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Roland Smith (1951–) is an American author of books for children and young readers.
STARTING POINT
Think about your grandparents or your parents. Are you like them in any way? How?
ROLAND SMITH
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Remember! You don’t have to understand all the words in a story to enjoy it.
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Marie leaned her head against the cold window of the small airplane. The snow-covered tundra seemed to stretch out below without end. She and her mother were on their way to Two Rivers, Alaska – population 17. “That water to the left is the Bering Strait,” the pilot shouted above the engine noise. He had been giving them a geography lesson ever since they left Anchorage. Marie knew about the Bering Strait and the legendary land bridge that spanned it thousands of years before. Her Yup’ik ancestors were said to have crossed this bridge from Siberia to Alaska in pursuit of prehistoric game. She wished they had followed their hunger to a gloriously warm place like Arizona. If they had, she thought, I would be half Apache right now, or Hopi, or Navajo, sitting in the sun, watching lizards bask on desert rocks. I could be – “We’re here,” her mother said from the front seat next to the pilot. Marie still could not believe her mother was making her spend the summer in a ghost town with her grandmother, Aanaq Wasuli, a woman Marie had met only twice before. The pilot pushed the nose of the small airplane down and came in for a slippery landing. A snowmobile pulling a sled bounced across the snow toward them. It was driven by a Yup’ik named Sam. He tossed Marie’s luggage into the sled and drove them toward Two Rivers. “We need to talk,” her mother said. “Aanaq is the only one who knows where the old ivory is buried …”
The Yup’ik are an Indigenous Arctic people who live in Alaska, Canada and Siberia. The word Yup’ik means “real people”. About 20,000 Yup’ik live in Alaska today. Alaska is the biggest state in the USA.
the Bering Strait Beringstredet land bridge landbro spanned strakk seg over ancestors forfedre in pursuit of på jakt etter prehistoric game forhistoriske dyr lizards firfisler bask on sole seg på twice to ganger slippery glatt sled slede bounced hoppet tossed kastet
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