Two Old Women [Anniversary Edition]: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival
![Two Old Women [Anniversary Edition]: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival - Wallis, Velma](https://images-us.bookshop.org/ingram/9780062244987.jpg?height=1200&v=v2-a91a3885f77aed41c8ea05e1a1771a6f)
"No one should miss this beautiful legend." --Tony Hillerman
Velma Wallis's award-winning, bestselling tale about two elderly Native American women who must fend for themselves during a harsh Alaskan winter
Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine.
Though these women have been known to complain more than contribute, they now must either survive on their own or die trying. In simple but vivid detail, Wallis depicts a landscape and way of life that are at once merciless and starkly beautiful. In her old women, she has created two heroines of steely determination whose story of betrayal, friendship, community, and forgiveness "speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness, and wisdom" (Ursula K. Le Guin).
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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.
"Two Old Women speaks straight to the heart with clarity, sweetness, and wisdom." -- Ursula K. Le Guin
"A beautiful and moving book. Velma Wallis's writing is as lean and muscular, as full of unexpected bounties, as the far north, and readers are sure to be delighted with Two Old Women." -- Washington Post
"Full of adventure, suspense, and obstacles overcome--an octogenarian version of 'Thelma and Louise' triumphant." -- Kirkus Reviews
"No one should miss this beautiful legend." -- Tony Hillerman
"Velma Wallis has given us a gift to cherish." -- Alaska
