At twenty-four, Connie and her young husband, Harmon "Bud" Helmericks, set out from Fairbanks, Alaska in a homemade canoe. Paddling down the Tanana and into the great Yukon River, they leave their known world behind. Five months later, they portage a hundred miles across muskeg and icing ponds to the Kuskokwim River where they battle shifting ice into the little town of Bethel near the Bering Sea. Along the journey they...