A fine and bitter snow Read Online Free PDF

socks.
     
    Silence was not the enemy to these two women, and Kate sipped her coffee and thought about them.
     
    Nobody in the Park knew how old they were, but everyone knew the legend. How Dina and Ruthe had flown for the WASPs during World War II, towing targets over the Atlantic Ocean for fighter pilots to practice on. How rumor had it that one of them had been the WASP pilot instructorPaul Tibbets had tapped to fly the new Boeing bomber, to ' shame the male pilots afraid to fly it into climbing into the cockpit. How, after the war, Dina and Ruthe had been unwilling to give up flying and in 1946 had come to Alaska in search of jobs in the air. How in 1947 they had teamed up with Arthur Hopperman of Hopper Holidays, a travel agency out of Fairbanks that specialized in guiding hunters and fishermen to record kills in the Alaska Bush. How in 1949 they had bought out Art, acquired two de Havilland Beavers, and started flying tourists into remote lodges in the Bush, pioneering eco-tourism before it was fashionable enough to merit the hyphen. How in 1951 they had bought this cabin and the surrounding eighty acres from a homesteader heading south for the last time and had proceeded to build another ten cabins farther up the hill, along with a bathhouse, a cookhouse, a mess hall, and a greenhouse, and had started flying tourists into Niniltna and putting them up at Camp Theodore, which they had named for Theodore Roosevelt.
     
    That was a sign right there, all the Park rats said, and they waited grimly, rifles in hand, for Ruthe and Dina to start preaching conservation. They didn't have to wait long, and Ruthe and Dina didn't just preach it; they practiced it. "To leave as small a footprint as possible" was their declared and shameless intention. They grew their own food; they even had half a dozen apple trees that they actually managed to coerce into bearing fruit. They recycled paper. They had a compost heap. They avoided the use of plastic. They wouldn't allow hunting on their property, which, since it was only eighty acres, didn't amount to much of a statement, but then they started lobbying in Juneau and Washington, D.C., for stronger laws governing the taking offish and game, and the disposal of human waste in the Bush, and the damming of rivers and streams for power, and the use of heavy equipment in gold mining. Most damning of all, they were personal friends of Jimmy Carter, who visited Camp Theodore at least once every year, and sometimes twice.
     
    That alone should have been enough to ostracize them, to make and keep them bunny-loving, tree-hugging outcasts, but, like everything else, it wasn't that simple. Ruthe and Dina were too nice, too smart, too funny, too, well, just too damn authentic. Alaskans pride themselves on what makes them different from Outsiders, and, as Mac Devlin put it, "You don't get much different than a coupla old lesbos living way the hell and gone up a mountain, selling the view to a buncha tree huggers, and making a damn good living at it, too." "And how can you hate someone who was a WASP?" George Perry said. "They care about the land," Ekaterina Moonin Shugak said simply, and they were in.
     
    One of Ruthe and Dina's first acts upon establishing Camp Teddy was to reach out to the local arm of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, of which Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was at that time president. The three strong women bonded instantly, forming a lifetime friendship, which was not lessened by Ekaterina's death. Ruthe and Dina made serious donations to the fund that supported the fight for the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1972. When Dina and Ruthe began agitating for the designation of the Park as an "International Biosphere Reserve," Ekaterina was first in line to demonstrate her support, which all by itself would have guaranteed its success.
     
    Not coincidentally, Ruthe and Dina had also dandled Ekaterina's grandbaby, Kate, on their knees practically from the moment of her birth. Dina had