She watched him chivvy and chastise Tim and Amelia for two hours, a grouchy little bully even older than she was, and loved him and wished for him immortality, or to live as long as she did, because she had no wish to live without him.

“All right, Moses finally decided, and stepped back.

Amelia, trembling in every limb, tears and sweat running down her bewildered face, folded up where she stood, subsiding to the ground with a thump and a grunt. Tim, more prideful, managed to walk to the porch and more or less fell onto one of the folding chairs.

“Now to the sweat, Moses said. “Come on, come on, move it!

Amelia began to cry in earnest. With no regard for her distress, Moses took hold by the scruff of her neck and yanked her to her feet. Tim, determined to work the old fart into the ground if it killed him, struggled upright on his own. Both of them tottered around the cabin to the sweat lodge next to the creek, a tiny, enclosed shack, weatherproofed more to keep the steam in than the cold out. There was a woodstove inside, vented through the roof, with a pan of rocks sitting on top and a bucket of water sitting on the floor. Built-in benches wide enough to lie down on provided space for four. Moses stripped both kids down to their underwear and more or less shoved them onto a bench. Tim tried not to look at the lacy little brassiere Amelia was wearing, or at the further bruising the removal of her clothes had revealed. Amelia lay down and closed her eyes, oblivious to his presence.

Moses head popped around the corner of the cabin. “You coming?

Bill smiled at him. “A little too crowded at the moment for my taste.

His grin was equal parts understanding and lechery. “Later.

“Later, she agreed.

EIGHT

Nenevok Creek, September 2

The bed shifted as Mark got stealthily to his feet. Clothing rustled as he dressed, the door creaked as it opened and creaked again as it closed. Rebecca rolled to her back and stared at the ceiling, at the patched, cracked, stained ceiling of uninsulated plywood four-by-eights cut haphazardly to fit. The double bed was shoved into a corner, and the air blew cold through the chinks. Theyd used the down comforter all summer except for eleven days at the beginning of July.

Now it was September. September 2, four days from a flight home.

She was going home. There was no doubt of that. She was going home with or without her husband. She was going back home, going back to Anchorage, if not to that nice split-level in the old neighborhood in Spenard with the thirty-year-old prickly rose bush bending the back fence out of shape and the thirty-one-year-old birch coating the lawn with leaves. The yard sloped down in front of the house, and when the four different varieties of poppies she had planted and so carefully nursed through their infancies were in bloom it was like something out of Disney.