Note: The chapters posted now are from the revised book.
PROLOGUE
A time ago in a frontier territory, migrating swans made stopovers at an inlet hedged in hardy reeds and fenced off by foothills. Whistler and trumpeter swans swooped in to tuck up their wings for a night or two in the spring and in the fall. Sometimes a flock of them came, sometimes a flotilla. The strong-flying birds had been landing on the far bay of the inlet for as long as the glacier melted into freshwater streams.
One pair usually stayed to nest after the others flew north. They were waiting in the fall with their cygnets when the migrating swans came chuffing in, searching for sedges before they made their long flight south.
A few years after 1900, a young man began building a cabin near the secluded shore. He couldn’t meet the swans properly because they ruffled up every time he strode towards them. After a few weeks, the nesting swans saw that two people were working on the cabin as if it were a large nest. Then the man sailed past them along the inlet to the ocean. He sailed back again with salmon in his skiff, landing near the sunflowers and vegetables that the young woman tended. And there was a boy, not seven years old, who tossed corn and sunflower seeds for the swans.
Since the resident pair found it safe to feast on the harvest leftovers, the traveling swans trampled up the bank and into the yard. Afterwards, there were swan feathers and swansdown to gather up from the ground.
When the migration was over, the woman took the precious feathers to the nearest town on the Alaska seacoast. That was half a morning’s wagon ride from the cabin under the foothills. Merchant ships came to the harbor for salmon and fur. The swan plumes sold like caviar. Plumes were used for hats while the smaller feathers and swansdown filled pillows and powder puffs and even featherbeds.
As more folks moved to Alaska, the family at the bay couldn’t help but notice how the migrating flocks were dwindling. Towards 1920, fewer and fewer of the trumpeter swans made rest stops at the inlet. But whistlers still came after nesting in the tundra.