All the Winters After Read Online Free PDF

faces in Caboose, Alaska. But he returned with a deep disdain for the World Out There. In a few short, horrific years, he said, he’d learned a lifetime of lessons about human nature and wasn’t interested in learning more.
    â€œI’ll take plain old nature with a minimum of the human element, thank you,” he was fond of saying.
    But then he’d met Bets, and she restored his faith in humankind, or at least in womankind, and instead of the life he’d planned as a hermit bachelor, he became a family man. Still, he answered to no one (except, it was a known fact, Bets) and lived off the sea and the land for the most part, earning a decent living as a fisherman. They’d been able to transform the cabin into a real house, with huge windows facing the bay and the Kenai Mountains. Bets had eased him into one compromise after the other over the years, first with a generator and then, once Caboose Electric Association extended their service, real electricity, although they never did have central heating. She’d confided to Kache that it was next on her list, right before the Cessna crashed.
    It made sense for homesteaders, like all farmers, to have large families to help with the work. But Lettie and A. R., and later Bets and Glenn, had only had two children. Fortunately, Denny, like his father Glenn before him, had been able to do the work of three or four strapping boys. Kache, however, had been a disappointment, and his father had had a hard time hiding just how much Kache had let him down on a daily basis.
    A bull moose plunged through the spruce trees, and Kache slowed to a stop and let it cross in front of him. Its long legs navigated the mud with each step before it disappeared into the alder bushes. Kache drove on and turned down their private road to the homestead, but he quickly pulled over. Road was an optimistic term. A churned-up pathway of sludge obstructed by downed spruce and birch trunks and overgrown alders was more like it. He grabbed the flashlight, which was also optimistic—the light dim, the battery exhausted. Aunt Snag knew to keep the battery fresh, but Kache should have checked it before he left. He didn’t want to walk in the dark through moose and bear country at the onset of spring when the animals experienced the boldest of hunger pangs.
    His cell phone was useless: no service. He should turn back. Get in the car and head into town and return tomorrow. But his dad, his mom, Denny—they seemed so close. A slap on his back, an arm around his shoulders, as certain as the cold on his feet, and he shivered from both. He smelled the fire from their woodstove, as if they had kept it burning all these years. All around him, they said his name in all its variations and tones, so achingly clear: “Kache, honey?” “Oh, Ka-achemak, there’s my widdle brodder…” “Did you hear me, Son? Pay attention.” He heard their snow machines, though there wasn’t any snow, though there wasn’t any them . He didn’t believe in heaven exactly, but this place was thick with recollections and maybe something more. If their spirits watched him, somehow, from somewhere, didn’t he want to prove he had become capable of more than any of them thought possible? But had he? No. A city boy number-cruncher-turned-couch-potato who wore pretty boots and forgot a decent flashlight would hardly invoke awe. Still. If they were waiting, they’d been waiting twenty years, and he didn’t want to make them wait another day.
    He made his way through the mud, tripping, sinking, until the full moon rose from behind the mountains. Like a helpful neighbor in the nick of time, it shone its generous golden light through the cobalt sky. A wolf howled, holding a single lonely note in the distance. The scent of spruce and mud and sea kept dredging up the imagined hint of smoke. All those scents had always come together here. Even in the summers, a fire burned