Amy was from Nanwalek, what they used to call English Bay, and she had learned about Alaskan herbs at her grandmothers knee. Fireweed leaves could be used to brew tea for indigestion, and dried fireweed root could be ground and mixed into a paste with bear grease and used as an ointment on sores or bug bites. It had its culinary purposes as well; young fireweed made for fine salad greens, and the tea didnt have to be medicinal.

Amy had given Rebecca a book, Eleanor Vierecks Alaskas Wilderness Medicines, and Rebecca had brought it with her, thinking she might spend part of the summer looking for the herbs listed there. The book described the herbs in alphabetical order, each with a black-and-white drawing of the plant, and at the back of the book there was a glossary and a couple of lists, one A Therapeutic Use of Alaskan Plants. Under A it had Aphrodisiacangelica. Under B it had Baby bathrose leaf tea.

Baby. Babies. Rebecca stared hard across the stream, at the trunk of a cottonwood lying on its side. She wanted babies, at least one, preferably two. Shed always wanted them. Shed talked to Mark about it before they got married, and he had said sure, just not right away. “Lets give ourselves time to play first, he had said, and grinned, leaving no doubt as to what kind of play he meant.

It wasnt as if she had disagreed with him, but this year they had celebrated their seventh anniversary. Rebecca was now thirty-two years old, and she was beginning to have visions of pushing a stroller and a walker at the same time. Shed tried to reopen the discussion with Mark over the Christmas holiday, but at the same time he started to tell her about this defunct gold mine for sale in the Wood River Mountains. Hed always had a hankering to look for gold, he told her, although in seven years of marriage this was the first shed heard of it. He seemed so excited and so enthusiastic, though, and Rebecca tried so hard to be the good wife. This was obviously something Mark wanted very badly. How could she say no?

Halfway through the summer she began to wonder how much the gold mine was a ruse to avoid the baby talk. Moving out here, in the middle of nowhere, no hospital, no doctor, no pharmacy, how could she have a baby out here? The nearest school was in Newenham; how could she raise a child out here? She wanted to drive her child to soccer practice and ice-skating classes, and to the movies and Baskin-Robbins afterward. She wanted to go to parent-teacher conferences. She wanted to join the PTA. She wanted to shop at Gap for Kids and Gymboree.