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 had a hundred years before, even perhaps a thousand years before. That it did was at least in part due to the two old women now eating Ruthe's legendary moose stew across from Kate this evening. Kate finished first and got up to refill her bowl. "There's some spice in this I can't identify," she said, hanging over the cauldron on the back of the woodstove. She sniffed at the rising steam. "You don't put cloves in it, do you?"

"Good heavens, no," Ruthe said placidly, but Kate noticed she didn't volunteer what spice it was.

"You don't want the recipe to die with you," she said with intent to provoke.

Dina choked and had to be thumped on the back. She mopped her streaming eyes and said, "That's the first time I've heard that one, at least to Ruthe's face."