Shirley S Felts

Fourteen Days in The Yukon Shirley S Felts

FOURTEEN DAYS IN THE YUKON With hellacious marriages over, sisters Betty and Anne plan a trip to Alaska. Just what they need to fill their lives with a little excitement. The story takes place in the summer of 1968. In a used van, camping their way from Mississippi into Canada, things begin to go awry with the vehicle the second day on the road. Limping from one garage to another a mechanic in Jasper, Canada assures them he has it 'purring like a kitten'. However, miles from nowhere the van decides to give up the ghost completely. A mountain man named 'Doc' appears from the forest on a hand made contraption he calls a 'three wheeler'. He offers them the use of his hunting shack in the woods until he can get some needed parts and someone out to fix the van. The quaint little shack is more smack dab in the woods than the ditch where the van landed. Lulled into a tranquil sense of security in the roughly hewn shack, they never think once about man nor beast, deciding to relax in a place one usually only find in dreams. These daydreams are ripped away with the ferocity of a tornado in the flatlands of MS when scumbag Clyde attacks Betty. Terrified beyond anything they've ever experienced...the act, the buried perpetrator under an old tree, jail in a foreign land, and the fact they may never see their kids again, they take the only way out available. Follow the river. Easy for a time, thinking around every bend of the water, that is getting deeper and more turbulent, the nightmare is somewhat replaced with bruises, hunger and a fatigue they've never known. Mile after mile with no food left from the rations they took from the shack, they're fully aware of the fact that they may never see their families again. One disaster follows another; food poisoning from unknown berries, a sprained ankle, the worst a light earthquake that erases all thoughts of 4-legged beasts from their mind!