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scowled at her. She halted in midstride. "Does it bug you?"
     
    "What?"
     
    "Jim and me." She didn't elaborate, but Johnny was going on fifteen and extremely intelligent.
     
    "There is no Jim and you."
     
    She grinned. "Not yet."
     
    His frown deepened. "He's not good enough for you."
     
    "Absolutely not," she said cheerfully. "No one is."
     
    "What about Dad?"
     
    She sat down next to him and looped an arm around his neck. "He almost made the grade."
     
    The frown eased. "Only almost?"
     
    "Well," she said. "I really am something, after all."
     
    He was forced to laugh. "You sure are," he said, and protested the headlock and the noogie she gave him.
     
    "We'll drive into town tomorrow, get you registered for school."
     
    He was not displeased by this news, as Vanessa Cox was in town, living with her adoptive parents, Annie and Billy Mike. "You gonna get that woman's mom out of jail?"
     
    Kate felt for the check crumpled in her pocket. "I'm going to try. I don't hold out a lot of hope that I'm going to succeed."
     
    "You'll do it," Johnny said with boundless faith. "You always do.".....
     
    That earned him another noogie, arid he squealed and wrestled free. "Where am I staying while you're gone?"
     
    "I figured Auntie Vi's. She's got the room, and it's close enough for you to walk to school."
     
    "Okay."
     
    She gave him a suspicious look which he met with a bland stare. "I think it stinks that your love life is better than mine," she said.
     
    He blushed beet red, and she laughed.
     
    Bright and early the next morning, they climbed into the cherry red pickup and lurched back up the twenty-five miles of road into Niniltna. The road ran through the heart of the Park, 20 million mostly pristine acres extending from the Canadian border on the east to Prince William Sound in the south to the TransAlaska Pipeline in the west to the Glenn Highway in the north. Plus maybe a little extra all the way around. It was sparsely populated, the biggest town being Ahtna, which technically wasn't even in the Park but which was the market town for everyone who lived there—Park rats, rangers, hunters, trappers, fishermen, farmers, mostly Native and Anglo, living in tiny villages at the confluences of rivers, on land homesteaded by great- and great-great-grandfathers when the federal government strove to justify the expenditure of $7.2 million to purchase Alaska from Russia by offering incentives to Outsiders in the form of free land. This free land was far north of the fifty-three, but it was free, and in spite of the frosty latitude, a few thousand took the feds up on it. A few thousand more stayed on after the gold rush in 1898, and a few thousand more stayed on after World War II, and a couple of hundred thousand more after oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay. Most of them stayed around long enough to put in their twenty and then decamped with their pensions to Arizona and Hawaii.
     
    Fortunately, Kate thought as the truck lunged into a pothole and lunged out again, most of the six hundred thousand plus people living in Alaska today didn't live in the Park. Nope, most of them lived in Anchorage.
     
    Oh. Wait. She was going to Anchorage.
     
    The sun always seemed to shine when she had to leave the Park. The Quilaks loomed less menacingly on the eastern horizon, the spruce, aspen, birch, cottonwood, alder, and willow never seemed more lush and profligate, everywhere she looked an eagle or a raven or a Canada goose was taking wing. Which reminded her: She needed a new shotgun; she'd look around for one in Anchorage. Moose with their sides bulging from a summer's browse ambled across the road looking like a filled freezer. A freezer being something else she could get in Anchorage.
     
    She thought of the last time her meat cache had been knocked over, and the labor that had been required to put it back up again. To the uninitiated, it might look like Kate was turning her back on decades of tradition, but it wasn't