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it, had taken just enough trees to let the sun through, not so many as to look as if someone had come through with the blade of a Caterpillar tractor. Stumps had been cut to the ground, drilled and filled with an organic stump-rotting powder, with the result that they were already being overgrown by raspberry and blueberry bushes and wild roses and of course the inevitable fireweed, with horsetail, forget-me-nots, and lupine fighting over what ground was left. Usually the trees and the brush formed a dark undergrowth impenetrable by eye or foot, close, confining, to some even claustrophobic; when Len Dreyer was done, the sun dappled a landscape of trees, shrubs, and flowers that, if it hadn’t been tamed, was at least open to be admired.
     
    That was the last big job Len had done for her. She’d been able to tend to other chores as they cropped up on her own, until Johnny Morgan had appeared on her doorstep and indicated his intention to embrace permanent Park rathood. Her one-room cabin with its sleeping loft was roomy enough for one person. With Johnny, it was getting a little crowded. They’d made it through the winter amicably, more or less, and now it was spring with summer hard on spring’s heels. They’d be spending most of their time out of doors, but autumn would come, when they would be driven back inside, first by rain and then by snow and then by the bitter cold of the long Arctic winter night.
     
    And the Park was rife with stories of lifelong friends, entire families, and couples married and unmarried splitting the blanket over the effects of that long night on the psyche. Kate wasn’t about to let that happen to her and Johnny.
     
    Initially, the plan was to have added a room on to her cabin. The winter together had changed her mind. Or, truthfully, Johnny’s. “Why not my own cabin?”
     
    She didn’t have a lot of experience raising kids, so she said unwisely, “Because I said so.”
     
    “That’s not good enough,” he told her, and, impressed by the lack of temper in the statement, she shut up and listened. They had been sitting across the table from one another, Kate sprawled back with her hand wrapped around a mug of cocoa, Johnny sitting up straight, torso precisely perpendicular to the edge. Kate was beginning to recognize Johnny’s body language. This posture meant business.
     
    “You’re kind of solitary,” he said. “You like living alone or you wouldn’t be here on your dad’s homestead in the middle of twenty million acres of national park, with the nearest village twenty-five miles down an unpaved, unmaintained road.” He wasn’t being confrontational or accusatory, exactly. It was more like he’d adopted the impartial air of the scholar. A sociologist, perhaps, come to the Park to examine non-mainstream socioeconomic systems, about which he would then write his thesis, which would then earn him a doctorate, followed by a publishing contract, followed by a visiting chair at UC Berkeley, a college in a state which celebrated alternative lifestyles.
     
    Johnny had continued to tick off items on his list, and Kate had reined in her imagination. “Even Dad only visited, or you visited him in Anchorage, you never lived together. Right?”
     
    “Right so far,” she said obediently.
     
    “I want to stay here with you. I’m not going back to Anchorage to live with her, and I’m sure as hell not going back to Arizona to live with my grandmother. I don’t want to be anywhere else but here, so if I’m smart I’m going to annoy you as little as possible.”
     
    She couldn’t help laughing a little. “You don’t annoy me, Johnny.”
     
    He grinned. “Thanks, Kate. That’s so sweet of you,” and then had to duck when she’d thrown a spatula at him. “To tell you the truth, Kate, I’m feeling a little cramped myself.”
     
    Amused, she said, “Oh, you are, are you?”
     
    “Yes. It’s why I couldn’t stand Arizona, too many people. Which is why I think I