“I’d live here in a heartbeat,” Buck said when Mika had shown him through the upstairs. It consisted of one large main room, with a flagstone fireplace, walls made of split logs, and plank wood floors. The ceiling was also planks of lumber, held up by heavy rafters. Behind it was a kitchen and a storage room. “Well, I would if it wasn’t a hundred miles from anywhere.”
Mika laughed. “It felt like that at times, when Reko and I got an urge to be with other kids our own age and couldn’t. That didn’t happen all that much, though, until we were in our late teens. Then, when we went down with Dad to pick up supplies, we wondered what we were missing. Still, over all it was a good life. We had loving parents, which a lot of kids don’t. Parents who did everything they could to make us realize the
