That was a sign right there, all the Park rats said, and they waited grimly, rifles in hand, for Ruthe and Dina to start preaching conservation. They didn’t have to wait long, and Ruthe and Dina didn’t just preach it; they practiced it. “To leave as small a footprint as possible” was their declared and shameless intention. They grew their own food; they even had half a dozen apple trees that they actually managed to coerce into bearing fruit. They recycled paper. They had a compost heap. They avoided the use of plastic. They wouldn’t allow hunting on their property, which, since it was only eighty acres, didn’t amount to much of a statement, but then they started lobbying in Juneau and Washington, D.C., for stronger laws governing the taking offish and game, and the disposal of human waste in the Bush, and the damming of rivers and streams for power, and the use of heavy equipment in gold mining. Most damning of all, they were personal friends of Jimmy Carter, who visited Camp Theodore at least once every year, and sometimes twice.

That alone should have been enough to ostracize them, to make and keep them bunny-loving, tree-hugging outcasts, but, like everything else, it wasn’t that simple. Ruthe and Dina were too nice, too smart, too funny, too, well, just too damn authentic. Alaskans pride themselves on what makes them different from Outsiders, and, as Mac Devlin put it, “You don’t get much different than a coupla old lesbos living way the hell and gone up a mountain, selling the view to a buncha tree huggers, and making a damn good living at it, too.” “And how can you hate someone who was a WASP?” George Perry said. “They care about the land,” Ekaterina Moonin Shugak said simply, and they were in.