*
LENI WOKE TO THE SOUND of someone—or something—pounding on the cabin door. She scrambled out of her sleeping bag, shoved it aside, toppling her stack of books in her haste. Downstairs, she heard the rustle of beads and the pounding of footsteps as Mama and Dad ran for the door. Leni dressed quickly, grabbed her camera, and hurried down the ladder.
Large Marge stood in the yard with two other women; behind them, a rusted dirt bike lay on its side in the grass, and beside that was an all-terrain vehicle, loaded down with coiled chicken wire.
“Hullo, Allbrights!” Large Marge said brightly, waving her saucer-sized hand in greeting. “I brought some friends,” she said, indicating the two women she’d brought with her. One was a wood sprite, small enough to be a kid, with long gray Silly-String-like hair; the other was tall and thin. All three of them were dressed in flannel shirts and stained jeans that were tucked into brown rubber knee-high boots. Each carried a tool—a chain saw, an ax, a hatchet.
“We’ve come to offer some help getting started,” Large Marge said. “And we brought you a few things you’ll need.”
Leni saw her father frown. “You think we’re incompetent?”
“This is how we do it up here, Ernt,” Large Marge said. “Believe me, no matter how much you’ve read and studied, you can never quite prepare for your first Alaskan winter.”
The wood sprite came forward. She was thin and small, with a nose sharp enough to slice bread. Leather gloves stuck out of her shirt pocket. For as slight as she was, she exuded an air of competence. “I’m Natalie Watkins. Large Marge told me ya’all don’t know much about life up here. I was the same way ten years ago. I followed a man up here. Classic story. I lost the man and found a life. Got my own fishing boat now. So I get the dream that brings you here, but that’s not enough. You’re going to have to learn fast.” Natalie put on her yellow gloves. “I never found another man worth having. You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
The taller woman had a beige braid that fell almost to her waist, and eyes so pale they seemed to take their color from the faded sky. “Welcome to Kaneq. I’m Geneva Walker. Gen. Genny. The Generator. I’ll answer to almost anything.” She smiled, revealing dimples. “My family is from Fairbanks, but I fell in love with my husband’s land, so here is where I’ve stayed. I’ve been here for twenty years.”
“You need a greenhouse and a cache at the very least,” Large Marge said. “Old Bo had big plans for this place when he bought it. But Bo went off to war … and he was a great one for getting a job half done.”
“A cash?” Dad said.
Large Marge nodded brusquely. “A cache is a small building on stilts. Your meat goes there, so the bears can’t get at it. This time of year, the bears are hungry.”
“Come on, Ernt,” Natalie said, reaching down for the chain saw at her feet. “I brought a portable mill. You cut down the trees and I’ll saw ’em into planks. First things first, righto?”
Dad went back into the cabin, put on his down vest, and headed into the forest with Natalie. Soon, Leni heard the whir of a chain saw and the thunking of an ax into wood.
“I’ll get started on the greenhouse,” Geneva said. “I imagine Bo left a tangle of PVC pipe somewhere…”
Large Marge walked up to Leni and Mama.
A breeze picked up; it turned cold in the blink of an eye. Mama crossed her arms. She had to be cold, standing there in a Grateful Dead T-shirt and bell-bottom jeans. A mosquito landed on her cheek. She slapped it away in a smear of blood.
“Our mosquitoes are bad,” Large Marge said. “I’ll bring you some repellant next time I come to visit.”
“How long have you lived here?” Mama asked.
“Ten of the best years of my life,” Large Marge answered. “Life in the bush is hard work, but you can’t beat the taste of salmon you caught in the morning, drizzled with butter you churned from your own fresh cream. Up here, there’s no one to tell you what to do or how to do it. We each survive our own way. If you’re tough enough, it’s heaven on earth.”
Leni stared up at the big, rough-looking woman in a kind of awe. She’d never seen a woman so tall or strong-looking. Large Marge looked like she could fell a full-grown cedar tree and sling it over her shoulder and keep going.
“We needed a fresh start,” Mama said, surprising Leni. It was the kind of rock-bottom truth Mama tended to avoid.
“He was in ’Nam?”
“POW. How did you know?”
“He has the look. And, well … Bo left you this place.” Large Marge glanced left, to where Dad and Natalie were cutting down trees. “Is he mean?”
“N-no,” Mama said. “Of course not.”
“Flashbacks? Nightmares?”
“He hasn’t had one since we headed north.”
“You’re an optimist,” Large Marge said. “That’ll be good for a start. Well. You’d best change your shirt, Cora. The bugs are going to go mad for all that bare white skin.”
Mama nodded and turned back for the cabin.
“And you,” Large Marge said. “What’s your story, missy?”
“I don’t have a story.”
“Everyone has a story. Maybe yours just starts up here.”
“Maybe.”
“What can you do?”
Leni shrugged. “I read and take pictures.” She indicated the camera that hung around her neck. “Not much that will do us any good.”
“Then you’ll learn,” Large Marge said. She moved closer, leaned down to whisper conspiratorially into Leni’s ear. “This place is magic, kiddo. You just have to open yourself up to it. You’ll see what I mean. But it’s treacherous, too, and don’t you forget that. I think it was Jack London who said there were a thousand ways to die in Alaska. Be on the alert.”
“For what?”
“Danger.”
“Where will it come from? The weather? Bears? Wolves? What else?”
Large Marge glanced across the yard again to where Dad and Natalie were felling trees. “It can come from anywhere. The weather and the isolation makes some people crazy.”
Before Leni could ask another question, Mama came back, dressed for work in jeans and a sweatshirt.
“Cora, can you make coffee?” Large Marge asked.
Mama laughed and hip-bumped Leni. “Well, now, Large Marge, it seems you’ve found the one thing I can do.”
*
LARGE MARGE AND NATALIE and Geneva worked all day alongside Leni and her parents. The Alaskans labored in silence, communicating with grunts and nods and pointed fingers. Natalie put a chain saw in a cage thing and milled the big logs Dad had cut down into boards all by herself. Each fallen tree revealed another slice of sunlight.
Geneva taught Leni how to saw wood and hammer nails and build raised vegetable beds. Together they started the PVC pipe-and-plank structure that would become a greenhouse. Leni helped Geneva carry a huge, heavy roll of plastic sheeting that they found in the broken-down chicken coop. They dropped it onto the ground.
“Sheesh,” Leni said. She was breathing hard. Sweat sheened her forehead and made her frizzy hair hang limply on either side of her flushed face. But the skeleton of a garden gave her a sense of pride, of purpose. She actually looked forward to planting the vegetables that would be their food.
As they worked, Geneva talked about what vegetables to grow and how to harvest them and how important they would be when winter came.
Winter was a word these Alaskans said a lot. It might be only May, almost summer, but the Alaskans were already focused on winter.
“Take a break, kiddo,” Geneva finally said, pushing to her feet. “I need to use the outhouse.”
Leni staggered out of the greenhouse shell and found her mother standing alone, a cigarette in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other.