Sixty Miles South

Chapter 1: The Last Flight North

The turboprop banked hard over the Chugach range, and Kenna Sandstrom pressed her forehead against the window to watch the world below turn white and infinite. She was sixteen years old, and she was being sent away.

Not sent away exactly. That was her mother's word—"sent." As if Kenna were a package requiring a signature. What her mother had actually said, from the hospital bed with the IV taped to the back of her hand and her skin the color of old paper, was: "You'll stay with your father until I'm better. It's already arranged."

Arranged. As though Russ Sandstrom were a hotel.

Kenna hadn't seen her father in two years. Not since the divorce finalized, not since he'd packed his truck and driven north from Anchorage without looking back. He'd called a few times—stilted, awkward conversations that lasted four minutes on average, because Kenna had timed them. He sent money on her birthday. He sent a knife once, a real one, carbon steel with a birch handle, and her mother had confiscated it immediately.

Now her mother was in Providence Alaska Medical Center with what the doctors were calling a "complicated cholecystectomy recovery" but what Kenna understood to be an infection that had turned septic, and the only family she had left was a man who lived in a cabin eighty miles from the nearest paved road.

The bush pilot, a thick-armed woman named Deb who smelled like diesel and cinnamon gum, glanced back from the cockpit. "First time out to the interior?"

"First time anywhere," Kenna said.

"Your dad's place is on the Koyukuk drainage. Pretty country. Cold as hell this time of year, but pretty."

"How cold?"

"Thirty, forty below some nights. You got gear?"

Kenna looked down at her duffel bag, which contained three pairs of jeans, a laptop she wouldn't be able to charge, and a parka her mother's friend had lent her that was rated to negative twenty. "Some."

Deb made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Your dad'll sort you out. He knows what he's doing out there."

Kenna wasn't sure about that. She wasn't sure about anything regarding Russ Sandstrom except that he'd chosen a frozen wilderness over his family, and now she was supposed to pretend that was fine.

The plane descended through a ceiling of clouds and suddenly the world was close—spruce forests stretching to every horizon, rivers frozen into white ribbons, and mountains that looked like the spine of something enormous and sleeping. Kenna could see no roads. No towns. No evidence that anyone lived here at all.

Then a clearing appeared, a rectangle of flattened snow beside a frozen creek, and at its edge a cabin that looked like it had grown out of the ground. Smoke curled from a stovepipe. A figure stood near the makeshift runway, hands in his pockets.

Deb brought the ski-equipped Cessna down with a series of jolts that made Kenna's teeth click together. The propeller wound down. The silence that replaced it was the loudest thing Kenna had ever heard—a vast, pressing quiet that seemed to have weight.

"End of the line," Deb said.

Kenna climbed out into cold that hit her like a wall. It wasn't just temperature. It was a physical thing, an assault on every exposed inch of skin. Her nostrils froze shut on the first breath. Her eyes watered and the tears began to crystallize on her lashes.

The figure by the runway was her father.

Russ Sandstrom was forty-four but looked older. He'd always been lean, but now he was gaunt, his cheekbones sharp beneath a beard that had come in heavy and streaked with gray. He wore canvas overalls and a wool shirt and boots that looked handmade. His eyes were the same—pale blue, watchful—but there was something behind them that hadn't been there before. A wariness. A constant low-grade alertness, like a dog that had been hit and was waiting for the next blow.

"Kenna," he said.

"Dad."

They stood there in the killing cold, neither moving to close the distance. Deb hauled Kenna's duffel from the cargo hold and set it on the snow between them like a referee placing a ball at midfield.

"I'll be back in three weeks for a supply run," Deb told Russ. "You need anything before then, you've got the sat phone."

"Appreciate it."

Deb looked at Kenna, and something in her expression softened. "You'll be okay, kid. It's quieter than you're used to, but you'll adjust."

Then she was back in the cockpit, and the Cessna was taxiing, and the engine sound was climbing, and the plane was lifting off the snow and banking south, and Kenna was alone with her father for the first time in seven hundred and forty-one days.

Russ picked up her duffel. "Cabin's warm. Come on."

She followed him across the clearing. The snow was packed hard and squeaked under her boots—a sound she'd read about but never heard. The cold was already working through her borrowed parka. She could feel it in her fingers, in her toes, in the bones of her face.

The cabin was small but solid. Log walls, a plank floor, a cast-iron woodstove that radiated heat like a living thing. One room served as kitchen and living space, with a table built from rough-sawn lumber and two chairs that didn't match. A doorway led to a back room where Kenna could see a cot with a sleeping bag on it.

"That's yours," Russ said, nodding toward the back room. "I sleep out here by the stove."

"Okay."

He set her duffel on the cot. "You hungry?"

"I guess."

He ladled stew from a pot on the woodstove—moose meat, she realized, with potatoes and some kind of root vegetable she didn't recognize. It was good. Better than she expected. She ate two bowls while Russ sat across from her and ate one, and neither of them said much.

Finally Kenna set her spoon down. "Mom's going to be okay. The doctors said the antibiotics are working."

"Good. That's good."

"She didn't want to send me here."

Russ looked at her. His expression didn't change, but something moved behind his eyes. "I know."

"There was nobody else. Aunt Gail is in Juneau and she's—"

"I know, Kenna. It's fine. You're welcome here."

The word "welcome" sat between them like a stone. Kenna looked around the cabin—at the traps hanging on pegs by the door, the rifle on a rack above the stove, the shelves of canned goods and ammunition and books. So many books. Field guides, survival manuals, topographic atlases, and stacked beside them, paperback novels—the same adventure stories Russ used to read to her when she was small.

"You read a lot out here," she said.

"Not much else to do after dark."

"No electricity?"

"Solar panel charges a battery bank in summer. This time of year, I've got a few hours of light to work with. Mostly I use the kerosene lamp."

Kenna tried to imagine her father—a man who'd worked as a geological surveyor in Anchorage, who'd had a truck and a mortgage and a favorite sports bar—sitting in this cabin by lamplight reading paperbacks while the temperature outside dropped to forty below.

"Why did you come here, Dad?"

He was quiet for a long time. The stove ticked and popped. Wind pressed against the cabin walls.

"Seemed like the right thing," he said finally.

It wasn't an answer, and they both knew it. But Kenna was tired—tired from the flight, tired from the cold, tired from the months of watching her mother get sicker—and she let it go.

She crawled into the sleeping bag on the cot in the back room. It was a good bag, rated to negative forty, and it swallowed her whole. Through the doorway she could see her father sitting at the table, turning something over in his hands. It was too dark to tell what it was.

"Dad?"

"Yeah."

"Goodnight."

A pause. "Goodnight, Kenna."

She closed her eyes. The silence of the Alaskan interior pressed in from every direction, enormous and alive, and she slept.