Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery by R.E. Donald Page A

attitude toward extravagance, not to mention her attitude toward visitors. The sudden change in her outlook was a source of confusion even for her. Lately she’d been feeling increasingly irritable about Goldie’s threatened defection, and now in a total about-face, she felt herself beginning to not care. In fact, she felt herself sliding down a slippery slope towards some kind of carefree self-indulgence.
    Was it just the arrival of that man?
    Betty picked out two potatoes and began to peel them with a small paring knife. It was difficult to hold the skinny handle of the knife with her arthritic fingers, so it took her longer than it used to. As she worked, she wondered: what was happening to her? She pictured an ice jam on the Yukon River. After the first ice floes blocked the river from bank to bank, pushed relentlessly from upstream, the mass of ice built up one frozen chunk at a time, ice piling on ice in a jagged patchwork until it blocked the river. The river built itself up behind it, only a fraction of its mass moving beneath and around the jammed ice, the dammed water rising higher and wider. When the ice began to thaw and weaken, with the relentless water pressure, small chunks would start to give way, then bigger ones, and before you knew it, all the jammed ice would start to shift and bob, and soon there would be a mighty flood of ice and water rushing downstream, sweeping away everything in its path.
    Had she created an ice jam in her life, in her very soul? Had Orville’s arrival been what finally breached the dam and started the flood? Would it be impossible for her to go back to the simple, ascetic life she’d been living ever since–. Ever since what? What had started this ice jam in her soul?
    Betty’s life had always been about hard work and self-sacrifice and making do. No one had ever given her anything; no one had ever volunteered to make her life easier or more pleasant. Even her mother had been too preoccupied with her own survival to give Bitty (as her mother called her) more than basic care, except for an occasional brief glimpse of tenderness when her father was out of sight. Betty had learned to work at her mother’s side as soon as she could walk. Except for the gifts that nature bestows on all her creatures – gifts like the warmth of the sun, the freshness of a breeze, a cool swallow of clear water from the creek , the smell of newly picked herbs and the taste of wild blueberries – pleasure to Betty and her mother was nothing more than the absence of pain, usually just the oblivion of sleep. Her father had worked her Athapascan mother into an early grave, then worked his daughter just as hard until he traded Betty to a fellow trapper for a new rifle when she was only fourteen.
    Her first husband, if you could call him that, was a taciturn, grey haired French Canadian with a cabin near Hootalinqua who had treated her much like he did his sled dogs. She was told to call him 'patron', which she assumed was his name. He took care of her because she was useful to him, but there was no tenderness or affection. He came to her bed frequently at first, and she was grateful that sex for him was primitive and quick; the less fondling there was, the faster it was over, the sooner he left her alone. She had been with him for two years when she became pregnant. He scowled and grunted when he realized in May that her belly had begun to grow. Soon after, he took her on a three day journey on foot, and left her sitting on a log with her few possessions and a small bundle of tea and dried moose meat at her feet beside the Yukon River. Betty sat on that log for hours, before it sank in that he had no intention of coming back for her. 
    Up to that day, Betty had spent her lifetime living in what could be considered the Yukon wilderness. She had often gone hunting small game, setting rabbit snares or picking herbs and berries, sometimes walking for many miles alone in the vicinity of her camp or cabin.