Tiny's Stories

Climb to the pilot house roof with Tiny Demientieff on her parents' paddlewheel riverboat, the Sea Wolf, to bask in sights and sounds of the broad Yukon and winding Innoko. Number eight of Nick and Nellie Demientieff's ten children, young Tiny loves her family and her town of Holy Cross, Alaska, but is not afraid to steal her sister's birthday party or laugh with her mother at the neighbor who is certain she sees black bears on skis-black bears who turn out to be nuns from the Holy Cross Mission! Through child eyes and her family's stories, Tiny takes us up remote rivers to glimpse gold mining towns in their last days of fancy ladies and storekeepers. When her family barges freight along the Yukon after WW II, Tiny enters her school days in Fairbanks and learns to be a town kid. She schemes with her siblings to join the Empress Theater "Space Cadets" in the brief neon glow of that historic movie theater. Tiny's stories take us into her young adulthood at Copper Valley School. At CVS, Tiny is still the lively prankster, but she asks hard questions of herself and others as she encounters heartache in her family's first great loss. Readers will relish the first-person voice of an Athabascan youngster in these true tales, set against the dynamic backdrop of Alaska's history.