Palin's Strengths Rooted in Alaska

He would stop his children on a footpath and point to fossils etched in rocks. "How old do you think those are?" he would ask.

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.

The next morning, they found the ravaged caribou remains, 30 yards from their car's wheel wells.

'All About Winning'

In Wasilla, physical command of one's own arms and legs was hardly a masculine virtue. Sarah Heath and her friends played ball with boys in the family's hard, dirt-packed back yard. "It was just what we did," recalls Palin's friend Jackie Conn, now a detective with the Anchorage Police Department.

Nor did anyone question Title IX, the 1972 law that mandated equal opportunity for women in public education. It's the rare feminist issue for which Palin is an unambiguous cheerleader. "I'll tell you, I'm a product of Title IX in our schools," she says on the stump. "Equal education and equal opportunities in sports really helped propel me into, I guess into the position that I'm in today."

At Wasilla High School, she ran with a set of tomboy friends who competed year-round, because that's all there was to do in town. They ran cross-country in the fall for the track team -- coached by Palin's father -- played basketball in the winter and softball in the summer. "We weren't trying to prove anything," Ketchum says. "It was all about winning the game. It wasn't an issue. It just didn't seem to be a barrier."

Chuck Sr. drove Palin hard, both as a father and a coach. "She gets her steel, her competitiveness, from him," says Marie Carter Smith, who was the school statistician. Chuck ran alongside on training runs for miles, barking maxims he picked up in his own career as a high school football player in Idaho, under a farm legend named Cotton Barlow. "Lead by example, not with your mouth," he said. Or: "Run through it! The more pain you're feeling, the more it will show in the performance."

When Chuck chewed her out like a football player, she stared back at him and nodded. "She just looked me straight in the eye, didn't talk back or anything," he says. "It's a wonder she didn't whack me."