365 Days to Alaska , livre ebook

PUBLISHER S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-4380-1
eISBN 978-1-68335-870-1
Text copyright 2021 Cathy Carr
Illustrations copyright 2021 Maeve Norton
Book design by Marcie Lawrence
Published in 2021 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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For my father, my first and best teacher
Chapter 1
Rigel put the tip of the hunting knife into the hare s belly and made a careful slit.
Once there was a hole in the fur, she could work her fingers in and pull the pelt right off, like turning a glove inside out. Then it was time to lay the pelt over a nearby branch and finish field-dressing the hare.
A raven landed in a nearby spruce tree with a heavy flap. It studied Rigel, its head to one side, then hopped to a lower branch for a better look. It was probably waiting for her to finish gutting the hare and throw its goodies into the scrub. Rigel would bet it had seen hunters do that before. It might have seen her doing it before. Ravens remembered things.
Hello, Rigel said to it.
The raven riffled its feathers. It offered her a croak-not a long, loud cr-r-ruck ; a shorter, softer ah-ah .
Rigel always spoke to ravens. It would have seemed rude not to, they were so smart.
The cleaned hare and its rolled-up skin went into Rigel s pack. She tossed the innards, head, and feet under the spruce where the raven sat. She squatted by the stream to clean the buck knife, then put it back into its sheath. She rinsed her hands quickly in the icy water, wiped them on her hoodie, and went back for the pack and gun. Then Rigel checked the safety on the .22 and put it over her arm in a cradle carry, the way her dad, Bear, had taught her.
Enjoy, she said to the raven before turning away. She d noticed waitresses in restaurants said that when they put your food down. Not that Rigel ate in restaurants very often, but she was no hick. She d been to Fairbanks.
She headed home along the stream.
Rigel was bringing home two hares, not bad for her first time out. Two was enough for a meal for the five of them. She hoped her mother would make a casserole. Lila s rabbit casserole was the best. Bear always said that, even nowadays, when he had almost nothing else nice to say about Lila.
And Rigel had proven Bear was right when he argued last week that she was old enough to hunt on her own, that she had a good head on her shoulders. She s eleven years old, he d said, and Lila had answered, You know, some people would say she s only eleven. For a moment there, Rigel had been afraid they were going to start fighting, on her birthday. But she shoved that memory away. The point was, she had gone out and taken her time and done everything exactly right, and now she was bringing home meat.
If it had been winter, Rigel would have walked back to the cabin on the frozen stream, which was quicker. But breakup had come early this year, and now in mid-May, the ice was already gone. She walked along the trail at the top of the sandy bank instead. She got glimpses of their cabin through the trees and brush as she went along, and started catching snatches of voices. Her sisters were outside.
Izzy s voice came first. Izzy was only five and her high, bright voice carried easily. Willow s voice came later, because it was soft and low. Rigel hoped her voice would sound that nice when she was fourteen.
Rye Bear! Izzy threw down her jump rope and ran to her. Did you get anything?
Rigel twitched her nose and munched with her mouth, the way a hare would.
Rabbits! Izzy shouted. Rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit!
She bunny-hopped beside Rigel all the way back to the cabin.
Hare, not rabbit , Lila would have said. She had a degree in biology and could be picky about that stuff. Hare, rabbit, it s the same thing , that s what Bear would have said. Rigel didn t correct Izzy. She swatted one of Izzy s sunshine-yellow braids instead and Izzy laughed and whirled away. Her real name was Iris, but that name only got used when she was in trouble.
They had a good-sized cabin, ten logs high, with two rooms. There was one window on each side of the front door, and the door and window trim were painted red. The red was pretty against the weathered brown logs, and there was a bench under each window, where you could sit on nice days. The dried head of a northern pike was nailed to the cabin door, jaws spread open to show all of its long, sharp teeth. Wilfred Thompson, one of Bear s old hunting buddies from Fort McPhee, had put that up when the Harman family moved out here. He told them to not take it down, and they never touched it.
Willow was sitting on a bench with a stack of her magazines. She d already read them all and torn out pictures for the collages she liked to make, but it seemed like she could always look through them just one more time.
She turned a page. You re my hero. I m so sick of moose.
They were all sick of moose by the end of winter. Moose soup, moose stew, moose potpie, mooseburger gravy on rice. Usually they would be getting more fresh meat and fish by this time, but everything was messed up in their house, and had been since Christmas.
Rigel wondered if she could go inside. She d like to leave the hares for Lila and wash her hands with warm water and soap. She needed to clean the rifle. And she would have liked a little snack and a mug of tea. She was hungry after the long hours of walking, looking for hare tracks, kicking at scrub and waiting for startled hares to pop out from under the brush.
But the cabin door was closed.
Yeah, Willow said; she must have seen where Rigel was looking. Lila said to go play out for a while. Said she needed to talk to Bear.
Rigel and her sisters called their parents by their first names. They always had. It was one of their father s notions.
Do you know what s going on? Rigel asked.
No clue, but Lila got another sat call this morning, so maybe it had something to do with that.
Their satellite phone was supposed to be reserved for business or emergencies. Its minutes cost a lot and it wasn t easy to charge either, given that they were off the grid and had no electricity. Until this past winter, Rigel had never seen her mom on the satellite phone for more than a minute or two, but lately Lila was taking it out into the cabin entryway, where she could have some privacy, and chatting on it for half an hour at a time.
I m hungry , Rigel grumbled, throwing herself down on the bench.
I am too. Willow opened her magazine again. Taylor Rocks Snapchat! a headline shrieked in big pink letters. Who was Taylor? And what was Snapchat? Probably some TV show, Rigel guessed. If Willow were in a better mood, Rigel would have asked her, but she could tell by Willow s quick flipping of pages that she was nervous, and when Willow was nervous, she got cranky. Better leave her alone.
Rigel rested her back against the cabin wall and closed her eyes.
Rigel s folks had always fought now and then, but Rigel could remember when their arguments were about important things, like how many traplines to run or whether to buy a second snow machine. She wasn t sure when those arguments had gotten hotter and more frequent. It happened gradually, the way a full teakettle heats up until it s red-hot and whistling furiously. By last fall, Bear and Lila were fighting about anything. They could argue for two hours about how many rows of carrots to plant in the garden. The last, biggest, and dumbest argument had been on Christmas Eve, about whether to have blueberry pie or spice cake for Christmas dinner. Lila ended up making pie and Bear cake. The grown-ups did their baking without speaking, which wasn t easy in the cabin s tight quarters. On Christmas Day, they still weren t talking, and Rigel had made sure to have a slice of each dessert, to avoid taking sides.
A few days after Christmas was when Bear and Lila had sat the girls down and told them they d decided a divorce was best, for everyone. That things between them weren t going to get better.
And a few overnight trips to Fairbanks was all it took. Rigel could hardly believe it was that simple, but there were the papers in Bear s old briefcase with the cardboard showing at its corners. Dissolution of Marriage was written right across the top.
Rigel hadn t minded much. That s what she d told herself anyway. At least her parents wouldn t be shouting at each other anymore, or going through one of those times when they weren t speaking at all, which was almost worse than the yelling.
But the rest of the winter in their cabin was so strange it was almost as bad as the days when Bear and Lila were arguing all the time.
For one thing, there were the sleeping arrangements. In a two-room cabin, there weren t a lot of options. The girls had the cabin s smaller room, with its one window and three bunks. Bear and Lila slept in the main room, the bigger one. On one side was their big brass bed, the one Bear had ordered all the way from L.L.Bean in Maine and brought down from town