CHAPTER ONE

THE PAPAS

BO’S PAPAS were Jack Jackson and Arvid Ivorsen. She didn’t have a mama.

Bo started out with a mama, of course. Everyone does.

Hers was Mean Milly—not a nice motherly sort of person as anyone could tell from her name—but Mean Milly didn’t want the job of mama, so she took off. Just before she got on the steamboat headed upriver she marched over to Arvid, who was standing on the riverbank smoking a cigarette, and shoved her baby at him.

A few minutes later Jack came out of the mine cookshack and there was Arvid looking startled, standing on the banks of the Yukon with a baby in his arms, watching the steamboat go away.

Jack could see that Arvid didn’t know one thing about newborns because of the way the baby’s head was wobbling around. But Jack was an expert on the subject, so naturally they partnered up to take care of Bo.

And that’s how Bo came to have no mama and two papas.

*   *   *

SHE WASN’T long out of diapers when she found that it wasn’t the usual arrangement. And she could see that hers weren’t the usual sort of fathers. People meeting them for the first time would get this look on their faces the way people do when they come up against something out of the ordinary. Trying not to look surprised, trying to pretend they’d seen fathers like that lots of times.

For one thing, her papas were so much the same. Both massive, with bulging arm muscles straining the sleeves of their shirts. And very tall. You don’t often see one man that big, and so two of them together is the kind of thing you can’t quite take in for a minute.

Other than that, they were completely different. Arvid had ice blue eyes and straight Swedish hair, getting a little thin on top. He always swore in Swedish.

Jack was black with smoky gray eyes and a soft Southern way of talking. He hardly ever swore.

Bo called them both Papa, which might have gotten confusing, but it didn’t.

When Graf came along, the papas hardly blinked. Just added him to the mix.

Explaining about unusual things can get long and complicated, so when someone asked how he and Arvid came to have two kids, Jack would just smile and say it was downright uncanny how he and Arvid were always both there, right on the spot, whenever someone was giving kids away.

*   *   *

ARVID AND JACK had known each other a long time when they got Bo. Arvid came north during the big Klondike gold rush in 1897, and Jack came a few years later along with hordes of other men. That gold rush fizzled out fast, and most of those stampeders, disgusted and broke, couldn’t leave fast enough. But some, like Jack and Arvid, stayed—because they liked the mining life and because they liked the country.

Over the next twenty years Jack and Arvid often crossed paths in one mining camp or another, had a game of cards or teamed up to do some blacksmithing. They were both working at the Rampart mine when Bo happened to them.

Right after that, Jack and Arvid went to work at the Ballard Creek Mine up the Koyukuk River. Jack was the camp cook, and Arvid did the blacksmithing. But after they got Graf, the mine ran out of gold, closed down, and the papas had to find another job. They had to leave the place that had been Bo’s home for all of her life.

So they were on the way to their new job in a mining camp, which was far away in the Iditarod country. Down two big rivers and up two.

Down was easier because they could just glide along the cold river, using the long pole to steer. Up was harder because they had to travel against the current. Then they might have to use the little three-horsepower gas engine—but not any more than they had to because gas was hard to come by.

Bo and Graf were under the bow, snuggled into the billow of down sleeping bags their papas kept stored there. They crawled under there when it was raining or the wind was blowing.

Bo was trying to teach Graf how to think backwards. Graf had only belonged to them for a little while, so she wanted him to see how lucky it was that they’d all ended up together.

But thinking backwards took imagination, and she wasn’t sure Graf had any.

It was Jack who had taught Bo how to think backwards.

“A lot of little things have to happen first before a big thing can happen. Really tiny things—things no one would pay any attention to—could change someone’s life forever,” he said.

Like if Arvid hadn’t stopped to have a cigarette, Bo wouldn’t ever have belonged to the papas. Just a little, little thing like that had turned her life in a completely different direction.

Bo did a lot of thinking backwards. Jack said she was really good at it, because it was like anything else. If you practice a lot, you improve. But you could get carried away—go backwards on and on, all the way to the beginning of the earth.

You had to know when to stop.

The papas had pulled their yellow slickers on when it started to rain. Jack was hunkered near the bow, reading the water under the brim of his rain hat. Arvid was standing spread-legged for balance, steering the boat with the long pole.

If a wind whipped up and turned the river rough, or if the rain fell so hard they couldn’t see anymore, the papas would pull the boat up on the beach, and they’d wait it out.

But it wasn’t that bad yet.

It was noisy under the bow, the little waves slap-slapping against the bottom of the boat, the raindrops drumming over their heads on the wood of the bow, so Bo had to talk loudly.

“See, Max always brought the mail in the winter with his dog team and Silver was his lead dog. But Silver got a hurt foot, and Max had to put him in the sled. And he hooked up Frosty to take his place. But Frosty wasn’t as hard-pulling a dog as Silver, so Max was late with the mail.”

She paused dramatically. “See, if Max wasn’t late, he wouldn’t have been behind you and your dad. He would have been ahead of you. So he never would have found you in the mail shack. And you would have frozen. And it’s all because of Silver’s hurt foot!”

Bo thought she had told all this very well, but Graf just gave her a troubled look and didn’t say anything.

Bo decided to give up on thinking backwards.

“Do you remember your dad?”

He didn’t answer, and she hadn’t expected him to. Graf wasn’t a big talker.

His dad had died in that mail shack, but Graf never talked about anything that happened to him before they got him. Arvid said maybe he didn’t remember, and Jack said maybe he didn’t want to.

She snuggled down and pulled a sleeping bag up over her. The thrumming rain always made her sleepy.

Suddenly Graf’s head popped out of the sleeping bag, a tuft of hair standing straight up.

“He got sick.”

Bo nodded, startled.

“He had a fingernail was torn off.” Graf pointed to his index finger to show her which one.

“Oh,” said Bo, getting that lurch in her stomach that she always got when someone was hurt. “How did that happen?”

Graf gave a little shake of his head. Didn’t know.

Bo smiled. Graf had started to open up.

Text copyright © 2014 by Kirkpatrick Hill

Illustrations copyright © 2014 by LeUyen Pham