In her spellbinding second book, the award-winning author interweaves two classic Athabaskan legends set in ancient central Alaska. This is the story of two rebels who break the strict taboos of their communal culture in their quests for freedom and adventure. Readers will be captivated by this profound myth about two young people who wander far from their culture's deeply held traditions and eventually must find a way to come home again. Wallis's first book, Two Old Women, is an international best-seller, translated into seventeen languages.
Velma Wallis was born in Fort Yukon, a remote village of about 650 people in Interior Alaska, near where the Porcupine River flows into the Yukon. Wallis was raised in a tradtional Athabaskan family, one of thirteen children. When she was thirteen, her father died and she left school to help her mother raise her younger brothers and sisters. Later, she passed her high school equivalency exam and moved to a trapping cabin twelve miles from the village, where she learned to live off the land by hunting, fishing, and trapping. Wallis based her first two books, Two Old Women and Bird Girl and the Man Who Followed the Sun, on the Athabaskan stories her mother told her when she was growing up.
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