ON HEAVEN'S HILL

Heacox’s novel follows three overlapping lives in a remote Alaskan town.

Salt d’Alene is a devout Christian and former trapper who lives with his family in the coastal Alaskan village of Strawberry Flats. He’s trying to provide for his wife, Hannah, and four sons—including Solomon, who has muscular dystrophy—but money’s tight even after working 60 hours a week at a mechanic shop. Salt gets a covert offer that could pay for his son’s medical treatment and requires him to keep an eye on the pack of wolves that’s recently taken up residence near town. The wolves include Silver, a young male with exceptional hunting abilities, even if the rest of the pack fails to appreciate them—a mistake, given how scarce food has become. Eleven-year-old Kes Nash has just moved to her uncle’s compound outside of Strawberry Flats. Her father hasn’t spoken since his Humvee was blown up in Afghanistan—an incident that cost him his legs—and the family hopes time in remote Alaska will help him recover. The community of veterans living there isn’t thrilled when they learn that a road and bridge are planned that will connect Strawberry Flats with the rest of the world—a scheme that will also affect the fate of Silver’s pack of wolves. The novel’s painterly prose evokes Alaska as a place of great beauty and scarcity, where animals of all sorts compete for space and food: “Silver awakens, startled by the moonlight and a deep-throated growling coming from the direction of the dead whale. On his feet in an instant, he travels fast through the shadowed forest….He finds the big male coastal brown bear atop one end of the whale, near the head.” Salt is an especially memorable character of fascinating contradictions. The book mostly manages to overcome the sentimentality of its premise (sympathetic wolf point of view, wounded war veteran) to present a well-plotted tale of frontier utopianism that should appeal to nature lovers.

A deftly told story of the difficulties that come from living close to the wild.