A fine and bitter snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

instructed a nine-year-old Kate in the art of rappelling down a cliff face, after Ruthe had taught her how to get up it. Thanks to Ruthe and Dina, before Kate was twelve, she was on a first-name basis with every living thing in the Park, Animalia and Plan-tae, by division, class, order, family, genus, and species. Both women had taken her white-water canoeing on the Kanuyaq and saltwater kayaking on Prince William Sound. In this, they had Ekaterina's tacit, if not overt, approval, because in those days all it took for Kate to be against something was Ekaterina to be for it. The result was a greater understanding of the ecosystems among which she lived, and an appreciation of the whole of nature itself that would last her whole life long.
     
    So, not unnaturally, when it came time to lobby for the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, also known as d-2, Park rats were unsurprised when the Niniltna Native Association, of which the same Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was then president and chief executive officer, lined up behind it. ANILCA created ten new national parks within the state, and added to four already existing parks, one of which had Camp Teddy smack in the middle of it.
     
    The Park was now 20 million acres in size, located between the Quilak Mountains and the Glenn Highway on the north, the Canadian border on the east, Prince William Sound in the south, and, variously, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the pipeline haul road, and the Alaska Railroad on the west. It was drained by the Kanuyaq River, which twisted and turned over 225 miles in its search for the sea, coming to it in an immense delta east of Alaganik Bay, which saw the return each year of five species of Alaskan salmon in quantities capable of supplying tables in gourmet restaurants as far away as New York City, as well as the drying racks and smokehouses as far upriver as the creek behind Kate's cabin.
     
    The river was navigable by boat in summer and by snow machine in winter. The coast was almost impenetrable everywhere else, defended by a lush coastal rain forest made of Sitka spruce, hemlock, alder, birch, willow, and far too much devil's club. Behind it, the land rose into a broad valley, then a plateau, foothills, and lastly the Quilaks, mountains forming an arc of the Alaska Range. There was a grizzly bear ("Of the Kingdom Animalia" went Dina's voice, starchy and schoolmarmy, "Ursus arctos horribilis, once known to roam much of the continent of North America, now restricted to the northern Rockies, western Canada, and, of course, Alaska") for every ten square miles, and following a good salmon year, even more. There were moose, white-tailed deer, mountain goats, Dall sheep, wolves, coyotes, wolverines, lynx, fox both arctic and red, beaver, marmot, otters, both land and sea, mink, marten, muskrat, and snowshoe hare. There were birds from the mighty bald eagle to the tiny golden-crowned sparrow, and every winged and web-footed thing in between.
     
    The hand of man lay lightly here. There were a few good-sized towns, Cordova on the coast, Ahtna in the interior, both with about three thousand people, and maybe thirty villages ranging in population from 4 to 403. One road, a gravel bed left over a thriving copper mine in the early days of the last century, was graded during the summer but not maintained after the first snowfall. If you wanted to get somewhere in the Park, you flew. If you didn't fly, you took a boat. If the river was frozen over, you drove a snow machine. If you didn't have a snow machine, you used snow-shoes. If you didn't have snowshoes, you stayed home in front of the fire until spring and tried not to beat up on your family. There were Park rats who disappeared into the woodwork in October and were not seen again until May, when it was time to get their boats out of dry dock and back into the water, but they were few in number and so determinedly unsociable that they weren't missed.
     
    The Park, in fact, looked much as it