My Feelings For Heather

She was about 14 when Chuck taught her how. She helped lift the legs, which weighed more than 100 pounds, while her father gutted and quartered the animal and then used a bone saw to take off the ribs. Next he began removing various organs for his biology class. He wanted to use the eyes for dissection. When he tried to hand them to his daughter, she finally rebelled. "I can't," she said, shuddering.

In the summers, she took swimming lessons in a Red Cross program at a lake, in water so cold it turned her blue and had kids digging in their heels at the shore. "They'd report to our parents that we were afraid of the water," Ketchum remembers. Chuck thought his kids should learn "how to handle extreme conditions," Heather recalls, and he dared the older Heath children to sleep outdoors on the coldest snowy night.

Nobody watched much television. The Carter family had a battered old set that worked for about one hour a day before it conked out. The Heaths had a working one, but Chuck was always snapping it off and hustling the kids outside, and in the summer he put it away altogether.

On Sundays, Sally, now 68, exercised her own influence, shuttling the children to church for lessons in devotion. A lean outdoorswoman with feathered brown hair and a musical voice, she possessed "deep faith and convictions, hospitality, serenity in the eye of a storm," according to Heather. Though they were baptized Catholic as infants, they attended a small gray evangelical church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, and Sally enrolled them in summer Bible camps directed by the pastor.

On the family's long hikes and camping expeditions, Palin absorbed her parents' dueling views. "Sally is very devoted . . . and Chuck worships Mother Nature," says Marilyn Lane, a longtime family friend. Chuck may or may not attend church, but he wanted the children to appreciate the "grandeur" of nature. He lectured them on wildlife biology and was such a tireless dispenser of information that friends called him "Mr. Almanac." He collected furs, bones, shells and skulls.
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Smoked marijuanHe would stop his children on a footpath and point to fossils etched in rocks. "How old do you think those are?" he would ask.
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Sally, meanwhile, wanted them to understand "the bounty of it all," she says. The wild game, meat and fish, "was a gift to have." Both messages penetrated. "We heard both sides and formed our own views," Chuck Jr. says.

The summer Palin was 12, she asked to be baptized at Bible camp and was dipped in the frigid waters of Beaver Lake. According to Heather's account of their conversion, "I vividly recall at about 10 years old, looking out at Alaska's beautiful scenery and wondering how anyone could not admit there was a God who created it."

There was one indisputable lesson the Heath children learned about the wilderness: how dangerous it was.

Once, a grizzly showed a frightening interest in the family car on a camping trip in Denali National Park. The Heaths were bedded down for the night after bagging a caribou, Sally and Chuck in one tent and the children in another, when they heard an ominous rustling. Sally peered out and saw the enormous bear just outside the children's tent. It was eyeing the caribou they had strapped to the top of the car.

"We heard this grunting," Chuck Jr. remembers. His father raised his rifle and told Sally to train the flashlight on the bear, but she was trembling so badly that the beam wavered. Chuck didn't want to take a potshot in the dark. Instead he put himself between the bear and the children, and yelled at them to run for the car. He followed them, and the family huddled behind the windshield while the bear circled the car for half an hour. At one point it stopped, put its paws on the door and pressed its nose to the window.