Tisha: The Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaskan Wilderness

The sun was just coming up over the mountains--blood red and cold. I felt as if I was standing in the mightiest cathedral that had ever been built. There was no end to it, and no beginning. All I could do was look at it and worship.

Now I was going to be myself. I wasn't going to be hard to get along with or go out of my way to say anything mean, but from now on people were going to have to take me for what I was.

Are you too destitute to buy shoes Miss Winters?" "What makes you ask?" "I know the Indians are accustomed to wearing such footgear, but I've never seen respectable white women do so. They prefer shoes. From the rear I might have taken you for a squaw." "Nobody asked you to look at my rear.

I never realized how much water a person used until I started packing it up from the creek---water for washing clothes, for washing yourself,for cooking,washing dishes. That’s all I seem to do all day is pack water and then dump it out.

After a while I found myself near Mary Angus' shack. It looked so lonely and forlorn I almost started to cry. For the first time I really understood why she was staying here, how even though she was sick she could keep on living in a space like that. If you loved somebody enough you could live anywhere.

The revolver lay heavy against my thigh. I hadn’t even thought to use it, I realized. I mentioned it to Mr. Strong. “It was fortunate you didn’t. That grizzly would have torn you to pieces.

It was only too bad that the women who were going to wear them couldn’t see the whole sickening process of trapping, killing and skinning the animals they came from. They’d never wear them again.

People must have noticed I’d changed, because they acted differently towards me, as if I wasn’t a kid anymore—or a cheechako either for that matter. They stopped asking me things like whether it was cold enough for me or not and what I wanted to be when I grew up.

So the Indian went to this white man and he said, ‘Bud, I like your style. Want to live the way you do. How do I do it?

He kept on complaining so much all the way over that I knew he was scared Mert was going to die.

Anne, that’s fresh meat—eight hundred pounds of it. Think of it,” he said, “pickled tongue, braised kidneys, liver, heart, steak. You’ll have enough for the whole winter.

Now I realized what the North was really like. It was made for winter, because winter was when everything went on.

It was like traveling through a stage setting, the air clear and tingling, the moonlight sparkling off bushes laced with frost.

That Indian was stuck. From living in one place and eating the white man’s food, he’d gotten weak. Flour, sugar, biscuits—none of that stuff can keep you going for long. You need meat in the winter, good fresh meat with plenty of fat on it. But there wasn’t any meat around, at least not nearby. The white man had chased it away and the Indian, not being a hunter anymore, didn’t have the strength to go any long distance for it.

was almost looking forward to being back in Chicken. I’d left there hoping I’d never see the place again, but staying with Cathy made me realize that my troubles just weren’t that big.

A two-dog winter, now that was tough, but a three-dog, “Well, missis,” he said, “it gets so cold the smoke freezes in the stovepipe.

Him and those other old-timers always drop by,” Jimmy said. “They like to. You know—they’re kinda lonely.

of her hand. “One thing you’ll learn is that it doesn’t take much to collect a crowd in Alaska. As for the trip, you don’t have a thing to worry about. It’s only ninety miles and you’ll be perfectly safe. Mr. Strong will take good care of you.” But it really wasn’t the crowd that was bothering me. Hardly anybody was paying any attention to me. To the people here this was just a little event, nothing like the riverboat coming in, which was really exciting to them. And I wasn’t