LINDA NIJLUNSING

After the death of her mother, twenty-seven-year-old Linda leaves the Netherlands. After many wanderings she ends up in Alaska, where she meets “Big Jim,” who has withdrawn into nature and provides for himself by trapping fur-bearing animals and fishing. Linda falls head over heels for Jim and moves in with him in his cabin on the Yukon River, far from civilization. She tends the vegetable garden, catches salmon, learns to drive a dog sled and to skin moose. Together with Jim she sets traps for martens and wolves. Jim is blunt about it: he is looking for a woman who will make his life easier. When Linda becomes pregnant, she realizes that she should have taken that remark far more literally than she initially did.