent Bookshops

We Welcome Your Feedback

Copyright

Contributor Credits

# A Time Machine Called the Chilkoot Trail   
by Dana Stabenow

Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on a 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere. She is the author of 30 novels, many essays and short stories and anything else anyone will pay her for. "A Time Machine Called the Chilkoot Trail" comes from Alaska Traveler: Dispatches from the Last Frontier.

Part 1

What the HELL was I thinking?  
— entry from Happy Camp log, Chilkoot Trail

I HAD A PLAN.

I wasn't going to let anyone rush me. I wasn't going to let ME rush me. I was going to take it one foot at a time, one boulder at a time. I was going slow, I was going careful, I was not going to slip or fall, there would be no Stabenow blood shed in the Chilkoot Pass that day.

That was my plan. I slithered across the snow field to the foot of the Scales and got chest to chest with a boulder taller than I was. Slowly, carefully, one fingernail at a time, I thought my way over it.

One boulder behind me. A thousand to go. I stretched out a toe that was suddenly and inexplicably prehensile for the next.

What the hell was I thinking, saying I'd hike the Chilkoot Pass with my friends Rhonda Sleighter and Sharyn Wilson? I didn't even know what the Sheep Camp ranger meant when she told us the pass was a class three rock scramble. Who was I, overweight, out of shape, someone who voluntarily quit camping when she was twelve, who was I to think I could hoist myself over a mountain pass which Henry De Windt had described in 1897 as, "difficult, even dangerous, to those not possessed of steady nerve"?

Plus, I was carrying half a tent, and at the end of every day of the five-day hike, I had to help pitch it. Adding insult to serious injury, I then had to sleep in it, because there are no cabins on the Chilkoot Trail, a situation I felt should be remedied. Preferably before I started.

I was an unhappy camper.

Again.

At least I wasn't one of the women of 1897, who wore an average forty pounds of clothes each. The prospect of getting over the pass with a full pack was intimidating enough, never mind getting over the pass with a full pack and a bustle.

One image, according to Pierre Berton in The Klondike Fever, tells the entire story of the Klondike gold rush. It is a black-and-white photograph of "a solid line of men, forming a human chain, hanging across the white face of a mountain rampart." Alaskans are as familiar with this image as we are our own faces, it is part and parcel of our history, it has been transmuted into legend, it's even reproduced on the Alaska license plate.

In the winter of 1897-98, twenty-two thousand people crossed the Chilkoot Pass in a reckless quest for their share of the gold discovered by George Washington Carmack in the Klondike the year before. At some point, each one of the twenty-two thousand had stood in that solid line of men. Jack London lived it, Robert Service wrote verse about it, and now Rhonda and Sharyn and I were taking our place in that same line.

This time, it was all Rhonda's fault. Ever since we were college roommates, I've known her to be hooked on old photographs. "Don't have to know a soul in them," she admits cheerfully. She has wanted to hike the Chilkoot Trail, to cross from Alaska to Canada in the footsteps of the stampeders ever since she went to Dawson City and saw the old photographs of the gold rush days there. In a weak moment I agreed to accompany her, and when Sharyn heard about it she foolishly said she wanted to come, too. So we three flew into Skagway on a Saturday and committed the cardinal error that evening of going to the National Park Service exhibit to watch their slide show on the Chilkoot. Most of my comments were unprintable, and we returned at once to the hotel to re-evaluate what was in our packs. "I don't really need to change my underwear every day," I said. "We don't need bowls," Sharyn said, "we can eat out of our mugs." "I don't need camp shoes," Rhonda said, dumping her sneakers. At the Trail Center when we picked up our permits that afternoon, Ranger Jim Wessel had told us, deadpan, "The rangers are happy to haul your packs over the pass." Pause. "For a hundred bucks." I immediately said, "Is that a hundred bucks for all three of us?" Still deadpan, he said, "No, that's each." I barely stopped myself from asking if they took Visa.

The next morning we took Dyea Dave's taxi to the trailhead, where the first half mile is twelve hundred feet straight up and then twelve hundred feet straight down. "There's nothing wrong with this section of trail that a couple of sticks of dynamite wouldn't cure," Rhonda said, and then added, "But I have the can-do attitude, so I will be fine." It was our mantra afterward, we were the Rhonda Sleighter Chilkoot Trail Party in the year 2000, we had the can-do attitude, and we would be fine. Four miles later we lunched at Finnegan's Point, where in 1897 Pat Finnegan and his two sons built a bridge and charged a toll of two dollars until the press of stampeders rolled right over the top of them. We camped that first night in Canyon City, in a muggy, buggy rain forest with trees so tall we couldn't see the sky. Before dinner we walked the half mile to the ruins of Canyon City, the southern terminus of the aerial tramway, completed in 1898, which would haul freight the fourteen miles from Canyon City up and over the Chilkoot Pass, the gold rush precursor of air cargo. At seven and a half cents a pound, the cost was out of reach of most stampeders. All that is left today is the boiler that provided its power.

The next day, more rain forest, more bugs, a sheer cliff face that had Rhonda rethinking her great idea ("But I have the can-do attitude, I'm fine"), and we arrived at Sheep Camp, where that evening Ranger Suzanne gave a talk.

First she made what she called the August 1st Team Chilkoot introduce itself. There were two large groups, one a guided hike from Vancouver, led by Len Webster, who was on his tenth Chilkoot hike and who has that Canadian twinkle in his eyes (When asked at Canyon City what there was to see at Sheep Camp, he replied solemnly, "Nothing. Except me." Worked for me.) There was a mother from Wasilla who thought hiking the Chilkoot would be empowering for her two daughters, both of whom were along, as was their godmother, who showed extreme good sense in preparing for the next day's hike by sleeping through the ranger talk in their tent. There were two guys from Belgium who smiled a lot and were always first out in the mornings, a couple from Toronto on their honeymoon who were still speaking to each other by Bennett Lake, which augured well for their continued future together, and another couple in their seventies hiking the pass with their daughter and son-in-law. For the whole five days, the daughter kept saying, "Where's Mom?" and she'd look around and say, "Oh. She's right here." There was geologist Cara Wright of Anchorage, who felt it was part of her job to the hike the Chilkoot, making the trip with Karen, Linda and Michelle, who, I noted enviously, were very well supplied with myriad small bottles of liquor and liqueur.

Then Ranger Suzanne warned us about bears, they were all over the place, she said: "If you see one, don't run from it, and don't feed it." We promised we wouldn't. Then she gave us the weather report, as follows: "Evening showers, partial clearing by midnight, partly cloudy tomorrow," and added, "This is the first forecast this year without the word 'rain' in it."

Then she described the next day's hike. Three miles to the boulder field called the Scales, another half mile to the pass, where came the "class three rock scramble" remark, another five miles to the next night's camp, Happy Camp. She demonstrated methods of climb, using both hands and feet. She mentioned snow, and wind, and rain, and sleet, and hypothermia. She explained that fluorescent orange markers would guide us if fog settled in. It would be a long day. We should start early.

I went to bed that night fantasizing about Sherpas. I got to sleep only to have nightmares of broken bones and blood at the bottom of the Golden Stairs. Sharyn said later that her legs were shaking the next morning as she took down her tent, and she kept asking herself, "Why am I doing this? Why am I putting my life in danger?" Her nightmare was that the weight of her pack would pull her backward down the Scales. The most Rhonda would admit to was that she was "concerned." You'll understand when I tell you that the Chilkoot Trail was the first hike of her life.

No one's mood was improved when we discovered that in the mad rush to lighten our packs in Skagway, we had miscounted and left a dinner behind. If the weather went contrary to forecast, if the temperature dropped, if it rained or snowed, Rhonda's Lipton Cup-a-Soups, Sharyn's herbal teas and my tiny bottle of honey would go only so far.

The Resurrection Trail is a stroll compared to the Chilkoot, and on the Resurrection we hike from dinner to dinner. Now here we were on the Chilkoot, a hike rated "moderate to strenuous," accent on the strenuous, and we were short of food. How could we have been so stupid?

"It's okay," Sharyn said.

"We'll be fine," I said.

"Because we have the can-do attitude," Rhonda said.

Part 2

...almost seventy feet of snow fell   
on the summit of the Chilkoot that winter...  
— Pierre Berton, The Klondike Fever

FIRST LIGHT AND fear jerked me awake at four-thirty. I woke Sharyn and Rhonda, thinking to get a really early start on the day, but Len's group was up before us. The Belgians of course had already left.

The first three miles were an uphill grind, crossing and re-crossing the same creek. Now we left the tree line behind and were at the foot of the Scales, a steep slide of boulders the size of minor planets with edges like steak knives. I looked up and thought, "What's a class four rock scramble, the West Buttress of Denali?"

Some of the boulders were teetery and tippety and some were not and you never knew which was which until you stepped on or grabbed one. I had a brief, rose-colored vision of one of those tough, surly Tlingit packers who hired themselves out to the Klondike stampeders to pack goods over the pass, who were known to sit down in the middle of the trail on strike for better wages, usually just before the summit. The Scales got its name because this was where the packers would re-weigh their loads and jack up their prices.

Whatever they charged, it wasn't enough.

Although...a third of the way up I realized I was kind of enjoying myself. My pack was still heavy, with a distressing tendency to hit me in the back of the head every time I bent too far over, but I was moving upward, slowly, steadily, undeniably upward. I had a few bruises, and one moment of real terror when I got stuck on the wrong side of a patch of homicidal shale, but came the moment when I realized there were more boulders behind me than were ahead of me, that the sun was beaming blindingly down, that the view seemed to go all the way back to the Lynn Canal, and I was about to kick the Scales' butt, in the best tradition of that long, long line. Only I was doing it in color.

Rhonda was waiting at the top with a grin the size of Galveston and a handful of gorp. What I really wanted was champagne.

Now only forty-five degrees of Golden Stairs lay between us and the summit. During the winter of 1897-98, two enterprising stampeders carved steps in the snow covering the pass and collected eighty dollars a day in tolls, which after six weeks they promptly blew on an extended tear. This was summer, and to me the Golden Stairs looked like just another, albeit shorter Scales. "Rhonda," I said, "Samuel Benton Steele is waiting for me at the summit, right? In his red uniform, with his Mountie hat on and his arms wide open, saying, 'I've been waiting for you, babe'?" Steele being that magnificent Mountie who saved so many lives during the gold rush by refusing to admit stampeders into Canada without their supplies, who saved more lives by keeping strict track of the boats that sailed to Dawson from Lindeman and Bennett, who kept Soapy Smith's gang bottled up on the U.S. side of the border, and whose enforcement of Canadian customs at the Chilkoot Pass established a de facto international border that stands to this day.

"I don't know, Dana," Rhonda said, and I said, "Just say he is, Rhonda," and she said, "Sam's waiting for you on the summit, Dana," and I said, "Okay, then, let's go."

Another snow field, another boulder climb, and there was the summit. No, wait, it was a false summit. Bad word. Another snow field, another boulder climb, and the summit, but no, a second false summit. Very bad word. Another snow field, and then there was the summit, the real summit, the last, the final, the one true summit of the Chilkoot Pass.

"Rhonda, I can see the Canadian flag!" I shouted. I don't even remember the last rocks I climbed over to get to the border. The Lion of the Yukon wasn't waiting for me, only a warden in a Parks Canada uniform, but I was so happy to see her that I flung out my arms and belted out the first line of the Canadian national anthem as we crossed into her country. The wind was kicking up and it was nippy, but the sun had never been brighter, the sky bluer, the Canadian flag more beautiful, no orange had ever tasted better, and I had never loved Rhonda and Sharyn so much.

"I can't believe what my body just did," Sharyn said.

"It's a great accomplishment," Rhonda said.

"We've still got five miles to go," I said.

They looked at me in disgust. They didn't say I had no soul, but they were thinking it.

We were triumphant at one crossing of the pass, but the stampeders had to haul enough supplies to support themselves in Canada for one year without outside help. This amounted to about a ton of goods. Some of them had to climb the Chilkoot Pass thirty-five times to bring it all across. Through seventy feet of snow, a glacier fall in September that killed three, and an avalanche in April that took more than sixty lives, not to mention Soapy Smith's gang waiting to rob and frequently kill them from Skagway all the way to the pass.

Thirty-five times. I couldn't bend my mind around that number before I climbed the Chilkoot. Now, I find it even more unthinkable.

We set out again, through a broad valley filled with a careless spill of deep sapphire lakes and rimmed with wedges of mountain that seemed to have risen whole from the center of the earth, chilling into single monoliths when they reached the surface. We passed the Stone Crib, the northern anchor for the aerial tramway. It was beautiful, but the trail here was a seemingly endless series of snow fields, boulder fields and creek crossings and we were exhausted before we began. By the time we got to Happy Camp we were literally staggering with fatigue. It was after five o'clock, we'd been hiking for almost eleven hours, and the campsite, hewn from an alpine slope, looked like kitty corner from heaven.

The log at the Happy Camp warming cabin was filled with comments written by people who hadn't had the luck of good weather. One man who crossed the pass the day before us wrote, "I've never seen it rain uphill before." I, on the other hand, was sunburned. Len's group didn't make it in until after seven, and Sharyn said she had watched Len guide someone step by step up the pass — " Okay, you're doing great, put your right hand here, your left hand there, okay, terrific, now put your left foot here..." It turned out he had three people in his group who were afraid of heights. His assistant, Deb, who has a mountain goat somewhere in her ancestry, climbed the Scales three times carrying someone else's pack. Happy Camp was the first time I saw either one of them tired.

Cara's group celebrated crossing the pass with Yukon Jack. "It seemed appropriate," she explained. I wished I'd thought of that.

The weather held, sunshine all the way to Lindeman City, a glorious hike that follows first a mountain ridge with a view that puts you at eye level with the surrounding mountains and then the narrow edge of a deep gorge filled with a jumbled, tumbling mass of rapids. At Lindeman there is an interpretive exhibit, and a warden who displayed a stampeder's homemade crampon that a bear looking for ants had dug up the day before.

The last day was a seven-mile hike over an up-and-down trail made mostly of sharp-edged granite. It isn't fun, and neither is the last half-mile, a long, sandy, uphill trek. "It's a good thing I have a can-do attitude," Sharyn said, "otherwise I'd be in complete despair." If I'd known, I would have offered my body to the Lindeman City warden in exchange for a boat ride to Bennett and eschewed the last day's hike entirely.

That night we were down to one freeze-dried package of Santa Fe Chicken. Fortunately, the honeymooning couple had a package of corn tortillas they didn't like and gladly offered us. The tortillas were dry and tough and ambrosial. Sharyn remarked on how clever it was to get them to carry the tortillas for us all the way to Bennett Lake.

Bennett is where a tent city sprang up overnight in 1897, where the stampeders built their boats to sail the seven hundred miles to Dawson and gold. There isn't much left but a stove made of three sheets of rusted iron held together with bent nails, a lot of broken glass, and St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church.

But at Bennett the earth rises up and folds in upon itself in abrupt granite inclines and precipitous descents of rock and boulder and shale that I did not have to climb, only appreciate. The lake is a narrow, inland fjord, made a grayer blue than the pass lakes with glacial silt. The sun was reluctant to set, painting a lingering glow on the mountain faces raised to it.

I felt as if I had walked backwards through time. The same mountains and lakes and passes that we crossed, the same path we walked are in the photographs of the time. The trail is strewn with the debris of those who went before us, shoes ("Another damn shoe" Len says), boats, stoves, boilers, saws, cans, machine parts.

Did they look up, the stampeders? Did they look up from their packs and their sawpits and their boat building, from their frantic preparations for the last leg of the journey to the Klondike gold fields? Did they look up and see the beauty of the mountains, of alpine vale and sapphire lake and rain forest, of hanging glacier and endless sky and rushing stream?

I hope so.

For more by Dana Stabenow, visit one of Alaska's fine independent booksellers.

# She Was Good — She Was Funny   
by David Marusek

Author David Marusek writes science fiction full time in his low-maintenance cabin near Fairbanks, Alaska. According to Publisher's Weekly, "Marusek's writing is ferociously smart, simultaneously horrific and funny, as he forces readers to stretch their imaginations and sympathies." His work has appeared in Playboy, Nature, MIT Technology Review, Asimov's, and other periodicals and anthologies and has been translated into ten languages. His two published novels and clutch of short stories have won the Theodore Sturgeon and Endeavour awards and earned numerous nominations. He is currently at work on a novel about love, faith, and space alien invasion in the Alaskan bush.

Following is one of Marusek's few published stories that is not in the science fiction genre. Rather, it portrays a young anthropologist's last ditch efforts to be a good neighbor to a jealous man.

IN A BORROWED CABIN, in a northern wood, Walt Baffen welcomed winter. He had sacks and tins of food in the root cellar and a moose quarter in the cache. He had three cords of firewood. He had a bookshelf full of paperback classics and a propane lantern to read them by. He had a shortwave wireless and a carton of spare batteries.

Most of all, he had his work — ten crates of obsidian flakes from the University of Alaska Fairbanks archeology lab, a case of excavation maps and site catalogs, calipers, a stereomicroscope, and a 12-volt laptop computer. By spring — if all went well — he would return home to England with his dissertation, The Detection of Meat Processing in the Prehistoric Record: Microblade Analysis of Late Pleistocene Denali Artifacts in the Brooks Range.

In the meantime there was plenty to do. Walt hauled water uphill by sled from a hole he had chopped in the lake. He split and stacked firewood. He shoveled snow from his rather lengthy driveway. He taught himself to cross-country ski and visited his few and odd neighbors.

In early winter, when it was still warm enough to start the old Subaru wagon, Walt made monthly trips down to Fairbanks to consult with his graduate committee chair, to take in a show at the Goldstream Cinemas, and to get pissed or laid, or both.

Soon, real winter began. The dense Arctic cold settled itself about his cabin and pressed against the logs. The sun no longer rose above the ridge across the highway. At night the splitting crack of freezing trees sounded like rifle shots.

Walt stayed indoors. He fed the wood stove day and night. It hissed and groaned as it poured out heat. Walt slept in the loft, near the ceiling where the heat collected. During the day, no matter how warm the cabin got, the air near the floor was frigid. So Walt wore a silk kimono over heavy wool trousers and used his pac boots as house slippers. All in all, this log cabin — 120 miles below the Arctic Circle, with no plumbing and no electricity — was more comfortable than his damp and drafty student flat back in Oxford.

Today the weather began to change. Walt checked the dial thermometer nailed to a tree outside the window. An American thermometer, it had two concentric scales: the Fahrenheit large and easy-to-read, and the Celsius grudgingly small. The needle, these past ten days, had lingered near minus 40 degrees, equally bitter on both scales.

It had indeed warmed up, so today would be a good day to do firewood. There would be about four hours of weak daylight. But first Walt needed to make a quick trip to the outhouse, and then to have some breakfast. He opened the wood stove and tossed two pieces of birch into the miniature hellscape inside. The papery bark exploded into flames, sizzling and popping, and trickles of smoke leaked around the edges of the cast-iron plates. Walt filled the teakettle and placed it on the hot spot. He donned his stylish wolverine hat — which had set him back £200 — opened the thick cabin door and stepped outside.

Now he could tell with his nose it was warmer. And the patch of blue sky above the cabin was hazing over. The thermometer, up close, read minus 30 degrees Celsius, minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit. He took the path to the outhouse. If he didn't walk too fast, his thin clothes could actually retain a layer of warm air next to his skin — a trick of the North.

Walt stood behind the small wooden outhouse. It wasn't true what he'd been told: Urine at minus 40 degrees does not freeze before it hits the ground. It steams and cuts through snow like lava.

On his way back to the cabin, Walt was startled to see someone standing in the path. At first he didn't recognize the man in old insulated overalls and bulky brown parka. The man's wolf-trimmed hood was pulled into a face tunnel so that only his eyes and the bridge of his nose showed. But his large size, the way he filled the path, made Walt think of his neighbor, Gus Ostermann. And he recognized Gus' mukluks, the ones made from caribou hide, knee high, and trimmed with bits of arctic fox, ermine and seal fur. Hell, thought Walt. Bloody, bloody hell.

"Gus," he said as he approached the man. "Nice of you to drop by." Walt cinched up his kimono, which was cold now wherever it touched his skin. "Come inside."

Gus slipped his hands, in bright red cotton gloves, out of his pockets long enough to unfasten and pull back his hood. Underneath he wore a woolen watch cap that covered his ears. He hunched his shoulders and bent his neck left and right to pop his vertebrae. But his flat expression never changed. He fixed his dull gray eyes on Walt and said, "I have a bone to pick with you."

"Fine," said Walt. "Let's pick it over tea — or coffee. I have water on the boil." He motioned with his arm, but Gus didn't budge. So Walt tried to step around him on the narrow path, but Gus leaned over to block him.

"Actually," said Gus, "here will do."

"Don't be absurd, man," said Walt. He turned and walked to the other side of the cabin. He would have liked to run, so thoroughly chilled he was by now, but that might be interpreted as fear. In any case, Gus had cut around front and was waiting for him next to the woodpile.

Walt stepped right up to him and said, "Are you mad?" and tried to shove past him. But the big man easily pushed him to the snow-packed ground. Walt shivered, from the cold, from sudden anger, not from fear. He got up and said, "You're behaving stupidly, I hope you realize." He feigned a lunge to Gus' right and tried to dart around his left, but Gus crouched like a goalie in front of the cabin to block him. "That does it," said Walt. "You've taken your little stunt too far." He balled his stiff hands into fists and tried to hit Gus, but he connected only with pillow-thick clothing. Gus pushed him to the ground again.

Walt stood up, refastened his kimono, and said, "I shall have you arrested." He walked around the woodpile, wading through deep snow, and came out on the driveway next to the Subaru. Meanwhile, Gus matched his progress via the path, and when Walt climbed into the driver's seat and slammed the car door, Gus sat down on the cabin porch a few yards away.

Walt couldn't bend his fingers, couldn't feel them. He used them like screwdrivers attached to the ends of his arms to jab the door locks. The little car shook with his shivering. American men, he thought, are so bloody primitive over their women.

Walt hugged himself, tucked his hands under his arms and shivered. His feet hurt. That much was true, at least. He hadn't even noticed his hands go, but his feet were freezing painfully.

Walt glanced through the car window at Gus, who was refastening his parka hood. Gus saluted him and buried his hands deep into his pockets. Dressed as he was, Gus could take a nap there if he liked. Still — there must be something Walt could do. He wondered if his car keys were in his trouser pocket. Then he noticed them dangling from the ignition of the steering column. Of course! But as he grappled with the ignition he realized the car had been sitting out at minus 40 degrees. The motor oil was toffee, the engine a block of ice; it would never start. And indeed, when he managed to turn the key, there were three or four metallic clicks, then nothing. Bloody hell!

Gus, when Walt looked at him, shrugged his shoulders.

There must be something, thought Walt. He crawled between the bucket seats to the back and rummaged through the cargo compartment. The emergency kit! He pulled the nylon athletic bag into the back seat with him and, with claw-like hands, unzipped it. Inside were woolen hats and gloves, an old vinyl mackintosh, and a thin tartan blanket. That's all? He had packed this kit for an emergency somewhere warmer and damper. Still, it was something. He wrestled himself into the raincoat, covered himself with the blanket, stuffed the woolen hats beneath his kimono, and draped the nylon bag over his boots. He could not put on the pair of gloves. His purple fingers kept jamming together. But he managed, using his teeth, to pull on a pair of mittens. These he held up to the window to show Gus, who nodded his compliments.

As bundled up as possible, Walt sat in the back seat of the Subaru and considered his options. The first option was to stay where he was until Gus got bored and left. There was a problem with this option.

Walt marveled at the calm lucidity of his thought process, his lack of panic or desperation. Was this the stiff upper lip he had always suspected he possessed, the cool head under fire? Or was it — despite his expensive wolverine hat — the effects of a cooling brain?

The second option was to run. If Gus allowed him. Running would warm him up, too. But run where? The nearest cabin was two miles away, and it belonged to Gus.

She'd be there, of course, glad he stopped by. We have all afternoon, she would say; let's go skiing. She would lead the way, kick-stepping up the ski trail with her long legs. She'd stop and wait for him, laughing with rosy cheeks. Her black hair would smell of woodsmoke. I'll turn off the light, she would say. Care for a drink? Let's get cozy.

Walt felt cozy. He noticed he'd stopped shivering. The blanket, thin as it was, must be doing the trick. And his feet had stopped hurting. But trying to wiggle his toes informed him that his feet had stopped hurting because they were frozen numb. And he realized that unless he got up immediately and moved about vigorously, he was surely dead.

So the third option was to get into the cabin at all costs, Gus or no Gus. Walt poked at the door lock and clawed the latch. The car door creaked open. Gus looked up, but didn't move, so Walt climbed out. And fell on his face. Slowly, clutching the door, he stood up, wobbly on wooden feet. He draped the blanket over his kimono like some large plaid shawl. Walking was like walking on stilts; he couldn't feel the ground and had to look down to place his feet. He went to the outhouse side of the cabin. Gus didn't follow. He could break the window on this side of the cabin, but it was too high to climb through. He went to the back. There were no windows here except for the tiny one at the roof peak that ventilated the sleeping loft. The window on the woodpile side was likewise too high. He would need a ladder.

A ladder! What about the ladder he used for his monthly chimney sweeping? He lumbered back to the outhouse side, but the ladder was not leaning against the tree where he kept it. Two holes in the snow, like empty sockets, marked its absence.

I shall have to use something else, he thought, as he surveyed the small clearing that served as a yard. The lumps under the unbroken blanket of snow were piles of rubbish. The large mound was the remains of a 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air. Or perhaps it was the stack of salvaged lumber. One of the smaller lumps was surely an empty 55-gallon drum. If he could identify it, wade out to it, excavate it, break it loose from the ground, roll it back —

Walt went to the woodpile side of the cabin again. Perhaps he could stack firewood under the window. Then he noticed the storage shed.

Yes!

There were all sorts of things in the shed he could use: wooden crates, sawhorses. An ax!

Gus was still guarding the porch. Walt hurried to the shed and reached up to unlatch the hasp. But it was padlocked. He stared in disbelief at the lock, a lock he'd never seen before.

A little brass padlock.

All at once it struck him that Gus intended to kill him. There were no two ways about it, he really did. Walt flushed with anger. The bloody arrogance of the man. The churlishness. The monumental ego. How dare he?

Walt fumed, but little of his heat reached his fingers or toes.

It came down to the fourth option, then. He must kill Gus. So be it. The problem was — with what? Even if he had the ax, he doubted he could grip it. He needed something big and heavy, like a rock. Small chance of finding a rock under all the snow. But what about a chunk of cord-wood? He had birch logs, cut green, that were heavy — maybe two stones — and hard. They had clanked like bricks when he stacked them. Walt brushed snow off the woodpile, found a large piece of frozen birch, and scooped it into his arms. There was no way to sneak up behind Gus, so the best attack would be a lightning frontal assault. When Walt reached the corner of the cabin, he hoisted the piece of wood over his head as best he could, took a deep breath, and rushed the porch. But he could hardly walk, and the birch billet slipped from his hands. Gus saw him, but didn't get up, so Walt picked up the wood and walked over to him, raised it and let it fly. It bounced off the step next to Gus and landed in the snow beside the porch.

"Nice try," said Gus, who hadn't even removed his hands from his pockets.

Let his arrogance be his death, thought Walt as he returned to the woodpile for another round. This time he positioned himself squarely in front of Gus, raised the firewood high overhead, and brought it down with all his strength. This time Gus did take his hands out of his pockets, caught the wood easily, and tossed it lightly back to him. Walt caught it and fell backwards into the snow.

"So," said Walt when he discovered he couldn't get up, "you had something on your mind?"

"I warned you away from her — twice," said Gus.

"And I stayed away," said Walt.

"Do I look blind?" said Gus. "You think I'm stupid?"

This discussion is stupid, thought Walt. Lying in the snow is stupid. Yet, Walt felt comfortable where he lay, warm, even drowsy.

"Help me up," he said.

"Soon."

Soon, but not soon enough, thought Walt, as he watched the sky through the treetops, now completely overcast with cotton-batting clouds. Walt could see part of the cabin roof and chimney. The woodsmoke did not rise in a straight column as it usually did, but spilled out and fell before being swept away by a breeze. Another sign of the changing weather, no doubt. Walt could hear the muffled whistle of the teakettle inside the cabin. A spot of tea with honey. A biscuit from the round tin.

"They'll catch you," he whispered.

Gus' face hovered over him, blotting out the roof and sky. "I wouldn't count on it," he said. Walt could smell the heat of Gus's breath. "You had an accident, Walter. You went out to the crapper in your kimono, just like you brag to everyone all up and down the road. Just like the dumb cheechako shit that you are. And you fainted or something. There will be no blood. No cuts. No marks on the body."

"Your tracks," whispered Walt.

Gus laughed. "What tracks? Look." His face moved away so that Walt could again see the heavy sky. "A foot of new snow by morning."

THERE WERE SOME nice dreams, of Mother finding the red disposable lighter and holding it up to the window. "Aha!" she crowed.

Of Peter in the bath, and pennies for the electric fire.

Of someone putting him on the potty when he didn't even have to go. His thighs were blue.

"That oughta do," said Gus.

Walt sat propped on the seat in the outhouse. His trousers were pulled down around his knees. The mackintosh, blanket, and woolen hats and mittens were gone. A wad of toilet paper was stuffed into his frozen hand. Gus was closing the door, entombing him in the tiny slat-wood outbuilding.

Wait, thought Walt. He struggled to speak but only murmured.

"Don't fight it," said Gus through a crack in the door. "Just close your eyes and go back to sleep."

Walt commanded his frozen mouth to move, to mold the three words, "She was good."

"Huh?" said Gus.

"She was good."

"Oh, all right," said Gus. He opened the door, removed his hood, and brought his ear in close.

"She was good. She was funny."

"Who was good?" said Gus.

"She told me all your secrets."

"You're babbling, Walter. Good night, Walter." Gus rose to leave.

"You can't read," said Walt.

"What's that?"

"You've a rash on your bum."

"Is that what she said?"

Walt looked up into Gus' eyes and said, "She makes you wear condoms."

"Now you just wait a minute," said Gus as he grabbed a fistful of kimono at Walt's throat.

"Careful," said Walt, "she bought me this."

"She did not," shouted Gus. "You're lying."

"We screwed in your pickup once."

"Shut up!"

"She makes you wear condoms — but not me."

"Shut your mouth, or I'll shut it for you."

"She says, 'Fill me up, Walter, fill me up.'"

Gus' fist, big and red, came hurtling like a comet.

Don't friend him on Facebook. Don't follow his tweets. The only way to keep up with Marusek is to sign up for his occasional novel updates. Inquire about his books at Alaska's fine independent booksellers.

# From Still Points North   
by Leigh Newman

Leigh Newman was raised in Alaska by a Great Alaskan Dad...and in Baltimore, Maryland, by A Great, Former Alaskan Mom, moving back and forth between her two parents. As child, she learned to fish, hunt, curl up and play dead in the case of curious black bears, and throw up artfully in the hood of a parka while flying in a single prop plane. As an adult she regularly teaches that same skill set to her two boys. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Real Simple, O The Oprah Magazine, Bookforum and many other publications.

The chapters that follow come from her memoir Still Points North: An Alaskan Memoir (Dial Press), forthcoming in softcover from Shorefast Books.

Chapter 1: The Great Alaskan

IN THE LARGEST state in the Union, a state built on gold rushes and oil pipelines, 90-pound king salmon and 20-pound king crabs, a lot of things come prefaced by the phrase Great Alaskan. There's the Great Alaskan Salmon Bake and the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show and the legendary 8.6 Great Alaskan Earthquake and, of course, a species of larger-than-life male citizen, who shall be referred to from here on out as the Great Alaskan Dad.

Some identifiers: The Great Alaskan Dad flies his plane on floats in the summer and on skis in the winter. He hunts for caribou, moose, wild sheep, wild goats, geese, and ducks, plus fishes for halibut, salmon, and trout. No matter where he goes, his outfit remains the same: falling-down hip boots, patched wool pants, drugstore sunglasses with Polaroid lenses for spotting fish underwater, and a Stearns life jacket with a red plastic tag that reads PULL-IN-THE-CASE-OF-AN-EMERGENCY, which has never been pulled, despite his frequent, always almost fatal emergencies. A buck knife — the blade stained with dried unidentified blood and slime — dangles from a lanyard somewhere on his person.

At one time or another, he has suffered from an unforgettable — for all involved — case of beaver fever, a violent lower-intestinal disease caused by drinking downstream from an active lodge. At one time or another, due to a plane crash or bad planning, he has had to live — for days, in the bush — off tasteless ancient Pilot Bread and a jar of powdered Tang.

The Great Alaskan Dad can sew on his own buttons, patch his own waders, repack his own shotgun shells, and repair his own boat motor, even as the boat is filling with water in the middle of the ocean. The Great Alaskan Dad can land a Piper Cub on a 150-foot-long gravel bar, which is technically impossible according to all aviation authorities. He can outrun a grizzly bear by running very fast or at least faster than his hunting buddy (which, by the way, according to a Great Alaskan Dad, is the only way to survive a grizzly bear, so don't curl up, play dead, and make yourself into a human meatball like those dopey forest rangers advise) with a hundred pounds of freshly dressed moose on his back. He can make a fire out of wet green wood, in the middle of the winter, just as the blizzard starts, using his last match, which he strikes with his fingers nearly — but not totally — paralyzed by frostbite. He can — and will — also defend the veracity of the above three claims to the point of shooting saliva across the room, should any family member dare challenge the few overly extravagant or Jack Londonesque details therein.

In addition, although he might not bring this up around the campfire, the Great Alaskan Dad has invented a diaper out of alder leaves and garbage bags when all the Pampers that the Great Alaskan Mom packed happened to fall out of the raft. The Great Alaskan Dad has piloted a plane, while his airsick Great Alaskan Child projectile-vomited inside the fur-lined hood of his parka. And he has — not mythically or romantically or hyperbolically in the least — grabbed that same child's belt loop or leg right before that child fell into a raging stream or fell out of the flying plane or slipped off the boat or wandered off a cliff or tumbled down the crevasse of a glacier or ate the poisonous blue berries that were not blueberries or sauntered directly into the path of a black bear with two newborn cubs.

Where all this experience might not help him, though, is in the land of toothbrushes and crustless peanut-butter sandwiches, recommended daily vitamins and monsters under the bed. In short, the world of domestic survival, which is where my Great Alaskan Dad and I land the first summer after my parents' divorce.

It's June, the first week of salmon-fishing season. For the past six months, I've been away from Anchorage, Alaska, where I grew up, in order to relocate with my mother to Baltimore, Maryland, her childhood home. The first day I am back up North, I find out that Dad has moved from our old house by the mountains into a new house across town. The house is big and sunny and filled with lots of wall-to-wall beige carpet — but no furniture.

It's eight o'clock at night. "Time for bed," Dad says. He rolls out two identical down bags — bags designed to keep you warm in temperatures up to forty below — on the beige carpet. I hop in my bag, crumple up my jeans for a pillow. The sky through the windows is a blazing, sun-heated white. We have no blinds or curtains.

"Shut your eyes," he mumbles.

I shut my eyes. But I am eight years old. I squirm. I hum. I kick Dad, whispering, "I can't sleep. Can you sleep?"

"Tell your brain it's nighttime. Your brain will believe anything, if you say it over and over."

"It's nighttime," I say, my voice echoing off the blank plaster. But my father's brain is better at believing than mine, it seems. He is asleep already, his mustache twitching mid-dream.

Two weeks later, we're duking it out in the upstairs bathroom. Dad stands roaring in the doorway, trying to convince me to take a bath — or at least comb my hair. I crouch inside the shower stall, hiding, wearing only my flowered underwear and undershirt. I am a tiny, runtish girl, with twiggy fingers and a dense rind of dirt on my elbows and knees. The shower is an enormous stretch of blue tile and glass, with three shower nozzles at three different heights: one for Papa Bear, one for Mama Bear, one for Baby Bear. The idea for this family-sized bathing arrangement came from my mother, who designed this new house not knowing that by the time it was built, she and I would have already moved Outside — as Alaskans call anywhere beyond the borders of the state, including Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and Hackensack, New Jersey.

Dad and I might not have spent last winter together, but I still know one thing: if you're going to run from my father, you really need to make sure that you have a long, unobstructed area ahead, if not a vista, because he's going to be right behind you — catching up.

Water drips from the broken faucet, pinging against the tiles. A Dad-shaped shadow drifts across the shower door. The glass has a premade cloud inside it, a crystallized puff of decorative steam. "Come on," he says. "Let's get realistic."

I curl up tighter.

"Either you're coming out. Or I'm coming in."

Dad counts to three. I listen dully. But there is nowhere for me to go except between the thin lines of grout. In he comes, tossing me over his shoulder and setting me down on my bottom on the bathroom counter. I scream. Dad's face goes ashen. He stands me up on the counter, off my thighs.

In the long mirror lining the wall above the double sinks, we both look at the edges of the rash on the backs of my legs, a rash I have been hiding since my arrival, never undressing in front of him, bandaging the boil-like welts myself — not entirely successfully. The crusted scabs have broken open and reinfected. A trail of thin, clear ooze leaks down my thighs.

Dad blinks. He steps back. There is no medical reason for my rash, the doctors have told my mother. I consider telling Dad this too, if only to stop his face from scrambling around for an expression. But if there isn't any medical reason, I am pretty sure the rash is somehow my fault. The same goes for my weight loss. I'm a bad eater or I have a bad stomach or I don't try hard enough to keep the food inside. My teeth stick out; my ribs stick out; my head is a big wobbly ball on the top of my neck.

"Okay," Dad says. "We've had a rough spring. Nothing to worry about. Nothing some antibiotics and a little protein can't fix."

In his hand, however, he still has the comb, a black dime-store comb with rows of tiny, close teeth. It is the one hair instrument he owns. It belongs on the counter with his one bottle of shampoo, which he also uses as soap and shaving cream, and his one disposable razor. He lifts the comb towards me, slowly.

I throw my arms over my head. The comb is going to snag on my hair, or what's left of my hair, which is, by now, a matted, snarled pelt. I haven't gone near it, not even to wash it, since coming to Alaska. I've tried to, once. I've thought about it. But I'm still too scared of touching it or having anyone else touch it — a fear that my father also does not know about, not having seen me with lice a few months prior, nor at the beauty parlor where the stylist swooped up my waist-long blond hair and sawed it off by the base of the ponytail with her brisk, professional scissors. The result: a ragged, blond tuft that caused little old ladies in restaurants all over Baltimore to redirect me to the boys' room.

Dad sets down the comb. He leans his fists on the counter, his arms muscling up. Is he mad? Am I in trouble? Dad loved my long hair. He used to make us matching mustaches from it, draping the long blond strands over my upper lip. Mom didn't tell him about the lice, probably. The two of them don't speak.

Dad leaves the bathroom, coming back a few minutes later with a kitchen fork and a pair of fish-gutting scissors — bent-bladed, thick, heavy surgical scissors that he brings from the hospital to filet salmon in the garage. He lines up this equipment on the counter on a hand towel as if he's in the operating room. He is very good surgeon, grown-up strangers in town always tell me, pointing to their knees and hips, showing me they can walk again, thanks to him.

But I am trembling already. I keep my eyes on the comb, just to make sure he isn't about to use it. The comb is worse than the scissors. The comb will get stuck in the knots and tear out my hair by the roots. Dad points to the counter. I lower myself into a crouch, resting my chin on my knees. The bathroom smells of steam and pee. In the distance, the windows of the house rattle as a floatplane takes off on the lake outside.

"Leigh," my father says, which is already worrisome. My name is Leigh, but only according to my birth certificate. Dad calls me Leifer, or Pookey or, sometimes, Pooks.

I hunch up a little tighter. He approaches with the fork. "What I am doing now," he explains in a calm, rational, professional voice, a voice he uses with his patients at the office, "is loosening the knots, in order to determine which we can untangle." He moves slowly. He keeps his hands away from the comb. But I don't want this Doctor Dad, this understanding, gentle surgeon who picks through my hair with the wide teeth of the fork, teasing out the hairs strand by strand. I want my dad, who should be telling me to stop the waterworks and suck it up, who three years from now, when we tip our raft in a rapid-filled canyon and watch our gear float off downstream as we head directly for a boulder and I begin to scream hysterically, smacks me on the top of my skull with an oar and tells me "You're okay! Got it? Now paddle!"

I lean into the mirror. My father gives up on the fork and begins scissoring through the little hair that I have left. Clumps brush against the back of my neck and slide to the floor. My rash itches. My legs shake. I dig my toes into the counter. Dad makes a hard, strangled sound.

He is crying. I shut my eyes. I hunch forward, the air shivery and cold on my neck where the hair is gone. Not to hear him or his choky-sounding sobs, not to let him hear my own tears that keep slopping out, I do the thing that he always does when he's gutting fish or tying flies. I hum a floaty, no-tune song, blowing the air up through my teeth so it comes out as a whistle.

TWO HOURS LATER, on the dock at the back of the house, Dad and I don't discuss what he did during the previous spring while I was gone. Nor do we discuss why my body is melting down. Nor do we discuss the new custody arrangement, which gives me only eleven more weeks this summer in Alaska, plus Christmas in December, meaning that I will be spending most of the year, for the rest of my life, in Baltimore. Instead, we get the plane loaded and get out of there, away from the mirror, away from the bathroom and the house and the city of Anchorage, into the bush.

Our plane is a four-seat Cessna 185 on floats. Over Cook Inlet, Dad keeps us low, swooping over the cold gray expanses to point out surfacing Beluga whales. I sit beside him, wearing my matching headset and holding my matching steering wheel. He pretends to falls asleep after a while. I take over the controls, the way I'm supposed to, checking and rechecking that our nose is level. "Dad?" I say over the crackle of radio static. "Dad?"

He saws off a phony snore, his eyes still shut. "You're fine. You're doing great."

"But — "

"Keep your eyes on the artificial horizon."

I stare at the two-dimensional plane in the gauge, its wings teetering over the line between the painted land and sky. No throwing up, I tell myself. Copilots don't throw up. Or get scared. Or let their planes crash into the ocean. Or look over to see if their father is really sleeping or just pretending to sleep. And he is pretending, right? He always pretends. It's like a fire drill, but in the sky.

"Eyes on the horizon, Leifer," Dad says, opening his eyes. "You're in control. You're one hundred percent capable!"

I take my hands off the steering wheel. And puke in his lap.

AT LAST, WE SPOT the deep, gray channel of Beluga River. Dad brings us down with a hard slapping landing. There are no romantic northern pine trees here, no sap-scented breezes. The air reeks of fish and gulls, the water flows by, choked with mud and red, bloated dying salmon. Walls of alders line the riverbanks, clouds of mosquitoes hum in the branches. Grizzly tracks paw across the sand.

We dump our tackle boxes by a driftwood log. At this time, my dad isn't the master fly fisherman he will soon become — the fisherman-artist with his delicate rod, catching and releasing, throwing C-shaped casts over dappled creeks. It is 1980 in Alaska, a state with 3,000 rivers and 3 million lakes. The sporting mores are not quite as respectful, or picturesque. We set up our spin poles with giant shiny Pixies — slabs of silver metal gussied up with an appetizing glop of plastic salmon eggs. The hooks are yawning trebles, in effect mini anchors with three lethal barbed points.

As usual in the summer, the river is red with fish, throbbing with movement in shallows where the salmon fight for space to lay their eggs. With the sun broiling down on us and hours and hours to go before the 11 P.M. sunset, I prowl the bank in my boy-sized hip-boots, the tops sloshing down off my thighs, the feet filled with freezing mud and water. I cast upstream, and get my hook caught in a bush. I cast downstream, and get my hook caught in the weeds. I snag on a rock in the shallows. I hook my own jeans. Down the river, as always, Dad has a fish on. He fights it through the boulders, wading in up to his chest.

I swing my Pixie in the sun, studying the drops of water glistening off the line.

"Leifer!" Dad says, holding up a salmon. "Hook in the water."

I climb onto the plane float, sitting on a lifejacket to protect my rash. Deep in the current, my lure bump-bump-bumps along the bottom. I daydream about a seagull that I train to sit on my shoulder like a parrot. My line jerks. My rod bends a little funny. And — bam — my line is sizzling through the river, zig-zagging through the shallows. I jump off the float, already running, half letting the fish yank out more line, half pulling it back up the shore. Not to mention half listening to my dad as he shouts: "Watch your drag!" "Pump and reel!" "Watch your tip!" "Reel. Reel!" "Thatta girl!"

Fish-drunk and screaming, I inch the flopping salmon onto the beach, then run for our trusty wooden club. Only now do I see what I've hauled in. The fish is unmistakable — the swollen back, the hooked mouth, the mottled gangrene-colored skin. I've caught a humpy, the lowest species of salmon in the salmon family, a fish mocked statewide for its swamp-creature looks and lack of intelligence. Worse, my humpy is soft, lumpish, at the end of its natural life span.

I look up at Dad, waiting for him to laugh.

He rocks on his heels. "Now," he says. "That's a beauty!"

"But — "

"A keeper!" he says. "Throw her in the take-home pile." To prove his point, he steadies the fish for me, holding it firmly against the gravel. Slowly, I raise the club. The fish looks up at me, with glittering, green, very alive eyes. Its gills heave. Its fins twitch. I shut my own eyes as I bring down the club hard, over and over — bits of blood and skin splashing up onto my cheeks, the skull creaking, giving way to mush. Still I don't stop, as if I am listening for Dad to thunder at me, That's enough.

But he doesn't. Above us, seagulls wail, swooping down for scraps.

HOUR AFTER HOUR, for the rest of the day, we bring in humpy after humpy. Our tempo turns swift, methodical. We bash them on the head, bleed them by the throat, throw them in the waterlogged storage compartment in the floats. The more we catch, the more we have to catch, as if, in our minds, the next unnecessary salmon will justify the previous. Neither of us talks as the pile grows, the pebbles at our feet turning flecked with blood.

If Mom was here, we would have made a fire to keep her warm while she read her novel on a log. If Mom was here, she would have told us to knock it off — not because we'd caught enough fish, but because we were all too tired and hungry and it was time for a big hot plate of spaghetti.

The moon rises. The mosquitoes swarm. The sun lowers in the white sky. Still, we stay and stay, catching and clubbing and bagging, not going home as if we don't ever have to go home, until it is too dark and dangerous to stay any later, and we have to take off.

"Great job today!" my dad says, over the headset, as we fly over Fire Island. "You're a champ fisherman, you know that?"

"I think my last one was eight pounds!" I say. "Maybe."

"Sure it was. A state record, I bet. We'll have to look it up."

I smile. It isn't a real lie that we're telling each other. It's a fairy-tale lie, a fish-tale lie, the kind Great Old Alaskans tell each other about the five-hundred-pound halibut that once leapt into their rowboat and sank it before leaping back out and swimming off. Besides, I might really be a champ fisherman. One day. If I practice my casts and keep my rod tip held up and live in Alaska for forever, just like Dad.

Chapter 2: Can't Lives on Won't Street

BACK ACROSS THE INLET, on the deck of the house, Dad and I have plenty of visceral truths to confront. In the form of: mealy, mushy, gray-tinged, barbecued humpy. A fine steam rises off the fish, smelling the way it will soon taste in our mouths — like a riverbank, after a school of dead fish washes up in the mud. We shake on salt, a lot of salt. We gulp our Frescas. We stare down at our plates. Then we look up at the sky, as though a rare trumpeter swan has just flown by.

Our new house is built on Campbell Lake, a man-made body of water that allows my father to land our plane in the backyard, a big luxury for people living on the edge of a carless, roadless wilderness. Except for the occasional, distant honks of traffic, it's hard to tell that we live in a city, or that a few miles north, the downtown is filled with oil-company towers and high-rise tourist hotels.

Campbell is a protected natural preserve. Behind the houses on the opposite shore, the foothills of the mammoth Chugach Mountains rise up, sheathed in fireweed purples and alder greens. Salmon roll across the surface of the water. Geese and ducks glide by, their babies paddling madly to keep up. As late as it is, almost midnight, our neighbors are mowing lawns and fussing with the tie-downs on their planes, trying to use every minute of light they have before the days shorten and darken for winter.

"Well"says Dad. But his voice wobbles.

"I'm starving!" I say, holding up my fork. "I'm double-starving."

"Me too."

And we dive in, eating the way we always do, tornadoing through our overfilled plates, rubbing our entire faces off with paper towels, horrifying my mother — if she'd been here — by spitting the thin, transparent bones directly onto the ground. In this case, there's an advantage to our wolverine etiquette. We eat too quickly to taste.

"Humpy's not so bad," I say.

"Tastes like wild hickory nuts," says Dad.

This is some kind of grown-up joke, I know. It comes from a Grape-Nuts ad from before I was born. But my dad doesn't have any grown-ups to joke with anymore. When he laughs, I laugh, too.

By July, we aren't living full-time in the bush. We can't. Dad has to work. He's an orthopedic surgeon; people in the hospital need him to fix their backs and hips. But it's not as if we live in our house, either. The rooms remain empty, save for a few decorative white throw pillows that Dad has tossed around the living room as if to evoke a couch. In the morning, he goes to the office and I go to a terrifying, loud place in the nearby woods full of kids and kickballs and crusty jars of paste, also known as day camp. As soon as it turns 3 P.M., we hop in the 185 and fly out as fast as we can get the plane loaded.

Ashamed of our humpy massacre — or perhaps too tempted to repeat it — we move from Beluga to an isolated stream we call the Secret Spot. As pristine as Alaska is (especially in the 1980s) fishing rivers are known. Even on what seems like a completely deserted stretch of bank, you'll find evidence of outdoorsmen past — a lure on a branch, a heap of blackened firewood.

At the Secret Spot, though, there is zero sign of humanity. Not even a loose tangle of line in the water. The stream looks almost tropical, overgrown with lush, jewel-green alders and small, wet patches of darker green moss. The water is slow and deep, the silence total, except for the occasional riffle or splash of jumping fish, all of which belong to a more respectable species of salmon: bright, meaty silvers.

We catch these fish, however, with the same grim, ruthless determination, filling up thirty-gallon garbage bags that we cache in the shallows or the plane floats. At night, we pitch a tent, fry up tiny fresh rainbows on the propane stove, and play games of gin by the lantern.

One morning, I wake up just as the sun is rising. I have to go the bathroom, a complicated process when it comes to girlhood and jeans and long underwear and regular underwear and unzipping half-asleep. I undo the door to the tent and crawl out. And there — only a few feet ahead — sits a black bear. She's playing with an alder branch, rubbing her head against the trunk of the tree, making a woof-woof-woof sound. My father's arms reach out from the door of the tent and yank me back in, flat on my back. He puts his finger to his lips. Then he hauls his rifle out from underneath his sleeping bag.

He points the barrel at the door. I lie very still. No bear. No bear.

Woof-woof-woof. The crackle of branches.

Time slows, then sludges as we wait for the bear to charge the tent and Dad to shoot it. Or for Dad to miss and for the bear to maul us. Or for the bear to skip us and scavenge for our salmon in the plane and wreck the plane, stranding us in a spot so secret that nobody back in civilization knows about it. Or for the bear to do what we hope it will do, which is what bears mostly do — go away.

We wait and wait, more woof-woof-woof. Dad keeps his gun trained on the door. I curl beside him, watching the shadows of the leaves through the fabric, growing sluggish in the hot damp tent, knowing I should stay awake, but surrendering, finally, to an almost lazy feeling of safety — Dad is here, Dad will protect us. I fall asleep on his shoulder, never hearing when, hours later, the bear finally wanders off in the alders.

SOON ENOUGH DAD and I are forced to buy one piece of furniture — a freezer. We are a salmon machine by now, hauling in catches of reds, pinks, silvers, kings, whatever kind of salmon is running, plus anything else in our path: pike, trout, graylings. All the while never asking ourselves why we have to keep catching fish, long after we need any, long after two people could possibly eat them in any kind of reasonable timeframe. And we have to eat them.

We are good, moral Alaskans, who use what they kill, fins to gills.

Every once in a while, though, the magnitude of our slaughter strikes us — or maybe just me. We never fished like this before Mom and I left Alaska. Somehow, on a flight back to town, I get it into my head that if Mom were still here, we would be able to eat all this fish. The problem is not that we are killing too many, but that we don't have enough people in our family to eat them. I don't say this to Dad, though. I don't want him to cry again.

Besides, when you are fishing and clubbing and gutting and filleting, there is no time to think about mother or families or people that are gone. Fishing is a lot of work. My job is to haul the garbage bags out of the floats and gut our most recent twelve or fifteen — we're careful not to count actual numbers — fish down at the dock. Unfortunately, I have never been that wild about gutting, save for the fact that the activity comes with a knife, specifically a thirteen-piece Swiss Army Knife that my father presented to me one night of this same summer, along with a braided rope lanyard.

"The lanyard will keep your knife from sinking to the bottom of the river," he said. "If and when your knife slips out of your hands. If and when you remember to tie your lanyard to the belt loops of your pants."

This afternoon, I check my knot on my belt loop. Then recheck it. Off Dad goes, up the hill to start filleting in the garage.

"Get a move on!" he says, no need to even turn around.

I kneel down in the mud, stick the blade into a fish's egg hole, and bring it straight up the belly and around the gill cover, sawing down around the head. The next step is snapping and yanking off the head, then peeling away its dangling heart and intestines and stomach. Then I scrape off the kidney — a layer of blackish gunk along the spine — with my fingernail.

The first fish or two are fun. After that, gutting is no different from mowing the lawn or doing the dishes: egg hole, belly, head, guts, kidney, egg hole, belly, head, guts, kidney, eggholebellyheadgutskidney. A process that gets, at first, faster and faster, then slower and slower. A process that begins to stall mid-process, when I wander over to the fence to watch the neighbor's mentally challenged black Lab, Wacker, try to gulp down flying bumblebees in the backyard.

Eventually, pretending I'm done, I head up to the garage and hang onto Dad as he industriously fillets fish after fish, wrapping each one in plastic, labeling it with masking tape, and shoving it — with a great deal of effort — into our overstuffed freezer.

Dad takes one look at me, puts down his knife and says, "Let's get the rest of that catch up here."

I smile. I slump, enacting the Look at me, your cute, towheaded, helpless daughter. As an extra flourish, I add, "But I can't finish them all. There's too many."

Even as I say these words, I wonder why I bother. I know what my father is going to say. He knows what he is going to say. Finally, he goes ahead and says it. "Can't lives on won't street, Leifer. Check your home address."

NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, I know better than to bring up my mother. By August, though, stray objects remind me of her — a plate with little blue cornflowers I find hidden under the sink, the smell of my just-washed pillowcase, forgotten opera records in a milk crate in the crawl space. I am careful to call her at night, after Dad has fallen asleep.

"Do you miss me?" she mumbles, never mentioning it's three in the morning her time.

"Every day," I say, even though I don't miss her. She's my mother. I love her. I love her long delicate fingers and her slender gold necklaces and the shush-sound of her silk work blouse when she bends over me to say good night. But every time I shut my eyes, I can't really see her face. All over Anchorage, thin jagged cracks cut through the sidewalks and streets, left by the Great Alaskan Earthquake that leveled the city in the 1960s. It's as if she and Baltimore and our lives there have fallen into one of those cracks, way down into the deep dark melted center of the earth.

A FEW TIMES, I ask to go see our old house, the one Dad sold right before my mother and I left. The house is way across Anchorage, in our old neighborhood by the mountains. I try to invent reasons to stop by: maybe we can go pick the raspberries that we planted in the backyard, maybe we forgot my bike in the garage.

"I sold the Schwinn, Leifer," Dad says. "It was way too little for you. We'll get you a new bike. With a banana seat."

I bring up Baby, my husky puppy that Dad said had run away while I was gone. Dad's own dog, Chrissy, is a hunting Lab. Maybe Chrissy could sniff Baby out from the bushes, I suggest, if we went back to our old house. Maybe if we drove up and down our old streets and called Baby's name, she would come.

My father gets a far, irritated look in his eye. I vaguely understand what it means: Baby peed in the house. Baby chewed up a fly rod. Baby got taken out to the woods and sent off to that great invisible dog cabin in the sky. I run up to my room. There is no bed to hide under. I hide in the closet.

"That's enough, now," Dad says, somewhere in the muffled distance. "Cut that out. We've had enough theatrics for one summer."

I hold the door handle shut from the inside.

"You didn't even like that dog," says Dad. "It stank. It crapped in the house."

He is right. Baby did stink. And she did poop in the house, one time in my bed on my pillow while I was sleeping. I never walked or fed her or bathed her the way I'd promised. I never even played with her very much. But I want her back all of a sudden. I want her and I want her old outdoor kennel, which was next our old garage, which was next to our old laundry room, which was next to our old family room with the leather couch and the rocking chair and the cabinet TV and the thick, dusty carpet that you could draw pictures in with your fingernail: flower, tree, bird, stick-house, stick-me.

Dad's boots thud across the room. "I'm going to count to three. Either you come out or I'm going to rip down the goddamn door."

I wipe the crying off my face. I crawl out of the closet. "Get in the plane. Now. Hop to."

Off we go to Deep Creek. The silvers are running there, fast and thick. We catch a planeful. We catch a mountain of fish.

JUST OPPOSITE OUR HOUSE on Campbell Lake lives Lou Gallagher, Dad's surgery-practice partner and best friend. Lou is new to the neighborhood, too. He has purchased himself a split-level house with a leather-walled, fully stocked bar downstairs and, in the entrance, a waterfall fountain made from giant clamshells terraced into a grotto of petrified coral and cement.

For the past ten years, a seemingly endless supply of money has flowed into Anchorage from the oil companies and contractors that are building the Arctic pipeline. This, Dad says, combined with the fundamental Alaskan love of individualism, has led to some lavish, one-of-a-kind décor choices.

Personally, I love the clamshell fountain. I harbor certain classified plans about peeing in the upper tiers and watching the golden waterfall tumble down over the embedded starfish and faux pearls. Lou, however, is not at all enthralled. He's decided to tear the rancher down to build a bigger, more tasteful home. He invites us to a demolition celebration barbecue, right on the rubble of the old foundation.

By the time we arrive, the yard is thick with cigar smoke and random black Labs. Watermelons lie piled up by the coolers. Whole salmon, wrapped into tinfoil logs, sizzle on the grill. Lou, a tall, dark, and charismatic version of my blond, smaller, quieter father, waves us over with one giant lobster-claw pot holder. When Dad stands back, rocking on his heels, Lou bear-hugs him. When Dad says we have to be home early, Lou says Dad has to wear a ruffled apron that says KISS THE COOK, plus finish up grilling the salmon, plus finish up drinking Lou's beer, plus put on the goddamn lobster pot holders that his lovely wife bought him for Christmas. Then Dad can go home and be a party pooper. You bet.

To my surprise, Dad neither thunders back at him, nor tells him to redirect his misguided energies. He blushes, the way I would. Then ties on the apron. Lou sticks a few beers in the front ruffled pocket, plus an unlit Roman candle.

Over on the half-built deck, Great Alaskan Moms are sipping jug Chablis and nibbling on canapés made from Triscuits and spreadable port wine cheese. They wear silk blouses and teetering heels and gold hoops straight from the disco-dancing photos in magazines at the supermarket. The poetry of their outfits is lost on their husbands, all of whom have gussied themselves up in JCPenney and hip boots, as usual.

I sit in the mud by a broken patio chair. My job is to listen and worship and not, under any circumstances, be noticed. I can do this until the end of time. Gesturing with his hands, then his spatula, then a raw moose sausage, Lou explains how to land a plane on a moving glacier. Rudolph Deer (his real name) enacts his escape from a bull moose that charged him down his own street.

Beer flows. The grill sizzles. Stories curl and wind around us. Dad joins in, finally, pausing at just the right moment and stroking his mustache for effect, as if he just can't seem to remember how he fought off that grizzly with a butterfly net, a canned ham, and a broken paddle.

"I used a can of Cutter once," says Four-Finger Dick. "A blast of bug spray, straight to the bear's face. Gave me that thirty extra seconds."

A high-pitched scream cuts through the laughter. All ten male heads swing around, evaluating the landscape of the lake for a possible drowning or discharged firearm. Down on the beach, ten girls freeze in instant, identical states of paralysis.

Oddly enough, in a state whose population averages 65 percent male, all my father's friends have daughters. Lou has the one and only son in the group, a six-year-old boy named Timmy. But he knows which of his kids causes most of the excitement when left unsupervised. "Mary-Frances," he roars. "There's enough goddamn pantyhose for everybody to catch a minnow. Share the wealth! Or no firecrackers after dinner!"

Lou's wife, Caroline calls me over with a little wave. She smells of bath oils and perfumes in curvy glamorous bottles with jeweled stoppers. Her hand feels soft on the back of my neck — creamed and cool. "How is your mother?" she whispers.

Before the divorce, she and Mom were best friends. Are they still? How can they be when Dad and Lou are also best friends?

"She's great!" I say.

"She told me she bought you guys a nice house."

"It's white," I say. "And black."

Caroline seems unimpressed.

"It's got a Lazy Susan. And — " I'm not sure what to say next. That Mom misses her? That Mom is sick a lot now? That we have been away since January, but I'm pretty sure that if Caroline called her up and told her to come home, Mom would do it? Except I don't know if Mom would. She loves Baltimore.

Caroline gives me a hug — and nudges me downhill toward the other kids. "Go on," she says. "They're all waiting."

I trudge down — struck mute by shyness as always, only more intensely now that I no longer go to school up here. While the other girls dare one another into eating mud or plot how to get the ducks drunk on gin-soaked corn, I stand on the edges, pretending interest in the dog-kennel trash cans.

"Let's get our dads drunk instead," says Francy, which is her name whenever her parents aren't mad. She, like her father, is smarter and wilder than the rest of us. Her brown ringlets bounce down her shoulders. Her lips jut at a naturally flippant angle. Before the divorce, we were also best friends. Caroline and Mom dressed us in matching outfits — terry cloth short-shorts, rainbow-embroidered jeans. We're sisters, Francy and I always told people.

Like any good sister, Francy doesn't ask me if I missed her in Baltimore or if I like my new school. She bosses me into stealing the beer. I sneak up through the woods, and over the fence and grab a six-pack from a cooler. Then another.

The rest of the girls turn themselves into eight-year-old waiters, nudging fresh full beers into our fathers' hands the instant their cans go empty. Soon Lou is lurching over the yard. Soon my dad is joining him. "Now," they say, their slurs overlapping, "what about those flipperabuggits? Those whatchmacallits turnoverupsandarounds?"

"Round-offs?" says Francy, sweetly. "Or cartwheels?" She executes two perfect demonstrations, straight out of gymnastics class. Swaying and tumbling, we all follow her — upside down and right side up, men and girls and dogs — across the rubble and grass.

Night comes on. Bottle rockets are set off, their exploding colors invisible in the white sky. Ornate, never-to-be realized plans are made to dynamite, then trap, then poison the weasels who keep stealing the wild duck eggs down by Lou's dock.

The Gallaghers are living in a trailer while their new house is being built. I sneak into the back bedroom and hide underneath the windbreakers on the bed. There I lie very still, as if I might be mistaken for one of the white feral cats who hangs around the building site looking hungry and lost, until they are eventually adopted as part of the family. But this is an old trick of mine. My very real, experienced father feels though the pile of coats and finds me. Time to go home.

ONE WEEK LATER, Dad and I start building smokers out of three old refrigerators from the Anchorage town dump. If we don't have enough room in the freezer to store all our fish, we can do like the Natives do and dry it out for jerky. We saw holes in the tops of the refrigerators to let the smoke escape, insert pans of burning hickory chips in the produce drawers. On the racks, we lay out strips of fresh raw red salmon. That thinly sliced, the meat turns jeweled and see-through. I hold a piece over my eyes, thinking it will turn the world pink like sunglasses.

"You're going to go next door and spend some more time with kids your age," says Dad, shaking his head. "You'll play there tonight. And I'll pick you up at eleven."

He uses shampoo that evening. And combs his mustache. And pulls on a sweater. I watch him in the mirror. Where did my father get a sweater? It is a soft, fancy sweater, in a fancier lord-and-lady color that he refers to as "burgundy."

He walks me next door and drops me off at the Bardells' porch. The Bardells have four kids — all one year apart — and a wall-sized TV in its own wooden cabinet. They are louder, older, far wiser children than myself, who have rigged up their antenna with elaborate tinfoil antlers in order to capture porn off an unsubscribed cable channel. As we study various body parts thrashing through a blizzard of static, the oldest boy, Shawn, leans over my way and says, "So. Have you met your dad's girlfriend?"

Legs writhe over the screen. Moans filter through the crackles. "Girlfriend?" I say, staring at the TV, swallowing hard. "Yeah. Her. Sure."

But I begin counting chimpanzees until it's time for my father to pick me up. One chimpanzee equals one second. Sixty seconds equals one minute. Sixty minutes times sixty seconds equals thirty-six hundred chimpanzees, which equals an hour. Dad won't be late, will he? He promised to come at eleven o'clock. Luckily, nobody can hear my mumbles over the blasting sex sounds and the crunching mouthfuls of Jiffy Pop.

My father is late — by 1,789 chimpanzees. I don't speak to him. I pretend to be asleep in his arms and let him carry me home and tuck me into bed. In the morning, over our matching vat-sized bowls of oat bran, I finally figure out how to ask him about the girlfriend without embarrassing myself. "If there's some girl you like," I say, slow and casual. "You could take her out maybe. Like on a date."

"Actually," Dad says. "I've seen a very nice lady a few times. She works with me."

I spoon through my cereal. I think about how much I hate oat bran and how it gets gritty and soggy as soon as you pour on the milk. My dad's girlfriend doesn't like it, either, maybe. And right then I invent him a girlfriend. She is perfect. She lives in an apartment. She has short dark hair and diamonds in her ears and looks a lot like the figure skater, Dorothy Hamill, which is how I want to look, too. The best part about my invented girlfriend is, however, that she is a stewardess. She flies away to foreign countries all the time, and stays there for months and months.

THE LAST WEEK of August, hot black clouds billow over the roof of our house and our backyard starts sliding into the lake. The smokers are going full blast on the driveway, puffing salmon grease into the cool, autumn-smelling wind. Meanwhile, the muddy lot on which our house is built is slipping inch by inch into the water. We forgot to plant grass. Or trees. Or anything with roots to prevent erosion. As the mud moves, long thin cracks split up our kitchen walls. The tiles on the floor buckle.

My father puts me in charge of the smokers, then goes back to the dump for railroad ties. He drags them one by one — each an eight-and-half-foot-long tie weighing about 250 pounds — down to the lake himself, rolling them into the water off the bank.

Up in the garage, I sit around, lonely and bored. My hands stink of rotten fish. Flies bite my ankles. "The smoker door is stuck!" I call out to Dad, who is now diving into the lake, trying to lift the railroad ties on top of each other, underwater, to build us a retaining wall. "I can't find the spatula!"

"Look by the ice auger."

"I can't find the bag of hickory chips!"

"Honey," my dad says, standing up with weeds hanging off his ears "For Christ's sake, imagine you're on a desert island."

I stomp off to the kitchen, leaving all our fish to burn. My father is stupid. My father is a jerk. I look up at the fridge. My airplane ticket is still there, under the calendar magnet, where it has been all summer.

Dad and I are already on a desert island, aren't we? We've been there for a while, fishing and flying and eating and smoking and grilling and piling railroad ties into walls. While the rest of the world has been buying new backpacks and hemming new jeans, plus doing all the summer reading that I haven't even looked at yet.

I jump up and slide the ticket down to eye level. NORTHWEST ORIENT, it says across the thick red packet. In a few days I will be going back to Baltimore, back to my mother and school and my new life Outside. And Dad will be staying here in our house, sleeping in his down bag, eating all our salmon, all winter, all by himself.

Inside the packet is a bundle of thin, bound, smeary carbon paper. The ticket. I sniff it. Then lick the purple-black ink that rubs off on my fingers. The ticket cost a thousand dollars. If I rip it up, I'll have to pay Dad back that thousand dollars, the way I had to pay him back the nine dollars for the Bonne Bell lip glosses that I stole one time when I was seven.

I slide the ticket back under the magnet and leave it on the fridge.

When Dad takes me to the airport, he walks me all the way onto the plane and straps me into my seat. His face goes red and squishy. Huge, wracking sobs burst out of him. He hugs me. He hugs me again. It's not even like in the bathroom when he cried and it was only us two, and we could pretend it wasn't happening. I look around the airplane. An old lady is staring at us. Another one is looking straight ahead so as not to stare at us.

The stewardess tugs on his arm. I try to hug Dad back, but that only makes him hug me harder. I have a horrible feeling about what's about to happen. Already, in fact, I can feel it happening — the smile widening across my face, a huge toothy zinger.

The last — and only time — I ever smiled like this was two years before, the night our old house caught on fire from the stove and the kitchen burned down. Dad ran around, beating the fire out with blankets, while Mom cried in the corner and I smiled like a jack in the jack-in-box and didn't move and didn't run and did nothing to help. I wanted to help. A voice in my head was saying, At least stop smiling. You look like you think this whole situation is funny — or that you're glad about it. But my face was rubbery and stuck, and when I tried to move, I couldn't figure out what to do: run to the closet for coats, or run to the bathroom for towels, or fill some cups and throw water, or hide from the fire and Dad and Mom in the family room, under the afghan on the couch.

This time, though, I can do something. Because Dad doesn't know it, but I am coming back to Alaska — and not just for Christmas or next summer. There is a clause in the custody agreement that requires me to come up to Anchorage and live with my Dad, for one full year when I am twelve. After that year, I'm supposed to go back and live with Mom again. But I'm not going to. I'm not sure how yet. I've been working on some scenarios — like getting "lost" in the bush and then hiding out for a while, just long enough for everybody to give up looking for me. Except for Dad and Mom.

A few of the specifics need ironing out. Fact one: Twelve years old is a long way off, four huge never-ending years from now. Fact two: I'll have to get lost in early June, so I can get back inside a house by September. Fact three: I'll have to figure out how to protect myself out there, with a gun maybe, which I don't know how to use and I'll have to steal from Dad. Not to mention, where in the bush should I hide? Somewhere like Chugach National Forest, outside of Anchorage, which I can get to on my bike? Or someplace further out, like Beluga, which means getting lost from Dad while we're fishing? The latter seems a little too scary. Then again, it would be the ideal setting for Dad and Mom to realize — as they chop through the alders, calling out my name — that they made a mistake, that I have to live in Alaska, and Mom has to live here with me, and Dad has to live with the two of us, the way we did before.

None of which I can tell Dad. Not while he is sobbing still. And I am smiling, smiling like his crying is funny instead of loud and embarrassing and scary. I unbuckle my seatbelt and stand up. I start to hug him one last time, but that won't work; if I hug him, he'll only hug me back and not let go. So I stick out my hand — an unconscious and unplanned gesture, a firm, welcoming handshake of the kind that my Swiss headmistress in Baltimore gives to each girl in the morning as we enter the double doors of the school.

To learn more about Leigh Newman, visit leigh-newman.com. When looking for her book, visit one of Alaska's independent booksellers.

# Storm Out of Paradise   
by Howard C. Weaver

Howard Weaver was born in Anchorage, attended public schools there and worked in Alaska until he was 45. He tried construction, dishwashing and commercial fishing before settling into his lifetime work as a journalist. He worked at the Anchorage Daily News from 1967 – 1995, including 12 years as the editor, and worked on both the paper's Pulitzer Prize series. He details his time in the Alaska Newspaper War in the memoir Write Hard, Die Free.

The essay that follows — Storm Out of Paradise — comprises the essence of a work in progress that seeks to understand changes in Alaska culture and character from the pioneering days of his birth until the oil-financed society of today. His conclusions are his opinion, of course, but the facts are accurate and the events described here happened.

Many of the newspaper columns and some related material cited in the essay may be found online by clicking here: column links. Readers are invited and encouraged to offer their own views there, and some of those observations may be included in future editions of this work, which will be published digitally.

Introduction

The angel's eyes are staring . . . His mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin,

Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History

During more than 40 years living in Alaska, I came to realize how much I appreciated the Outsiders who were always telling us how things should be done.

How much? Not one goddamned bit.

This essay may feel like that kind of criticism to many readers. I assure you that I am not in the market for the kind of scorn I once dished out on such occasions.

I am writing this only because I must.

First, despite having moved away 18 years ago, I feel like an Alaskan in many important respects. If I didn't care about the place so much — if I didn't still love it — I wouldn't bother trying to sort out what happened to the state that attracted my idealistic parents in the 1940s, or examine why it changed the way it did during my life there.

More importantly, I write this because I am a writer, a storyteller. This is what I do and in large measure who I am. Whether you agree with my analysis or think I'm entirely wrong, know this: I did not come to these conclusions lightly. I am not just shooting off my mouth or (as we used to say about editorial writers) simply coming down from the hills after the battle to shoot the wounded.

I hope that Alaska's best days may indeed still be ahead, but I do not believe the state will get there if it keeps heading the way it's going now. If I can nudge your debate about that — by reminding you of something, or educating somebody, or even just making you mad — then I'll feel better.

Alaska is a precious jewel now balanced on a precarious ledge of decision and destiny. We will all need to act from our better natures to move it back to safety, and forward to greatness.

Storm Out of Paradise

A Meditation on Love, Heartbreak and the

Loss of Innocence on America's Vanishing Frontier

The story of my long love affair with Alaska and the heartbreak that ended it is easy to retrace. For 23 years I chronicled my every turn in the pages of newspapers, in public, for everyone to see.

I explored those pages again recently while researching a book about those years and the Alaska Newspaper War that occupied me through most of them. Hindsight naturally brought clarity I didn't enjoy at the time and — most importantly — perspective. What first saw light as isolated, individual articles and observations revealed a clear pattern when viewed from the ridge line looking back.

Almost all those writings were composed in haste, written on deadline and left to drift away uncollected, but I see now that they were more than fragments. Each small piece was a tile in a larger mosaic that now comes into view.

My memoir itself doesn't tell that story plainly. Write Hard, Die Free is mainly the tale of a quest for good journalism against imposing odds and as such looks at Alaska through a particular lens. It deals mostly with what I called "dispatches from the barrooms and battlefields" of the newspaper war, naturally a more institutional than personal view.

Now I find that I have something more to offer, thanks to the perspective of time and distance. Though I rarely recognized it as these events unfolded I now see a consistent theme woven through the narrative.

It's a love story.

I was born in love with Alaska, a frontier baby born to an idealistic young couple working to build a new life far away from the Great Depression, from Texas, and from World War II. Their fortunes would ebb and flow over time — often ebbing, it is true — but their fundamental optimism and affection for Alaska never faltered. I drank in their ideals and affection with my mother's milk, I suppose. I can't recall a time when I didn't share them.

Not long after he returned from war in the South Pacific to the dry land cotton fields of north Texas, my father and his young wife loaded a few belongings in a GMC pickup and drove north toward their future.

Like many in their generation they had been shaped by depression and war, toughened by a lifetime scratching at the cotton crops they hoed by walking through dusty fields and harvested by hand-picking bolls by the sackful. Despite that — or perhaps because of it, I suppose — they were idealists, optimists not content with waiting for a better world but ready to start building it for themselves.

They were not afraid when they pointed the navy blue pickup truck northward, drove to the end of the road and found a town called Anchorage, Alaska.

Though its population had boomed with wartime expansion and the opening of the Alaska-Canada Highway, Anchorage was then a small town nonetheless, isolated and remote. As I heard them say a thousand times over the years, to them it seemed the Promised Land.

My father had no trouble translating the lessons learned in his hardscrabble Texas childhood to his adult concerns in Alaska.

In arguments about the Vietnam War, which he opposed, I often heard him say, "This is a war between the landlords and the tenants, and we're on the wrong side." Later I heard him talking with a neighbor who cautioned that a trifling tax the state was then proposing on oil production would "drive the oil companies out of Alaska." As I recall my father snorted in reply: "The goddamned Alaska National Guard couldn't run them out of here now."

My father, a carpenter, smelled like sweat and cigarette smoke; my mother worked as a bookkeeper at a lumber yard and smelled of Evening in Paris. As it turned out, their aspirations and expectations were rather different, but they were united in their desire to create a better, fairer society for the sons they expected to prosper as they never did. Their ambition did not come to pass in their lifetimes, but lives in me to this day.

No doubt I had been an integral part of my parents' footloose aspirations — a chubby blond first-born baby carried from Providence Hospital in 1950 to the young couple's unfinished Muldoon homesite. On that cold but snowless October day their hopes and expectations were still high. I spent most of a lifetime in Alaska fighting to advance the dream they had chased northward.

"We spend most of our adulthoods trying to grasp the meanings of our parents' lives," Philip Lopate once said. "How we shape and answer those questions largely turns us into who we are."

The poet's father grew old and died a lingering death, with time aplenty for reflection by both father and son. I was left with no such well-considered farewell, not much transition from child to orphan. My parents died in ways that left no final chapters for their stories, tied up no loose ends, resolved nothing. Each departed in midstream, mom at the bottom of a swift downward spiral of addiction — dead at 45 — and dad three years later, alone in an overturned car in a whiskey haze, his last words heard only by the patrolman who found the accident: "It hurts."

Swift, precocious failure ended lives that had once shown bright with promise, and I would spend a lifetime working in that shadow.

I had come of age in the last generation of Alaskans before oil, graduating from East Anchorage High School in 1968. The commencement address I delivered for my class that spring was a predictable bromide of graduation clichés but it was nonetheless an honest reflection of the general optimism that then defined Alaskans.

About a year later Alaska sold oil leases on the North Slope at Prudhoe Bay. The mighty payday that accompanied the 1969 auction was seen as a beacon of optimism at the time, the down payment on a new society defined by independence and opportunity. The $900 million in leases — worth about $5.3 billion in today's dollars — promised financial stability and independence the state had never enjoyed.

Though it would be more than 25 years before I recognized it and moved away from my native state, the leases actually had unleashed forces that would inexorably change Alaska. The dream of Alaska exceptionalism steadily eroded, a telling blow to the American dream of perpetual fresh starts somewhere just past the far horizon.

The story unfolded sometime between discovery of oil at Prudhoe and Sarah Palin's parody of the state's frontier values. During that span the home of idealists and pioneers became a land of cynical self-interest, its larger-than-life legends too often replaced by larger-than-life villains. At one end of the comparison was a group of men and women gathered in what became Constitution Hall at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks to draft a model constitution for a new state. At the other we find a seedy suite in Juneau's Baranof Hotel where a group that called itself the Corrupt Bastards Club drunkenly traded Alaska's frontier birthright for a pocketful of trinkets.

If the American mythology of frontier opportunity and perpetual rebirth was to be tested anywhere, Alaska was the place.

The 500-year history of Europeans' insistent push to the western edge of North America comes to a cold, abrupt halt in Alaska. Where the tundra plain kisses the cold gray Bering Sea, the continent's limits are established.

This marks far more than a geographic boundary. As America has been defined by a restless quest for new frontiers, so too is it constrained by the end of what once seemed to be limitless space. Where North America ends at the North Pacific, the old dream of boundless opportunity and second chances ends as well.

At the continent's northern and western edge, Alaska had long represented a last great hope for the renewal and idealism that drove Americans like my parents westward. Here was yet another opportunity to make good on the promise of a fresh start — and this is where the dream died, transformed by an indulgent generation that sold Alaska's birthright for a government check.

I feel this personally, because the Weavers' heritage of westward roaming ends in Alaska as well, and that wasteful generation is my own.

For 239 years — from arrival at the Philadelphia waterfront in 1711 to Anchorage in 1950 — the immigrants from whom I am descended moved steadily, relentlessly toward the American frontier, never resting in any place for much more than a generation. My parents were the last; the Weaver pattern changed with me. When it came my time in 1995 to pick up and move I headed not for a physical frontier but an electronic one, moving south and east to California and a strategic planning job in electronic publishing.

As I discovered reviewing old news articles for my book research, my Alaska journalism career had been punctuated with worried musings about our state's eroding values.

Alaska's promise felt so real to me for so long. I wanted it to be true.

My mentor Paul Goodrich often told me about the Alaska he discovered as a teenager in the 1930s, a place that demanded its residents grow to match the ever-present challenges of the vast, indifferent wilderness that surrounded them. He told me how, as the caretaker of a remote cabin one winter night near Fairbanks, he walked out into stunning cold to fetch more firewood and stood transfixed at the spectacle of silent snowfields under Arctic moonlight.

"Far away a wolf called out from the hilltop," he remembered nearly 70 years later. "Another wolf answered from even farther. And my heart expanded."

That expansive spirit remained in Paul's heart forever after, as it remained for others of his pioneering generation. It defined them and informed the lives they bequeathed us. We let them down.

The record of my worrying about Alaska's future begins in 1973, just a year after I returned from college to a job at the Anchorage Daily News, still in the dawn of Alaska's oil age. Part of it said:

Doesn't anyone else remember that Alaska was a land of bright promise before any of us dreamed of oil or pipelines?

It is as though we Alaskans recently have been infected with a case of monetary myopia that prevents us, when we survey economic horizons, from seeing any farther than the nearest section of 48-inch pipe.

Without the pipeline, we have all been told countless times, Alaska will surely wither and die, strangled in the grip of brigands such as Outsiders, Conservationists and Meddlers.

As a people, Alaskans have bought that pitch — pump, line and tanker....

Suppose — even if the thought makes you tremble — that oil had not been discovered at Prudhoe Bay.

If Alaskans had never heard of Pet Four, Sag River or Deadhorse, would we have abandoned all hope for our state?

If BP, Exxon and Atlantic Richfield had never drooled about 10 billion barrels of North Slope oil, would our senators have told Congress to run up a white flag signaling the end of Civilization As We Know It?

...If you never lived in pre-pipeline Alaska, you may not believe our state had a hope of survival without the oil...

What has happened, l fear, is that we all got greedy when the oil companies in 1969 shelled out $900 million to lease some North Slope oil fields. Every day became Christmas Eve for Alaskans, and we began to live in the glow of our expectations rather than the sweat of our current efforts.

Faced with the prospect of dollars flowing into Alaska as freely as the crude flowed out, we have gotten lazy. Here was wealth, ease and prosperity, ours for the asking because nature, in some prehistoric time, saw fit to deposit vast petroleum reserves beneath our Arctic tundra.

No longer will we have to work at greatness: By an accident of geology, we can sit back and let the oil companies pump it out of the frozen oil fields for us.

As tired and worn as the cliché may seem, we have put all our eggs in the billion-dollar basket of Big Oil. Alaskans have willingly donned the blinders, and look to nothing else.

The discovery of North Slope oil may prove to have been a tragedy of the highest order — not because a pipeline across Alaska will necessarily mean disasters, but because it may rob us of our initiative.

By 1973 I'd moved on to join a handful of others in creation of the Alaska Advocate (which I had proposed calling The Turnagain Arm World Defender), a publication with an obvious point of view that reflected our desire to preserve Alaska's special legacies despite the winds of change.

In one of its first issues, in February 1977, I acknowledge oil development as an inevitable fact of life in Alaska but worried, "the growing fear in the soul of Alaska is that [development] decisions will be orchestrated far away, by those with an eye only to the profits and products, with no feeling for the life we choose. As the wealth we shelter becomes more dear, the price we must pay for our values becomes immense...The pressure is on, and growing. If there is something worth fighting for, prepare to start now."

Like many in Alaska, we fought, and sometimes we won. Through the late 1970s and early '80s the state was perpetually engaged in close-fought battles about fundamental issues: How much of the state would be open for exploitation, how much preserved as parks or wilderness? Would the rights and properties of Alaska Natives be recognized? How effective a watchdog could the state be over global oil producers as they pumped and transported North Slope crude? How much of the oil wealth could be preserved for Alaskans — it was discovered on state land, after all — and how much exported along with the crude?

These were not small questions; the answers came in billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of acres of land. The public's margin of decision often was vanishingly small, never so evident as when the opposing visions of Jay Hammond and Wally Hickel clashed in a gubernatorial primary decided by just 287 votes.

The magnitude of the issues came into focus in a column I wrote for the Advocate in 1978 when the American supertanker Amoco Cadiz spilled a load of crude oil onto the coast of France:

Don't you see? The only variable is time. Alaskans are not waiting to see IF a major tanker spill will strike; the only question is WHEN...

If we can do nothing else, we can at least recognize that hard fact. As we watch oil company advertisements advise us of their concern for Alaska, we can remember their concern for France. And when it is time to tax them for the wealth they export, we can take full measure of the costs they will certainly visit on us.

Eleven years later, when the Exxon Valdez was drunkenly run aground in Prince William Sound to spills millions of gallons of crude, there would be no pleasure in saying "I told you so."

In the middle years between Amoco Cadiz and Exxon Valdez no question preoccupied Alaska like oil money: how to get it, what to do with it, who would profit from it? That debate permeated all others. When you talked about environmental regulation the old argument my dad had faced came up again and again: "But you'll drive the oil companies out of Alaska." When you pointed out that oil revenue was a lucky geological accident — that the Alaskans of our generation had done nothing to earn or intrinsically deserve it — a chorus of entitled citizens would likely shout you down. If you suggested that Alaskans, like their ancestors, ought to pay taxes as the dues of citizenship, the shouts turned into laughter and eclipsed the argument entirely.

I found two articles from that era that outlined my worries and growing disillusionment. The first was an essay written in 1984 when the state celebrated a Silver Anniversary — 25 years of statehood. Though I struggled mightily to come to an optimistic conclusion, most of the essay was cautionary instead:

In most of the old photos, the faces seem happier than today's.

Grinning out of a 1959 Fur Rendezvous exhibit or marching in a long-forgotten Independence Day parade, the portraits glow as if lighted from within. There were smiles, but more than that: the eyes laughed, too. These were faces sketched in innocence, joy and confidence. Most important was the confidence.

Would tomorrow be better than today? No question. Could a hard-working carpenter turn moonlighting renovation into an empire? You bet. Was there ever a place with 'manifest destiny' embroidered across its mountains by the hand of God? Alaska...

In the Alaska of those smiling statehood photographs, children died because the best medical care was a seven-hour plane ride away in Seattle...tuberculosis consumed Alaskans at a fierce rate, village housing would have needed considerable improvement to deserve a 'sub-standard' rating, and inflation and the cost of living regularly galloped past national rates...

So why are the faces in those of photos smiling? Perhaps they know a secret...When the Army trucks and Antique Auto Mushers roll through Anchorage on snow-covered February streets, the crowds and the clowns know the truth: Macy's or the Rose Parade this isn't. Miss Alaska is likely to be wearing long johns, and it's tough for the bands to play with anti-freeze on the trombone slides.

But it was fun. The secret of Alaska is that verbs matter more than nouns. It isn't the parade that's important, it's the parading.

Too much of the debate in the 1980s was about nouns: more of this for me, less of that for them. Project '80s, a massive public works program in Anchorage, brought a new convention center, a sports arena, a performing arts complex and a new headquarters library, all paid for by oil money at no cost to local residents.

And when the time came to pay a little more in taxes to maintain the new facilities? Most Alaskans just didn't want to.

In the fall of 1987 I was invited to present the annual Loussac Lecture at the main library in Anchorage, named for Zachariah Joshua Loussac, a pioneering mayor and philanthropist from the 1940s. The original building in the heart of downtown had proclaimed on one side, "Ye Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Set You Free," and it played a large role in my education. I was thrilled to be asked and worked hard to have something useful to say.

By that time the headquarters library had moved from its original location to a new mid-town facility built — you guessed it — with tens of millions in oil money appropriated in the Project '80s extravaganza. Perhaps it was churlish to stand in the splendid new auditorium and complain about Alaskans' excesses, but I did it anyway:

With the welling forth of oil riches, Alaska came eyeball to eyeball with its long-proclaimed destiny.

Many Alaskans blinked.

Did we exhibit the hearty self-reliance that is the legacy of our pioneers?

We did not.

Did we behave differently than the Oklahoma Indian or desert Bedouin suddenly confronted with massive wealth?

We did not.

Did we husband this once-in-an-epoch windfall to seed the gardens of our children's future?

We did not.

What did we do instead?

We demanded cheap housing loans, and then property tax relief to further subsidize them.

I went to high school in pre-oil Alaska, and we had bands and football teams and French clubs. We had them because our parents participated in that society — with their time and energy and checkbooks.

Now, Alaska school districts are willing to sacrifice education to avoid a three-mill tax.

What else did we do instead?

We lavished billions on questionable construction projects.

We wanted an instant culture, without history or sacrifice. As a friend has put it, we tried to "buy ourselves a Houston off the shelf." And a huge percentage of that spending went to Seattle suppliers and laborers attracted by our spending spree.

What else did we do instead?

We elected leaders expressly for their inability to tell us no — and then cursed them when the sugar daddy died.

We established the "Alaska Compromise" in Juneau — a deal that was not a conciliation, a meeting halfway, but simply an arrangement where both sides get everything they wanted.

Senators openly acknowledged their shameful new credo: "Don't question my projects and I won't question yours."

That is corrupting, no matter how worthy some of the projects may have been.

When we sacrificed the honorable process of government to meet our short-term appetites, we also sacrificed our innocence.

We have been largely unable to admit that behavior even now. We tend to blame distant Arabs or legislators past.

But it seems more accurate to acknowledge, as a correspondent from Ketchikan wrote to me, that "Alaska, awaking after its long debauch, is ashamed to see old friends."

And which old friends are those?

Independence. Self-reliance. Confidence. Idealism.

Three and a half years ago, I wrote:

"Ten years after statehood, the state leased land for drilling up at Prudhoe Bay. That $900 million dollar payday was to have been the endowment that bought Alaska happiness.

"It didn't.

"Ten years later still, billions of dollars from Prudhoe's production flowed through the pipeline and bulged our bank accounts. Then we learned all over again that if money can't buy happiness, neither can MORE money."

What had happened to Alaska? Was there time enough left to change course?

I thought so then but I kept worrying. Also in the late '80s I wondered in a column, "Can anybody remember exactly when Alaska filled up with whiners? At what point in our fairly recent past did we decide the world owed us a living? When was it that we decided to try and trade independence and self-respect for a guaranteed annual raise?"

And then Exxon blackened the tides of Prince William Sound. In March 1989 (almost precisely 23 years after an earlier disaster, the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964), Exxon's drunken skipper ran a loaded supertanker aground on Bligh Reef and my worst dreams started coming true.

The environmental despoliation was far from the worst of it. After all, the risk of a catastrophic spill had been with us since the first barrel of crude entered the trans-Alaska pipeline in June 1977. In a way I didn't even blame the oil companies. They had behaved as I knew they would, in their own economic interest, as oil companies always have. Now the disaster had happened, it was as horrible as predicted, and there was nothing to do but work through it.

It seemed to me for a while that the spill had at long last galvanized Alaskans into taking responsibility for their state. More clearly than a hundred newspaper columns or a thousand campaign speeches, Exxon's spill made plain that we could rely on no one else to safeguard the treasures of Alaska.

I thought I felt that realization take hold. Recognition of the disaster and its origins rallied the legislature briefly to strengthen environmental regulations and reexamine the severance taxes and royalties oil companies paid for the right to take such risks. Citizens seemed to see beyond the television commercials proclaiming that oil companies cared as much as we did about Alaska. Maybe a new understanding would emerge from the tragedies of Exxon Valdez.

But it didn't. Before long oil companies held the legislature more fully in their thrall than ever before. It took only until May of the next year for a pro-oil senator to torpedo a bill that would have allowed state inspections of oil tankers. "Obviously, oil is back," State Rep. Mike Davis told the Seattle Times afterward. "And it certainly didn't take long."

From there retreat only accelerated. Before long a crude, bullying oilfield millionaire named Bill Allen bought the Anchorage Times, was honored and celebrated as Alaskan of the Year, palled around with Sen. Ted Stevens and called a legislator to his suite in the Baranof Hotel to remind him, "I own your ass."

I'm glad my father wasn't around to see it. But he wouldn't have been surprised.

Perhaps I should not have been, either, but I always was a sucker where Alaska was concerned.

I left Alaska in 1995 against all expectations — my own and those of nearly everybody who knew me. I was a lifer if ever there was one. When people asked if I had lived in Alaska all my life, I always just answered, "Not yet."

I'd been gone a while before I started to see why.

A couple of years after leaving, a friend asked me to write a foreword for a history of oil in Alaska and I was flattered to do it. I didn't want to cause troubles for his book and consciously toned down my comments about what the industry has meant in Alaska.

After I showed it to my wife she told me, "You know, this is awfully bitter." So I toned it down considerably and sent it to the publisher, who told me the same thing again. Then I toned it down again.

I hadn't examined my feelings closely until then. That's when I realized I'd left because Alaska broke my heart.

It couldn't have happened if I hadn't loved the place so much. I still do, but the ugliness that ended our affair has only gotten worse since I left her.

Sarah Palin is certainly not responsible for the deterioration of the state, but she is a perfect representation of it. How did the spirit of Alaska's pioneers — of my parents, of Paul Goodrich — devolve into such selfishness and foolishness, all within my lifetime?

It took such a short time; it all unfolded between discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay and Palin's parody of the state's frontier values. During that span the beloved home of idealists and pioneers became a land of cynical self-interest, its larger-than-life legends too often replaced by larger-than-life villains.

Always before I have managed to return from my jeremiads to a place of optimism about Alaska. I'm looking for that place again.

Shortly before his death in 1993, Wallace Stegner wrote an essay about the West that I believe also speaks perfectly about Alaska, that prototype of the American frontier:

"Deeply lived-in places are the exception rather than the rule in the West. For one thing, all Western places are new; for another, many of the people who established them came to pillage, or to work for pillagers, rather than to settle for life. When the pillaging was done or the dream exploded, they moved on, to be replaced in the next boom by others just as hopeful and just as footloose. Successive waves have kept Western towns alive but prevented them from deepening the quality of their life, and with every wave the land is poorer.

"(Yet) somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on Western ranches, and in Western towns and even in Western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

"I believe that eventually, perhaps within a generation or two, they will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air and water. I think they will learn to control corporate power and to dampen the excess that has always marked their region, and will arrive at a degree of stability and a reasonably sustainable economy based on the resources that they will know how to cherish and renew."

You can learn more about Howard Weaver's history and current work at his website, www.howardweaver.com and in the memoir Write Hard, Die Free — Dispatches From the Battlefields and Barrooms of the Great Alaska Newspaper War, which is available in paperback and Kindle editions. He blogs about current affairs and is a frequent contributor on Twitter as @howardweaver. Ask for his book at one of Alaska's fine independent bookstores.

# On Ice   
by Deb Vanasse

At age twenty-one, Deb Vanasse was dropped by a bush pilot on a gravel runway in the middle of the Alaska wilderness. No roads, no houses, no cars, no people — only a winding brown slough and tundra spread flat as the prairie. She had come not for adventure but to live, an isolating but enriching experience that inspires her work. Between her mountain home and a glacier-based cabin, she continues to enjoy Alaska's wild places. The author of more than a dozen books for readers of all ages, she is co-founder of the 49 Alaska Writing Center.

The chapters that follow come from beginning of the novel Cold Spell, which tells parallel stories of a mother who risks everything to start over in Alaska and a daughter whose longings threaten to undo them both.

Isostacy

Displacement from the advance or retreat of a glacier

I AM A POEM, Sylvie once thought, swollen like a springtime river, light swirled in dark, music and memory. Then her father ran off and her mother became obsessed with a glacier and she realized this was what happened to girls who believed themselves poems, poems in fact being prone to bad turns and misunderstandings.

Before the glacier, Sylvie's mother had been ordinary and dependable, a plain woman with kind eyes, unlike her father who was dashing and quick, with a flair for the dramatic. When he'd come home cursing his boss in the Ford parts department or when he'd blow up at the neighbor for turning his dog loose, Sylvie's mother would massage the base of his neck and speak calm soothing words. After he left Minnesota for Florida in the company of Mirabelle, a redhead from the dealership, Sylvie cried in long, heaving sobs every night for a week, and because she cried her sister Anna did too, and there was nothing poetic in their sorrow, no words for it even.

With her soft, steady voice and her fingers stroking their hair, Sylvie's mother assured the girls that their father loved them whether he was still in Pine Lake or not. For her mother's sake Sylvie tried to pretend this was so, though in truth she doubted it deeply. She wished her mother would cry, wished she would wail and scream and flail, wished she would rage at something, at someone, at anyone, even at Sylvie.

Instead her mother's smile, always ready, became automatic, as if by the push of a button her lips made their slight upward turn. She roused the girls every day at precisely 6:30, even on weekends. She sliced bananas over their oatmeal and sprinkled brown sugar, one tablespoon each. She sipped coffee brewed in a new pot that made only one cup and ate toast spread thin with peach preserves and deflected Sylvie's complaints that no one else ate oatmeal for breakfast. She rinsed the dishes and loaded the dishwasher, glasses on top, bowls on the bottom, spoons up, butter knives down, and she folded tidy waxed paper over sandwiches cut on the diagonal, peanut butter and apple for Anna, cream cheese and turkey for Sylvie, both on wheat bread no matter how Anna begged for white, the old-fashioned wrapping an embarrassment to Sylvie, who turned her wishes to small things like thin, transparent plastic. The tiniest quiver in her mother's smile hinted at their shared understanding, hers and Sylvie's, of how a single uncontrolled moment could upend everything.

Not long after Sylvie's father drove off, her mother took the girls for their annual physicals. Dr. Temple was the only pediatrician in Pine Lake, and for as long as Sylvie could remember she had been ushered to him for every sniffle and cough. She was humiliated at the idea of the old doctor with his hairy hands and long ears poking her cold naked chest where breasts had recently sprouted. She begged to be taken to Gainesville, to the sprawling clinic where no one would know her, but her mother refused, insisting of course on their usual routine. So Sylvie planted herself in a corner of Dr. Temple's waiting room, apart from her mother and sister, and buried her head in a book as she tried not to choke on the heavy smell that hangs over medical places, part alcohol and part cleaning products, foolishly confident that after her father's sudden departure things at least couldn't get any worse.

From the doorway that separated the waiting from the business inside, Dr. Temple's nurse called for Sylvie and Anna. When their mother rose to join them, the nurse suggested the girls were old enough to see the doctor alone. "But Anna is only five," Sylvie's mother said through her auto-smile. "She just started kindergarten."

The nurse cupped a milky white hand over Anna's shoulder. "Eleven and five. Plenty old to see the doctor alone." As she steered the girls toward the door, Sylvie's mother blinked hard, like a shutter that closed on an image to save it.

"You're a big girl," the nurse said to Sylvie as she trotted them down the corridor. "Slide right on into this little room and slip off your clothes and put on that gown while I help your sister." The nurse brushed back a strand of Anna's hair, silky and fine like their mother's.

"We always . . ." But Sylvie had no words for their self-conscious cleaving since her father had left.

"It's okay." Anna's pressed lips turned up like their mother's. "I don't mind."

Since she was in no way a poem, Sylvie did as the nurse said, slipping out of her jeans and her shirt and folding inside them her underpants and her sad little bra. She eased onto the exam table, her slender but big-knuckled feet dangling as her haunches stuck to the vinyl and her nipples stiffened beneath the rough cotton. She had never before had to fully undress for the doctor, and her resentment at this fell squarely on her mother, helpless to insist on a routine when for once one was needed.

She sat hunched under the impossible blue gown, a limp balloon from which her limbs protruded, while Dr. Temple tapped at her knees with his little hammer and pretended not to look as he pressed his cold stethoscope to her chest. Then he started in with the questions. How were things at home, now that it was only the girls? Did Sylvie miss her dad something awful? Were there bad dreams she might want to share?

Sylvie mumbled fine, no, and no as she beat back the dream image of her father sinking in a vast, lapping ocean, and Sylvie paddling with all she had, trying to save him. Finally the doctor gave up with his stethoscope and patted her shoulder, his hand sweet with soap, and pronounced her a good strong girl who would be a great help to her mother during this difficult time.

That's when Sylvie realized that not only a few of the parents but the whole town of Pine Lake was talking about how her dad had run off. If she'd been the good strong girl the doctor pronounced her to be, she might have thought how this gossip must impact her mother. But instead her resentment balled up even tighter, like a leech left to dry in the sun.

Dressed, she returned to the waiting room. On her mother's lap was a magazine, splayed open to a white and blue-shadowed mass that shrugged out from a large range of mountains. Sylvie slid into a chair and waited for her mother to ask what had gone on with the doctor. But her mother only stared at the ice as if it were the most lovely and mysterious thing she had ever encountered. A tingling crept beneath Sylvie's skin, up her arms to her chest, dread at how a mere image could insert itself between them, so that it was no longer just her and her mother, pretending for Anna's sake that everything would be fine.

Sylvie's mother glanced at the receptionist, then pressed the magazine flat and with great precision tore out the glacier, folded it twice, and tucked the photo into her purse. "You're not supposed to do that," Sylvie said. Known by everyone, including herself, to be a compliant child, she was struck by the power in so few words. "The magazines are for everyone."

"What magazines?" From the hallway, Anna came forward.

Their mother pressed a finger to her lips. The way she draped her hand on her purse made Sylvie suspicious of what else might be stashed inside. Sylvie's father was the one to come home with a fluffy hotel towel stuffed in his suitcase or a shot glass swiped from a bar in his pocket. Her mother she'd never known to take anything.

They piled into the car. "I can't believe you ripped out that picture," Sylvie said.

"I want to see," Anna said.

Their mother tucked the purse next to her hip and folded her elbow across it. "Later."

In light of Sylvie's recent exposure, her mother's smug smile was especially hateful. "They're all talking about us," she said

Her mother's eyes shone in the rearview mirror. "Who's talking about us?"

"Everyone." Of all things, her mother was smiling; you could see it in the way the skin crinkled at the corners of her eyes. "Everyone in this whole entire town. And you think it's funny."

"No, honey." The smile stayed. "It's not funny. But there's nothing we can do about it."

"Is it a picture of someone we know?" Anna poked the side of the purse. "I want to see."

"In a minute." Their mother hung a sharp right into the Carson Crafts parking lot, where she wheeled the sedan between a panel truck and a big Suburban.

"You're parked crooked." How had Sylvie not noticed sooner this duty to point out her mother's flaws? "The door of that truck's gonna smack us."

"I'm just running in for a minute." Her neck flushed at the base, her mother pressed her purse between her ribs and her arm.

"I'm coming in." When Anna swung open her door, it clunked against the side of the panel truck.

"Told you," said Sylvie, but already her mother was scurrying toward the entrance, Anna half-running to keep up. Sylvie scooted out of the sunlit square that beamed through the window into her lap. She was used to hanging back, not drawing attention, but she had failed to anticipate this unexpected consequence, that Anna would latch onto their mother in her place.

When they returned, her mother clutched a small bag next to her purse. Anna got in from the driver's side. "It's a glacier," she informed Sylvie. "A big bunch of ice that never melts."

"I know that," said Sylvie, though it was clear no one cared.

Once home, Sylvie's mother trimmed the magazine picture and used a knife to pry back the wires that held cardboard next to the glass. She balled up the glossy photo that came with the frame, a girl plucking petals from a daisy, and replaced it with the glacier. Then she bent the wires back into place and raised the picture between her hands. "This will sit right on my desk."

"I'm never eating oatmeal again." It was the single act of rebellion Sylvie could summon on short notice. "Never."

"Goodness," her mother said. "What's gotten into you?" But her eyes never left the glacier.

Ogive

An undulation formed on the surface of ice

IN THE FLAT farm country of central Minnesota where mothers went crazy for things like PTA fundraisers and shoe sales at Henkes, her mother's picture drew attention as it sat on her secretary's desk outside the principal's office at Pine Lake High School, where she used her calm words to soothe students who'd gotten in trouble and their parents who believed bad behavior was all the fault of the school. Photos of Sylvie and Anna were displaced to a shelf behind her. When people asked about the glacier, Sylvie's mother would shrug and say she liked ice. Sometimes she'd balance the frame between her two index fingers and lift the image to her face, as if there were secrets chiseled into the frozen fissures of the glacier.

She passed through her own Little Ice Age. At home she'd pull the shades, dim the lights, draw her knees to her chest, wrap herself in a blanket, and stare for hours at movie footage of glaciers. Docu-voices crooned over snow that fell soft and light, gathering into a mass that turned harder than rock and yet still flowed like water. Calving ice crashed alarmingly into the sea. Cameras tracked climbers who scuttled backwards, clinging to ropes as they disappeared into steep blue crevasses. Helicopters chopped like insects, hovering over glaciers that might one day disappear, if the earth kept heating up.

You couldn't walk past the living room without being assaulted by some cold fact or another. Glaciers trap three times the fresh water that runs free on earth. The pressure inside a glacier builds to one thousand pounds per square inch. Believing ice had a soul, medieval peasants set crosses in front of glaciers, in vain hope of stopping them. One documentary featured a man who claimed that through the sheer power of thought you could infuse ice with beauty. He amassed believers who prayed for pure, crystalline ice, as if the forces that conjured a glacier could be moved by a tiny thing like desire.

The ice drew her mother as it shut out Sylvie, who was helpless to stop it. It was as if once her father packed his belongings into that refurbished Ford and pointed it south, her mother's head had swelled with palm trees and beaches and skimpy swimsuits that a woman like Mirabelle might still pull off, and she needed the big frozen mass to butt those tropical images out of her head. Or maybe she simply aspired to the cold, regal power of ice.

Sylvie grew into her body, the wisp of a bra swapped for a real one. A young woman, her father remarked when Sylvie and Anna flew down for their annual visit, eyeing Sylvie in a way that made her look down at her feet. She sensed the bad things that rattled inside her — anger, unsteadiness, guilt — but she remained an obedient girl, a good student, reliable in ways that would prove no match for ice.

On a cloudy February day during Sylvie's sophomore year, Kenny arrived. Sent to the school to retrieve his cousin's son after he'd gotten smacked with a ball in PE, no one would deal with him until he first signed in and received the required visitor's pass. He'd gone fuming to her mother's desk, directed first by the hall monitor and then by the school nurse. Sylvie's mother had set down her pen and tucked her hair in back of her ear while Kenny went on about the sorts of rules that robbed the last bits of freedom left in this country. Where he came from, he said, a man could do as he pleased. She'd nodded and watched with her plain but kind eyes until at last Kenny jabbed at her photo and said, "I'll be damned. That's my glacier."

By the time Kenny got done explaining how he'd come from Alaska where he lived not far from this same piece of ice, by the time he'd finished saying how the glacier wound twenty-six miles down from the mountains and how the face of it reared up wide as a fortress, he'd calmed himself. In the meantime her mother's obsession had grown to encompass a man, not that she realized it yet. As she escorted Kenny to the nurse's office, she slipped him her telephone number. What were the chances, she would say later. What were the chances a man from that very glacier would walk right up to her desk? And not any man, but one who with the press of his hands and his deliberate speech and the depth of his eyes seemed the glacier incarnate.

The attention she'd lavished on ice, Sylvie's mother now turned on Kenny. He began spending the night. Sylvie could hardly stand the sight of him shirtless in their tiny kitchen, the sun teasing the coiled hairs of his chest as he kneaded her mother's shoulders. The furrows on her mother's forehead softened and her plain eyes turned wide and alert with the mascara and shadow and liner she'd started to wear. For breakfast she set out cocoa and toast — no more oatmeal — and sliced peaches, Kenny's favorite, instead of bananas, and she sent the girls off with money instead of packed lunches. On her shirts, she left so many buttons unfastened that their principal, old doddering Mr. Stanton, could only stammer and look the other way.

Sylvie had just turned sixteen, and though she should have been happy for her mother, the danger locked up in the glacier was nothing compared to this man. One night their eyes met, hers and Kenny's, across the living room, and the look that passed between them was a humming that rippled down Sylvie's legs to her toes, an exquisite and shameful vibration that replayed when she lay down to sleep.

Anna loved Kenny because he took her and their mother to Happy Pete's Ice Cream Emporium, where he bought them waffle cones in flavors like Bubble Gum Mint and Cherry Cheesecake Surprise. He always brought a pint home for Sylvie, Double Deep Chocolate: a reward for staying back with her homework. With a flash of his perfect white smile, he'd set the frosty carton in Sylvie's hand, and with a mumbled thanks she'd shove the ice cream in the back of the freezer behind bags of peas and whole chickens. Only after everyone else was asleep and she could hear the puff-puffs of Kenny's breathing behind her mother's bedroom door would she sneak to the kitchen and scoop spoonfuls straight from the carton, the cold chocolate sliding in accusatory lumps down the back of her throat.

Her only hope was that Kenny would soon leave. The work he'd come to help with at his cousin's was done, and he swore any day he'd head back to Alaska. In the meantime, Sylvie did her best to avoid the yellow-flecked blue of his eyes.

Daffodils poked through the dirt and after them tulips. The yard went dizzy with lilacs. May came, the first day and the next and the next. Still Kenny lingered. Sylvie buried herself in her homework, projects and papers and tests that teachers piled on at the end of the year. But at night she'd catch her tongue running over the edge of her teeth as if they were his teeth and her hand touching her thigh as if it were his hand, and the humming would start all over.

The last day of school came, and still Kenny was there. Sylvie waded the halls to her mother's office where she sometimes sat after school, swiveling in the tall, cushioned chair, enjoying the way the attendance counter cut her view of the hallway, forcing her to imagine the bottom halves of bodies as they passed, the legs of girls who held themselves prim and tight while others self-consciously swayed at the hips, the feet of boys so full of themselves that they swaggered, shoelaces dangling, tempting fate.

She swung through the gate in the attendance counter and strode to her mother, bent over her desk. Sylvie shifted her books on her hip. "I'm going to Karen's," she said. "Right after school."

Her mother looked up. "We're going with Kenny to the lake."

Sylvie dismissed the swell that came from hearing his name. "Karen's filling the pool. I told her I'd help."

"Filling the pool takes one person," her mother said. "And a hose. We'll swim at the lake. And Kenny's renting a boat, to go fishing."

Sylvie's eyes flitted to the hallway, where the crowd was starting to thin, so she wouldn't think of the four of them packed in a boat, her mother and Kenny and Anna and Sylvie, so close their knees would be touching. "It's too cold to swim at the lake," Sylvie said. "And I hate fishing."

"A few hours with family," said her mother. "That's not asking much."

"Kenny's not family." He wasn't. He never would be.

Her mother fingered the papers on her desk as she searched Sylvie's face, looking perhaps for some trace of the child she had been — the wondering eyes, the compliant smile — a version of herself that Sylvie, too, longed for, reaching back to a time before the glacier and Kenny had inserted themselves between her and her mother.

"Family is whatever we make it," said Sylvie's mother, looking satisfied with the cagey truth of her words. "Wherever we make it."

Sylvie shifted her books to the other hip. "But I promised Karen."

Her mother looked down at the red squiggles and lines that criss-crossed the paper on her desk, then up at the glacier as if for fortitude. "You're coming with us," she said. "End of discussion."

There were moments captured on film, when huge chunks of ice fell booming and crashing to the sea. Though these collapses seemed sudden, there was always some kind of warning. Hairline fissures. Downwasting. Icefalls. Shifting you'd notice if only you tried. And Sylvie was trying. She was weary with trying. Queasy and weak, from pushing Kenny aside only to have him thrust back at her.

"You should get rid of that thing," Sylvie said, with the slightest of nods at the glacier. She turned and with a deliberate sway of her hips left the calm of the office for the noise of the hallway, forgetting the way the attendance counter would work, slicing her to half of what she thought she might be.

THE LAKE GLITTERED with the promise of summer. Sylvie's sixteen years were wrapped around the oblong body of water along which the town arranged itself. In this town her father was raised, her grandmother buried. It was where Sylvie had gone to grade school and middle school and where she would graduate high school. She knew every shop that lined Grand Street, the florist and the chocolate store and the six antique dealers that aimed to lure tourists off the two-lane on their way to Minnesota's North Country. She knew every farm yard along County 15, including the one where she'd gone on the hay ride that ended in her first-ever kiss. More times than she could count, she'd biked the four-and-a-half-mile circumference of Pine Lake, sometimes with Karen and sometimes alone, marking spring and summer and fall on the road that circled from the downtown shops to the fancy homes on the north end to the eastside park and back to the old part of town, where the lumber mill had been boarded up and closed three years before.

At the park that stretched along the east side of the lake, her mother lay on the dock, squeezed into shorts and a button-down shirt, her head in Kenny's lap. Kenny swung his feet in the water, stirring up mud, his pants rolled to expose thick, white legs. He lifted her mother's hair in his fingers, then let it fall. Her mother brushed her hand along the edge of his chin, as if Anna and Sylvie weren't there to see, on the hard seats of the rented boat tied to the dock.

Anna traced a finger over the gills of the dead fish that lay at her feet, a perch hardening in the sun, too small to keep. "Stop it." Sylvie whiffed at her hand. "That thing stinks."

Anna clutched her fingers to her chest. "I thought you liked me."

Their mother lifted her head. "You girls enjoy the sunshine," she said. "Before you know it'll be winter all over."

Kenny's fingers snagged in her hair. "You haven't seen winter till you've been at the glacier." He glanced at Sylvie, and the lake shimmered and its edges blurred and the sky shifted, a widening, a falling away. Then he leaned back on the gray boards of the dock, hands locked under his head, and Sylvie's mother arranged herself to accommodate the loss of his lap, her head at his shoulder, her shirt riding up to expose the thin skin of her waist as she fingered a worn spot in his jeans.

Kenny hoisted his head and squinted at Anna and Sylvie. "You kids run and play," he said, as if a merry-go-round were the thing they most needed.

You kids. Sylvie gripped the hot metal seat. From the shore rose the rank smell of lake weeds, from the boat the dead smell of the fish. You kids. "Race you," she said, and reached a hand to her sister.

Their feet thundered the dock. "Whoa, Nellie," said Kenny, but Sylvie refused his smile. Gone, gone, gone. Once he returned to Alaska, it would be as if he'd never had any part in their lives.

At ten, Anna was still of the age where a playground got her excited as long as she wasn't with girls who liked to watch boys acting like they weren't being watched. She clattered the worn wood of the merry-go-round and gripped the metal bars and closed her eyes and demanded Sylvie spin her faster and faster. Sylvie crouched, slapping the cold metal of each passing bar with the flat of her hand, until the spin acquired its own whirring force. Anna squealed and flung back her head, hair splayed in the sun. Sylvie might have jumped on and ridden with her sister, but she refused to give Kenny the satisfaction. You kids.

Anna dragged her feet in the dust and stumbled off the platform, swaying and staggering like a drunk. She insisted Sylvie ride the swings, the two of them pumping their legs like horses racing the sky. "Look, Sylvie. My toes will touch the trees." She flattened herself as she swung, arms rigid, face toward the sun, fearless. Sylvie half-stretched to pump her swing higher, but the gap between them was too wide to reach.

She left Anna arcing toward the blue-screeched sky and wandered toward Kenny's truck. It was the sort of vehicle her father and his friends at the dealership would have made fun of if someone had been foolish enough to take it on trade. The dull orange-red paint screamed after-market and the right fender was caved in and the driver's door rattled and the tailgate was crinkled so it had to be slammed. She grabbed the roll bar, the one part that still looked shiny and new, and swung herself onto the running boards, the metallic smell of the bar rubbing into her palms as she slid into the driver's seat.

The cab smelled like Kenny, dusty and raw. Ripped vinyl scraped her shoulder, pink from the sun. Stuffed in the visor were pull tabs and pay stubs and torn bits of paper, pieces of him. On a scrap torn from a yellow tablet, she read a handwritten number from some other area code, then tucked it back so it appeared undisturbed. Frowning at her bare thighs flattened against the worn gray upholstery, she leaned forward. Her chest brushed the steering wheel, and she had a sudden strong urge for the keys, though until now she'd driven only their tinny sedan, her mother gripping the seat, telling her when to brake, when to turn, how to watch backing up.

She rooted under the floor mats, gritty with sand and a winter's accumulation of dirt, pawing through crumpled fast food bags and smashed aluminum cans and wrinkled work shirts. The deeper she dug, the more convinced she became she would find them. She thrust her hand in the dark hole of the glove box where she'd seen Kenny lob keys, in where papers were shoved without creasing or care. She rifled through books of matches. Bottle openers. The serrated foil edges of condoms wrapped and ready. A fat pamphlet with a black-and-white sketch of Jesus. Good News, it said. Bits of Kenny that she felt as if blind, with her fingers. Her hopes rose when she came upon a thin looped wire that might have held keys, but it was only the tag from a repair shop.

She eased over to the passenger side and with a sweep of her arm dumped the entire contents of the glove box into her lap. You kids. A red matchbook with silver letters read Pharaoh's Den Cairo, Illinois. Sylvie had been through Cairo once, on the way to Missouri with Karen's family. It was a long way south of Pine Lake, down the Mississippi, where people talked in slow drawls. With the matchbook, she could challenge Kenny's claim that he'd driven straight to Pine Lake from Alaska and weaken perhaps her mother's unwavering trust.

She struck a match to the book, and the smell of sulfur and smoke rose. As she hovered the flame over the trash in her lap, a reluctant corner of a damp pink receipt from Joe's Transmission and Body ignited, a thin yellow burn wriggling along its edge. Near the smoldering paper lay a full matchbook that had the potential to ignite. She held that possibility like a full breath before a deep plunge.

Anna pounded the truck. "Whatcha doing?" she yelled at the window. Sylvie snuffed the creeping flame under the heel of her hand, then shoved the papers and condoms and matches and Jesus book into the glove box, slammed it shut, and slid out of the truck. She rubbed her hands on the sides of her legs, leaving a faint charcoaled streak. "Let's get Mom," she said, avoiding Anna's wide eyes. "Let's get Mom and go home." But even as she said the word home, she felt it slipping away. Like the glacier, Kenny was part of them now.

SHE WOULD LATER recall the afternoon heat, the prickle of grass through the blanket, the remarkable flatness of land, lake, and sky. The smell of mustard on rye, the hurried clouds blotting the sun, her desire to take Anna's hand, even though Anna didn't need her the way that she once had. The knowing way Kenny had looked at her mother, like she was the only one there, and the loathing that floated like an oily sheen across her desire.

Kenny wouldn't stay. No, that was too easy. With a large smile, Sylvie's mother announced that the three of them would pack into Kenny's truck and ride with him up to Alaska. Not for the summer. For good.

"We'll get to see moose," Anna said.

"Moose. Fox. Wolverine. Wolf." Kenny swatted a slow-circling fly away from the sandwiches, then roughed Anna's hair with the flat of his hand. "Heck, we might even find you a bear."

Her mother reached across the blanket toward Sylvie. "I know what you're thinking. But you'll make friends there just as easy as here."

Sylvie sprang up. Tipped soda gurgled from her can and streamed toward her feet. "You don't know what I'm thinking. And you can't make me leave." Her voice caught on leave. She would not cry, would not cry, would not cry. This punishment was beyond anything she deserved, no matter what evil thoughts she'd refused to let go of. She swore it all off. Anything could be denied. She might quite possibly hate Kenny, him and his sorry excuse for a truck, now that she saw where this was going, yanking her straight out of her life. She plucked a single sorry objection out of the jumble of hurt. "You'll lose your job," she said.

"Mr. Stanton already knows." Her mother spoke with deliberate, hateful calm. "I left him a note."

Of course. She must have nestled with Kenny on the front porch swing as she penned in careful script an explanation for this ridiculous turn of events. Creepy Mr. Stanton with his liver-spotted hands and shiny bald head must have nearly keeled over, reading it. Alaska. Of all places. Though what he'd mean of course would be of all people.

"Beauty of Alaska," said Kenny, "is you don't need a job." He stroked the back of her mother's hand. "And I've got a nice little place for you girls."

A nice little place for you girls. All Sylvie could picture was ice, bitter and cold.

That night Kenny took her mother to the movies to celebrate. Once his truck pulled away, Sylvie emerged from her room, her belly tight from having refused the mustard-laced ham and cheese. She stirred up mayo and tuna, then rinsed out the can and hid it in the bottom of the trash so no one would know she'd given in to her hunger.

Their house in Pine Lake was small, and even though they'd lived there for years and the landlord was willing to sell it, her mother had never shown any interest, making excuses about how the girls shared a bedroom and how the bathroom paint peeled and how the rusty kitchen sink leaked. This seemed a sign now, that her mother had somehow seen from the moment she tore the glacier out of the magazine the entire outrageous mess Kenny would make of their lives, while Sylvie herself had been too stupid to notice.

In the bedroom, Anna flattened herself on a quilt pieced of sharp-edged triangles, like dishes broken and scattered. "Aren't you excited?" she asked. "Not even one little bit?"

"No." Steam burbled from the iron as Sylvie pressed the collar of a crisp white shirt. "And you shouldn't be either."

"But it's an adventure."

"That's just what Mom says."

Anna rolled to her stomach and propped her chin on her hands. "How come you're so cranky?"

"Zip it," said Sylvie.

Anna looked away. A lump rose in Sylvie's throat as she slipped the warm sleeves over her arms. "What's to get excited about?" she asked. "No more Happy Pete's. No more swimming at the lake."

"I don't care." Anna jutted her chin.

In front of the mirror, Sylvie buttoned her shirt, then undid one button. She flattened the collar and turned to the side, catching the pleasing rise of her breasts. She bent toward the mirror and with her mother's liquid liner traced her eyes like Karen had been forever after her to.

"You look pretty," said Anna. "Prettier than Mom."

"Don't let Mom hear you say that." Sylvie brushed blush over the color that rose in her cheeks. "You'll hurt her feelings." Then she crouched next to the bed, the quilt a warm mess of cut blue and purple. "Tuck you in?"

"No thanks." Anna crossed her ankles and swung her legs, up and back. "I'll go to bed later."

"Someone's getting big for her britches." Their dad liked to say that. Sylvie jumped on the bed. She straddled Anna, who squealed and wriggled and rolled herself over while Sylvie dove for her ribs, tickling. "Uncle," said Sylvie. "Say uncle."

Anna laughed, and Sylvie laughed, too. "Uncle, uncle, uncle," Anna screeched.

"That's better," Sylvie said as Anna quit her thrashing. She tucked her shirt back into her jeans and checked her hair in the mirror. "Now, you want me to tuck you in?"

"Nope," Anna said.

Sylvie's disappointment in this small ritual foregone was larger than it should have been. She retreated to the top step of the porch and tucked her knees to her chin and waited for Karen. The night was starting to cool, a half-moon lighting a tendril of cloud that trailed in the sky. The far edge of town glowed with the lights of the state prison, shot up into the night. She had no sense of who she might be outside of this place, or of what she might become.

When her father first left, she'd developed a fear of the places they might end up if their mother acquired the same sudden urge to take off. Holiday visits to Miami were barely tolerable, between Mirabelle's dangling jewelry and her over-teased hair and the unending sound of traffic below the condo's guest bedroom with its seashell lamp and flimsy curtains, sea green, and its postage-stamp view of the ocean. Coming home to the gray skies and snow of Pine Lake, Sylvie felt as if God had breathed it to earth only for her. She loved the smell of mower exhaust mixed with the neighbor's fresh-cut grass in summer and the smoke-sting of trash that smoldered in burn barrels and the fine powdered smell of grain dumped in the Miller's Feed silo.

Tires scraped the curb. "Sorry I'm late." Karen leaned across the seat to pop the door, which didn't open from outside. "Lecture about good behavior and watching myself and all that. You have no idea how lucky you are. Your mom doesn't nag."

"There's Kenny." Sylvie's pulse betrayed her, quickening as she spoke his name. "Don't let those boys get all handsy." She dropped her voice, inflecting the way Kenny did.

Karen laughed. "I think Kenny's cute. In an old guy kinda way. Nice blue eyes."

"I hate how he talks," Sylvie said, so quickly she almost believed it herself. "He's all country music gone wrong. I ain't never seen no one as pretty as you."

Karen laughed, fleeting as a snowflake that lands, crystal and perfect, on a patch of warm flesh. "I like what you've done to your eyes."

Sylvie touched the edge of the liner, leaving a gentle smudge on the tip of her finger. She would not cry, would not cry. Karen hit the brakes, stopping hard at the four-way. Having pulled out part way, the driver to the right looked annoyed. Karen flipped him off. Then she started in about Ginny DeLong who was seeing Joe Matthews after dumping Brent Skinner, and about Tracy Larkin who was chasing Charlie Hodges who supposedly had gotten a girl pregnant over in Little Falls. Small-town talk, the indulgence of good girls. Karen might flip off a stranger, but only if there was no chance it would get back to her parents. Like Sylvie, she took honors classes and only copied her homework when the teacher didn't care enough to catch on. They went out to the dike not to be bad but because everyone did, and they only went out there together.

The party was well underway by the time they arrived. Karen eased the car into a dark shrubby spot. The dew on the grass chilled Sylvie's toes, open in sandals. Out here where the prison lights didn't quite reach, stars punched the sky. Beside the dike a bonfire glowed, lighting faces still giddy from the last day of school, fresh with the splat of water balloons and the pained looks of teachers and the plastic smell of silly string let loose in the halls.

Karen stuffed some cash in the bucket and filled a cup from the tap. Sylvie filled hers only to half. She should tell Karen now, but she had no words. They hovered next to the fire, the dike rising behind them, a long bump in a flat place. Near the keg a girl screamed, and a bunch of boys laughed.

Aside from a few out-of-towners, the lit faces were ones Sylvie had grown up with. The half-light made them look changed, but that was only illusion. They were the same, would always be the same, and among them only Sylvie would be transformed into someone she barely recognized.

Along the edge of her tongue, the beer tasted bitter. "What went on at the lake?" Karen asked.

"Not much," Sylvie said. There were things she couldn't speak aloud, even to Karen. How she'd once thought herself like a poem. How she lay in the dark, hanging onto the knowing and wanting she'd felt when her eyes had met Kenny's. How there would soon be nothing to ground her, not her friends or their house or the town she'd grown up in.

She sipped from her cup, holding the plastic rim between her teeth, warming the beer in her mouth. "You're awful quiet," said Karen. She leaned into Sylvie, brushing against her goose-bumped arm. "Kaelynn's gonna break up with Skyler. Maybe tonight. And you always said Skyler was cute."

Sylvie looked beyond the fire to where a truck gleamed the way Kenny's truck must have once. "I see Ricky drove his new truck." Amazing, the way your voice could carry on with the smallest things no matter what else fell apart. Rick Clement had just turned sixteen, and for his birthday his dad, who worked at the bank, had bought him a shiny new truck. Rick had one arm slung over a girl and in the other he clutched a big plastic cup, fresh-headed with beer. "Who's the girl?"

Karen leaned to look. "Dunno. Maybe from Gainesville. Or the Falls." When a Piney Lake boy got his first truck, an out-of-town girl would follow, sure as if she were part of the accessory package. Losers whose parents couldn't afford to buy them a truck got stuck with the locals.

Rick's eyes flitted, anxious, from the girl to the truck, like he didn't know which might escape from him first. The girl pulled out from under Rick's arm and began flirting with one of his friends. She laughed, wide and pretty, in a way that reminded Sylvie of Mirabelle. Rick leaned toward his truck like he didn't know where else to look, like he too needed grounding. "He looks lonely," said Sylvie.

"Rick the Prick?" Karen asked. He liked to strip his shirt, showing off in the gym, and so they'd christened him that.

"Rick's not so bad," Sylvie said. There were worse sins than wanting to be noticed.

Karen nodded toward the group at the fire. "I'm telling you. Skyler."

The girl turned completely from Rick to Pine Lake's football hero, the guy who'd thrown a game-winning pass in the final match of the season. There was talk he might play college ball. Rick wrestled, and while his body was tough and hard on the mats, in Pine Lake and in the towns all around, it was football that mattered, and in football Rick walked off the field in a uniform as clean as the one he'd walked on with. He was already dumped. Anyone could see it.

Sylvie handed Karen her cup and nodded toward Rick. "I'll be back."

Karen sipped first from her own cup, then from Sylvie's. "Really. Rick Clement."

Sylvie ran her fingers along the hem of her shorts as she worked her way toward the fire. Hey, Sylvie. Hey. Kids she'd known since grade school huddled close to the warmth, smelling of smoke and beer. She murmured heys back as she moved close to Rick, filling the space where the girl's perfume lingered. Next to Sylvie's hand, Rick jittered his leg, like he was weighing whether going after the girl or letting her go would do the least damage.

"That's a nice-looking truck," Sylvie said. She trailed her words one into the other like it might be the beer. In the fire a log popped, the sparks a dizzy swirl in the night. A thin film of sweat glistened on Rick's forehead. Sylvie felt awake without having known that she'd slept, disoriented but alert. Though she'd never been one for bold moves, she walked her fingers over the bulge of keys in Rick's pocket. "How 'bout a ride?"

His eyes fell on Sylvie like she was new and fresh like the truck, and they seemed good eyes and strong. She kept one hand on his pocket and ran the other up the inside of his arm. She would not think of Kenny. "Please," she said in a voice that wasn't quite hers.

She presented herself with enough possibility that Rick quit looking back at the out-of-town girl. Together they moved, shoulders touching, to the far side of the truck, away from the fire. It was cool there, and dark. Sharp-edged grass brushed Sylvie's feet. She moved her hands from the sides of Rick's jeans to his belt and ran her fingers under his waistband. He sucked in a breath where she touched. "Wow," Rick said. "Sylvie."

She took him all in with the truck, plucked from dozens that lined the lot where her father once worked. It was only her eyes but she saw how he liked it. He bent over her, parting his lips for a kiss. She slid underneath him, her back to the truck, palms flattened into the door. "Careful," he said. She spread her fingers and flush with power massaged the shiny red paint as he watched, helpless and panicked and filled with desire. "We should get in," he said.

They sprawled on the seat, Sylvie flattened beneath him, choked by the smell of the new dash and new mats and new floorboards, smells that had rolled over the darkened showroom each time her father would open the door of a new vehicle and hoist her inside, pretending they'd drive home together and surprise her mother.

"God, I never knew you were hot." Rick worked her breasts, urgent and hard. He thrust his hand up her shorts, and for a moment she wanted only the thing she'd vowed not to want. She felt his pants for the keys and eased out from under him and straightened her shirt and her shorts. "Let's go for a ride."

"Aw, Sylvie," Rick said. But his eyes caught the dash, gleamed by the fire, and he pulled the keys from his pocket.

Sylvie grabbed them out of his hand. A quick turn, and the truck rumbled mean and low, the twin mufflers chugging exhaust. "Hey," Rick said. "You can't drive."

"Don't worry," said Sylvie. Listen, her father would say as they moved through the lot, turning key after key. Hear how this baby purrs. Sylvie wrapped one hand over the stick and shifted the way he had taught her, stomping the clutch and moving the stick up and out. She gave it some gas and the gears caught and she shifted to second. Rick grabbed for the wheel. She jerked it away, and the truck spun a hard left.

Rick gripped the dash with one hand, the seat with the other. "At least get on the road."

She steered around the dark shapes of trees lit up in the headlights. In the mirror, the bonfire became a distant glow as she nosed the truck up and onto the road that ran along the top of the dike.

"Jesus, Sylvie," Rick said. "Take it easy." He smelled of sweat and beer and fear, and she felt his heart thumping as he leaned close, as if by pressing into her he might gain control. On one side the road dropped off into the embankment they'd climbed. On the other it fell toward a sheer wall that held back the river. The tires spit rocks as Sylvie shifted from second to third.

"Not so fast," Rick said as the truck hurtled into the night. She held tight to the wheel and scooted into the steering column as if through it she could pour herself onto the road, which wasn't so much a road as a built-up mound of gravel. There were signs warning kids to stay off, and since it was too narrow to race on and too exposed to go parking, mostly they did.

"Okay, Sylvie," said Rick. "You've had your fun. Let's go back." He flattened his sweaty palm against the bare skin of her leg as the truck lurched over a pothole. "I just got this truck."

She felt a surge of affection for him having said that, so simple and obvious. "A little farther," she said, and then, "please." She flicked off the lights.

"Hey," he said. "I can't bring this home wrecked."

The truck eased along the top of the dike, the half-moon overwhelmed by a jumble of stars and now, in the distance, the prison lights melting into them. Sylvie rolled the truck to a stop, and Rick's hand relaxed on her leg. "See," she said. "You get used to the dark." She longed to believe it herself, that you could get used to anything. Images flickered in her head, layers of ice creeping under their own weight, impervious to water and air. You might be safe, even from yourself, if you could somehow get to its core. It might have been what had attracted her mother.

Rick's hand rode up her thigh. She hugged the wheel, and her breath caught as he probed the hem of her shorts, shivering her leg. "You ever been to a glacier?" she asked, her voice thick.

"Nope." He reached to shut off the truck.

She leaned back. "This place was leveled by glaciers," she said. Rick nuzzled her neck, shifting goose bumps up and down the length of her. "Ice scraped it flat." A throaty whisper, deposited next to his ear. "Dragged out big chunks of land. Carved all these lakes."

"School's out." Rick's lips brushed her cheek. His arm shifted under her back as he drew her away from the steering wheel and into his chest. "Summer's here. No one cares about ice."

But she did. She cared, though she had no way to show it. Rick stroked her skin, his hands skipping down her arms, past her waist, pressing and kneading. She wanted to slow him, to make him back up so she could feel it again, the drift of his fingers, the force of his hands. She yielded to his warm probing tongue and then to a fumble of buttons and snaps, her breasts shining smooth and white in the moonlight, and she saw how she might feel and forget, requiring nothing more than the foil-wrapped package stashed in her pocket.

She closed her eyes and in the patch of darkness Rick's fingers weren't Rick's and Rick's breath wasn't his and it was all Kenny and wrong. She pulled away, smoothing her shirt and her shorts and her hair. Rick hugged the steering wheel, heaving half-breaths. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't . . . I mean, I'm not . . ."

Rick flexed and unflexed his hands. "Whatever." He turned the key, and the engine surged and then settled.

"Please," Sylvie said. "Don't be mad." This seemed all at once urgent, that Rick Clement not be angry, that she get this one small thing right.

He yanked the wheel and spun a tight circle on the gravel. How could she say that her life was a poem, that her future was ice? "I'm leaving," she said. "I might not be back."

Rick's hands relaxed on the wheel, the truck tamed now and sure. "For real? That sucks."

Sylvie would have leaned close and hugged him, but in her mind she was already gone.

Fracture Zone

A rigid section of ice, moving forward as a single unit

WHEN RUTH FIRST found the glacier, she learned words that rolled from her tongue when no one was listening. Firns and striations. Cirques and moraines. Adulation. Sublimation. She fell asleep to their music, and she woke to it. Chatter marks, eskers, and drumlins. Truncated spurs. Corries and tarns. Kames. Eolian loess. Katabatic winds.

A glacier was large and unyielding, while Ruth was herself small and pliable, bending to the needs and desires of everyone but herself. But she believed in the promise of ice, and the words to describe the transformation that might one day be hers she incanted like magic. Moulins. Plastic deformation. Transverse crevasse.

She hadn't expected the glacier to bring her a man. She hadn't believed in big sweeping forces like fate. But that was before she met Kenny. The move they were planning was bold and exciting and unexpected. She repeated these words when she woke every morning, bold and exciting and unexpected, to displace the ones that crept in while she slept, reckless and foolish and irresponsible.

For once she would not over-think, and she could care less what anyone else thought, least of all Richard. "Good God, Ruth. Alaska." Richard had a knack for making a word sound like it meant something entirely different. In this case, disaster.

Ruth steadied the phone and reached across the table for Kenny, his fingers thick and warm and reassuring. "A letter, Richard," she said. "That's all I'm asking."

"The girls will hate it," Richard said. "All that snow and cold."

In the background Ruth heard television voices, an argument escalating. She pictured Mirabelle reclined on a sofa, white leather, a cold drink sweating in her hand, wearing the same silky tee she'd had on the day she drove off with Ruth's husband, a red plunging V-neck. "The girls are excited to try something new," Ruth said.

"Let me talk to Sylvie."

Ruth sucked in a breath. "Sylvie's not up yet." From Kenny's eyes, she drew strength. "She was out late. Last day of school."

"Anna, then." Richard was a master of diversion, having diverted himself right out of their lives.

"A letter, Richard. That's all I'm asking. Permission to take the girls over the border. I, Richard Sanders, give permission for Ruth Sanders to take our daughters Anna and Sylvie through Canada on their way to Alaska. One sentence. That's it."

"You're driving? Do you have any idea how far it is to Alaska? A trip like that will take weeks."

She gripped the phone with both hands. "I didn't say I was driving. But for your information, I am. We are."

"We. Who's this we?"

"It's been five years, Richard. Five years since you left. And guess what? I've moved on." And she had. She really had.

"Don't kid yourself." The television noise shifted to a plunky tune, an advertising jingle. "You haven't changed."

"And you haven't either," Ruth snapped, though this was the wrong tack with Richard. The slightest turning of tables only hardened his position. "This isn't about us," she added quickly. "It's the chance of the lifetime. An adventure for the girls."

"Adventure," he sputtered. "Honestly, Ruth."

Richard had this special talent, this finely honed way of slicing deep to expose her. Ruth pitied him and his beach and his palm trees, the little life he had carved for himself in the sand. "Anna's already packing," she said. "Sylvie, too." An utter lie, but what would it hurt? "You've got no cause, Richard." She chose her words carefully. "You have to have cause to withhold your consent. That's what the judge said."

"I know that," Richard said.

"I know that you know. I'm just reminding you."

"I don't need your reminders."

"A letter, Richard. One sentence. To Whom It May Concern."

"You know what, Ruth? You've got a real disconnect going on here. What about your job?"

"There are jobs in Alaska." Across the table, Kenny leaned over his folded hands.

"Just like your mother," Richard said. "A total disconnect."

She summoned an image. Unwavering ice, solid and strong. "I'll go to court if I have to. And you know how expensive that gets." Parts work paid even less in Florida than it did in Pine Lake, this Ruth knew from her research. And the upkeep on Mirabelle couldn't be cheap.

"You're really stuck on this, aren't you?"

Kenny brushed the top of her head with a kiss. "Yes, Richard. I am. I'm really stuck on this. If I don't have that letter by Friday, I'm filing papers in court. By Friday," she repeated, and hung up.

"The same old crap." It made her crazy, the way Richard could still get her adrenaline going. "I'm just like my mother. Screwed up from childhood. You know your family's not right." She mimicked his flat, bitter tone.

"You're done with him," Kenny said. "Over and out."

"Of course his family's perfect." Ruth's hands flew as she spoke. "Never mind that his mom and dad argue over every little thing. Who should bring in the paper. Whether the dog has been out for too long. You should see them at holidays. Big shouting matches between him and his brothers. But Richard can't point out enough how my dad drinks and how my mom pretends that he doesn't. You're just like your mother. That's his favorite line."

Kenny settled her hands in his. "As if my mother would give the first thought to Alaska. If her bridge club switches from Tuesday to Monday, she needs sedation. Telling her won't be any better. It's wearing me out, trying to make people understand."

He teased a strand of her hair in his fingers. "Quit trying then. You know what you want. You're going after it. People are jealous, that's all."

"I don't know why they can't just be happy for me." Martha had looked up the glacier online and pronounced it too far from everything. Doctors. Groceries. Internet access. Why not encourage Kenny to hang around Pine Lake for awhile, Martha said, and get to know him a little? It was almost as bad as when Richard left, when total strangers had looked away, as if Ruth's sudden vulnerability were contagious and yet also somehow her fault. Hadn't she been reliable enough for the both of them? And still she hadn't seen it coming, the sudden wrenching hole of his leaving.

"Screw them," Kenny said. "Screw them all."

She stroked her hair where Kenny had touched it, silky and familiar. "What if he won't send the letter?" Ruth said. "A court order takes money. And time."

"If he doesn't send it, we'll forge one," said Kenny.

The prospect made Ruth feel wild and unsteady. But she knew what she wanted. She was going after it. There was no good reason to linger in Richard's hometown. Already she'd been here too long. Love and adventure. A fresh start at the ice. She owed that much to herself, and the girls.

"What about your mom?" she asked Kenny. "Have you told her we're coming?"

"I will."

She touched a finger to his chin. "You're not ashamed of us, are you?" It was the sort of teasing Richard could never tolerate.

Kenny pulled her finger to his lips. "Of course not. Mom's been distracted, that's all." His lips parted and his tongue wet her finger.

"Mom!" Ruth pulled her hands to her lap as Anna staggered into the kitchen and dumped a pile of books on the table. "I don't know which ones to take."

Kenny hovered his fingers over the books and plucked from the pile a Dr. Seuss title, the cover worn at the corners. "Gotta love Horton."

"You'd better bring fat ones," Ruth said. "Since there's no TV."

Anna clutched the book to her chest. "I don't want to sell Horton." She twisted toward Kenny the way she once had toward Richard, reaching without using her arms.

Kenny cupped a hand to his ear. "What's that I hear? A Who?"

Ruth brushed the feathery tips of Anna's bangs. "You don't have to sell Horton. We'll put him in storage."

Sylvie slouched into the kitchen, gray sweats slung loose on her hips, exposing skin between the waistband and the hem of her tee shirt. Though her hair was mussed from sleep and her face hadn't been washed, she had the glow that even the consistent bad mood of an adolescent can't extinguish. But then Sylvie had always had fine features, her face a perfect oval, her forehead the right height to accommodate bangs, her skin creamy, her lips full.

"Look what rolled out of bed," Kenny said. "Sleeping Beauty."

"How was the party?" Ruth asked

"Who said anything about a party?" Sylvie filled the teakettle.

"Of course there was a party," said Kenny. "Last day of school."

"We only get one box for our books," Anna said. "You and me. So you better pick yours."

"I don't care." Sylvie leaned against the sink, feet crossed at the ankles, the bottoms of her white ankle socks gray from the floor, which Ruth had been lax about cleaning. "You can have the whole box."

"There's no need to be unreasonable." Ruth summoned the even tone she used on children sent to the office at school. Sylvie's small objections — refusing the picnic, hiding out in her room, avoiding Kenny's eyes — these were nothing, understandable even, since they'd kept her out of their decision, knowing she'd have only said no, and that would have made everything more difficult.

"You talked to Dad," Sylvie said.

"Your father's sending a letter."

"So they'll let you two rascals through Canada." Kenny wiggled his fingers at Anna, threatening a tickle. She squealed and ran from the kitchen, her books still on the table.

Sylvie worked a hangnail on her thumb. Ruth patted a chair. "Have a seat and tell us what you and Karen were up to last night."

"We weren't up to anything."

"It wasn't an accusation. I'm just interested. We're interested. Aren't we, Kenny?"

"Sure," Kenny said.

Sylvie brought her thumb to her face and studied the little flap of skin. From a young age, she'd been like this — serious, fixed on things, wanting but not letting on. "We hung out, that's all."

"You must have gone somewhere. With someone."

Sylvie tucked her hair in back of her ear. "Seriously. You want the blow by blow."

"Not every last detail. Just the highlights."

Sylvie dumped powdered chocolate into her cup and reached for the whistling kettle. There were things no one warned you about when you became a mother. Not the homework and the shopping and the ferrying in the car but the moods and the minefields and the way that on one wrong word your sweet girl could turn.

Kenny tipped back his chair, balancing on its two back legs. "Who wants to go to the pawnshop?" he asked.

Sylvie eyed the chair while avoiding Kenny. "So now we're pawning our stuff," she said.

It was a big change, all around, but Ruth wasn't about to let Sylvie ruin it, right from the start. "No one's pawning anything," she said. "Kenny's shopping for a gun. He's extending the invitation, that's all. All I — we — expect is a little respect."

The spoon clanked as Sylvie stirred. "As in the respect you gave me when you decided we'd move to Alaska."

"Your mother's doing you kids a favor." Kenny pressed his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. "Maybe you don't see it now, but you will."

"I never asked for a favor." Sylvie's tossed spoon clanged off the side of the sink and into the dishes. "I just want my life back." Her eyelids quivered, a furious blinking.

"There are kids around here who'd die for this kind of adventure," Ruth said.

"Adventure. What's that? Some kind of code for your crush?"

If only Sylvie were still young enough to crawl into her lap. Then Ruth would stroke her shiny hair, thick like her father's, until she relaxed. "Perhaps we should have talked to you first," she conceded.

Kenny pressed his palms to the table. "She wants to be pissy, that's how she'll be. No sense trying to stop her."

Sylvie chucked the mug after the spoon, splashing thick chocolate over the white porcelain. "Sorry I can't make the pawnshop." She wiped her hands on a towel without looking at Ruth or Kenny. "I'm going to Gainesville."

"Gainesville," Ruth said. "That's nice." It was only midmorning, with a long day of sorting and packing ahead, and already she felt tired. "When's Karen picking you up?"

A faint smile. "I'm going with Rick."

"Rick." Ruth shuffled through the possibilities.

"Rick Clement. He's got a new truck."

"A boy with a truck," Kenny said. "A new truck. Even better."

He was nice, the Clement boy. A little full of himself, like his father, but nice. He didn't deserve being hurt, and neither did Sylvie. "This isn't the best time to take up with a boy," Ruth said.

"Why not?" Sylvie flipped her hair over her shoulder. "You did." It could have been Richard, stabbing and slicing with only a handful of words, leaving Ruth not so much shamed or angry as sad.

THE MOMENT SHE'D slipped her carefully worded note onto Bill Scranton's desk, Pine Lake had begun to shrink in Ruth's eyes. The First Episcopal Church receded into the corner of Seventh and Oak along with its sign announcing the weekly attendance in black removable numbers, the sermon topic "Give and Let Give" tilting even more than usual toward the improbable. The high school now seemed made of square sliding parts that in quick shell game moves might be swapped one for the other, the pool with the auditorium, the classroom wing with the library. In the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, shopping carts angled like spilled paperclips. Not one thing she would miss. Remarkable, not to have seen this before.

Kenny's truck idled at the lone stoplight. "Sylvie won't give two hoots for Pine Lake," he said. "Not once she gets to Alaska."

"Maybe we should have asked what she thought instead of just telling her." Beyond the traffic light, Sam Brenton swept the sidewalk in front of the drugstore with mechanical vigor. Ruth pictured him still there years from now, working the very same spot.

"If she's that upset about going, you can send her to live with her dad."

"Oh no," Ruth said quickly. "That would never work out. Sylvie shuts down around Richard. She took it hard when he left."

The light changed, and Kenny turned a hard right onto County 15. "She used to try so hard to get Richard's attention," she said. "I swear sometimes he forgot she existed. When Sylvie was six, she had this dance recital. She got all dressed up in a cute little tutu, pink tights, matching slippers, the works. Her big debut, on the stage at the high school. Of course Richard forgot. I called once the performance began, but the shop said he wasn't available. He showed up ten minutes before the whole thing was over, long after Sylvie had danced. But he pretended he'd seen it all, the pliés and the jetés and the pirouettes. You should have seen Sylvie beam. Then he took her to Mac's Mart and bought her this little tiara. 'For my princess,' he told her. Bragged to the store clerk how well she had danced. Sylvie wore that tiara around for a week. In and out of the shop. She'd ride her bike to visit him there. If the salesmen were watching, Richard would make a big fuss over her. But at home, she had to practically fall out a window to get his attention."

Kenny rubbed his jawline. "About time I started my beard."

Ruth ran her finger across the stubble, golden-red like his hair. "Then no one will see your nice chin."

"They'll all think I've turned soft if I go back clean-shaven." He brushed the back of her hand with a kiss. "They'll think I'm whipped."

Had Richard ever loved her like this? Sylvie could pitch fits and Ruth could wake up drowning in doubt, but the fact was that Kenny was everything Richard wasn't. Generous. Lighthearted. Kind. Not reliant on Ruth or on anyone else.

Past a curve, the half-lit sign for Roy's Pawn came into view, the store behind it a squat concrete fortress. "I can't count the times I've gone past here," Ruth said. "And still I've never gone in." The truth was she'd never had the slightest desire. Even when money got tight, she had drawn a line at buying other people's things, especially when they'd been given up in desperation. "I wish Sylvie had come." Sylvie had an eye for possibilities. In Alaska, they'd do things together. They'd have to, with no television or Internet. Ruth tried to form an image in her head, based on what Kenny had told her, of how they might spend their days, but the ice, heaving and crashing, blocked out everything else.

Roy's Pawn smelled like damp cardboard and metal. Overhead a fluorescent tube buzzed and flickered. Utility shelves spanning one wall displayed piles of dusty tools, blades and bits configured for purposes Ruth didn't recognize. She couldn't help but think of where each had come from, the reasons they'd been let go. Kenny picked up a tool with a thin-toothed blade, and a coiled orange cord patched with electrical tape dropped like a heaped snake to the floor.

Ruth veered toward the glass cases crowded with knives and watches and jewelry. Propped next to each item was an enthusiastic note penned in what she assumed was Roy's shaky hand: No Mexican Rolex! Authentic! Beside a ring set, chipped diamonds set in white gold: Never too late to get lucky in love!

A bent, thin-bearded man appeared through a curtain that hung behind the cash register. "Howdy," said Kenny. "I take it you're Roy."

"Most days," he said.

Kenny set the tool back on the shelf, the orange cord dangling. "Where's your guns?"

Roy gave Kenny and Ruth the once-over, like they were something brought in for pawn, then led them through the curtains and down a narrow hallway to a windowless room where guns were displayed in glass cases.

"What sort of weapon you looking for?" Roy asked.

"Hunting rifle," Kenny said. "Something to take to Alaska."

An approximation of a smile lit Roy's face. "Alaska. Well then." With a key, he began unlocking the cases. "Go ahead. Pick 'em up. Get a feel for 'em." To Ruth, he offered a thin-lidded wink. "Lucky you, going north."

Ruth's lips curved on cue. "It's an adventure," she said. Kenny fondled a rifle, the barrel, the trigger, the grip. He held the gun out, straight-armed. Squinting into the sights, he swung it toward Ruth.

She jumped. "Holy Moses," she said, an expression of her grandmother's that until that moment she'd forgotten. "That better not be loaded."

"Of course not." Kenny tipped the barrel toward the floor and worked a mechanism that Ruth couldn't name, click, click, click.

"I suppose some people bring them in loaded," she said to Roy. "I suppose you have to make sure they're empty before you display them."

"You should learn how to shoot," Kenny said. "Then you won't be so skittish."

"I'm not skittish," Ruth said.

Roy cracked a smile, revealing a single empty slot on his bottom jaw guarded on either side by a rusty row of teeth. Kenny set the gun on the glass. "A three hundred's better for bear. Got some big grizzlies up north."

"You never said bear." Roy padded to another glass case. "This here's a nice Browning." He handed over a rifle, its barrel long and black. "Guy said he bought it for deer. Blasted the whole side in on the first one he shot." His rheumy eyes fell on Ruth. "Wish I was headed for Alaska. You're one lucky gal."

"Shoot," Kenny said. "Three hundred's way big for deer." He shifted the gun's bolt up and back. "Nice action." Ruth touched her arm to his elbow. A man she could trust, that's what he was.

Kenny set the gun down, then picked it back up and fingered the etched lines on the stock. Roy flattened his hands on the glass. "Road up there's a bitch. That's what I hear."

"It's not that bad," Ruth said. "Is it, honey?" But Kenny was busy checking the sights — she believed they were called that.

"The wife wouldn't have it," said Roy. "No matter how much I begged. Got me stuck right here in Pine Lake."

"Pine Lake's not so bad." Ruth gripped the glass, overcome with a sudden wave of nostalgia for the shrinking town. She wished herself home, drenched in the morning light that streamed through the windows.

Kenny bent close to the gun, his finger on the trigger. "How'd he do it?" Roy asked. "How'd he talk you into it?"

"Wasn't hard, really," Kenny said.

It must have been a closet once, that room, thick as it was with the smell of old forgotten things.

"Ain't the hunting," said Roy. "I see she's got no interest in that. So it must be the money."

"No," Ruth said. "Not the money." Love and adventure. What would Roy know about that? And what business was it of his, where she went or why? What business was it of anyone's? Hadn't Kenny said as much? She needed him to say it again. Now. So Roy would shut up.

Between the heat of the room and the musty smell and Roy's relentless watery eyes Ruth felt heavy with the wrongness, the way she had when Richard first left. She pressed close to Kenny. "What's that gun got that I don't?" The teasing tone she'd intended fell flat.

"The jealous wife." Roy sounded delighted with this observation. "Half the guns that come in, it's the wife that's behind it."

"I'm not that way," Ruth said.

"Love to know your secret," Roy said to Kenny. "How you twisted her arm."

Kenny hoisted the .300 again to his shoulder and pointed it at the wall. "She had it in her head already."

"Stars lined up, did they?"

Kenny's eye squeezed shut, his finger on the trigger. "Not stars." He lowered the gun. "Ice."

Helpless under Roy's rheumy gaze, Ruth said, "There's this glacier. I've always wanted to see it."

"I'll be Double-Dutch damned." Roy slapped the glass. "If that don't take all."

"It's not so odd." She felt ready to gag on Roy's wheezing breath, the stench of onions and bacon that rolled from between his tobacco-stained teeth.

Kenny's hands left the gun, but his eyes never wavered. "How much?"

"Eight-fifty," Roy said.

Ruth grabbed Kenny's sleeve. "Let's get out of here."

He shook loose of her grasp. "They're just over nine hundred new."

Roy trailed a skinny finger along the shiny barrel. "Been shot only once."

"We don't have room." It felt like someone else talking, someone who didn't love Kenny the way she did. "The truck will be jam-packed. That's what you told the girls."

"Must be a bitch up there come winter," Roy said. "Dark all the time. Snow and cold." Across the glass case, Roy jabbed an elbow at Ruth. "Great for rolling around in the sack."

She tried nudging her hand through the crook of Kenny's arm, but he bent it and the space disappeared.

"That's what I heard," Roy insisted. "Dark twenty-four seven."

"Not where we're going," Ruth said, though she had no idea actually. "The ice goes back twenty-six miles. Except it's not really ice. The snow turns to something called firn. It's from the pressure. The age."

Kenny set down the gun. "Seven-fifty," he said.

"The air gets squeezed out." Ruth couldn't stop herself. "The whole thing starts to move. On the liquid beneath it. Plastic flow, it's called."

Roy seemed at a sudden, happy loss for words. "The man didn't ask for a lecture," Kenny said. "Seven-fifty," he repeated.

"That's a lot of money." Ruth felt desperate to steady herself.

"A lot of my money," Kenny said sharply.

From Roy, a perverted smile. "Eight hundred," he said, "and it's yours."

Ruth slipped outside as Kenny began to count bills. Through the thin soles of her shoes, the sun-soaked asphalt warmed her feet as she leaned against the truck. A single bird chirped from the pawnshop's flat roof, a familiar loop of sound that seemed tinged with desperation. Ruth tried the door. Kenny never locked it, and he always left the keys stashed inside. But the door wouldn't give. She tugged on the handle again and again, as if through sheer persistence she could crawl in and hide.

When Kenny came out, he leaned on the door and lifted the handle and popped the latch. Tenderly, he slid the gun across the seat. Ruth reached past it to brush her hand on his jeans. "If they think you want it too much," she said, "they never budge on the price."

Kenny eased the truck onto the highway. He checked the rearview as he rubbed his perfect, beautiful chin. "Guess I did save fifty bucks."

Eskers. Eolian loess. Truncated spurs. Ruth repeated the words to herself as they passed the stoplight and the empty sidewalk in front of the drugstore and the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly and the sign in front of the First Episcopal Church, repeated them over and over until her faith was restored.

To learn more about Deb Vanasse and to sign up for her e-newsletter, visit www.debvanasse.com or www.runningfoxbooks.com. Inquire about her book at Alaska's fine independent booksellers.

# Digging Robert's Grave   
by Don Rearden

Don Rearden grew up on the tundra of Southwestern Alaska. His experiences with the Yup'ik culture shaped both his writing and his worldview. His critically acclaimed novel The Raven's Gift was named a 2013 Notable Fiction selection by The Washington Post. You can read a sample chapter or order The Raven's Gift here. Don's writing has been published internationally and he is also a produced screenwriter and poet. His heart often draws his writing back to characters and stories that originate on the tundra; in his fiction, he hopes to shed light on the struggles of everyday life in rural Alaska. Rearden is an Associate Professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage and president of the 49 Writers.

"Digging Robert's Grave" is a fictional short story of a young man dealing with the tragic death of a father figure.

THROUGH A MOUTH full of Copenhagen he gave some of his last words of wisdom to me: "No good when you die in the winter. Gonna leave too much work behind."

A couple hours into digging and I understood what he meant, and I wanted to shoot the guy came up with six feet as the regulation depth of a grave. I worried we wouldn't be finished in time. Just one day to dig the hole. One day. One day before the village carried his plywood coffin to the cemetery. Men stopped by to help. Someone brought an old red Sears chainsaw that looked like it had been digging graves since the day it left the store shelf. I thought about the irony of digging the grave with a chainsaw when fifty miles of tundra stood between the village and the nearest real tree. Why not use it to cut frozen dirt, why not dig graves?

I thought the men who came to help probably saw in my face that I needed to dig the grave by myself. Robert wasn't a relative, not even a distant uncle, but the old man was special to me and somehow everyone seemed to understand this.

After a quick demonstration without words, Robert's brother handed me the rumbling saw. I crawled back down into the hole and began gnawing away at the black earth. The hungry saw sputtered and threw a fine dark mist of permafrost. I kept my eyes fixed on the tip of the saw blade and worked it into the iceblock soil. I would pull the blade and hungry chain out, and make another slice, until I could kick with my boot and loosen a chunk of the frozen ground. Robert's younger brothers stood over me. They waited to relieve me. To grieve with me. Their shadows crept into the grave. The lights from the small village houses turned the white crosses in the cemetery into an army of straight soldiers, their dark arms held out against the snow.

Over the whine of the small saw's engine, I felt the men grow restless. I sensed they no longer wanted to help dig. They wanted the warm comfort of home. Perhaps it wasn't the icy burn of the wind getting to them, but the chill of standing amongst the spirits of their ancestors. Still, they didn't leave. They stood guard, at the edge of the grave, watching this battle with the frozen earth.

My fingers and toes had lost all feeling, and I could feel the frost cutting away at the tip of my nose. I tried to think of Robert and find strength in his last breaths. How the river ice must have just opened up and swallowed him, how he scrambled from the swirling black water and pulled himself to shore, his clothing soaked. I pictured the small patch of willows where he spent his final hours, minutes, seconds, fighting for life, for warmth. I wondered why he didn't just allow the water to take him, why he put up such a struggle in the howling, burning, cold winds when he didn't have anyone left to live for.

When they found his body, he was huddled beneath the willows. A small pile of dried yellow grass and green twigs half-blackened, his lighter had almost managed to save him. Almost. He hadn't dug into a snowbank for warmth, knowing he was already too wet. It was more important they find his body so that his spirit could be properly cared for. So someone could dig him a grave. Perhaps he knew it would be me.

At the sight of Robert, I had collapsed to the snow and cried. Robert. Frozen in a ball, on his side in the back of a long plywood sled, wrapped in a blue tarp. Forever selfish, I thought nothing of anyone, except myself. My friend, my teacher. I was alone again.

But in the grave I was too busy working, thinking, and I didn't hear the saw sputter out. My mind still in the sled, wrapped in the blue tarp. I heard a voice, "No more gas."

I looked up and saw the hand reaching towards me. Then lowered my eyes to the saw, dead. I started to hand the saw up to Robert's brother, but he reached for my free hand and he began to pull me up and out of the grave.

"That's good," he said. "We'll finish in the morning. Robert can wait another day, if he needs to."

I looked down at my three sad feet of progress against the impossible permafrost. Pathetic. A day of digging and no answers. My arms, legs, and back hurt, but I couldn't stop.

The oldest of the brothers pulled the old shovel from my hands. "No more," he said.

His eyes were like Robert's eyes, only a lighter shade of brown, sharper. I couldn't argue.

I turned to walk back to the village. The large black hole in the tundra behind me like a mouth, open to the sky. The snow beneath my feet uttered small squeaks. The sounds of my breathing against the cool night air filled my ears. There were no words for that short journey through the village. The occasional sled dog yipped as we passed, reminding me that Robert's dogs still needed to be fed.

At Robert's house I stopped. The brothers continued walking, but then the crunching snow beneath their feet stopped, too. His small one-room house stood dark. The darkness of the night sky, of the black beneath each village house, that dark space between the floorboards and the frozen ground — none of it equaled the blackness coming from Robert's windows.

I wanted to go into the house. I wanted to open the door and be greeted with a duck or a beaver bubbling in a pot on the small green camp stove. I wanted to hear Robert's raspy old voice, "Hey, Favorite-White-Boy!" To hear his laugh, and watch him remove his stained Chicago Bulls hat and scratch his head all in one strange motion.

My eyes couldn't leave his house. His name for me, Favorite-White-Boy, still rang in my ears. In the black of the window I saw the ice shatter, a giant spawned-out red salmon mouth opening, the river water swirling, trying to pull Robert out of this world, and I realized then, as I imagined him clawing at the ice, that he'd fought so hard not just for me, but for all of us.

Interested in reading more of Don Rearden's work? Check out his blog, watch his book trailer, follow him on Twitter, and more at www.donrearden.com. You'll also find his book at independent bookstores throughout Alaska.

# Landscape of Anguish  
by Kaylene Johnson

Kaylene Johnson is a writer and long-time Alaskan who lives in Eagle River, Alaska. She writes non-fiction, biography, and memoir including A Tender Distance: Adventures Raising Sons in Alaska. Her award winning essays and articles have appeared in the Louisville Review, Alaska magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and several Alaska anthologies. She holds a BA from Vermont College and an MFA in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

The chapter that follows comes from Canyons and Ice: The Wilderness Travels of Dick Griffith, which recounts the remarkable journeys of Alaska legend Dick Griffith. Canyons and Ice offers a rare look at the man behind the soaring achievements and occasionally death-defying moments. A grand tale of adventure, Griffith's story is also a reflection on what motivates a man to traverse some of the most remote places on earth. "I'm discovering there are degrees of desolation," says Griffith of the events recounted here.

IT'S THE LITTLE mistakes that kill you.

Shivering, with frozen fingertips, Dick could not thread the zipper of his sleeping bag back onto its track. Stunned, he wondered for a moment if this was it. If this would be the one small detail that tipped the balance.

He quickly wrapped himself the best he could in his sleeping bag and crawled into the two-foot-deep snow trench he had dug for himself. This would be his shelter for the night. At minus thirty degrees, with winds howling up to forty miles an hour, the wind chill factor was more than one hundred degrees below zero. He had staked his sled and backpack into the snow using his ski poles to keep them from blowing away.

Snow drifted in over the trench, covering him with an insulating layer of snow. He began to feel warmer. As his body warmed, so did the frostbitten parts of his anatomy. The wind that had pressed at his back all day — which had been strong enough to push his sled out in front of him — had frozen the flesh of his backside and legs.

He was terribly thirsty.

LESS THAN TWO days earlier, on March 10, 1980, Dick had been lying in the loft of his friends Roosevelt and Beth Paneak's home in Anaktuvuk Pass. It was the night before his trek and the plan was to ski from Anaktuvuk Pass to Bettles and then over the mountains to the village of Tanana and on to the Yukon River. It was to be a 300-mile trek through rugged country with snow deep enough to swallow snowmachines.

With snow conditions as they were, Dick decided to lighten his load. He left his tent behind, opting instead for a large, heavy-duty sleeping bag that would shelter him from the cold. A layer of spruce boughs would be his bed. If necessary, he could build snow caves for shelter. He also decided to leave his stove and fuel at home. He liked a wood fire best, and as he had on previous trips, he would gather wood as he traveled. He also left his Gortex bibs behind. His plan was to keep moving at a good clip and take as little as necessary to stay agile and quick.

The 1959 trip from Kaktovik to Anaktuvuk Pass had taught him a great deal about wilderness travel in the North. Later in 1977, Dick walked 150 miles and floated 450 miles from Anaktuvuk Pass to Kotzebue with his friend Bruce Stafford. Between mosquitoes, rain, and rivers swollen with floodwaters, he learned that travel was best done before "breakup" — the time of year when Alaska's daylight grows longer but before the warmer weather of spring melts the ice on rivers. Two years later in 1979, he traveled solo on foot and by ski from Nuiqsut to Anaktuvuk Pass, a distance of two hundred miles.

People asked him why he took these trips, and sometimes he wondered himself. On his 1979 solo journey he reflected, "There are moments I don't know why I'm here. It's cold and the landscape is monotonous. Progress is slow and the distance ahead seems to be unreachable. You need the capacity to see beauty even when it's not pretty every day."

He learned he could travel much lighter. On the solo trip, he'd dropped a lot of gear — a thermos, food, a wet down jacket, even his sled. "This is a situation where possessions can forfeit freedom," he wrote. On that trek he also noted, "Comfort is best when interspersed with moments of great discomfort."

He would soon discover the slender thread between discomfort and disaster.

This trip in 1980 already had an ominous beginning. On his airplane flight en route to the Brooks Range, a defective engine on the plane had thumped to a sickening stop. In his career as a civil engineer for the FAA, Dick had worked on airports all over the state. The irony of dying in a plane crash on his way to traveling overland on skis was not lost on him. The pilot managed to turn the crippled aircraft around and with one engine return to Bettles.

Then, as Dick boarded a different airplane to reach his starting point, a snowmachine roared up to the Piper Navaho. A man on the sled cradled his hand, which was wrapped in a blood-soaked rag. The pilot agreed to take the injured man to Fairbanks. But the door to the plane refused to close. It was minus twenty degrees and Dick and the pilot took turns removing their mittens to fix the door.

"By that time I was ready to go back to Fairbanks and call it quits," Dick wrote. "Nothing was going right."

When Dick finally arrived in Anaktuvuk Pass, it was late in the evening.

The stove glowed as the wind buffeted Paneaks' small house. Dick thought about finding Elijah before heading out of the village the next morning. It was rumored Elijah was a shaman, wise as he was old. At one time the Nunamiut man had hunted moose and caribou with a bow and spear. Dick felt privileged to know a man who knew the old ways of subsistence, who lived before the introduction of television and snowmachines. Elijah had offered the bed of caribou hide on the last night of Dick's journey through the Brooks Range in 1959.

Dick gazed outside the window and saw hundreds of caribou grazing nearby. It had been a tough winter so far in Anaktuvuk, with temperatures regularly dipping to minus fifty and winds gusting to fifty miles per hour.

"The snow was worn out from the wind blowing back and forth through the pass," Dick wrote in his journal that night. The loft was cozy though — even a little too warm — and Dick unzipped his bag, not noticing that the zipper had come off its track.

The next morning he found Elijah. It had been almost twenty years since he had translated the Native meanings of the rivers Dick had traveled between Barter Island and Anaktuvuk. He had at one time been a sled dog driver for the famous explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Now, nearing the age of ninety, Elijah's memory was hazy.

"Elijah was the type of person you could set down anyplace in the world, bare naked, and he would soon surface with clothes, much caribou meat, and a wad of greenbacks," Dick said. It was the kind of resourcefulness and self-sufficiency that Dick held in highest regard.

When Dick said goodbye to his old friend and left the village with his loaded sled, it was 11:00 a.m. A stiff wind was still blowing but ski conditions on the hard-blown snow were excellent.

"The 30 mile-per-hour wind was at my back and I was actually being blown down the John River. There was no drag on the sled because the wind pushed it," he wrote.

Minus thirty didn't seem that cold. The trick was to keep moving. As he traveled, he came across hundreds of caribou standing with their backs to the wind. The animals hardly noticed Dick's presence in their midst. They were stoic, braced against the wind. He could have touched them with his ski pole.

His plan was to reach the tree line by nightfall, where he would find spruce trees that offered firewood and shelter from the wind. At 2:00 p.m., when he reached for his water bottles to get a drink, he discovered that even with the insulation of being wrapped in his sleeping bag, the containers held only solid chunks of ice. He would have to do without water until he could build a fire. By 4 p.m., temperatures began to drop even further, from minus thirty to minus forty. The wind increased to forty miles per hour. Dick had to stop now and then to beat his hands together to regain circulation. He felt a tingling sensation on the back of his legs and backside. He was regretting leaving the Gore-Tex bibs behind.

The tree line was nowhere in sight and although he skied faster, the wind created a ground blizzard that made visibility nearly zero. There was no shelter, not even a meager stand of willows. He was skiing through a white funnel of snow.

As evening descended, Dick knew he'd have to stop and make some sort of camp. He dug the two-foot-deep trench in the snow and crawled in. Thirsty and shivering, he didn't think things could get a whole lot worse. Then he discovered that he could not zip his sleeping bag.

THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT, he used his mittens to punch holes in the snow for air. He slept fitfully, hoping that by morning the weather would let up. It didn't. Late in the morning the sun rose over the mountains, offering only a thin hint of warmth. He thrust his frozen boots in the bag to thaw them. His mouth felt woolen. He needed water badly. By 11 a.m. he was able, painfully, to get back on the trail. He needed a fire in order to thaw something to drink. And the only way to build a fire was to get to the tree line.

He finally reached the tree line at 3 p.m., but the still-raging wind made building a fire impossible. He managed to spark a feeble flame, but it was quickly swallowed by blowing snow and wind. So much for thawing ice or snow to drink. Once again he dug a trench to sleep in. This time, with fingertips now blackened by frostbite, he somehow managed to get the zipper back on the track of his sleeping bag. He put the frozen water bottles inside the bag with him, pressing them against his shivering body. Maybe his body heat would thaw the ice a little — even a few teaspoons to drink would be better than nothing.

"The intense cold has become the overriding sensation; it hovers in my dreams and wraps around my body. The cold is so intense that the moisture in my eyes freezes to form tiny icicles between the upper and lower lashes. I live deep inside the tunnel formed by the hood of my parka," he wrote.

The human body chooses to stay alive first and to function second. The next morning, Dick had a hard time getting out of his sleeping bag. As the cold seeped deeper into his body, his brain sensed the danger. By slowing blood flow to the extremities, his body circulated more blood to the vital organs. So Dick's limbs moved woodenly now, almost as if they belonged to someone else. Putting on his boots was a major undertaking.

At this point he was twenty miles from Anaktuvuk, where he'd started, and another sixty miles from Crevice Creek. Even though the distance back to Anaktuvuk was less than half the distance to Crevice Creek, the terrain back to the village was mostly uphill. With winds continuing to howl fiercely from that direction, a return trip would have been difficult if not impossible. Dick knew Bill and Lil Fickus had a homestead at Crevice Creek and made the decision to set out for their cabin. But he didn't really know where the cabin was. Or even Crevice Creek for that matter.

What he did know was that he needed water. And by following the John River he would eventually get to Crevice Creek.

Below Hunts Fork on the John River, he came to a large overflow area where water seeped over the top of the ice. An open spot in the river appeared and at last he was able to drink. He sipped greedily at the icy water. With one cold swallow after the next, he finally slaked his thirst.

The pain in Dick's legs and rear were intense. Exposure to the cold and lack of oxygen causes cells to die. Dehydration furthers their destruction. As blood flow returns to the extremities, it leaks out from damaged blood vessels, creating inflammation and further tissue damage. As Dick warmed himself in his sleeping bag at night and then traveled in the cold wind each day, the frostbite only worsened. He could hardly bend over; the pain in his backside was severe. As he skied, he could feel sticky fluid from his injuries seeping down the back of his legs.

By mid afternoon on the third day, he stopped and set up camp. This time he set his sleeping bag on an insulating layer of spruce boughs. His ski boots were frozen at the toes from skiing through the river's overflow. He hammered the ice off with his saw and in the brittle cold, the saw broke. He put the boots in his sleeping bag to thaw.

On the fourth night, as he stomped a platform to lay his bag on, he broke through the river ice with one foot, sinking thigh-deep in the frigid water. Climbing out to firmer ground, his leg was immediately encased in ice. He used his ski pole to shave off the ice before climbing into the sleeping bag with the frozen boot still on. By now his underwear was glued onto his skin and he began to note the fetid smell of decay.

Dick was now near a state of total exhaustion. Each morning it grew harder to get out of his sleeping bag. Traveling became a slow, painful slog. His focus narrowed to the path directly in front of his skis. Keep moving, he told himself. Just keep moving. His map showed two cabins. If he could find one of them, he could stop for a few days.

"I'd like to just stay in my sleeping bag and not get up anymore," he wrote. "I have to discipline myself to move on — no matter what environment you are subjected to, it is willpower that makes you survive."

That night, with weariness more pressing even than the cold, Dick considered the choices he'd made.

"We have choices between living life to its fullest and trying to live life to its longest," he wrote. "When I started this trip I would have opted to live life to its fullest. But now I want to live life to its longest. It is the reality of life; Mother Nature wants us dead."

The next morning he got up again and headed slowly, painfully, down river. At this point he was no longer thinking clearly, just sliding one ski ahead of the other, one hour after the next. He had done this before, gone long distances without stopping. He was no stranger to the cold. As a boy in Wyoming, he tried to sell Christmas trees door-to-door from the back of his father's truck. At one point, he and his brother were shivering so intensely that they could barely speak. A kindly old woman took them in, set them next to a warm stove, and fed them hot cocoa. His father, also shivering, waited outside. They sold not one tree. Not even after discounting them from fifty cents to a dime each. It was the Great Depression and no one had money to spare.

The cabins on his map were not materializing and he was growing weaker. A hard oozing crust had formed on his legs and rear end.

THE ARCTIC IS a landscape infused with tragedy. It strains the fragile filament between life and death; between the cold indifference of the elements and the stamina of a beating heart. It can test every wilderness skill. Every ounce of resolve.

"Boatloads of people perished in the Arctic," Dick said. "Mostly out of stupidity."

The most famous and tragic expedition was led by Sir John Franklin. In 1845, Franklin led two ships and 127 men through the ice-covered waterways north of the Canadian mainland, in search of the Northwest Passage. Their boat was frozen in the ice for two years. Those who did not die of starvation or scurvy resorted to eating their dead. In the end, not one man survived. More crews perished as they searched the Arctic to learn what had become of the Franklin expedition.

There were other stories. Dozens of them. Some were stories where one big mistake or a series of small mistakes tipped the balance. Others were the stories of just plain chance, where circumstances beyond anyone's control shifted. Where luck drifted from the center line into a collision course with disaster.

And sometimes, against all odds — call it a stroke of luck, or divine intervention — Providence offered, at precisely the right moment, another chance.

SIX DAYS AFTER leaving Anaktuvuk Pass, Dick happened upon a snowmachine trail. It was a trapline trail crossing the John River.

A lifeline.

He followed the track into a timbered area nearby. Following the snowmachine trail was easier than following the rough snow of the river. Besides, it presumably would lead to a cabin.

It was nearing dark when he saw a shadowed figure ahead. It was a lynx, alive and caught in a leg hold trap. Dick paused. The lynx lay next to the trail in a V-shaped hollow of terrain. Making a wide berth around the lynx would require a climb over and around the draw. He would not even attempt it.

He and the lynx eyed each other silently as Dick passed by, just feet away from where it lay. He felt sorry for the creature.

"Both of us were in bad shape," Dick wrote. "The lynx was at the end of a chain and so was I."

He pushed ahead. Several times he nearly lost the trail where it crossed frozen lakes. But somehow the track always reappeared, faint but welcome on the other side. Then at 9:30 p.m., he looked up to see a thin line of smoke threading from the chimney of Bill and Lil Fickus' homestead. The temperature was minus twenty-nine degrees.

IT'S NOT OFTEN in a wilderness cabin — where there are no roads or neighbors for dozens of miles — that someone comes knocking in the deep cold of the night. At their door stood a gaunt man, encrusted by cold, his nose blackened by frostbite. His eyes alone held the warmth of a man still living.

"They were very surprised when I knocked on their door," Dick said.

He entered a modern home with lights and heat and inside plumbing. Bill poured a tub of warm water and peeled off Dick's bloody underwear. Lil, who was trained as a nurse, knew by looking at the black hardened skin and blisters that Dick was in trouble. Bill went outside and hooked up the engine heaters to his airplane. The next morning he and Lil flew Dick to Bettles. From there Dick caught commercial flights to Fairbanks and then on to Anchorage. Other passengers sat as far away as possible from the stench of his decaying flesh.

Dick was admitted to Providence Hospital's thermal unit with a fever, elevated blood pressure, dehydration, malnutrition, severe frostbite, and gangrene.

He was in the hospital for nearly a month, during which time he wrote most of his journal entries recounting his experience. He had only a small thermometer to read temperature and wind speeds he later learned by checking the weather reports for the day. They were able to save Dick's fingers, but he needed surgery to remove the frostbite from his rear end and his legs, followed by the long painful process of skin grafts. When Dick returned to work at the FAA on crutches, he had to stand because he could not sit.

"They amputated my butt," Dick likes to say.

It is the reason he has earned the nickname "Black Ass."

Dick credits Bill and Lil Fickus for saving his life. "I could never have made the remaining forty miles to Bettles. I doubt if there were even four miles left in me," Dick wrote. That night, in the salvation of a warm cabin and before attempting to sleep, Dick drank two quarts of home brew.

ARCTIC EXPLORER VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON, who experienced ill-fated expeditions of his own in the early 1900s, is quoted as saying, "Adventure is a sign of incompetence." Throughout Dick's life, he always maintained that he'd rather be lucky than skilled. And on this trek between Anaktuvuk Pass and Crevice Creek he had drawn on ample measures of both.

Later on, Dick would write that the Arctic was a landscape of anguish. But it would repeatedly draw him back. As he recovered from his injuries, he was already thinking about his next trip. And he was formulating an idea to traverse the entire Brooks Range and beyond.

To learn more about Canyons and Ice: The Wilderness Travels of Dick Griffith, visit the website www.canyonsandice.com. Visit Kaylene Johnson's website at www.kaylene.us. For her books, visit any of Alaska's fine independent booksellers.

# Wildwood   
by Tanyo Ravicz

Tanyo Ravicz grew up in California. He attended Harvard University and settled for many years in Alaska, mainly in Fairbanks and Kodiak. In Alaska he worked as (among other things) a wildland firefighter, cannery hand and schoolteacher. His novel-in-progress, Wildwood, draws on his experience of homesteading with his family on Alaska's Kodiak Island. Tanyo's classic short novel Ring of Fire, which explores the conflict between an Alaskan big-game hunting guide and the Crown Prince of Rahman, will be released in a new digital edition in 2014. His books include A Man of His Village, relating the odyssey of a migrant farm worker from Mexico to Alaska, and Alaskans, a selection of his short fiction.

In Wildwood, the novel-in-progress from which the following passages come, Jason and Brenda Everblue, a couple since their student days, grapple with their troubled marriage by moving with their two young children into the wilderness of Alaska's Kodiak Island. At Wildwood, violent weather, wild bears, illness, isolation, and the intrusion of poachers are among the challenges they face, but they will learn much about love and courage and the bonds of family.

Jason (from "Apprehensions")

WHILE IN KODIAK I also buy a box of cracker slugs. These are shotgun shells that when fired will explode downrange and frighten an animal without hurting him. The brown bears at the north end of the island have reportedly been aggressive all summer. Two bears have been shot and killed. At Wildwood I see brown bears regularly. I met a mother and cubs one day on our trail and I stood tall and spoke aloud to them, moving my arms through the air. The mother bear rose on her hind legs and scrutinized me, and unimpressed, she lowered her bulk to the earth and went on munching her salmonberries. I retreated.

The bears will always have the right of way at Wildwood. These ancient trails were their trails first. It doesn't slight my pride to let a bear go ahead of me, and it's prudent, too. The mounds of bear scat are everywhere. There's a feverish dynamic in the air, a hot-blooded electricity. The cow parsnip lies crushed, the tall grass is tunneled, the berry thickets are broken as if barrels were dragged through them. My four-wheeler stalls one day in the trail and I work to restart it, hemmed in by the dense greenery of alder and elder and devil's club. Fox sparrows chuck softly and nibble the fungus in the alder branches. As I work, the air becomes warm and humid, almost rancid to my senses, and I notice, on raising my head, that the fox sparrows have vanished. The hair bristles on the back of my neck, my nostrils flare, and my body knows in its animal way that a bear is near. On a separate occasion I hear a loud repeated thrashing, something similar to a humpback whale's smashing the water with its tail, but what I find is a commotion in the cottonwood trees, a fierce huffing of breath, and a bear cub caught halfway up in a tree while a bigger bear tries to dislodge it by violently shaking the branches.

My census of the local brown bears is as follows: an adolescent; a pair of orphaned or independent cubs, quite large; a sow and two grown cubs; a sow and two yearling cubs; a sow and three spring cubs; and the big boar. This massive male bear tramps out of the silvery willows at the back of the homestead one evening and heads west down the old survey line, his steps driven by a peculiar urgency, not of fear — he's indifferent to me — but of appetite. Clearly he has some quarry in mind, something carnal. That a mature boar is ranging through Wildwood in the middle of so many sows and cubs makes for an explosive situation and the bears themselves are on edge.

One day the two orphan cubs approach too near to my worktable, which is simply a sheet of plywood resting on paint-stained sawhorses on the south side of the cabin. When it comes to wild bears, forty feet is close enough, thank you. I love for the bears to be here, and I think I know what the Biblical shepherds must have felt whenever a supernatural being graced the emptiness of nature by visiting them in some lost pasture. Being a man, though, I am a great betrayer, and it does the bears no good to come to trust me. They mill nearby, indifferent to my words, and when even my yelling has proved unpersuasive, I fire one of the cracker slugs over their heads, and the noisemaker does its job: the second bear literally bumps into the rear end of the first as they flee.

One of my projects at Wildwood has been to blaze a trail along our eastern boundary and to link it to the old survey line on the south and to the trail I've already cut on the west — a sort of circumnavigation of the homestead. I want to know the extent of my little world, and with this goal in mind I lay out a route, remove the obstacles, and build sturdy log bridges over the creeks. They aren't the Golden Gate or the Pont du Gard, my little spans, but they are sound enough. There's a ravine at the back of the homestead with a few inches of water running in it, and here I dismount the four-wheeler and look across to the opposite bank. The ravine is unbridgeable, too deep and its banks too irregular for my bridge-making abilities, but I am confident, surveying it, that I can cross it on the four-wheeler. Yes, I can do this, I know I can. The circumnavigation is almost done. I have overcome every obstacle. I remount the bike and with a light splash I drive down into the ravine, and I have just begun to throttle up the opposite bank when I inexplicably hesitate, slowed by some foreboding, and as a result I have to put the bike in reverse to be able to regain my momentum. I should not have stopped. I idle at the bottom of the ravine, staring up at the bank, and I can't see over the top of it. A wall of gnarled earth rises before me. Damn the doubts. I assault the bank in super low gear.

The bike rises. Water splashes off the mudguards. I stand on the footrests. Going up is a good feeling. Pistol on my hip. Oh, yeah. Nothing can hurt me. Right thumb on the throttle. Leaning forward over the handlebars. Hell yes. Green leaf canopy. Branches flick my face. A purple salmonberry big as a plum is knocked free by my shoulder. A secret despair in my heart. I look for the top. A bird flushes from the alders. The salmonberry big as a plum splashes below in the ravine. I am losing control of the bike. The bank is much too steep. Hugging the damn seat pommel for all I'm worth. A strange sickness in my stomach. Weightlessness. My infant hands curl before me. Blue sky between the handlebars. The machine rearing up and leaving the slope backwards. I lying supine in the ravine, I throw myself sideways and — pop! — the bike falls to earth beside me and the engine dies.

Silence.

The four-wheeler lies belly up in the muddy water. I roll it upright and, relieved to be able to restart the engine, I put it in gear and walk it up the bank I just descended. I'll leave it in the trail until I've cut a detour through the downstream alders. It's what I should have done in the first place. The chainsaw, which was tied on the front rack of the bike, is crushed into the mud. I carry it home and spend a couple of hours fixing it. I bend back the kickback handle, unbolt the cover, wash the air filter, oil the bar and sawchain, change the spark plug, remove the mud from the housing and starter rope, disassemble the muffler, and put everything together clean and dry.

I enjoy working out of doors when the birds sing and the fox and deer venture near. The details of my chores occupy me, and during the afternoon and evening I don't give much thought to what happened earlier in the ravine. But when I finally rest, sitting on the stoop in the early twilight, it is more of a collapse. My body hurts, everywhere. I recently lopped off the top of my knuckle while lag-bolting the chimney tee into the outside wall, and I notice the deformity as I rest my chin in my hand. After weeks of wrestling with the stuff of the world, my hands are scarred and ugly. But all of this is nothing compared with what happened earlier in the ravine. And what could have happened — being crushed, being pinned under the four-wheeler with nobody to help me or to hear me call — it finally gets through to me. I am alone here. Alone. And I'm never so weak as when I'm too strong.

I watch the swallows nab the clueless bugs from the air. The days are noticeably shorter. It gets dark around ten-thirty at night now. The fireweed flowers, bottom-to-top bloomers, glow eerily pale at midnight. It won't be long before I return to Fairbanks for the family. I'll rack the wine once more before I go, and if the chemistry tests right, I'll bottle the stuff early and put it to mellow rather than risk attracting the bears while I'm gone.

Jason (from "More Bear Trouble")

WITH THE DEER in rut, the bears hungry, and men and women hunting, there's a natural frenzy on the land. One night, hunters bed down in the derelict log cabin in the woods a half mile west of us. They leave it a shambles. When they've gone, I dispose of their garbage and seal the sunken, sod-roofed relic by nailing two-by-sixes across the door edges. A day later a bear claws my blocks and 8d nails straight out of the logs and with such force as rips part of the door frame off the cabin. The lintel is torn in half; claw marks score the wood.

The temperature drops into the teens at night, and the days aren't much warmer. So far the cold doesn't appear to have slowed the bears. I split firewood on a spruce block in the east grove and stack it against the outhouse while Ashley and Nicholas swing on their buoy swing, or they help me to gather the splinters and bark bits and spruce cones for kindling. Icicles cling to the beach boulders. The creek gels at its edges.

One day the children are playing on the ice formed where the creek has overflowed its banks and frozen. They skate on plastic tote lids or are pulled across the ice by Brenda, and their peals of laughter reach me by the cabin where I am laying out a wall for the arctic entry. Stepping around the lumber, calculating its linear feet — I plan to nail the wall together on the ground and erect it later; even if I space the studs at twenty-four inches, though, I doubt I have enough lumber to frame three walls plus a set of roof rafters, and I'm wondering, since the schoolteacher will visit us again in mid-December, if I should ask him to bring me some two-by-fours on his air charter — and hearing the spirited laughter of the children, I am filled with light-heartedness, considering the moment to be nearly perfect, epitomized in the children's delight and in my own swelling pride. Isn't this what Wildwood is all about? To be making something with my hands, to welcome the clasp of the cold air on my face, to hear my family's frolics, to see among the trees the pink flash of a dancing snowsuit — these things bring me great joy. But after an hour or so I become aware of a strange silence. Missing their laughter, missing the scrape of their sleds on the ice, I straighten and turn toward the creek and the south spruce grove. Ashley's pink snowsuit is visible among the trees, but she's standing absolutely still, she and Brenda both with their backs to me, and Nicholas stands behind Brenda, holding Brenda's hand while swinging around looking toward the cabin — toward me.

And the sight of my son's little face strikes fear in my heart. Brenda is concealing him. This is something I understand even before I have seen the bear, the big boar, lumbering through the spruce grove in their direction.

And I am already running. Brenda and Ashley aren't unmoving as I had thought but are slowly backing away with Nicky behind them. I come on at a noisy gallop, the spruce twigs snapping under my feet. You get torn between wanting to alert a bear to your presence and not wanting to startle him at too close a range.

The bear, when he hears me approaching, stops and pulls up off the ground. He rises on his back legs, his paws hanging down in front, the claws long and yellow and sharply curved. He takes two steps backwards to counter the sag of his belly and looks past Brenda and the children focusing with near-sighted intensity on me.

"Go away," I say.

I raise the shotgun and aim the beaded muzzle at his chest. The toe of the butt is jamming my collarbone but I am too worked up to change my grip or to otherwise move. He's a massive animal. He steams from the mouth, the wet locks under his chin pointed and swaying like flames. Along the side of his nose there's a scar or a patch of bare skin, and behind his muzzle the small eyes glimmer, deeply set under his brow.

Even among the spruce trees he's enormous.

The bear watches us intently for several seconds, then he exhales with a grunt, drops to the ground, lowers his head, rolls his face at me, and the lip curling back from his canines, he rattles his teeth at me. And without any hurry, with an air of indifference, he swings his right foreleg around to the west and continues on his way. A wise old boar.

When he's gone, his sour odor hanging thick in the grove, I pick Nicholas up in my arms and hurry him back to the cabin. Brenda is white-faced. All the expression has drained from her. She won't take tea and she won't talk to me. I can see she's absorbed in what happened but she refuses to talk about it. She seems to be repeating a question to herself and losing her way in the answer. Eventually she climbs to the loft and goes to bed.

I find a single bear track in a patch of snow and I lay a red shotshell in it to measure it. The front foot is fourteen inches long and nine and a half inches wide. It is breathtaking to consider an animal this big. Life at Wildwood wouldn't be the same without the bears, and I wouldn't want them not to be here. This has been my anthem all along. But I have never felt so ambivalent. The constant pressure of the bears has demoralized my family. I have to remember who I am. Granted, maybe I shouldn't be here, maybe I shouldn't have come to Kodiak, maybe I shouldn't have moved my family into the wild, but I am, I did, I'm here and by God I have to deal with it, and if I can't, well, if I'm not equal to it, just admit it and go, get out, leave, now, but remember this: Wildwood is it. This is your life. It's where your dream and your life are one. See it through.

Brenda (from "Homestead Dreams")

THE SNOW LINGERS in the high country, streaked by the dark purple of the mountain ridges. Jason sets his hands on his hips, gazing up at the mountain, and promises we'll climb to the summit on his return from Port Haley. He will be gone three days, working at the cannery, and while he's away, the lumber he set aside for the arctic entry reminds me of the unfinished homestead, the Wildwood we're building toward.

The country trembles on the verge of greenness. Under the dun shades of the old year, the drab leaves, the copper canes and yellow stubble, a green underlight of spring glows, and before the buds and blades are actually visible, the country beams with the inner light of their becoming.

Green joints spot the salmonberry canes. The hares nibble these buds in the mornings, standing on their hind legs to reach them. The children and I watch the hares from our breakfast table, amused by their outsize appetites and their high-strung cautiousness, their bulging brown eyes and fodder-filled cheeks. But a morning comes, the third of Jason's absence, when not a single hare appears, and when I step outside to brush my teeth, I see the reason.

Four brown bears are feeding on the grass, fireweed and cow parsnip shoots that have sprouted on the rich black earth where Jason burned his plant rakings two weeks ago. It's the same family of bears that rolled on their backs in the dirt at our trailhead last autumn. The children and I watch from the deck of the arctic entry, and Nicholas points his chubby finger at the bears to make sure I don't miss them. The mother bear leisurely crops the grass, and when she has had enough to eat, she lies down and looks bored.

"I'm going to name them," Ashley declares.

"All right, darling, you name them," I say. I go into the cabin and glance at the shotgun in the gun rack. I take Nicholas his binoculars and his Pooh and Ashley her sketch pad and her Paddington Bear and I go back into the cabin and climb on a chair and get the gun down and run my hand up its barrel and open the chamber and load in a cracker slug. I snap the forend into place.

"Mom, don't shoot them," Ashley says.

"Honey, I'm not going to shoot them. It's just to make noise."

"Can't we feed them?"

"You know we can't feed them. What would you feed them if you could?"

"Noodles."

"Poodles?"

"Noodles!"

Nicholas scowls, pressing his hands to his ears.

"It's all right, baby, I'm not going to shoot," I say.

When we hear the boat motor, we ride the four-wheeler down to the beach and help Jason to land the Quicksilver. We tell him about the brown bears and we're all extra sweet to him because we want him to not make the bears go away. The first thing he sees when he has come up the trail to the cabin is one of the bear cubs chasing a butterfly and the mama bear calmly cropping the greens. He studies her a long time and says she trusts us and we had better not cross her. The bears don't have a lot of food to eat these days besides the spring greens and whatever measly amphipods they can dredge up on the beach. Jason acts very cautious and stern but his heart is obvious, and instead of driving the bears away he gives them more range by moving his sawhorses closer to the cabin.

Jason (from "Homestead Dreams")

AT MIDNIGHT THE SKY is a cloisonné blue with the yellow stars trimmed in silver. A planet shines among the naked rafters of the unfinished arctic entry. Brenda and I sit on the stoop together and sip wine.

"Did you ever think you'd be doing this?" she says.

"Not in a million years," I say.

"Sometimes I still can't believe we're here." She leans her head on my shoulder.

"Which part can't you believe?" I say.

"Just being here, I guess. Does it make you happy?"

"I forget myself in it. I feel a part of things."

"Like in a dream," she says.

"Maybe I imagined it once. In that sense, yeah."

"It's your white castle," she says. "The white castle you dreamed of building."

"I don't know about white castles," I say.

We look up at the stars together. A twig crackles. She waves a mosquito off.

At daybreak Wildwood Strait is fogged in, and throughout the morning the light and fog mingle in a pale tactile embrace. The fog dissipates by noon and rolls in again in the evening. Then for several days we don't see a cloud. Such bluebird days are so rare in Kodiak, people are said to note them in their Bibles. Most of the time we're outdoors doing our human things while the squirrels do their squirrel things and the bears do their bear things, all of us quickened by one and the same wild heartbeat. I was certain the noise of our carpentry would drive the mother and cubs away, but that hasn't happened. To the contrary, the mother bear, accustomed to the hammering and sawing, may actually be reassured by the sounds. Other bears are in the area and she understands our presence probably discourages them from venturing near.

One day, turning from the worktable, I am startled to find the cub named Butterfly taking my measure from just a few feet away, his forepaw raised as if to suggest he'll come closer if I want him to. I want nothing of the sort, and after glancing around for his mother, I brandish a length of two-by-two and run him off.

He is no small cub, Butterfly. As much as I detest the naming of wild animals, I'll admit that Ashley and Nicholas have given him an apt moniker. Thousands of margined white butterflies breeze past the cabin in the spring and early summer, fluttering low to the ground, often under the cub's very nose, and when he encounters one of these winged curiosities he's inevitably drawn to chase it, sometimes to the point of launching into the air after it. He occasionally catches one of them, inspects its veined gray-green wings and eats it, but as a rule he ends up at the bottom of a badly performed somersault, and it may be he's not trying to catch a butterfly as much as to learn the secret of its flight.

I don't like giving wild bears a Christian or any other kind of name, first, last or middle initial, but my argument carries no weight with a six-year-old and a two-year-old. Ashley knows the bears' ages, hobbies, favorite colors and favorite animals. She also knows I'll drive them away if necessary, but the thought doesn't trouble her. That's what parents are for. The mama bear is as cautious and watchful as her cubs are bold and heedless. She's a solid, formidable mass of vital energy, an incarnation of the life force. Ambling broadside out of cover, she's a giantess, her golden hump the striking part of her, the seat of her power. Her cubs are a darker brown, but each has a blond or whitish patch, Butterfly on the backs of his wide, floppy ears, Halo around the neck, and Sandy Pants where else but in the backside.

Her jaws chomp up and down, cropping the grass, the young horsetail and cow parsnip, and when she's done eating she reclines to one side while her cubs explore and do inefficient things like paw at butterflies. I am reminded of our human playgrounds where the children mix it up while the parents watch from the edges ready to dash in if necessary. It's a pastoral, enchanting scene, but it's not without an undercurrent of melancholy in that the bears, for all their might and beauty, are such naked creatures of necessity. They have affection for one another, certainly, but they don't appear to be highly gifted with understanding, so I wonder if they enjoy the fruitfulness of self-awareness. Subjects of a severe regime, they seem isolated from one another, each going about the business of survival with relative indifference to the nuances of its own or its kindred's existence. I know this melancholy isn't in the bears but in me, and I wonder, actually, if it doesn't come from my seeing something of ourselves reflected in the bears, from a suspicion that for all our self-consciousness and richly layered love of one another, for all our comforts and attainments, we are equally creatures of necessity, subjects of the same regime as they.

Brenda (from "A Sign")

I LOVE OUR long days at sea, fishing, salvaging lumber and exploring the coastline. Our fourteen-foot raft is our inflatable island, the probe we send out beyond the firm limits of the shore, an extension of ourselves, a child of our imaginations. Wavelets flit around us like the fins of a myriad fish. An inquisitive otter pricks his head up and inspects us, two bright eyes and a slick silver muzzle. Porpoises circle our boat, their backs shining and blowholes flaring, uttering their weird plaints and their light, purposeful chatter. The otter returns, emboldened, and sniffs our boat with loud relish, and Ashley, hearing the rasp of his whiskers on the boat vinyl, drives him off, fearful of what his teeth may do.

It is late afternoon, the sea gray and silky. Drifting offshore, we catch herring on hooks at medium depth while the sand lance flash in the water around us. The gulls screech and bicker and rise with these half-gobbled fish in their bills, feeding in a noisy frenzy. Then all at once they silence and scatter, fleeing the water as though frightened by an unseen predator. Minutes later, they return. The water plips and plops and ripples, we hear a hum as of swarming bees, the sand lance flash and leap around us, and the gulls return to their obstreperous feeding. But again, they silence and scatter, and suddenly, inexplicably, the fish and the birds have dispersed. North of us, a muffled boom sounds, the echo of an explosion, or the report of a high-powered rifle in the mountains. Then we hear it again, closer, a pneumatic blast like a clashing of brakes or a coupling of train cars, followed, soon, by a murmur of moving water. And then off our port bow, the sea literally opens up. It's as if an undersea rock had surfaced or an island were being born before our eyes. A whale slides by with the mute smooth movements of a serpent.

"Fin whale," Jason whispers. He crawls forward and grabs hold of Nicholas. "My God, look at him."

Thirty, fifty, seventy feet long and more, descending on one side and rising on the other. There seems to be no end of him. We grip the sides of the rocking boat, our attention fixed on the immensity of the whale. Whirlpools play up and down his length. Our raft tips and bobs in his wake. Again, there's the silky hiss of the water, the whisper of his passage, the sea spilling over his upper fin, down his brown-gray back and sides.

Twice more the whale reveals himself to us. His spout blows twenty feet into the air, an eruption of steam. Awe is what I feel, but what is awe? I never asked until I knew the answer. Awe is to be filled with life, with the life that matters most. To witness power and grace twinned in one creation.

A fishing boat chugs toward us from the west. Jason is busy with the children's life jackets. How strangely disorienting to see a whale come between us and the land. The fishing boat looms larger on the horizon, squat and smoky, an old smogger of a boat. And one last time we hear the fin whale's breathing, the eerie seething of his passage, the echoes of his titanic life.

For me this day is a climax to a series of joyful, unforgettable days. We eat a meal at the cabin, then return to the beach to fillet our catch of fish and to put up our gear. At ten at night we stand on the cliffs, the four of us gazing west at the red rhubarb sky.

After such a full day, I am conquered. I needed direction or a sign, and the fin whale brought it. I decide to extend our stay at Wildwood for another year, though I haven't told Jason about it yet, and he still expects to book ferry tickets to the mainland the next time he's at the cannery. It's my way of buying time, of having it both ways.

Wildwood... The highs are so high, they're unearthly. But the lows are just low. A single mosquito loose in the loft at night reminds me of this. I can't lie on my right side because of a chemical burn I got from a cow parsnip plant. To roll on the burn is painful, so I lie on my left side while the mosquito veers in and out of earshot. Nicholas moans in his sleep. The nights have gotten dark. We've come a long way from summer solstice, and as the planet tilts and the darkness spreads from midnight in both directions, the distance tells.

Brenda (from "Intruders")

"IT'S A LONG WAY to come for two deer, Jason."

"Yeah, well, it's a father-son thing. They'll get to know each other."

"What's the salt for?"

"It's to rub on new bear hides."

"Maybe they won a bear permit."

"Maybe, but the fall bear hunt doesn't start for three months. They say they're scouting. Let's not bother about it."

"It bothers me."

"They'll go away."

For a week Jason seems to be able to put the Magreavys out of his mind. I can't. They are only a half mile away, squatting in that creepy old cabin, and me here with the children. I thought Jason was the reclusive, touchy one, but I'm the one brooding about it. We were considering whether to return to the world and here the world comes to us before we're ready. I wouldn't trust them if they were two priests on a retreat. Jason ignores them by imagining us living here long after they're gone — outlasting them. What I see in their coming is not the desirability of isolating ourselves at Wildwood but the impossibility of it.

The things that bother me if I let them bother me, the chills, the damp gloom, the mosquitos (Ashley scratching till her bites bleed, Nicholas wearing the war paint of calamine lotion) — all of my complaints against Wildwood are magnified when I fret about the Magreavys. Their presence affects Jason, too. He becomes more taciturn, more inward. Even from me he withdraws. Sometimes I think he mistrusts me. I have these fade-outs of reality when I feel I don't know the man, this lion-headed illusion I have loved and lived with so long. When I look out the window at him, he blends into the landscape like an animal in camouflage. After the concentrated intimacy of our lives at Wildwood, it's disheartening that he seems so strange to me. What do I really know of him? Does he purposely hold back, distancing himself, or is it simply impossible for me to find my way in? I'm like one of those finches that fly down our trail in a panic, unable to find an entry into the dense forbidding jungle on either side.

To learn more about Tanyo Ravicz and his work, visit www.tanyo.net or www.runningfoxbooks.com. Watch for news of his novel-in-progress Wildwood and for the 2014 digital release of his short novel Ring of Fire which, set in a wilderness lodge on the Alaska Peninsula, charts the destructive collision of opposing worldviews. For other books by Ravicz, check with one of Alaska's fine independent booksellers.

# From Cold River Spirits  
by Jan Harper-Haines

Jan (Petri) Harper-Haines is Koyukon Athabascan, Russian, Irish and Dutch-German. Her non-fiction has appeared in First Alaskans Magazine, West Marin Review, Alaskan Embers and Cirque. She is currently working on Jimmy's Song, a novel of suspense set in Anchorage and the Matanuska Valley.

Cold River Spirits is a biography of Jan's Athabascan mother and grandmother and their lives on the Yukon. It explores their rich cultural heritage and their heartrending, and often humorous, struggles to transition from a life intertwined with nature to a more fast-paced world.

Prologue

I WAS THREE YEARS OLD when we lived in Sitka and I came home one day with the announcement, "I'm not going to play with those kids — they're Indians!" Dad raised his eyebrows and my mother disappeared into the kitchen. Then my Dutch-German father sat me down and told me I was half-Indian.

He went on to tell me how special Indian children were and how lucky I was to have an Indian mother.

Years later, I was surprised when I heard Mom call herself ordinary. Eventually, I realized ordinary was what she wished for, to be like everyone else. As the only Athabascan (and one of only two Alaska Natives) at the University of Alaska when she graduated in 1935, she'd had major struggles, racially and financially.

"In my next life," she said, "I want to be a blonde with fat legs — mine are so skinny!"

My mother began telling Dad and me about her childhood when I was very young. She told us about her family living along the Yukon — in Rampart, Nenana, Tanana — and later in Fairbanks, Eklutna, Wrangell, and Anchorage. Sometimes mysterious, sometimes frightening, never ordinary, these stories told of the Chemawa Institute in Oregon where her struggling father sent his four oldest children for ten years "for their education" (but mainly, so they would have food and medical care). They told of my mother's struggle with tuberculosis and poverty as she worked her way through college. As I grew older, she would add, staring at me, "Someone ought to write these down."

In 1990, after twenty years in advertising and marketing, I took a writing class at a local community college. The fiction classes were full; the only opening was in a class called Tales Told from Memory. The first assignment was to write a character study.

One night I was reading in bed and something made me look up. Grandma was sitting in front of me. She wore a brown print dress, a hand crocheted sweater, thick hose, and heavy brown oxfords: her church and travel outfit. Her opal ring shimmered. She was gazing to her left. I blinked and she was gone.

The next day, I wrote a character study of my grandmother. Then I wrote my mother's stories and discovered my grandmother at the heart of each, whether in fact or spirit. Gaps were filled in with phone calls and letters. "Oh did you know...?" Aunt Mary began when I called with some innocuous question. From that phone call I wrote Ice Fog (Chapter 16), a story about a startling situation that that my mother had never mentioned.

CHAPTER 1

Fairbanks, 1948

WHEN THE CHENA RIVER overflowed its banks in 1948, as it did nearly every spring, Fairbanks took on the appearance of a slowly moving lake. The dirty brown water, dotted with chunks of ice, logs, carcasses of dead animals, and other debris from the long winter, spread across the little river town.

Lapping steadily, the floodwater crossed First Avenue and crept up the steps of the Episcopal Church and into the Masonic Temple. It leisurely entered saloons on Second and filled stores and houses all the way down Barnette Street past Seventh.

On Garden Island, the water hesitated at the steps of the Alaska Railroad depot like a mannerly aunt unsure of her welcome. A moment later, it washed across the old plank floor, covered the benches along the walls, and reached the top of the ticket counter.

The river rose fourteen feet as it flowed into truck stop cafes and smoky dives where the only women were bleary-eyed hoostitutes.

The water appeared smooth, even languid, but its rapid undercurrents and eddies swirled with energy. The force was enough to carry away sections of wooden sidewalk and cave in cellar doors all over town. With no hesitation it entered Louise Minook Harper's log cabin on Fifth, five blocks from the river.

A drunk wading home from the bars on Second stumbled on a washed out section of sidewalk and was swept into the river where he smacked his head on a passing log. His body was found a few days later, tangled in the flotsam of a floating tree.

That morning two other men died in a fight in the Nevada Bar over the timing of the Chena breakup. A third man, clutching the winning ice pool ticket, suffered a black eye and cracked his false teeth in the commotion. When two officers from the Territorial Police arrived, big and blustery in their uniforms, the survivor convinced them the two men had stabbed one another. This stretch of truth was heartily supported by the bartender and other none too sober patrons.

When the river receded a few days later, flood-weary residents reclaimed their homes and took stock of the damage. Whites, Natives, hoostitutes, and prominent families dragged muddied books, ruined mattresses, and unrecognizable whatall into the street to be hauled away.

THE SOUR STENCH of mildew, river sludge, and dog poop gagged Louise when she opened the shed door. "Chanh na hanh!" she swore, turning her head and blinking as she propped open the door with a shovel and stood outside while the cramped space aired.

Her glance fell on Sam's trunk in the corner. It was slimy with mud.

Holding her breath, Louise grabbed the cracked leather handle. The muck made a sucking noise as she pulled the trunk from the shed. Inside, Sam's papers and notebooks squished at her touch. His penciled words were blurred, and those written in ink were a blue smear. Louise glimpsed the butt of a pistol wedged into one side of the trunk.

She looked around her small, muddy yard. Her house was already full of damp clothes, smelly rugs, and bedding. There was no place to dry the trunk's contents. On top of that, the stove was filled with silt. The electricity was out and they still had no drinking water.

"THE TRUNK IS GONE? Dad's stories are gone?" Flora Jane tightened her lips to keep them from quivering. Louise glanced at her oldest daughter and sighed.

"Everything was wet, it was all ruined." Louise was making a piecrust, and she took her black mood out on it, smacking the rolling pin, pushing the dough around.

Ever since she'd had George haul the trunk to the street, she'd been answering for it. Even George had looked perplexed and said, "Are you sure?" Louise whacked the rolling pin again on the flattened dough. Flora Jane glanced at Elsie. The crust would be tough as a boot.

"Your father sent his stories to that Hollywood movie man, Sam Goldwyn. One was a finalist, is that what you call it? A 'finalist?'"

Flora Jane nodded. She had never heard the Sam Goldwyn part before.

"Then he got a letter back." Louise unfolded the dough. "It said the stories would be better if they were typed." She snorted. "Can you see a typewriter hanging off the side of the sled, along with food, kids, and everything else?"

Her daughters laughed, their eyes on the pie. Weese, Connie, Elsie, and Flora Jane had gathered at their mother's little log cabin on Fifth Avenue to help their mother clean up. Mary was still at work.

"Hey, Mom, remember how Ethel Milligan used to call you Louisie?" Connie laughed. "You really let her have it!"

"Mom sure got on her high horse when kids weren't respectful enough," Flora Jane added. "You were always reminding us how your great-grandfather, Pavloff, was the first Russian commander at Fort Nulato. And how Dad's father, Arthur Harper, discovered gold on the Yukon."

"Don't let Sally Mayo hear you — Cap Mayo and Jack McQuesten were right there with him." Pride in her family had kept Louise going, especially when Sam was off doing who knows what and she was left alone with the children.

She finished the pie, shoved it in the oven and sank into a chair with a virtuous sigh. Now, if she could only have a drink. But Flora Jane was there, and her eldest daughter worried about her health. That meant her drinking. Natives were especially susceptible to the effects of alcohol, her doctor said. Humph. Louise glanced at the clock. She could wait.

"Where'd this come from, Mom?" Connie fingered the scarred pearl handle of the small pistol. Louise had been unwilling to toss it out with the ruined trunk. She glanced at the rusty gun.

"That belonged to my sister, Lucy," Louise said. "From when she and Howard shot the grocer in Tanana."

Chapter 24  
The Roadhouse

Circle City, 1939

IN CIRCLE CITY, a roadhouse built during the gold rush still stands overlooking the Yukon River. In the 1930s, the Alaska Road Commission leased it for summer living quarters for its road crews. By 1939, few remained who knew it was haunted.

Louise Harper's cousin, Axinia Callahan Rasmussen, was a petite fifty-seven-year-old widow with an hourglass figure. Every summer the road commission hired Axinia as cook and housekeeper. Her workdays began at 4:30 in the morning, when she baked bread, and ended after 10:30 at night. Always on the lookout for dishwashers, and lonesome for female company, she invited friends and relatives to visit.

Axinia could have invited her cousin by word of mouth but she wanted to impress Louise, who bragged about her smart kids. So, after fixing breakfast and cleaning the kitchen and men's sleeping quarters, Axinia struggled with a letter at the table where she usually made bread, rolls, and pies.

A FEW DAYS LATER Louise, now forty-seven, had just gotten home from cleaning the Gassers' house at the university. Sweaty and tired, she dropped her purse next to the mail on the kitchen table. Francis was sitting at the other end adding some figures.

"Hey, Mom," he said, as she began sifting through the mail. Then she saw Axinia's letter. Only a few people she knew could write, and a letter was like a gift. Louise found a kitchen knife, slit the flap, and pulled up a chair next to her son. Axinia's penciled words were large, round, and awkward. As Louise read, she remembered a delicious noodle, cabbage, and moose dish Axinia once brought to a potlatch in Rampart.

"Axinia wants me to come visit," Louise murmured as she read. "She's such a good cook."

A WEEK LATER, on an overcast June morning, Louise and Francis left Fairbanks in an old pickup he borrowed from his boss. Dust billowed through missing side windows as they bounced over the dirt and graveled Steese Highway. Louise tied a faded blue scarf around her hair and settled back against the hard seat, smiling. Dust or no dust, she was happy to be going somewhere.

Rocks clunked the truck and pinged the fenders. Lifting her voice over the road noise, Louise reminisced to Francis about relatives who had joined the Circle City gold rush in the 1890s. "In those days, Circle City was a boom town with about 5,000 people," she said.

Francis shook his head in disbelief. Now the town's year-round population was a few dozen at best. The drive from Fairbanks covered 162 miles of rough road, and the old pickup seldom went over twenty-five miles an hour.

It was evening by the time they reached the end of the dusty road at the Yukon River. Francis ground the truck to a halt in front of the roadhouse and jumped out. He carried Louise's bag inside, then disappeared to the outhouse in back. He worked the next day and still had to return to Fairbanks.

Louise climbed gingerly out of the truck, stiff after the long drive, and ran a tongue over her gritty teeth. Stretching the kinks out of her back, she looked at the Yukon, or Big River as Natives called it. It was two miles wide at this point. Beneath its calm surface swirled undercurrents and eddies that had claimed many lives. In late winter, entire dog teams had been known to disappear through cracks in the ice. Even an occasional moose was swept away. Once a house someone was hauling on runners broke through and vanished. Most of it washed up thirty miles downriver the following spring.

Francis came out of the roadhouse with a sandwich in his hand and she knew he had already seen Axinia in the kitchen. "See you in a couple weeks, Mom," he said. At twenty-one, Francis, with his Russian, Irish, and Athabascan blood, had dark hair and eyes, a sensual mouth, and an easy smile. He was slender and, at 5-foot-11, tall for an Athabascan. He climbed into the truck and two Native girls walking by stared after him as he drove off in a swirl of brown dust.

The roadhouse was an L-shaped, two-story log building painted dark red. The main entrance through a small porch led to a saloon. The old plank floor creaked beneath her feet as Louise stepped inside. To the left was a mahogany bar about eight feet long. Behind it, and running the length of the bar, hung an old hazed mirror. Glancing at herself in the glass was like seeing a stranger. Her face was gray with dust and her black hair had loosened into a frazzled bun.

The mirror may have been handsome once, but the years it had spent in an abandoned house of ill repute, freezing and thawing with the seasons, had left it in a sorry state. The gilt frame was chipped and separating at the corners and the murky glass rippled like heavy water. As Louise turned away, she saw something move. Glancing back, she thought she saw what looked like a face. Frowning, Louise leaned toward the glass, the buttons of her dress grating on the bar rail. But now only her tired face looked back. Behind her reflection she saw a faded, rust-colored curtain. Turning, she saw the curtain blowing gently in an open window.

"Hey Louisie!" Axinia beamed as she hustled across the room. Axinia wore a bib apron over a cotton dress and Louise saw that she had put on a little weight. Otherwise, with her olive skin, her dark hair in a bun, and her inquisitive eyes, she hadn't changed.

Without ceremony, Axinia put Louise to work peeling carrots. While they fixed supper for the crew, Axinia told Louise about one of their older uncles who had remarried for the fourth time.

"He's always bragging about his young wife!" she said disgustedly.

"Anaa da coola," Louise snorted. "What a lot of talk!" She raised an eyebrow. "What makes that old goat think he can keep up with her?"

They laughed and tackled the next chore, washing the men's towels. Louise admired the white enameled, restaurant-size range. It had a reservoir for heating water and a warming shelf for plates and cups. "It bakes like a dream," Axinia said.

When the men came in for supper, they filled the washbasin with hot water from the reservoir in the range. The men's pants and shirts were covered with road dust. "They're a decent bunch, not like some," Axinia said, shoving a clean skillet into a cupboard. "They're working on the road to Fairbanks. You probably saw them when you drove up."

After drying their hands a final time, the exhausted women left the kitchen and headed through the bar to the staircase leading to the sleeping quarters upstairs. As she followed Axinia, Louise sneaked another look at the mirror. Dark and shining, it looked the same. Then she saw it again: a blurred face, reddish-brown hair, and a gold dress. Disbelieving, Louise stopped in mid-tread. Once again, the image disappeared, and the rusty red curtain came back into focus.

"What is it?" Axinia looked back at her cousin.

"Nothing," Louise said, puzzled. "Just tired, I guess."

At the top of the stairs, they entered a hall with windows at each end. Although it was nearly midnight, sunlight streamed through the glass. On either side of the hall, rough lumber partitions formed cubicle-sized rooms. Canvas hung from wire stretched across the openings and kerosene lamps hung from ceiling hooks. Axinia had made up the bed in one of the cubicles and draped a mosquito net above it. An enameled chamber pot sat beneath the bed and Louise saw a chipped ceramic pitcher and bowl on a rough wooden stand.

"Basee," she said gratefully, knowing Axinia still had work to do. After Axinia hurried back to the kitchen, Louise dropped her bag on the floor and hung her coat on a nail. She pulled off her dress and underclothes, stepped into her cotton nightgown, and climbed onto the hard, lumpy cot. Within minutes she was asleep.

What seemed only a few minutes later, an outburst of raucous laughter from the bar woke Louise. Groaning, she rolled over on the narrow cot. The saloon's front door slammed and a gravelly voice said, "I'll bet five."

"Hey, barkeep!" a second man yelled, "Another whiskey!"

The men's voices settled into a murmur and Louise had almost dozed off when someone yelled drunkenly, "You're not getting away with that!"

Startled, Louise lifted her head to listen. Then she heard glass break, a clatter of poker chips, and the sounds of a fight. A chair screeched and something heavy crashed to the floor. Someone yelled, "Let's get outta here!"

Her heart pounding, Louise wondered if she should check on Axinia. Then Louise remembered she'd have to go through the bar to reach the kitchen. No way did she want to be around men who were all liquored up! While she tried to decide what to do, the noises and voices faded.

She must have dozed off again because the next thing she heard were gunshots and a woman's scream. Boots thudded across the barroom floor, and someone yelled, "You shot her!"

Louise lurched up, entangling herself in the mosquito net. Then she froze as a mournful keening filled the cubicle. After several minutes, silence descended. Despite her fright, Louise sank into a hard sleep.

After the crew left for work the next morning, Louise and Axinia sat down with their tea. Louise looked at her cousin's tired face.

"Do the men fight like that every night?" Louise didn't think she could take two weeks of it. Axinia looked surprised.

"This bunch doesn't fight at all."

Louise stared at her. "You didn't hear it? All that fighting?"

Axinia sighed and looked out the window. "I was hoping that wouldn't happen while you were here." She paused. "Yiige." Her voice was so low Louise wasn't sure she'd heard correctly.

"Yiige?" Louise felt her skin prickle.

Axinia looked at her. "Nasdaetl'ne," she added.

Shocked, Louise stared at her. "But it was so real!"

Axinia nodded. "Spirits... ghosts fighting."

"You mean all that commotion," Louise blurted, "with guns going off and tables crashing, all that was spirits?" This was worse than she'd thought.

"This crew drinks some," Axinia said, shrugging. "And they play cards, but they don't get rowdy. They work so hard they don't stay up late. Last night, they went to bed. Didn't you hear them?" The crew also slept on the second floor. Louise shook her head. All she'd heard was the fight.

Axinia frowned and stared into her cup. "I didn't tell you because not everyone hears it. It happens only now and again." She sighed. "It used to frighten me, but now I'm so tired, I sleep right through the ruckus."

Axinia settled back in her chair. "Boy, it sure scared me first time I heard it... must have been five years ago. I asked around. That's how I met this old-timer. He was skinny, wore his hair long." Axinia didn't say his name, Louise noticed. He must be dead. Never speak the name of the dead or you will call them to you.

"His hair was white, like snow," Axinia said. "He was the oldest Native in Circle, and he had a deep scar on his face." She chuckled. "He had so many stories. His voice was odd, though. It rattled like old leaves blowing over a river bed." Axinia wasn't usually given to poetic descriptions. Louise was impressed.

"He could talk for hours! But that voice!" Axinia shivered. "Anyway, he said back in the early days there was a lot of drinking and fighting and crooked card games in that bar. And killings. A woman was killed there. A white woman."

She pushed herself up from the table and began rounding up the ingredients for k'oondzaah, a pudding made from mashed cranberries and pike eggs. The pudding was for her and Louise. For the men, she'd bake an apple pie, if she had enough apples. Or maybe blackberries.

Louise finished her tea. She couldn't get over it. It so dumbfounded her she forgot to ask about the mirror. It was bad hootlani to dwell on people who had died. At least Axinia hadn't said their names. That would summon the spirits for sure!

To learn more about Jan Harper-Haines, visit www.harperhaines.com. Inquire about her book at Alaska's fine independent booksellers.

# Raven's Letter to Edgar  
by Ned Rozell

A biologist once told Ned Rozell that Alaska contains large chunks of nothingness because of two things — bugs and cold air. He has cursed both in a few decades of wandering ice and muskeg but has hiked on due to the fact that he just can't figure out how wolves get enough to eat.

Dear Edgar:

I was poking around in a bin of opportunity ("Dumpsters" to your type, with a capital D for some reason) the other day and came across a newspaper that said you died in October 160 years ago. Bummer. I had seen your famous poem about us, in another bin (you wouldn't believe what people throw out), and I wanted to chew your ear for a minute.

First of all, thanks for calling us "stately" on first reference. I'm with ya. In fact, we're the real state bird of Alaska, no matter what those placemats say. Willow ptarmigan — whose idea was that? You ever see a willow ptarmigan with personality? Take a poll of Alaskans, Eddy, they'll give you their state bird, the same "ebony bird" you made famous in 1845.

No other creature has the guts to go where we go. Climbers on Denali try to hide their food from us at 17,000-foot high camp, but it doesn't work. We wait until they throw a bit of snow over their food and stagger away. Then we dig it up and poke away. Easy money.

And the oilfields around Prudhoe Bay — no trees, blowing snow, about a gazillion below in winter. Those big-money workers up there do a Christmas Bird Count every year, and they record just one species. You know which one it is, baby. Biologists up there have seen us nesting in drilling rigs and feeding our chicks when it's 30 below. Thirty below! Know where the robins are then, Edgar? Florida! One biologist named Stacia captured a few of us up there to fit us with wing tags. She had trouble re-capturing us for her studies, so — get this — she wore a fake moustache to fool us! But we still know it's her.

We only hang out in Prudhoe because your type is there, Edgar. Don't take this the wrong way, but you guys are slobs. You don't finish what you eat. Today, humans are what wolves were 250 years ago. Once, we were all over the Great Plains, and today we're not. It's not that we don't like wide-open spaces, it's just that there's no more bison there, and there's no more wolves, who, like furry can-openers, would open the buffalo for us.

It's kind of odd you lived on the East Coast, Edgar. It's hard to find a raven in Baltimore, except for those ones on the football helmets (Purple ravens?! C'mon guys, black is beautiful!). Today we prefer the West Coast and the far North, from Baja to Barrow. We really like caribou and other prey species, and in Alaska there's more caribou than people, and there's lots of wolves and bears left to scatter carcasses around the landscape for us. Ever picked at a fleshy backbone on a hot summer's day, Edgar? Heaven.

Back to your poem. Let me see if I remember it: Once upon a midnight dreary, after rapping on a chamber door, a raven stepped into a dark parlor, perched on a bust of a Greek goddess, and terrified a bereaved loner by answering all his questions with the word "Nevermore."

I heard that a University of Alaska Fairbanks English professor once picked apart your poem like we do a road-killed red squirrel. He suggested your narrator's ingestion of opium might have given the raven its voice. That's baloney. We talk all the time. We squawk, we knock; we make sounds like rocks thrown into water. A Fairbanks scientist who followed us around with a recorder came up with 30 distinct phrases in the raven dictionary. Lucky for him he couldn't translate them.

The farther I read into your poem, the more you punch up the descriptions. You describe the raven as ghastly, grim, ungainly, gaunt, ominous, grave, a devil, a thing of evil, a fiend and a demon. I'm flattered, but others have held us in pretty high esteem. In Norse mythology, for example, the god Odin employed two ravens with the names Thought and Memory to fly the world and inform him of what was happening out there. We were less dependable for Noah, when a pair of us failed to return to the ark after he sent us to search for land. We probably found some carcasses out there; why go back for hard-tack and scurvy?

In Alaska, we're treated as we should be. Every Native group has raven stories. In many stories, including those of the Tlingit, Haida, and Koyukon, Raven is the god who created the sun, the Earth, the stars, the moon, and humankind. We are also the tricksters who deceive others in our endless quest for food. True, all true. And tell me, Edgar, what has the moose created? Nothing but moose nuggets.

It's not easy being humble when you're a god, but we have our ways. We're very down to Earth, and we're Nature's great opportunists. And, I'll come right out and say it, we'll eat anything. Scientists who have found our winter roosting sites in spruce forests have found pellets we've coughed up overnight. They teased them apart (talk about a nasty job!) and found paper, colored glass, bone and plastic. A graduate student once went to the Fairbanks dump and set out five groups of food to determine what we liked best. Her results, in ascending order: balls of paper, lettuce, bread, Chicken McNuggets, French fries. Mmmm, French fries.

From reading other stuff of yours, Edgar, I know the following revelation may delight you: The guy who wrote of the raven's behavior on the battlefield in Beowolf was right on. I quote: "the black raven, eager for the doomed ones . . . plundered the corpses." Like I said, we'll eat anything, and that includes you. If fact, there's talk around the flock that a mountaineer/adventurer type living in Anchorage told his sons that when he dies, he wishes not to be buried, but to be stripped and set out to be consumed by ravens. I hope to meet him someday.

These Alaskans have paid attention to a few of our habits. One is our winter commute into towns and cities from communal roosts way out in the boonies. Biologists have captured a few of my less bright brethren and fitted them with tiny transmitter backpacks. Wearing the transmitter, one of us stayed in Fairbanks during his winter days, then flew to Nome Creek, 40 miles north, to spend the night in a spruce tree with dozens of other ravens. The next morning, he returned to Fairbanks. Why the 80-mile roundtrip in winter, when we need so much energy to keep our body temperatures at their constant 109 degrees Fahrenheit? That's a secret I'm not giving up.

In springtime, we do away with the commutes. The landscape thaws, and so do the carcasses that fell during the winter, and by then the voles can no longer hide in their winter worlds under the snow, and the hares hit by cars don't turn to stone in five minutes, and the defenseless chicks of all these wimpy migrants hatch, and I've got to stop because I'm making myself hungry.

I like these Alaskans, Edgar, and I think most of them like us, too. Maybe because when it's 40 below and the ice fog in Fairbanks is thick as cotton candy, through their frosted windshields they see us picking at frozen tidbits around town. Unlike the showoff birds that crowd us in the summer, we don't abandon these crazy people who have to plug in their cars to make them go. Ever see a robin perched on a metal streetlamp at 33 below? Didn't think so.

Maybe people love us because we're so very black. You used us in your freaky poem Ligeia, to describe your love's hair when she stirred from the dead: "it was blacker than the raven wings of the midnight!" Nice. It's hard to imagine a creature so lovely: our eyes, our beaks, even our feet are pure, undiluted blackness, sullied only by the frost on our shoulders during a cold snap. We're the largest all-black bird, and the largest songbird, though maybe our song isn't as smooth as the prettyboy robin's.

In springtime, when we're all feisty and in our mating mood — we stick with one partner for life, you know, unlike some other species (ahem) — we ride wind eddies in the lee of buildings, rising and falling on an invisible roller coaster. I've seen your kind pointing, smiling, wishing they had wings. Yeah, admit it, you do.

A sad note here, Allan-Poe. A couple of years ago, some idiot with a shotgun killed more than a dozen ravens in south Fairbanks. It marked a low point in Alaska raven-human relations. But then the local paper had lots of letters to the editor condemning that fool, way more than you see when one human kills another of its kind. It warmed the cockles of my black heart.

I've got a theory, Edgar. These Alaskans see themselves in us. They like to think of themselves as tough, stubborn, brave, funny, clever, sneaky, revered, reviled, and able to laugh at the rest of the over-showered world. I've got news for them — I see a lot of us in them. Have you ever been to the public "Dumpsters" in Fairbanks, Edgar? Probably not, but let me tell you something. There, you will see ravens, picking through trash for life-giving morsels. But next to us, shoulder to wingtip, you will see your species, in even greater number, some with homemade gripper things that resemble our feet. When the two animals depart, treasures tucked away, they return to their roosts with a warm satisfaction that comes from knowing they are both true survivors.

Yours for (n)evermore,

AK raven

Among the books written by Ned Rozell are Alaska Tracks and Natural Alaska. Ask for them at Alaska's independent bookshops or find them online.

# Alaska's Independent Bookshops

As you seek out books by the authors included in the Alaska Sampler 2014, we hope you'll try these fine independent booksellers who partnered with us on this project. Whatever they don't have in stock, they'll be happy to order at your request.

Anchorage

University of Alaska Anchorage

UAA Campus Bookstore

2901 Spirit Drive

(907) 786-4759

http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/bookstore

University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) Campus Bookstore is a non-profit bookstore. Open yearlong. Alaskana books, gifts, Seawolf apparel, textbooks, electronics and free special events with local authors. Everyone is welcome!

Homer

The Homer Bookstore

332 E. Pioneer Ave. #1

(907) 235-7496

www.homerbookstore.com

Southcentral Alaska's oldest independent bookstore. "The Homer Bookstore....sells new books to what's obviously a more intellectually demanding market than most. The selection is phenomenal." — Lonely Planet Alaska 2009

Palmer

Fireside Books

720 S. Alaska St.

(907) 745-2665

www.goodbooksbadcoffee.com

"The world pushes; you have to push back. Read!"

Skagway

Skaguay News Depot & Books

(907) 983-3354

www.skagwaybooks.com

Located on historic Broadway Street, a bookstore as independent as Skagway. Open all year. Come check us out and find out "Why We Spell It with a 'U'." 

# We Welcome Your Feedback

IF YOU ENJOYED the Alaska Sampler 2014, we hope you'll take a moment to leave a review with one of our online vendors.

To be among the first to learn of the next edition of the Alaska Sampler and other special offers from Running Fox books, sign up for our free e-newsletter at www.runningfoxbooks.com. We promise not to pepper your inbox with stuff you don't want, and we never sell our email lists. 

# Copyright

Alaska Sampler 2014

Edited by Deb Vanasse and David Marusek

Copyright © 2014 Running Fox Books

http://www.runningfoxbooks.com/

Copyright to all individual selections remain with the respective authors.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quoted passages, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Editors or Publisher.

Cover and interior design by David Marusek

Cover image by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic, flipped and color corrected from original

ISBN 978-1-940320-06-9

First ebook edition v1.1

June 2014

# Contributor Credits

"A Time Machine Called the Chilkoot Trail," Copyright © 2014 by Dana Stabenow. Used by permission of the author.

"She Was Good — She Was Funny" by David Marusek. First published in Playboy in February, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by David Marusek. Used by permission of the author.

From the book: STILL POINTS NORTH: One Alaskan Childhood, One Grown-Up World, One Long Journey Home by Leigh Newman. Copyright © 2013 by Leigh Newman. Excerpted by arrangement with The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC.

"Storm Out of Paradise," Copyright © 2014 by Howard C. Weaver dba Rosebud Creative. Used by permission of the author.

"On Ice," from Cold Spell by Deb Vanasse, Copyright © 2014 by Deb Vanasse. Used by permission of Running Fox Books.

"Digging Robert's Grave," Copyright © 2014 Don Rearden. Used by permission of the author.

"Landscape of Anguish" from Canyons and Ice: The Wilderness Travels of Dick Griffith by Kaylene Johnson, Copyright © 2012 by Kaylene Johnson. Used by permission of Ember Press.

"Wildwood" Copyright © 2014 by Tanyo Ravicz. Used by permission of the author.

Excerpts from Cold River Spirits by Jan Harper-Haines, Copyright © 2000 by Jan Harper-Haines. Used by permission of the author.

"Raven's Letter to Edgar," Copyright © 2014 by Ned Rozell. Used by permission of the author.
