Ms. Rhodes herded her chattering charges out of the classroom and through town and down to the docks. Everyone boarded Ms. Rhodes’s aluminum fishing boat.
They motored out into the bay and sped up, bumping across the waves, water splashing at their sides. The teacher guided the boat up the waters of the fjord, mountains all around them, down one stretch of water and up another, until they stopped seeing any cabins or boats at all. Here the water was aquamarine. Leni could see a sow and two black cubs walking along an isolated shore.
Ms. Rhodes pulled up to a dock in a narrow cove. Matthew jumped onto the weathered dock and tied the boat down.
“Matthew’s grandparents homesteaded this land in ’32,” Ms. Rhodes said. “It was their first family homestead. Who wants to see a pirate cave?”
Pandemonium.
Ms. Rhodes led the younger kids up the beach, marching through the heavy sand, stepping over huge pieces of driftwood.
When they rounded the corner of the bay and disappeared, Matthew took Leni by the hand. “Come on,” he said at last. “I’ll show you something cool.”
He led her upland, into knee-deep grass that ended at a sparse forest of stunted trees.
“Shhh,” he said, pressing a finger to his lips.
After that Leni noticed every twig that broke beneath her and every whisper of the wind. Occasionally a bush plane puttered overhead. At a wall of greenery, bushes grown to Alaskan size from all the water that ran down from the mountains, he showed her a path she wouldn’t have seen on her own. They ducked into it, walked hunched over in the cool shadows.
A small seam of light drew them forward. Leni’s eyes adjusted slowly.
A vista opened up in the break between the bushes: marshland, as far as the eye could see. Tall, waving green grass through which meandered a lazy, motionless river. Mountains were tucked in close, arms drawn protectively around the marshes.
Leni counted fifteen huge brown bears in the marshes, munching on the grass, pawing for fish in the stagnant water. They were great, shaggy creatures—called grizzly bears by most of the world—with giant heads. They moved in a shambling way, as if their bones were held together with rubber bands. Mama bears kept their cubs close and away from the males.
Leni watched the majestic animals move through the tall grass. “Wow.”
A bush plane banked overhead, began its descent.
“My grandpa took me here when I was just a kid,” Matthew whispered. “I remember telling him he was crazy to homestead land so close to the bears, and he said, It’s Alaska, as if that were the only answer that mattered. My grandparents relied on their dogs to run off the bears if they came too close. The government created a national refuge around us.”
“Only here,” Leni said with a laugh.
She leaned against Matthew. Only here.
God, she loved this place; she loved Alaska’s wild ferocity, its majestic beauty. Even more than the land, she loved the people to whom it spoke. She hadn’t realized until just this moment how deep her love for Alaska ran.
“Matthew! Leni!”
They heard Ms. Rhodes yelling for them.
They ducked back through the scrub brush and came out on the beach. Ms. Rhodes was there, with the younger girls gathered around her. Off to her left, a float plane was pulled up onto the beach. “Hurry!” Ms. Rhodes said, waving her hand. “Marthe, Agnes, get in the plane. We have to get back to Kaneq. Mad Earl has had a heart attack.”
*
MAD EARL DIED.
Leni couldn’t quite wrap her mind around it. Yesterday, the old man had been alive, vibrant, drinking moonshine, telling stories. The compound had been a busy place, a hive of activity: chain saws whirring, steel being fired into blades over open flames, axes chopping wood, dogs barking. Without him, it fell into quiet.
Leni didn’t cry for Mad Earl. She wasn’t that much of a hypocrite, but she wanted to weep for the loss she saw in the faces around her. For Thelma and Ted and Moppet and Clyde and the rest of the people who lived at the compound; the blank space left by Mad Earl would hurt for a long time.
Now they were all out in the bay, near the boat launch below the Russian church.
Leni sat in the dented aluminum canoe that her father had salvaged, with Mama in front of her. Dad was behind Leni, keeping them steady in the water.
There were boats all around them, floating in the calm of this bright day. They had gathered for their version of a funeral. It was almost summer; you could feel it in the sun’s heat. Hundreds of snow geese had returned to the head of the bay. The craggy shoreline, empty and slicked with ice all winter, now bore all manner of life. On a rock in the middle of the water, a green and black tower of stone that rose up from the deep, sea lions crowded over one another. Seagulls flew above them in lazy white arcs, yapping like terriers. She saw nesting gulls and diving cormorants. Seals, with black or silver cocker spaniel faces, poked their noses up from the water alongside otters who lay lazily on their backs, cracking clams in quick-moving paws.