Summer of the Midnight Sun (Alaskan Quest Book #1) by Tracie Peterson

Author:Tracie Peterson [Peterson, Tracie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2006-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Jacob looked at the ledger and then to Helaina. They had been back in Last Chance for nearly three weeks, and she still couldn’t comprehend the way Leah kept books.

“I don’t understand how to figure out what the furs or trade items are worth,” Helaina admitted. “I don’t know if a new pair of mukluks are worth two cases of milk, a bag of sugar, and a coil of rope. How would I know that?”

“You don’t have to know it. Leah can figure it all up later and then reconcile it with the villagers. Don’t turn people away just because you don’t understand the system. Qavlunaq said you yelled at her. It upset her and she came to me in confusion.”

“They all hate me,” Helaina retorted. “They are meanspirited and vicious. I don’t see why you even bother to help them.”

Jacob frowned. He considered what to say to her for several moments while Helaina paced back and forth in a huff. “They don’t hate you. . . . They just don’t understand you. You have to see it through their eyes.”

“Why can’t they try to see it through my eyes?”

“Because you’re in their territory, living off the fat of their land.”

“Literally. Who in the world ever decided that eating whale blubber and seal fat was a good thing to do?”

Jacob shook his head. She was by far and away the most difficult person he’d ever known. “It’s what’s available to them, Helaina.” He’d long since dropped calling her Mrs. Beecham, even though calling her by her first name seemed somehow unwise. He couldn’t really say why. Up here, everyone went by their first name, but using hers seemed to imply an intimacy that did not exist.

She stopped and looked at him hard. “Can you honestly say you prefer this life to something else you might have in a real town—in a civilized state?”

Jacob closed the ledger book. “Are you trying to convince me to leave? Is that your plan?”

She composed herself and pushed back an errant strand of blond hair. “I have no plan. I simply asked you a question. You seem quite content here in this isolated, remote village, yet so many things are missing.”

“Such as?”

“Real bathrooms. Electricity. Telephones.” She plopped herself down on a stool behind the counter. “There’s a whole different world out there. A world that’s developed and changed while this place just stays the same. It’s probably always been like this—and probably always will be.”

“But what’s wrong with that? Why must everything evolve into something else?”

She looked at him in complete exasperation. “For the betterment of mankind. Can you not see that?”

“I see problems in the south, just like we have problems in the north. There is good with the bad in both places. I don’t see that we have to be a replica of the States just because we’re a territory.”

She sighed and gazed, unblinking, at the wall behind him. “I didn’t expect you to comprehend my thoughts. I don’t even understand it myself .

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