Books, dogs, the woods: these things effectively summarize Kevin’s adult life. After one failed attempt at college (there would be several more) and a stint in the Navy, after a decade of wandering around the country, Kevin settled into a one hundred year old farmhouse set deep in the woods of northern Minnesota. The trees and star-littered nights, moonlight on snow and the songs of wolves and eventually of sled dogs, contests with bears over who can pick the most berries, days working the woods for stove-wood with a team of draft horses: these are the things that would become the structure of his life, these and nights sitting beside the fire with the woman who became the best thing to happen in his life – Linda – reading a novel by Dostoyevski, or out fifty miles from home with the sled dog team and a blizzard coming down.

The woods is where his heart is.