Kate keeps warning me not to get too close to the animals already, she’d probably freak if she knew I was going to write a whole journal about them. Vanessa says Kate’s probably afraid a bear is going to rip my head off. If one smells that calf it could happen I guess. I’ll be careful.
Van and I are looking for jobs for the summer. We both want to make some money, Van doesn’t even get an allowance. I was thinking maybe we could find someone who lives in the Park who fishes in Prince William Sound who needs help picking fish. There’s an old woman named Mary who’s some kind of relative of Kate’s who has a setnet site on Alaganik Bay. That would be cool.
1
Yuck!“ The pool of slush covered the road from snow berm to snow berm and thirteen-year-old Andrea Kvasnikof had just stepped in it up to her ankle and over the tops of her brand-new, white on white Nike Kaj. ”Ms. Doogan! Ms. Doogan, my shoe’s all wet!“
“This is where the leading edge of Grant Glacier was in 1778,” Ms. Doogan said, standing in front of a signpost surrounded by the seventeen students of the seventh and eighth grade classes of Niniltna Public School. “Who can tell me what else happened in Alaska that year?”
“The Civil War started!” cried Laurie Manning, a redheaded virago who seemed always to be on the verge of declaring war herself.
“No, the Revolutionary War!” yelled Roger Corley, a dark-browed eighth-grader who wasn’t going to let some little old seventh-grade baby go unchallenged.
“Not a war, stupids,” Betty Freedman said calmly. Betty always spoke calmly, an unnerving quality in an adolescent. She didn’t peer over the tops of her glasses only because she had twenty-twenty vision and didn’t need them, but it was impossible not to imagine two round lenses perched on her nose, magnifying her big blue eyes and increasing her resemblance to an owl. With all that fine white-blond hair, a great snowy owl. She even blinked slowly. “That was the year Captain Cook sailed to Alaska, wasn’t it, Ms. Doogan.”