On Heaven's Hill

Kim Heacox

Description

AWARDS: submit widely for fiction awards, NOBA, PNBA, etc.
ADVERTISING: boosted social/Amazon ads around publication to drive orders, considering regional advertising.
EVENTS: author tour with local Alaska bookstores/libraries
REVIEW: reviews, excerpts, author interviews, and byliners in Alaska newspapers, magazines, RTV, and national book media.
ONLINE: social media campaign, outreach to bookstagrammers; book trailer
PROMOTION: DRC via Edelweiss and hard copy ARC will be available; online promotion via author's social media (3.3k followers on Facebook), Alaska writers groups; giveaways on LibraryThing and Goodreads
TRADESHOWS: giveaways/features at PNBA, ALA

 F&P Text Level Z+ 

Sujets

• PTSD
• Wolves
• Military
• Posttraumatic stress disorder
• Gray wolf
• War
• Trouble de stress post-traumatique
• Fiction
• Alaska

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 21 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781513141350
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

On Heaven’s Hill
A NOVEL
KIM HEACOX
© 2023 by Kim Heacox
Edited by Sarah Currin and Olivia Ngai
Cover photo of Chichagof Island, West Chichagof-Yakobi Wilderness, Southeast Alaska, by Kim Heacox
Photo editing by Tammy White www .tammywhite .com .au . Steve Heap/ Shutterstock .com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Heacox, Kim, author.
Title: On heaven’s hill : a novel / Kim Heacox.
Description: [Berkeley, CA] : West Margin Press, [2023] | Summary: “A novel told from three alternating perspectives-a former trapper trying to care for his son with muscular dystrophy; a young girl who wishes for her father to be rid of his PTSD from the war; and a wolf fighting for his and his pack’s survival. Set in a small Alaskan town, the residents fight for the remote wilds they call home when plans for a building development threatens to upend the peace”--Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022040034 (print) | LCCN 2022040035 (ebook) | ISBN 9781513139111 (hardback) | ISBN 9781513141350 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3608.E226 O5 2023 (print) | LCC PS3608.E226 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20220829
LC record available at https://lccn .loc .gov/2022040034
LC ebook record available at https://lccn .loc .gov/2022040035
Printed in China
27 26 25 24 23 1 2 3 4 5
Published by West Margin Press®
WestMarginPress .com
Proudly distributed by Ingram Publisher Services
WEST MARGIN PRESS
Publishing Director: Jennifer Newens
Marketing Manager: Alice Wertheimer
Project Specialist: Micaela Clark
Editor: Olivia Ngai
Design & Production: Rachel Lopez Metzger
This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl, And my images roared and rose on heaven’s hill.
D YLAN T HOMAS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This story, in part, is about wolves. And while I cannot occupy the mind of a wolf or embed myself in a pack, I can avail myself of many excellent sources that tell me much. We now understand wolves far better than we did fifty to a hundred years ago. With each new observation and study, we gain more certainty that wolves (elephants, orcas, octopuses, and other animals) occupy much of the same emotional and intellectual landscape that humans do. With this in mind, I have taken literary license to create wolves that possess the compassion and brotherhood they deserve.
PART I
CHAPTER ONE Silver
L ATE AGAIN .
The wolf pup, far behind his pack, follows the river through a tangle of young cottonwood, the leaves golden medallions in the September rain. He works the ground with his big paws and keen nose. Wet ears. Searching eyes. Great heart. No stranger to hunger, he moves from one distraction to the next. A dusting of silver-black in the shoulders. A touch of russet in his lower flanks. All black in the legs and feet. “A real beauty,” men will say of him. Men with a hunger of their own, their hearts made of light and stone.
He follows the scents of moose and geese, circles, and moves on. Hunting. Listening. Working the air with his nose. Were he among his littermates, born this past spring, he’d play all day. But he’s alone now. As such, he must be mature for his age, mindful in a way that doesn’t create panic but instead makes him smart. Far ahead somewhere, his family travels in single file, fast and distant with the distance growing. The rain has washed away all but the faintest traces of their passing. Whenever his pack travels like this, Alpha and Mother and the subadults all work together to keep Old One up front so as to not leave him behind. As tough and determined as Old One is, his age slows him down.
Silver hurries on.
Mother must have lost track of him. It’s happened before. And she’d always come back for him and grab him by the nape of his neck—he was so little then—and carry him to where they needed to go.
He’s bigger now, growing fast. And hungry. Often hungry.
He emerges from a willow thicket and climbs a gentle slope onto a long, flat nothingness that reaches from one horizon to the other, its surface lifeless, hard, and dark. And worse: foreboding somehow, with strange marks down the middle. He holds still for a moment, as if death might speak and tell him what happened here.
How far does the nothingness go? And to where?
He travels upon it a short distance, then drops downslope and rejoins the river—so exuberant and free-flowing by comparison—and heads downstream, unaware that by traveling over the flat nothingness, he’s crossed the river where his family did not and is now on the opposite side from them.
He hears a strange sound, and stops. From behind a veil of willow he watches a shiny object cross the river over the flat nothingness, moving fast without wings or legs.
Silver continues on, following the river that’s fed by many small tributaries, growing as it goes. Again, he gets distracted as he tests rounded stones underfoot—rolls them back and forth with a nimble paw—and picks up the scent of a bear, then something else. Otter, perhaps. The river bends in a set of rapids, uncoiling over ancient scripts and hidden texts from the Ice Age. This is where his family would chase salmon and pin them in the shallows—and feast. The pup feels an ache in his belly. Hunger.
He thinks all wolves eat salmon.
He thinks with his stomach.
O NWARD . The rain lightens. The sky brightens. A strong smell assaults the young wolf. He pauses as fear rises in his throat, a fear new to him yet somehow familiar from long ago. He’s never smelled smoke. Never seen a man. Never tasted human kindness, cruelty, or greed, never mapped the soulful intelligence between their needs and his. That will change.
A raven flies low overhead, circles, and continues on.
The rain stops.
He climbs a cut bank, and sits, and begins to yip, his face turned to the somber clouds. Were he older, he’d howl and sing. Were he older, like his elders, he’d dream of mammoths, and of taking down a moose, and leading his pack through this wet, blue-green world of forests, glaciers, tides, and fish.
For now, though, he yips.
After a minute or so he stops, and listens. Then he yips again.
Soon it will come—the reply.
The chorus of his clan.
CHAPTER TWO Salt
S ALT D ’A LENE STEPS back to admire his work.
The Sitka spruce wheelchair ramp climbs at ten degrees, makes a less than elegant 180-degree turn, and continues up to the deck, four feet off the ground, where Salt has yet to finish the handrail. He can hear Hannah already, hours from now, when she returns home with the boys. It’s nice, love, she’ll say. But won’t the boys fall off it? Of course they will, Salt will tell her. They’re rowdy and carefree. Have faith. They’ll land on their feet. And if they don’t, they’ll land on their heads. They have hard heads.
The concern, of course, is Solomon in his wheelchair, with his brothers—especially Abraham, the eldest—racing him around, and Solomon laughing and screaming gleefully, asking for more, breathless without ever getting to his feet. Duchenne muscular dystrophy. One chance in thirty-five thousand that a boy his age will get it. And Solomon got it.
Why? Hannah asked one night in bed a couple years ago, not long after the genetic testing, the muscle biopsy, and Solomon’s diagnosis. Would he even live to age twenty? Why our son? Our beautiful son. Why… why… why? She began to cry. He’s exceptional, Salt told her as he fought back his own tears. That’s why. He’s one in a million, a gift from God. He’s our son—our sun, the brightest star in the sky.
Yes, she said. Our sun. And she cried herself to sleep.
A GAIN , S ALT TAKES stock of his carpentry. Not bad, he thinks. Not so good either. Many of the joints could be tighter. But they’ll hold. Structural integrity, that’s the important thing.
Later, while making a difficult compound cut with the chop saw and unsure of what he’s doing, Salt takes a break. He’s tempted to drive over to Willynillyville, the veteran encampment only a couple miles away, founded by the bush pilot Tyler Nash. There, he could ask for help from Nash’s buddies, the McCall cousins, Chippy and Cap, former Oklahoma Thunderbirds who served in Afghanistan and are said to be the best carpenters in Strawberry Flats. People say Chippy uses old, gnarled shore pines to make beautiful bannisters and handrails; that he has a fully outfitted carpentry shop and enjoys giving tours. How good it would be to get some strong advice; to build something beyond functional. To make art.
Salt has never been to Willynillyville. Never had a good talk with any of the war veterans there. Never apprenticed himself to a true craftsman.
He could be there in ten minutes. Drop by. Give his regards. Ask a question or two. Maybe have a few laughs. Make new friends.
But he talks himself out of it.
“You’re shy,” his mother used to tell him in Idaho, back when he was a teenager. “And that’s fine,’ she’d add, “until it keeps you from realizing your potential.”
The last time I was an artist, Salt tells himself, I was a trapper.
Rumors around town say Tyler Nash is down in Texas with his younger brother, a former singer/songwriter who had his own band and touring bus and recording contract until he joined the National Guard for some crazy reason—extra money, no doubt—and got shipped off to Afghanistan. Three weeks later, he got blown up.
A S HE REACHES to put his earmuffs on to make the compound cut, Salt hears a sound familiar to him from the cabin life he knew on Minto Flats, near Fairbanks. Interior Alaska, another world, where the winters aren’t as cold as they used to be, and river ice cannot be trusted, and one wrong step is all it takes—for both wolf and man. Where wild animals know a hundred times more than we ever will. Be car