One road, a gravel bed left over a thriving copper mine in the early days of the last century, was graded during the summer but not maintained after the first snowfall. If you wanted to get somewhere in the Park, you flew. If you didn’t fly, you took a boat. If the river was frozen over, you drove a snow machine. If you didn’t have a snow machine, you used snow-shoes. If you didn’t have snowshoes, you stayed home in front of the fire until spring and tried not to beat up on your family. There were Park rats who disappeared into the woodwork in October and were not seen again until May, when it was time to get their boats out of dry dock and back into the water, but they were few in number and so determinedly unsociable that they weren’t missed.

The Park, in fact, looked much as it had a hundred years before, even perhaps a thousand years before. That it did was at least in part due to the two old women now eating Ruthe’s legendary moose stew across from Kate this evening. Kate finished first and got up to refill her bowl. “There’s some spice in this I can’t identify,” she said, hanging over the cauldron on the back of the woodstove. She sniffed at the rising steam. “You don’t put cloves in it, do you?”

“Good heavens, no,” Ruthe said placidly, but Kate noticed she didn’t volunteer what spice it was.

“You don’t want the recipe to die with you,” she said with intent to provoke.

Dina choked and had to be thumped on the back. She mopped her streaming eyes and said, “That’s the first time I’ve heard that one, at least to Ruthe’s face.”

They finished their stew and moved on to coffee. “Like a piece of pie, Kate?” Ruthe said.

“Yes,” Kate said, practically before Ruthe finished getting the words out of her mouth.

On top of everything else, Ruthe was an incredible cook.

She’d trained all the chefs hired for Camp Teddy. No visitor ever went home hungry.