Palin's Strengths Rooted in Alaska

"I'm not doing that," he said.

"Get out of the way," Palin said. "I'll do it."

She did.

Serenity Under Pressure

In 1970, Wasilla was a village of 400 on the edge of the wilderness in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, a river-split basin where the first leg of the Iditarod dog sled trail runs. There was one road to Anchorage, "and parts of it were gravel," recalls neighbor and close friend Marie Carter Smith, "so it was an all-day trip."

The Heaths lived in a small cabin heated by a wood-burning stove, all four children crowded in an attic bedroom, where they huddled under quilts and watched their own breath. Since store-bought food was hard to come by, area families relied on wild game as their main form of sustenance. The Heaths and the Carters hunted together, and "one moose would feed both families for a winter," Smith says.

Palin stacked firewood endlessly and worked in a large communal garden where winter vegetables were grown. Anyone who dined at the Heath home remembers large stews of whatever the family had shot. "Bear, moose, sheep," recalls Kim Ketchum, one of Palin's childhood friends.

By age 10, Palin was picking off rabbits out the back door and sniping at ptarmigan, an Alaskan game bird, on cross-country skis. Her father would rouse her at 4 a.m. to hunt duck before school. On hunts, she learned how to field-dress a moose, a fancy term for butchering it.

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.